German Magazine Research Articles

Jelinek’s Rechnitz and Greenberg’s The Testament: Two Executions of One Massacre

Jelinek’s Rechnitz and Greenberg’s The Testament: Two Executions of One Massacre Hartmut Heep On March 24, 1945, approximately one thousand Jewish forced labourers were transported ten miles from Köszeg in Hungary to the Austrian border town of Rechnitz. Nazi Germany had annexed Austria on March 11, 1938, and throughout World War II, thousands of Austrians fought alongside German soldiers. Soviet troops reached the outskirts of Vienna by April 3, 1945 and liberated the Austrian capital ten days later. The deported Hungarian Jews were supposed to fortify the southeast trench of Rechnitz, in order to impede the Red Army invasion. Severely weakened and malnourished, one hundred eighty of the male Jews were considered unfit to perform this manual labour. It was decided that they had to be eliminated. That same night of March 24, 1945, the Countess Margit Thyssen-Batthyány (1911–89), the mistress of the Nazi Hans Joachim Oldenburg, hosted a soirée at her castle in Rechnitz. The countess, the daughter of Heinrich Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon, was born in the castle. In 1933, Margit married Count Ivan von Batthyány. Like the family Thyssen, the Batthyánys, whose noble roots can be traced back to the ninth century, are associated with power and money. The countess was known for her close ties to SS officers and Nazi collaborators. Among the invited regular officers was the local Nazi chief Franz Podezin, who handed out guns to the guests. The British journalist David Litchfield suggests that fourteen to sixteen of the guests murdered the one hundred eighty unfit Jews during the party. Eighteen Jews, who had been forced to bury the victims in a mass grave, were themselves killed the following day. The grave was never found, nor were the perpetrators. On March 29, 1945, Rechnitz surrendered to the Soviet Army without much resistance. Auschwitz had been liberated on January 27, 1945. The facts related to this event remain murky. Walter Manoschek, for instance, discovered inconsistencies between the official court files and the judgement of the [End Page 476] Austrian People’s Court. The German magazine Der Spiegel quotes the German antisemitism researchers Wolfgang Benz and Winfried Garscha of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. Both argue that the party guests did not participate in the murder. The one hundred eighty murdered Jews were too weak to work or march and therefore, according to official Nazi policy, “were murdered everywhere at the time” (Spiegel). Eventually, the South African journalist Steven Krawitz confirms Litchfield’s theory. Szilvia Pais-Horváth recaptures the research of the last descendant of a Rechnitz victim, the Hungarian surgeon Gábor Vadász. All sixteen attempts to find the mass grave have so far been unsuccessful. Pais-Horváth reports that “some of the prisoners were beaten to death; others were hunted down or shot in the head.” She also states, “prisoners from the castle cellar were ordered to dig graves. One of them told an organization helping those who had been deported in 1945–46 that they dug up nine L-shaped graves, two meters wide and two meters deep.” Franz Podezin, the alleged mastermind of the massacre, disappeared in 1945, Pais-Horváth assumes “with the help of the Baroness.” Margit Thyssen-Batthyány moved to Switzerland, where she died peacefully in 1989. This massacre has been the focus of several artistic productions. The film Totschweigen (1994), directed by Margarete Heinrich and Eduard Erne, is a documentary in search of the mass grave. Unable to find it, even though Heinrich and Erne participated in the search, the documentary shifts its focus to interviews with the local population. Katya Krylova calls Totschweigen “a powerful visual language for the repression of memory in Rechnitz” (70). The documentary leaves no doubt that the grave is a metaphor for a missing chapter in Austrian history. Elfriede Jelinek’s play Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) (2008) presents a paradigm shift in the traditional Holocaust discussion. Neither the search for the grave nor the suffering of the Jewish victims takes centre stage. Her play intends to extort a confession from the local Austrian perpetrators, whose collective memory has gone missing just as much as the...

