Human rights violations linked to norms of health, fitness, and social usefulness have long been overlooked by Historic Justice Studies. Kathrin Braun introduces the concept of »injuries of normality« to capture the specifics of this type of human rights violation and the respective struggles for historic justice. She examines the processes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the context of coercive sterilization, institutional killings, as well as the persecution of homosexual men and of »asocials« under Nazi rule. She argues that an analytic perspective on political temporality allows us to better understand the formation of these biopolitical human rights violations and their exclusion from memory and historic justice.
Author(s): Kathrin Braun
Series: Political Science
Edition: 1
Publisher: Transcript Publishing
Year: 2021
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 195
Tags: Historic Justice; Biopolitics; Nazi Crimes; Political Temporality; Human Rights Violations; Law; Memory Culture; Contemporary History; Human Rights; Political Science
Cover
Contents
1 Introduction: Coming to Terms with Biopolitics, Temporality and Historic Justice
1.1 From Times Believed Long Overcome
1.2 Coming to Terms with the Presence of the Past
1.3 Biopolitics and the Threshold of Modernity
1.4 Biopolitical Temporality
1.5 Biopolitics, Historic Justice and Injuries of Normality
1.6 Outline of the Book
2 Biopolitics and Modernity: Revisiting the Eugenics Project
2.1 A Modern Project
2.2 Eugenics and Social Reform
2.3 Eugenics and the Question of Race
2.4 Welfare Eugenics
2.5 Eugenics and Feminism
2.6 Biologist Determinism and Social Engineering
2.7 Eugenics, Progress and Productivism
2.8 Conclusion
3 Nazi Sterilization Policy, Second-Order Injustice and the Struggle for Reparations
3.1 The Hereditary Health Act and its Biopolitical Rationality
3.2 No ‘Forgotten Victims’: Non-Reparation Policy after 1945
3.3 The 1980s: The Struggle Gains Momentum
3.4 Reparations as the Greater Injustice?
3.5 Ostracization or Annulment
3.6 Comprehensive Rehabilitation?
4 Justice at Last: The Persecution of Homosexual Men and the Politics of Amends
4.1 “Exterminating the Disease”: The Nazi Persecution of Homosexual Men
4.2 Normal Persecution: Paragraph 175 in the Federal Republic
4.3 Banned from Reparations
4.4 Regret and Reluctance
4.5 From Injuries of Normality to Sexual Exceptionalism
4.6 Conclusion
5 Marginal Justice: Coming to Terms with the Persecution of the ‘Asocials’
5.1 Model Germany?
5.2 Doing Justice — or not. The Performative Politics of Historic Justice
5.3 The Nazi Persecution of the ‘Asocials’
5.4 Meaningful Work and Orderly Life
5.5 Excluded Victims
5.6 Forgotten ‘Forgotten Victims’?
5.7 Commemoration Beyond the State
5.8 Conclusion
5.9 Addendum
6 Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on Biopolitics, Time and Totalitarianism
6.1 Life and Labor
6.2 Total Management
6.3 Politics, Life and Modern Temporality
6.4 Improving Life
6.5 Living in the Interval
6.6 Beyond Biopolitics: Zur Welt Kommen
7 Increasing the Forces of Life: Biopolitics, Capitalism and Time in Marx and Foucault
7.1 Missing the Link: Biopolitics and Capitalism
7.2 Biopolitics as Biotechnology
7.3 Biopolitics as Self-Government
7.4 Power and Productivity
7.5 Enhancing the Forces of Life
7.6 The Time of Capital and Biopolitics
7.7 Conclusion
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
References