Since the end of the Second World War, restitution in Germany – Wiedergutmachung – has been mainly understood as part of state or private law.
This book offers a different approach, arguing that authors and artists have also taken up a responsibility for restitution. Deploying the literal translation ‘making-good-again’, this book focuses on the ‘making’ of law, literature and visual art to argue that restitution is
a practice which is found in different genres, sites and temporalities.
The practices of restitution identified are dynamic, iterative and incomplete: they are practices of failure.
Nevertheless, in this book, the question of how to conduct restitution emerges as a material question of responsibility asked through the making of texts and objects in different genres, including law.
The resulting text is a unique expansion and re-conceptualisation of the practices of jurisprudence, restitution and responsibility in the context of the aftermath in Germany.
Contents:
- Practices of Restitution in the Aftermath: An Introduction
- Glossing Restitution: Walter Schwarz and Re-forming the Practice of Law
- Literary Restitution: W. G. Sebald, Alexander Kluge, Heimrad Bäcker and the Responsibilities of Writing
- Artistic Restitution: Institutions and the Limits of Art by Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter
- Memorial Restitution: A Walking Tour of Berlin’s Memorial Landscape
- Making-Good-Again? A Conclusion
This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