Exile and Literature in the Prague German Magazine Die Wahrheit

Exile and Literature in the Prague German Magazine Die Wahrheit

Exile and Literature in the Prague German Magazine Die Wahrheit

Exile and Literature in the Prague German Magazine Die Wahrheit

Como se a ficção de fato desviasse os rios

O naturalista Fritz Müller publicou o artigo “Der Minhocão”, em 1877, na revista alemã Zoologische Garten, coletando depoimentos sobre o anelídeo descomunal que teria sido avistado nos estados de Santa Catarina, Paraná e São Paulo. Objeto desta leitura, o relato científico oitocentista é lido a partir da teoria do deslocamento das ideias de Filosofia do como se (Philosophie des Als Ob, 1911), de Hans Vaihinger, com elementos de Wolfgang Iser (fictício, imaginário) e Vilém Flusser (fábula filosófica Vampyrotheutis Infernalis). Nessa leitura, descrições de zoologia alterna de Guimarães Rosa e Wilson Bueno, um poema de Fritz Müller e fragmento de Galáxias, de Haroldo de Campos, são contrapontos que exploram lindes entre ficção e fato, entre ficção, hipótese e dogma científico.

Strolling the Streets to Discover the Cities: Cosmopolitan Collage in the Independent Magazine <i>Flaneur</i>

The modern indie magazine Flaneur: Fragments of a Street, an English-language periodical published in Germany from 2013 onwards and distributed worldwide, examines a single street of a foreign city in each issue via a creative compilation of various visual and visceral materials in order to construct multimedia fragments into a cosmopolitan collage. Owing to its incorporation of sensate components, its focus on transnational networks, and its evocation of the figure of the nineteenth-century flâneur in order to bring urban environments to life for its widely dispersed readership, Flaneur offers a focal point in the diverse expanse of contemporary independent magazine publications. In order to capture the kaleidoscopic nature of modern life, the publication creates an amalgamation of poetic text, unusual layout, visual input, and haptic interaction within its printed pages. As a result, the interaction between mosaic content and multilayered flexibility within this modern, German magazine functions as the driving force in Flaneur’s goal to both build imagined communities across borders and establish an embodied, emotional reading experience.

New Novichok poisoned Navalny

On Oct. 6 the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons released a report confirming that Russian politician Alexei Navalny was poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent. Such agents block messaging from nerves to muscles. The new report confirms the findings of German , French, and Swedish laboratory tests. It says that Navalny’s blood and urine contained the biomarkers of a cholinesterase inhibitor with a similar structure to those of the Novichok chemicals recently added to the Chemical Weapons Convention’s list of chemicals under the most stringent control. However, the nerve agent identified is not included in that list, suggesting that it is a new variant. Navalny first became ill in Russia on Aug. 20 and was airlifted to Berlin a few days later. Now discharged from the hospital, he told German magazine Der Spiegel that his mental abilities have returned and he is undergoing physical therapy.

Strategic Product Variety Choice: Theory and Empirical Evidence

The optimal number of products to offer consumers constitutes one of the core decision problems that firms face. In this paper, we provide a new model to investigate how firms choose their product variety in response to changes in market conditions, and empirically test the resulting predictions. While existing work on product portfolio size primarily focuses on consumer heterogeneity and entry deterrence, we consider the interaction between portfolio size and investment in customer satisfaction (e.g., through quality improvements) in an environment with imperfect competition. We show that the interaction between these decisions yields novel predictions of how market conditions shape a firm's product variety. Interestingly, we find that a higher customer profitability can lead to a reduced number of products, whereas an increase in the number of competitors or a larger share of loyal consumers might induce firms to expand their product variety. Several model extensions confirm the robustness of these results. We conduct an empirical analysis using data from the German magazine industry, which provides supportive evidence for our predictions.

