Abstract
It is a commonplace of transitional justice scholarship that in post-conflict societies, public apologies by former wrongdoers are practices that promote respect for victims.2 An apology, even in the simplest of senses, involves recognition that the victim was not treated appropriately, and that at the very least she deserves redress in the form of an acknowledgment of the wrong done. Notwithstanding the potential of apologies to foster respect, this chapter makes the case for considering an ambivalence in the acts of apologising that are common to transitional justice situations. It focuses on the familiar although insufficiently explored case of the public exposure of informers (Inoffiziellen Mitarbeiter, IM) who worked for the infamous secret police or Stasi under the German Democratic Republic (GDR).3 Public apologies might build respect, but they can also circumvent that possibility. This ambivalence, I contend, has not been fully appreciated in the relevant literature, where apologies are regarded by and large as what one scholar calls ‘performative redress’.4
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A longer version of this chapter appeared in German Studies Review 36, no. 2 (2013): 327–345.
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Notes
The list is immense, but consider the following essays contained in Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, ed., Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000): Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, ‘The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions’; Elizabeth Kiss, ‘Moral Ambition within and beyond Political Constraints: Reflections on Restorative Justice’; David Crocker, ‘Truth Commissions, Transitional Justice, and Civil Society’; Charles S. Meier, ‘Doing History, Doing Justice: The Narrative of the Historian and of the Truth Commission’;
See also Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Ernesto Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Political Violence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009);
Jeffrey Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
On transitional justice in Germany see Claus Offe, ‘Disqualification, Retribution, Restitution. Dilemmas of Justice in Post-Communist Transitions’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 1, no. 1 (1993): 17–44.
For a comparative perspective, see Marek M. Kaminski and Monika Nalepa, ‘Judging Transitional Justice: A New Criterion for Evaluating Truth Revelation Procedures’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 3 (2006): 383–408.
John Borneman, ‘Public Apologies as Performative Redress’, SAIS Review of International Affairs 25, no. 2 (2005): 53–66.
A recent sceptical line of reasoning may be found in Rebecca Saunders, ‘Questionable Associations: The Role of Forgiveness in Transitional Justice’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice 5, no. 1 (2011): 119–141.
One exception is David Sussman, ‘Kantian Forgiveness’, Kant-Studien 96, no. 1 (2005): 85–107.
The list of articles and books is extensive, but some of the major works used in this chapter are the following: Lucy Allais, ‘Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 36, no. 1 (2008): 33–68;
Christopher Bennet, ‘Is Amnesty an Act of Political Forgiveness?’ Contemporary Political Theory 2, no. 1 (2003): 67–76;
P.E. Digeser, Political Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001);
Trudy Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge (London: Routledge, 2002);
Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Jeffrey G. Murphy, Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
Andrew Schaap, ‘Political Grounds for Forgiveness’, Contemporary Political Theory 2, no. 1 (2003): 77–87;
Nick Smith, I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991);
Glen Pettigrove, ‘Hannah Arendt and Collective Forgiveness’, Journal of Social Philosophy 37, no. 4 (2006): 483–500;
Danielle Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Murphy, Getting Even, 35. See also Linda Radzik, Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 94.
Alison Lewis, ‘En-Gendering Remembrance: Memory, Gender and Informers for the Stasi’, New German Critique 86, Spring-Summer (2002): 121.
Quoted by Anne Sa’adah, Germany’s Second Chance: Trust, Justice, and Democratization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 74.
John Borneman, ‘Public Apologies as Performative Redress’, 2005.
See also Borneman, Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
This is a roughly Warnerian framework. See Michael Warner, ‘Publics and Counterpublics’, Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–90.
Herbert Fischer-Solms, ‘IM Torsten: Der Stasi-Fall des Eislauf-Trainers Ingo Steuer’, Deutschland Archiv: Zeitschrift für das vereinigte Deutschland 2 (2006): 197–200.
See also, to illustrate, Thomas Purschke, ‘Bemerkenswerte Stasi-Personalie’, Gerbergasse 18, 31, no. 4 (2003): 5.
Ernesto Verdeja, ‘Official Apologies in the Aftermath of Political Violence’, Metaphilosophy 41, no. 4 (2010): 563–581.
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© 2014 Juan Espindola
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Espindola, J. (2014). An Apology for Public Apologies?. In: Mihai, M., Thaler, M. (eds) On the Uses and Abuses of Political Apologies. Rhetoric, Politics and Society Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343727_11
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