ABSTRACT
As legal experts have noted, the downfall of Soviet style Communism in Central Eastern Europe lent momentum to the reactivation of norms and institutional settings from the era of post-WWII justice and the Nuremberg trials of 1945–1948. Propelled by a world-wide memory boom and the emergence of new, comprehensive human rights concepts like transitional justice and historical truth-telling, post-unified Germany quickly became embroiled in international and national debates about the adjudication of grave human rights violations and the creation of a permanent international criminal court. Moreover, in the German context the caesura of “1989” marked the beginning of an astonishing transformation process paving the way for a reinvention of Germany’s national identity, leading up to its future as an influential global actor on the contested policy field of international criminal justice. Focusing on the entanglements between law, memory, and historiography, this chapter explores how 1990s’ discourses and practices vis-à-vis Communist/Stalinist crimes and demands for a “Nuremberg for Communism” shaped Germany’s understanding of post-Cold War justice. It asks how historical imaginations impacted on the conceptualization of legal tropes with regard to Communist/Stalinist state sponsored criminality and whether this contributed to its impunity on national and/or international levels.
