Restorative Justice and the Global Imagination Audrey Josephine

Restorative Justice and the Global Imagination Audrey Josephine Golden Charlottesville, Virginia Juris Doctor, Wake Forest University School of Law, 2009 Bachelor of Arts, Wesleyan University, 2006 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia August, 2014 Table of Contents Introduction: Nuremberg, International Human Rights Law, and the Narrative Foundations of Restorative Justice………………………………………………………. 1 Recovering Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon: Literary Fictions, Bodily Restoration, and the Politics of the Totalitarian Novel…………………………….…… 43 Remaking the Historical Record: Remedies for the former Yugoslavia and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno……………………………………...…… 94 The ‘Terrible Genius of Literature’: Post-Apartheid Reconciliation in Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun…………………………………………………………… 153 Coda: A Future for Recuperative Global Narrative…………………………………………… 210 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………….... 218 ! ! ! Introduction: Nuremberg, International Human Rights, and the Narrative Foundations of Restorative Justice I am consoled by the fact that in proceedings of this novelty, errors and missteps may also be instructive to the future. —Justice Robert H. Jackson, closing out his report to then-President Truman on the Nuremberg Trials We gradually came to accept the depravity of the Holocaust, but then slotted it in our consciousness as ‘history’; we resisted acknowledging that genocide was occurring in the present. Survivors and witnesses had trouble making the unbelievable believable. Bystanders were thus able to retreat to the ‘twilight between knowing and not knowing.’ —Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell In late 2010, the “Court Room 600” museum opened in Nuremberg, Germany at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, where the International Military Tribunal (IMT) trials were held between 1945-46. The trials officially concluded in 1948 with the close of the tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), in which Japanese war criminals were tried. More than sixty years after the close of the World War II trials, public interest sparked the opening of the museum, suggesting that Nuremberg and its cultural significance remained salient in second-generation memory. How do the crimes of the Holocaust show themselves in relation to twenty-first century juridical paradigms? Numerous accounts of cultural memory have sought to address the ways in which wounds of the past might be healed or tempered through “museumification” and construction of memorial sites.1 Yet these accounts tend to disconnect social knowledge of mass crime from that acquired through international legal processes. Certainly, museums do much to begin the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 See Huyssen, Present Pasts and Twilight Memories, for discussions of the “museumification” of contemporary culture. ! 1 ! ! ! process of restoring dignity to victims of mass violence, but the relationship between juridical inquiry and narrative more closely attends to new forms of healing that encompass both political and cultural concerns. Between 1961 and 1993, employees at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice—which has been used as a court since the early 1960s for criminal trials—noticed visitors standing outside the building, hoping to gain entry to sneak a peek inside the internationally famous Court Room 600. A curator, Henrike Zentgraf, explained that visitors asked how they could get in, and some were admitted entry on a small scale. Employees began keeping records of the number of visitors to the site and counted approximately 3,000 within the thirty-year period. By the mid-1990s, however, even more travelers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and China began appearing outside the Palace of Justice throughout the week, seeking entry into the building. Between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, the number of visitors had risen to more than 20,000. Zentgraf believes that the sharp increase in domestic and international visitors implies a direct link to the creation of the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and for Rwanda (ICTR) in 1993 and 1994. “Nothing else could account for people visiting the tribunal during the week,” she said.2 Can the rising number of visitors to the Nuremberg Palace of Justice provide evidence of a connection between the IMT and the re-creation of international criminal tribunals in the 1990s? Historical and sociological inquiries have suggested that Zentgraf’s assumption is right.3 What knowledge do visitors hope to acquire? What can be gleaned from a space that has been radically transformed from its 1945 incarnation?4 Notably, visitors to the museum can learn that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 Interview with Henrike Zentgraf, Nuremberg, Germany. July 23, 2012. 3 See, for example, David Scheffer. 4 Zentgraf emphasizes that the Court Room 600 museum does not spatially resemble the room used to prosecute Nazi war criminals. In fact, Court Room 600 was “refurbished” specifically for the trials, and “refurbished” again ! 2 ! ! ! the trials admitted no visitors and only a handful of victim witnesses in the 1940s. Zentgraf describes the IMT’s treatment of these witnesses as “horrible, it is horrible to look on the way victims were treated in Nuremberg.”5 In Germany, at least, there exists a distinct need to recover the history of criminality during the Nazi regime and to consider the politics of “healing” the sites that contain it.6 Marina Christmeier, a curator of the Nazi Documentation Center in Nuremberg, emphasizes that museums are performing extra-legal work of “looking forward,” moving away from a culture of adversarial interaction and into one focused on “a new image, of human rights and freedom.”7 By its backward-looking nature, retributive justice stands in opposition to restorative justice, which aims to provide healing and reconciliation to victims of mass violence. My study arose from a double perception: the absence of initiatives in restorative justice within international law, and the manifold attention to human recovery in the postwar novel. Novelists, in short, have imagined scenes of restoration while international jurisprudence has focused primarily on punishing perpetrators. This study brings together writers in exile, non- native speakers writing in English, and Anglophone novelists engaging with continued matters of the postcolonial. It is framed by the 1945 International Military Tribunal (IMT) for Nuremberg on one hand, and the establishment of the 1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the 1995 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for South Africa on the other. Individual chapters engage the works of Arthur Koestler, Aleksandar Hemon, and Nadine Gordimer to explore new models of restorative justice in the wake of political violence. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! with its reopening for court in 1961. One of the only remnants of the original trial room were two benches that had been stored in the basement of the Palace of Justice since 1946. In 2008, an employee pointed out that the benches were in the basement, and they were taken out and restored to be part of the exhibition that visitors now see. 5 See Zentgraf interview. 6 Interview with Martina Christmeier, Documentation Center, July 22, 2012. Christmeier explained how new discussions emerged in the mid- to late-1990s about how to deal with the decaying sites of the Nazi regime, such as the parade grounds. 7 See Christmeier Interview. ! 3 ! ! ! The readings will suggest that literary reckonings with restorative justice occur not just within the bounds of particular novels, but through texts that have developed a literary dialogue across the decades. Those that speak to totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, for instance, have been answered by novels about the 20th-century endemic violence in the Balkans and the reconciliatory possibilities in a South Africa still contending with its long history of state-sanctioned racism. The Nuremberg trials prosecuted high-ranking Nazis from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. Strategically held in Nuremberg, the cultural center of Nazi Germany, representatives from the United States, England, France, and the Soviet Union came together to try crimes against humanity in the first international tribunal of its kind. After much deliberation, the prosecution team decided to hold the trials in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice— a symbolic structure in which to hold German war criminals accountable.8 I argue that the anecdotes about the site of the trials stress an important sociological shift in thinking about justice after political violence. The significance of Nuremberg remains in public memory, but elicits a need for understanding the past and using it for the future. Rather than focus on the backward-looking terms of punishment and retribution enacted at the IMT trials, the cultural outcry at the Palace of Justice provides an opportunity for us to rethink the question of restorative justice through the labor of narrative imagination. Indeed, as Ravit Reichman has maintained, the Nuremberg Trials present a key moment for exploring the relationship between the work of literary

Load more