Submission beyond Islam: Yielding as Organizing Principle in Michel Houellebecq's novels

Submission beyond IslamYielding as Organizing Principle in Michel Houellebecq's novels Karl Ågerup introduction On 7 January 2015, the same day as the attack on the Parisian satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission was published in French. This novel, depicting a future France in which a Muslim president is elected, immediately became part of the ongoing debate on Islam and French identity. In an address to the country, then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls claimed that the attack on Charlie Hebdo should inspire the French to rise up against hatred, intolerance, and Michel Houellebecq: "La France ce n'est pas la soumission, ce n'est pas Michel Houellebecq" [France is not submission, it is not Michel Houellebecq] (all translations are mine unless otherwise stated) (Tronche). Thus, the Prime Minister associated Houellebecq and Soumission with intolerance and hatred. In this he was not alone. Former editor of Le Monde and founder of Mediapart Edwy Plenel called Houellebecq Islamophobic on national TV ("Houellebecq et islamophobie" 5:00–5:15), and socialist politician Alexis Corbière stated on national radio that Soumission adhered to xenophobic discourse ("Le grand directe" 01:30–01:40). Faithful to his habits, and to the operating manual for poets he had integrated in his 1991 essay Rester vivant (26), Houellebecq had found one of society's most sensitive wounds and rubbed salt in it. Only this time the debate was more extensive than before, and the audience too: by February 2015, the novel had simultaneously topped the sales charts in France, Italy, and Germany ("Houellebecq, superstar des ventes"). The German magazine Der Spiegel ranked Submission among the fifty best books of our times (Scappaticci), and The New York Times named it one of the top hundred books of 2015 (Pagesy). There are comprehensible arguments for reading Houellebecq's picture of a submissive France as neo-conservative discourse. Whether in the form of Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" theory, of Renaud Camus' vision of a coming "great replacement," or of more realistic prognostics of cultural transformations in Europe, the question of a rising Muslim community threatening French traditions was frequently raised during the decade preceding Houellebecq's novel. Professor Jérôme Meizoz solemnly declared that he felt Soumission fed on these ideas ("Lettre" 80). The fact that [End Page 196] Houellebecq had called Islam "la religion la plus con" [the stupidest religion] in the literary magazine Lire made it easy to classify Soumission as Islamophobic (Sénécal). Notably, "Islam" can be translated as "submission," but what did Houellebecq mean by giving his novel this title? The critics were intrigued. As Agathe Novak-Lechevalier has noted, the word "soumission" is highly polysemic and takes on meanings in various areas such as sex and politics (154). From the viewpoint of Soumission's narrator, Islam is not dangerous, but valuable: Houellebecq's hero benefits from the new patriarchal order and finds it ideologically reasonable. As Philippe Lançon has emphasized, the novel can be read as both Islamophobic and Islamophilic. The novel's reception has accordingly been mixed and confused (see Ågerup, "The Political Reception"). The debate is nowhere near consensus on what Houellebecq wants to say. Is he out to make the public afraid of Islam in general, or just of patriarchal politics? Or is he attracted by the conservative morals practiced by some Muslim societies? Given the novel's evident anchoring in contemporary French political debate, such questions impose themselves even on a reader who is conscious of the literary text's principal autonomy. A certain ideological tension appears during the realization of the text, and this disturbing ambiguity, as several critics have maintained, is also one of the novel's key assets (Dorais 29; Knausgaard; Novak-Lechevalier 154). In his classic work "Implied Truths in Literature," John Hospers remarked that the literary text's resistance to a single interpretation is "frustrating and at the same time fascinating" (45). It is precisely because fictional discourse lacks a stable, responsible, and identifiable speaker that it can be so intriguing. The present study is driven by the frustration-fascination that Hospers notes, and it approaches Soumission as fictional discourse with political implications. It takes into account...

