Abstract
Laura Petersen’s first monograph offers a rich and dynamic approach to conceptualizing restitution in the aftermath of atrocious state violence. She focuses on Germany’s practice of Wiedergutmachung (or what she translates to “making-good-again”) after the Second World War to examine how the concept of restitution is not confined to the courtroom. Rather, across six chapters (an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion), Petersen shows that visual culture, literature, and architecture all play critical roles in producing conceptions of “making-good-again” that have legal ramifications outside state or private law.
Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical and methodological approach that informs her substantive chapters. Petersen begins by exploring the etymologies and histories of “restitution” and “Wiedergutmachung” in the German context from the medieval period through to the twentieth century, the First World War, and then the aftermath of the Second World War. These terms have broad connotations, from material compensation to victims to memorialization. In Petersen’s work, “making-good-again” is an active, material, and ongoing process that continues after legislation is written, cases are closed, artwork is complete, and texts have been published. She emphasizes the ongoing life of these objects as they continue to engage with the public and are experienced by others. Thus, the “making-again” in “making-good-again” plays a significant role in her intervention.
Chapter 2, “Glossing Restitution,” explores the genre of glossatorial writing through the work of jurist, Walter Schwarz. Legal gloss (commentary written in the margins of legal texts) is read by Petersen as a unique genre that requires attention as both a literary and legal form. She takes the reader through her journey to the archives at the Berliner Stadtbibliothek (Berlin City Library) to sift through entries of the journal, Rechtsprechung zum Wiedergutmachungsrecht (RzW; Jurisprudence in Restitution Law). She offers original translations of Schwarz’s glosses and analyzes the form and content down to the typesetting. She attends to the placement of text on the margins and the italicized font that make the “glosses [. . .] self-contained memorials—framed and entombed on the page” (40). Throughout these glossatorial entries, Schwarz comments on German restitution cases in an enigmatic way. Petersen observes his commentary as a literary form that “returns a human passion to an intensely bureaucratic system” (69). Through a focus on the gloss, Petersen re-centers legal commentary that is literally and figuratively marginal to the restitution practice in post-war Germany.
The third chapter, “Literary Restitution,” examines how the literary frame broadens conceptions of restitution and “making-good-again” by experimenting with the legal archive to blend fact and fiction. Petersen examines work by W. G. Sebald, Alexander Kluge, and Heimrad Bäcker to explore how their “texts offer insights into the telling and making of jurisprudence” (71). Her close reading of their short stories, novels, and poetry reveals how literature can challenge the appearance of closure present in legal decisions and transcripts. The literary texts she analyzes use the law’s language and form while fragmenting it and responding to it. This gives cases of restitution space to evolve and be read and reinterpreted by their readers. Kluge’s writing, for instance, repeats the “objective” language of legal writing in case law and reports, thus highlighting the violence of bureaucratic language used to justify state-sanctioned atrocities. Bäcker’s concrete poetry cites legal documents such as transcripts and reports, creatively playing with a citational practice that adds layers of interpretation to the source materials. Finally, Sebald’s well-known novels The Emigrants (1992) and Austerlitz (2001) mimic and “shadow” (121) the legal and historical method to construct stories of restitution. These examples of literary restitution honor Sebald’s call for German authors to take responsibility for restitution through their work.
The following chapter, “Artistic Restitution,” investigates the role visual art plays in the aftermath of atrocities. With an examination of two works of art, Sternenfall (2007) by Anselm Kiefer, and Birkenau (2014) by Gerhard Richter, Petersen continues her formalist reading of texts and objects to consider how artwork (as well as viewing artwork) can be a restitutive jurisprudential practice. She takes the reader along with her to two separate sites across the world: Berlin, Germany and Hobart, Australia. Much like the other objects she analyzes in this book, Petersen is interested in how these pieces have a life of their own both by commenting on the violence of the Holocaust, as well as by continuing their commentary through their reception. Petersen interrogates the artistic and material form as well as how the art speaks to questions of restitution differently depending on the space in which it is located and how audiences “behold” the work. Petersen’s use of the word echoes its roots in Old High German, as to “behold” connotes a sense of responsibility; thus, the spectator is implicated in restitution (128).
The institutions in which artworks are placed are extensions of the form she analyzes. Thus, as an artwork moves from building to building, it transforms and begets new commentary. For instance, Petersen observes Richter’s Birkenau which hangs on the walls of Berlin’s Reichstag. This piece reflects the space in which it is located, working as a constant reminder of the atrocities which originated with orders emanating from the Reichstag. In Hobart, Australia, Kiefer’s work is displayed in its own pavilion at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). The sculpture—a giant bookcase holding leaden books, covered in dust and broken glass—sits in a windowed room looking out onto the Derwent River. Petersen suggests that considering the landscape in which the work is situated releases the work’s commentary from being solely directed at the Nazi regime and demands that the viewer to consider it within the Australian setting as well.
In the final substantive chapter, “Memorial Restitution,” Petersen expands on her exploration of space with a tour of Berlin. She walks through the city, visiting memorial sites to consider how we can “embody legal movement [and make] jurisprudence with our bodies” (170). Accompanying her throughout the chapter, the reader is taken to visit national memorial sites such as the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered by the National Socialist Regime (2012), Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism (2008), and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005). Petersen also explores local initiatives such as the Places of Remembrance signs and the Stolpersteine plaques which mark physical sites where Nazi legislation had violent consequences. At each site, Petersen recounts the environment she moves through, the bureaucratic history of the establishment of each memorial, and her own felt experiences. This chapter considers the physical and affectual means through which jurisprudence is made.
Practices of Restitution is an ambitious text that contributes to scholarship in law and humanities and jurisprudence. Petersen toggles between languages, space, and academic traditions, writing from her perspective as an Australian scholar and drawing on both Australian and European debates within the field. It is, however, her methodological approach that is arguably her richest contribution to law and humanities scholarship. Through her method, she engages with questions of memory, responsibility, and prudence. There is a physicality to the method as Peterson paints vivid illustrations of the spaces she enters to conduct her research. The spaces themselves offer a platform through which she analyzes restitution and shows how while each space is complicit in a fascist history, it now houses or acts as a vessel of restitution. Through extensive archival research and fieldwork analysis, Petersen emphasizes something that private law often neglects to consider: that “making-good-again” is an active, ongoing, and evolving process.