Minority Rights, Honor, and Hate Speech Law in Post-Holocaust West Germany

Abstract

This article examines the political and cultural dynamics surrounding postwar West Germany’s passage of its 1960 hate speech law, which remained in effect for 50 years. It uses the case to question and rethink the dominant narrative of human rights history as the progressive triumph of human rights since World War II. Instead, it argues for the centrality of identity politics and a distinctive German political culture in shaping the law. While the development of Germany’s formal law on hate speech is consistent with a progressive narrative, a different story emerges when, as this article does, one shifts the focus downward and outward, from lawmakers and the formal law to the extra-legal political and social context and to the reactions of ordinary citizens. Here, the article finds a great irony: Jews, the very minority group which Germany’s new hate speech law was most intended to protect, fought successfully to remove strong human rights language from the final bill, while, at the same time, championing an old and seemingly outdated legal tool, defamation law. Political culture and the historical struggles of liberal, assimilationist German Jews trying to balance a particuliarist group identity with the universalistic claims of equal citizenship in the nation state, explain this irony.