Ustrój i prawo w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie w poglądach prawników niemieckich na łamach czasopisma „Deutsches Recht” w czasie II wojny światowej

<p>„Deutsches Recht” to niemieckie czasopismo, które w okresie II wojny światowej miało istotne znaczenie dla prawników w III Rzeszy. Na łamach tego periodyku, obok opracowań dotyczących prawa obowiązującego w Niemczech, publikowano także teksty odnoszące się do ustroju i prawa Generalnego Gubernatorstwa. Te ostatnie miały głównie charakter propagandowy, a w mniejszym stopniu – merytoryczny. Wśród autorów tych publikacji przeważały osoby związane z realizacją niemieckiej polityki okupacyjnej w GG (niemieccy funkcjonariusze administracji okupacyjnej, niemieccy sędziowie i adwokaci).</p>

СИНТАКСИЧЕСКИЕ СРЕДСТВА ВЫРАЗИТЕЛЬНОСТИ ЗАГОЛОВКОВ ПРЕССЫ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ ПУБЛИКАЦИЙ ЖУРНАЛА SPIEGEL)

Принято считать, что заголовок – неотъемлемая и главная часть любой публикации, поскольку он является первым звеном, на которое обращает внимание читатель при знакомстве с публицистическим текстом. Заголовок несет определенную информацию о содержании публицистического произведения, поэтому должен иметь эмоциональную окраску, возбуждать читательский интерес, привлекать внимание.Цель. Данная статьяпосвящена анализу синтаксических средств выразительности заголовков. Предметом анализа выступают современные немецкие публицистические тексты. Выбор текстов публицистики в качестве материала исследования позволяет по-новому проанализировать средства выразительности заголовков на синтаксическом уровне.Метод или методология проведения работы. Основу исследования образуют метод сплошной выборки при подборе практического материала, описательный метод лингвостилистического анализа, а также метод количественно-качественного анализа.Результаты. Результаты исследования показали, что синтаксические особенности заголовков публицистических текстов многогранны и разнообразны. Журналисты используют различные синтаксические средства для того, чтобы сделать заголовок более эмоциональным и экспрессивным. Самыми частотными являются номинативные заголовки, как односоставные, так и состоящие из двух или нескольких существительных. С целью придания заголовку броскости широко используется эллипсис. Краткий заголовок быстрее воспринимается читателем, его необычная форма вызывает интерес и побуждает читателя прочитать сам текст. С точки зрения цели высказывания наиболее распространены повествовательные предложения. Однако встречаются заголовки в форме вопросительных предложений, весьма редки побудительные предложения. Для привлечения внимания читателя к тексту нередко возникает эмфатическое выделение в начале заголовка путем изменения порядка слов. Использование повтора на разных уровнях в целях эмфазы также имеет место быть в исследуемом материале.Область применения. Результаты исследования могут быть использованы в теоретических курсах по стилистике немецкого языка, а также в спецкурсах по дискурсу современной немецкой прессы.

Влияние Советского Союза на послевоенное развитие культуры Восточной Германии (1945– 1949 гг.)

The study of cultural problems in the countries of the socialist community has acquired considerable relevance in historical research recently. At the same time there are considerable gaps in the study of culture of German Democratic Republic. For the period from 1945 to 1949 it is especially true. Appeal to the sources of the Soviet period can make it partly up. Nevertheless, this is insufficient. A modern view of the culture of East Germany after Second World War is ne-cessary. The policy of Socialist Unified Party of Germany at the socialist culture formation period is the subject of this research. The consideration of the influence of Soviet Union and ideas of Oc-tober Revolution on the postwar cultural development of East Germany (1945–1949) is the aim of this research. The realization of research tasks based on the using of Soviet and German books, newspapers and magazines is achieved. Sociopragmatic method, that allows to objectively investigate the processes in Soviet occupation zone of German is the main in this work. Social processes that occurred from 1945 to 1949 in East Germany are investigated. The degree of influence of Soviet Union and the ideas of October Revolution on the cultural policy of Socialist Unified Party of Germany is determined. The study of the Soviet influence on the cultural policy of Socialist Unified Party of Germany in the German society allowed to determinate its level as quite high. The study confirms the conclusions of researchers that party persons of SUPG sought to conduct cultural policy in East Germany based on the Soviet sample.

