The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide

Carolyn J. Dean

Published by Cornell University Press 2019

The Moral Witness

Trials and Testimony after Genocide

Carolyn J. Dean

In the series Corpus Juris: The Humanities in Politics and Law

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501735080

Overview
Contents

About this book

The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.

Author / Editor information

Carolyn J. Dean is Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French at Yale University. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of Modern Europe and the author of five books, including The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust and Aversion and Erasure.

Reviews

Thomas Keenan, Bard College, and co-author of Mengele's Skull:

Carolyn Dean provides a rich, enlightening, and eye-opening narrative on a central figure in twentieth-century ethics and politics: the witness to mass violence or atrocity.

Samuel Moyn, Yale University, and author of Christian Human Rights:

The Moral Witness is a brilliantly insightful and thought-provoking book on how the imagination of testimony evolved, which goes far beyond earlier accounts of its public emergence and power. Carolyn Dean has always been one of the best there is at combining theorized history with the interventions in theory itself, and this book is no exception.

Carolyn Dean's painstakingly researched, rigorously argued reconstruction of the cultural icon of the moral witness exemplifies the ascendant genre of the succinct, historical essay-book.

Carolyn Dean traces the paths by which victims, survivors, and witnesses of mass atrocities moved from the culture's sidelines to its moral center... convincingly show[ing] that the figure of the witness has become the barometer of moral consciousness across the West.... [Its] global lens and longue durée perspective have considerable value.

Dean has provided a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the emergence of "the witness" as a moral symbol and pervasive icon of suffering and surviving genocide and mass atrocities.... The book will be valuable to students and scholars who study genocide, testimony, victimhood, and social and cultural trauma in the aftermath of mass atrocities.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
ILLUSTRATIONS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
INTRODUCTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. THE RIGHTEOUS AVENGERS. The Tehlirian and Schwarzbard Trials, 1921 and 1927 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	26
2. THE CAMP SURVIVOR. The Libel Cases of Victor Kravchenko and David Rousset, 1949 and 1950–51 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
3. THE HOLOCAUST WITNESS. The Eichmann Trial and Its Aftermath Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
4. THE GLOBAL VICTIM AND THE COUNTERWITNESS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	132
CONCLUSION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 198
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 7
- Images: 7
- Other: 7 b&w halftones
Keywords: Armenian genocide; genocide; survivor; trauma; humanity

eBook

Published: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 9781501735080