Legal Entanglements: Law, Rights, and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989 by Sebastian Gehrig

Abstract

Reviewed by: Legal Entanglements: Law, Rights, and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989 by Sebastian Gehrig Sarah Colvin Legal Entanglements: Law, Rights, and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989. By Sebastian Gehrig. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. 2021. xiii+327 pp. $145; £107. ISBN 978–1–80073–083–0. Sebastian Gehrig has written a detailed, scholarly, and very useful account of the legislative debates and tensions in East and West Germany during the Cold War: that is, at a time when the political legitimacy of the competing German states depended not least on their perceived adherence to international legal standards. This new study opens out a novel and important perspective on the 'two Germanies' not as merely divided, but as importantly and complexly entangled in the context of their shared national history. Among other things, Gehrig meticulously unpicks the entangled intricacies of East and West German citizenship law, offering crucial historical background for those seeking to understand the debates around Federal German citizenship laws and (right-wing) identity politics now. Law and rights, Gehrig demonstrates, were a key element in the Cold War battle for legitimacy between East and West Germany, even while the competing ideologies of the two states meant that terms such as citizenship and human rights had different meanings, which shifted over time. Consideration is also given to how post-war decolonization and the global development of nation states impacted on conceptions of law, rights, and the state, and how East Germany's branding of West Germany [End Page 515] as neo-fascist and neo-colonial accompanied the GDR's diplomatic efforts to be recognized in Africa as a nation state. In the context of the overarching narrative of legislative developments and entanglements, Gehrig offers fascinating micro-stories on issues such as the legal and political manoeuvring that drove the outlawing of the West German Communist Party (KPD) in 1956, or the domestic struggles over Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik in the early 1970s. In 1973 both Germanies were accepted into the United Nations, and Gehrig's study charts the establishment of international human rights norms in both Germanies, at least in theory. In the GDR, the author comments, 'legal realities remained a different matter' (p. 225); though the same could conceivably be said of the FRG, whose treatment of its prisoners from the domestic terrorist groups in the mid-1970s drew letters of protest to the Federal German government from Amnesty International (Gehrig does address problematic aspects of West German counter-terrorism measures in the 1970s, but not the highly controversial treatment of accused and convicted members of the terrorist groups in West German prisons). Gehrig notes that in East Germany citizens' rights were not absolute or basic, but contingent on individuals' participation in the socialist project. Crime in the GDR failed to abate in the way it was supposed to as socialism developed, Gehrig notes; but again, the problems of penal law and practice are not part of his study. Nelson Mandela rather famously wrote that 'no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails', and it would have been extremely interesting to see the penal codes and practices of the two Germanies contextualized in this otherwise comprehensive study. It remains, however, an admirable piece of work that not only does a very significant amount of meticulous groundwork, but provides new and fascinating perspectives on and insights into East and West Germany after 1945, and tracks the after-effects of that time to the present day in ways that should inflect thinking on citizenship and identity now. Sarah Colvin University of Cambridge Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association