The Politics of Repair in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: The Diary of a Critical Jurist

It is widely assumed that the reparations that Germany paid to Holocaust survivors and the state of Israel ‘established a milestone in international morality’, as former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz put it – that the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement was, as MIT political scientist Melissa Nobles wrote, an ‘exemplar of successful reparations’. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the Federal Republic of Germany set up what is to date the most extensive reparations programme to deal with the consequences of mass human rights violations and genocide.

But how did this programme take shape – and what did it feel like to witness and try to influence its successive metamorphoses? Drawing upon a series of handwritten diaries kept by a little-known German jurist which have never been made available to historians until now, Negotiating Reparations after the Holocaust will explore Otto Küster’s experiences to tackle this question.

The rich collection of diaries – 118 in total spanning the years from 1932 to 1989 – reveal Otto Küster’s experiences as a ‘critical jurist’. He was sacked from his position as a judge in 1932 and from the Ministry of Justice in 1954, because of the criticism he levelled at the political circles of his time(s) – yet kept working on reparations-related questions for much of his professional life. By unpacking Küster’s experiences and his reparations-related engagements in the Federal Republic of the early 1950s, the talk will reflect on the dilemmas and contradictions that characterised compensation and restitution programmes in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

See more of: The Politics of Transgenerational Trauma, Displacement, Naturalization, and Repair: New Research Perspectives on the Holocaust and Its Aftermath
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