Medical media discourse as an object of linguistic study (based on the material of modern German magazine periodicals)

Medical media discourse as an object of linguistic study (based on the material of modern German magazine periodicals)

International adoption: thematic discourse in the German media

The problem of international adoption is analyzed. Special interest in international adoption is explained by less strict requirements to potential adoptive parents, which reflects the asymmetrical nature of interaction between donor and recipient countries on this issue, and the need to separate the child from biological parents in order for adoptive parents to insure themselves against possible claims from them. The existing system of international adoption is considered as a modern form of exploiting developing countries, which have excessive reproductive resources. The peculiarities of the international adoption discourse are considered on the example of German mass media as one of the acceptor countries that form a solvent demand for this service. On the basis of the qualitative content analysis of 205 publications in four leading German magazines and newspapers (Der Spiegel, Der Stern, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), published in the period from 2002 to 2018, the peculiarities of topical presentation of international adoption and the formation of attitudes towards it among the majority of German citizens are traced. Currently, the areas of discourse on international adoption are as follows: expansion of the adoption rights of same-sex families; promotion of adoption through the media; legislative changes to eliminate the black market of international adoption; surrogacy and the spread of IVF as a factor of reducing international adoption; success of adopted children in adulthood; criticism of racism and sexism in adoption; and adoption of children with disabilities. Based on the above, it is logical to forecast a further increase in demand for international adoption in the host countries despite the backdrop of tighter legislation in donor countries.

Visual and Verbal Ascribing of Meanings to the Term “Holy” in the German Magazines Stern and Spiegel

The case study focuses on how the semantic field sacred is linguistically and visually taken up in the German weekly print magazines Stern and Spiegel. Both magazines are defined by the use of visual material. Therefore, the analysis is based on theoretical concepts of image linguistics, which deal with the effect and functions of the connection of language and image in mass media.

ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЕ ИСКУССТВО НА СТРАНИЦАХ БЕРЛИНСКОГО ЖУРНАЛА “OST UND WEST”

“Ost und West” is a German magazine of the first quarter of the XX century, associated with the Zionist movement and the Jewish cultural renaissance. A unique feature of the magazine is the support of the Jewish artists from different countries of Europe. Articles on art criticism, art history and theory were devoted to the phenomenology of the national art of the Jews and considered the prospects for its evolution. According to this program, the authors of the magazine studied the work of the artists, important for the Russian art of the late XIX - early XX century. M. M. Antokolsky, I. I. Levitan, L. O. Pasternak and L. Bakst are among them. I. Ya. Ginzburg and P. D. Ettinger collaborated with the magazine. Some publications of “Ost und West” are included in the historiography of the Russian art for the first time.

The art of crime - New models of governance, compliance and accountability for the art world

Issue 29/2005 of German magazine Der Spiegel announced that, according to German Police findings, terrorist Mohammed Atta possibly tried to finance the attacks of 11 September 2001 through illegal art trade. According to the publication, Atta had offered antiques to a Professor of the University of Göttingen, who suspected the origin of the artwork and declined. Despite the world’s astonishment at such revelation, Al Qaeda was not the first terrorist organization to use the art and antiques market to finance their criminal operations, a market that only in 2016, handled an officially reported amount of 45 billion dollars, according to the TEFAF Report 2017 on the global art market.

DIE STILISTISCHEN PARAMETER DER VERBALEN INNOVATIONEN IN DER DEUTSCHEN PUBLIZISTIK

This article is devoted to analyse the stylistic characteristics of the verbal innovations taken from the German magazines. Each functional style has its own special features. Stylistic peculiarities of the modern German journalism consist in the evaluative connotation, in the metaphorical usage of the verbs and in the usage of grammar categories of the verbs. The evaluative connotation can beshown in semantics of the whole word as well as in its components. There are 27 evaluative models and only 3 of them are not active. The metaphorical sense of the innovations lies in the usage of the verbs in the fi gurative meaning, in the usage of the lexical items in the unusual communicative situation and in the obtaining of new shades of meaning. The grammatical peculiarities of the journalistic style consist in the digression of the grammar rules and norms of German in the usage of such categories as person, number, tense, voice and mood.

