Projekt

Daten zum Projekt

The Administration of Normality. Law and Society 1944-1952

Initiative: Freigeist-Fellowships
Bewilligung: 31.03.2014
Laufzeit: 5 Jahre

Projektinformationen

Legal services are provided and requested at all times. Even in the last months of the 'Third Reich', the German judiciary remained accessible for the trivia of daily life. Beyond courts-martial and military courts, insults, assaults, damages, or household arguments made their way to the legal system. And these cases survived the unconditional surrender of May 8th, 1945. The legal threads from the collapsed dictatorship were tied together before the forcefully democratised judiciary, with no regard to the fractures of world history. "This struggle has now been going on for 10 years already", complained a weary landlord after he had returned from captivity in 1948 and had still not won his tenancy dispute. Even total state, total war, and total defeat left room for a splintering in personal experiences, which can perhaps be best described, following Reinhart Koselleck, as the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous. In the middle of the national socialist defence orgy, societal conceptions of normality were stored in the law and preserved for the future. The law cushioned the caesura of the unconditional surrender and transferred the normality of the old order into both succeeding German states. The study explores this process.

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