The Committed Observer: On Tzvetan Todorov

The Committed Observer:On Tzvetan Todorov1 Henk de Berg (bio) What kind of thinker Was Tzvetan Todorov? First and foremost, he was a European intellectual. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that he was the European intellectual par excellence. He spoke several languages fluently, was remarkably erudite and cultured, and displayed a striking curiosity and openness towards the world around him. The German magazine Der Spiegel expressed it well in the opening sentence of its obituary: "if one wanted to explain to a Martian what a European intellectual is, one would have to tell him about Tzvetan Todorov."2 Yet this obituary demonstrated something else too; to wit, that our literary critic, cultural theorist, and historian never quite achieved the status of an iconic philosopher: the eulogy was limited to a single 100-word column. Tzvetan Todorov was a thinker of the highest calibre, but he was much less read by, and much less known to, the general public than the "stars" of the intelligentsia whose publications find their way into bookshops at train stations and airports. I believe that this was the case precisely because he defended the ideals of tolerance, moderation, and freedom—the very values that are constitutive of liberal democracy. Behind this, there lies a paradoxical and somewhat disconcerting development. Modern self-consciousness emerged with the French Revolution;3 in other words, as a radical critique of contemporary society. But once the genie of suspicion had been let out of the bottle, it could not be put back in again. As a result, every action and every institution became suspect, to such an extent that even the most defensible and admirable social achievements proved insufficient and hence in need of replacement by perfect alternatives.4 And so the foundations of freedom morphed into social shackles and the institutions of the liberal state came to be seen as instruments of repression, while the self-proclaimed representatives of the critical gaze ensured—and continue to ensure—that nothing can escape this reign of suspicion. Now, Tzvetan Todorov never signed up to the program of these chiens de garde (on the right or the left), who are constantly on our television screens, disciplining and punishing those who stray out of bounds. Neither did he join the ranks of the intellectual alarmists, equally loved by the media, who at regular intervals announce the defeat of the mind, the [End Page 38] French suicide, the decline of the West, or the end of the world. And he decidedly was not one of the would-be saviors of humanity who know just how to avoid such catastrophes—if only one were to follow their guidance. When Karine Zbinden and I interviewed Todorov in March 2015, it was the first time we had the opportunity to talk for an extended period of time. I was struck by three things. The first of these was the complete absence of vanity. "You know," he said to us, "I don't really see myself as a philosopher. I think of myself as more of a historian, a historian of ideas certainly, with opinions, defending certain positions, but not conversing as an equal with the great philosophers of the past."5 The second thing that impressed me was his lucidity, his presence of mind. I remember asking him a set of three detailed questions about Sudhir Hazareesingh's latest book, How the French Think.6 Todorov gave a long, complex answer to the first question, followed by an equally extensive answer to the second one, after which he addressed the third question, which by that time I myself had already forgotten! The final thing that struck me was his intellectual fair-mindedness and rhetorical moderation. He hated all forms of pathos and always endeavored to consider all sides of the argument. No matter what we asked him about—the hateful nationalism of the extreme right, the omnipresence of the media today, or the possible future "robotization" of humanity—his answers were invariably well informed, open-minded, and judicious. This is what left the most lasting impression on me—his determination not to give in to panic or exaltation, but to maintain at...

How to Implement Informational and Emotional Appeals in Print Advertisements

ABSTRACT Advertising nudges consumers along several steps to purchase, and each step necessitates that advertisers set different objectives and message strategy. This study offers a framework for the appropriate choice of advertising appeals based on advertisers9 objectives and target group demographics. Using data from German magazine publishers, the study differentiates magazine advertisements9 effects for five marketing objectives along the hierarchy-of-effects model, while accounting for the moderating effects of age and gender. Results show that emotional appeals were superior to informational appeals for most marketing objectives but not for achieving integration into the evoked set, a group of relevant brands that a prospective consumer is favorably familiar with when thinking about making a purchase. Consumers9 age and gender significantly influenced the effects of advertising appeals and revealed interaction effects.

Cold War Myopia: Germany’s World in the 1970s and its Relations with Cambodia

Kiran Klaus Patel Cold War Myopia Germany’s World in the 1970s and its Relations with Cambodia Introduction “We’re doing something that’s never been done before.” This was the title used by the West German news magazine Der Spiegel in May 1977 for an interview with Ieng Sary, the deputy prime minister and foreign minister of Cambodia. Ieng Sary was also known as “Brother Number Three,” a reference to his position as the third most powerful figure in the Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot. In prefacing the interview, Der Spiegel briefly described how the Communists had been ruling the country since April 1975 “while keeping the global public mostly in the dark.” Refugees had told of a “barbaric stone age socialism with hundreds of thousands of victims.” This was, as Der Spiegel claimed, the first time a representative of the Cambodian leadership had given an interview to a Western press organ.1 The magazine was obviously proud of its major scoop. Hence, the article’s title took on a second level of meaning because it not only referred to what the regime was implementing, but also underlined the significance of the article itself. The West German magazine did not shy away from posing critical questions. It confronted the Cambodian leader with the findings of the French priest Fran- çois Ponchaud and the American journalists Anthony Paul and John Barron, who estimated the number of the regime’s victims to be at least one million.2 Yet Ieng Sary showed nothing but contempt for such criticism: “These people are mad.” He maintained that only dangerous criminals were sentenced to death in his country, while repentant members of the former regime were treated with leniency . At the same time, however, the article offered him plenty of space to present the regime’s alleged achievements.3 The essay by Tim Szatkowski in this volume takes us back to the years covered by this article in Der Spiegel as he examines how the government of the Federal 1 “Was wir machen, gab es noch nie,” in: Der Spiegel, May 9, 1977. 2 See François Ponchaud, Cambodge année zero. Document, Paris 1977. Penguin published an English translation in 1978; there was never a German version of Ponchaud’s book. See also John Barron/Anthony Paul, Murder of a Gentle Land. The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia, New York 1977. 3 “Was wir machen, gab es noch nie,” in: Der Spiegel, May 9, 1977. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110522990-003 64 Kiran Klaus Patel Republic of Germany reacted to the Khmer Rouge terror regime and the situation in Cambodia in general. His analysis revolves around the question of the position accorded to human rights in West Germany’s relations with the Southeast Asian country. The essay correctly points out the confusing and unclear political situation in Cambodia, which made it hard for Western states to find reasonable answers. Drawing mainly on archival holdings of the Federal Foreign Office, Szatkowski identifies and elaborates on the multi-layered and occasionally contradictory West German reactions to developments in the country. He concentrates on the years from 1975 to 1979, when Cambodia descended into the bloody terror of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship. Szatkowski emphasizes, however, that these years can only be properly assessed by placing them within a longer historical perspective. He therefore devotes – at least in light of this research question and claim – a striking amount of attention to the preceding historical phase from the mid-1960s onwards and sketches, for readers less familiar with this period, the general contemporary historical context for the Southeast Asian country. Overall, Szatkowski convincingly shows that the West German government distanced itself from the Pol Pot regime for a long time. In 1976, for example, the government decided not to resume diplomatic relations, not least because of the terror of the Khmer Rouge. At the critical juncture, however, Bonn backpedaled from its focus on human rights. In 1979, a decision loomed on the global level, namely whether the Khmer Rouge or the new regime under Heng Samrin was to be recognized as the legitimate representative of Cambodia at the United Nations. At the time, the...