Following the Moscow Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe of October 1943, the Allies agreed in Potsdam in August 1945 that “war criminals and those who have participated in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes shall be arrested and brought to judgment. Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters, and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions, and any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives shall be arrested and interned.” During the immediate postwar years, the internment practices by the Allies of the anti-Hitler coalition were quite similar. Altogether, the Allies interned about four hundred thousand people who were suspected of constituting a danger to occupation policies (a “security threat”) or who had held a rank in the Nazi state apparatus (categorized for “automatic arrest”). In every Allied occupation zone in Germany, investigation of personal guilt and prosecution of “Nazi and war crimes” was not a prerequisite for internment, which can be seen foremost as a means of Allied security policy immediately after the end of the war, in a situation that was still militarily unsafe for the occupying powers. But how was internment connected to the Allies’ overall goal, formulated in the Moscow and Potsdam declarations, to determine and prosecute individual guilt—especially if the crimes affected their own citizens? This chapter will trace the identification and prosecution of guilty parties in the context of internment and Soviet occupation policy by examining the Soviet investigations in the context of internment, the practices of extradition between the Allied forces, and the convictions of former internees in Soviet military tribunals (SMTs), which were held mostly in secret. In connection with our analysis of these procedures, we seek to answer how the secrecy of both internment and prosecution affected the perception and assessment of Soviet efforts to prosecute war crimes in German society. We make extensive use of material from the Russian state archive of the Department of Soviet Special Camps in Germany, an element of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD; renamed Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD, in mid-1946). This collection, however, does not contain individual camp prisoner records or case files. The Soviet material is complemented with sources from German and British archives.

In July 1963, the Supreme Court of East Germany convicted West German state secretary Hans Globke to life imprisonment for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Nazi rule in Germany. The verdict was returned in absentia in East Berlin. This public event was the end point of a longer history of various Cold War efforts aimed at compromising “Adenauer’s chief aide” by means of the historical record.

Hans Globke, born 1898 in Dusseldorf, who worked from 1929 in the Prussian, then Reich Ministry of Interior, wrote in 1936 together with State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart the first commentary on the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws (“Reichsburgergesetz” and “Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre,” 1935). Due to the need for expertise in the new postwar public administration, positive testimonies, and luck in the “denazification” process, Globke gradually returned to public service during the second half of the 1940s. From 1953 until his retirement in 1963, he served as federal secretary of state and chief of staff in the West German Chancellery.

Globke belonged to the West German political elite that propaganda by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) continuously referred to in the Adenauer era. In 1956, the Committee of German Unity (ADE) published the first brochure dedicated to Globke. Also in West Germany, Globke was a controversial figure. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been critical of Globke and his successful political career from the beginning. His past was no secret. Adolf Arndt, the Social Democrat expert on legal affairs, referred to Globke’s commentary on the Nuremberg Laws already in a parliamentary debate on July 12, 1950.

The international controversy around Hans Globke between 1960, when the anti-Globke press campaign intensified, and 1963, when the Globke case culminated in the East Berlin trial, was a complex public affair. The capture of Adolf Eichmann in May 1960 by the Mossad markedly influenced the Communist campaign that now aimed to implicate or at least discredit Globke by the criminal procedure in Jerusalem. Another turning point of the Globke affair dates to early 1963 when the final decision was made to organize a separate trial in East Berlin to incriminate Globke.

In chapter 2 we saw how Humboldt does not understand the task of linguistic translation as being to conceal or remove what is “Other” in the original language (“Das Fremde”), but rather to overcome its foreign quality or appearance (“Die Fremdheit”). The real task of translation is to enable us to understand the true meaning of the difference between languages. Humboldt’s insight about the task of translation between languages is directly relevant to his understanding of translation between cultures: that is to say, to intercultural understanding. In this chapter I will explore Humboldt’s engagement with the sacred texts of ancient India and how it differs from the practice of “Orientalism” in Germany at the time he was writing.

Humboldt’s insight anticipates a formulation of the German orientalist scholar Andrea Polaschegg, who has argued that the key categories of intercultural study should not be what is our own and what is other than ourselves—“das Eigene” and “das Andere”—but rather the dialogue between what we initially experience as familiar (“das Vertraute”) and what is initially foreign to us (“das Fremde”). As Polaschegg shows, an exaggerated concern with deconstructing false ideas of the Oriental Other—which may or may not be the product of language—might prevent us from communicating with and so understanding the actual other person whom we encounter. Understanding people who are other than ourselves necessarily involves making them “strange” to ourselves—that is, becoming conscious of the false linguistic and cultural categories we may project on to them—precisely in order that we might recognize who they are in themselves. But this “making strange” always involves a dialogic relationship that will ultimately change ourselves as much as our understanding of others. To recognize what is truly strange (“das Fremde”) about peoples as much as languages is the first step to making them known and trusted. By the same token, Humboldt’s idea of cultural as well as linguistic translation necessarily requires the “making strange” (“Verfremdung”) of our own culture and language: a creative act of self-alienation which for Polaschegg is the unavoidable precondition for understanding the cultural and linguistic Other, whether she be “Oriental” or otherwise.

Because of performance’s intangibility, descriptors relating to it are imprecise, and interpreting any textual reference to performance entails the potential for loss or modification of meaning. For example, Beowulf 1063a reads þær wæs sang ond sweg, which can be translated as ‘there was song and music’ with little reservation. However, even if this translation is fundamentally acceptable, it is unclear whether the concepts indicated by sang and sweg were the same for the poet as they are for a modern reader. Indeed, they are likely not to have been. The Modern English reflex of sang is ‘song’, but sang could refer to a concept as general as ‘noise’ or as specific as ‘psalm’, and we do not know whether certain performance material or a particular mode is intended. Poetic creativity also needs to be acknowledged: in Beowulf, Grendel’s wail of defeat is described as a sigeleasne sang, ‘victoryless song’ (787a), yet he is unlikely to have sung of his demise! Speaking of the Beowulf poet’s performance mode, Roberta Frank points out that ‘[his] depiction of two anonymous Danish scops reciting stories from Germanic legend (853– 97, 1068–159) indicates only that one Englishman, in whatever century he lived, believed that sixth-century Danes were likely to behave that way, not that song was his medium of exchange.’ Things are even less certain: we do not know whether song is the ‘medium of exchange’, the mode, being depicted in these instances from Beowulf. As Frank possibly unwittingly infers, they could refer to spoken recitals. Indeed, the performance mode is likely to be spoken storytelling in both passages that Frank refers to. Moreover, just before Grendel’s wail of defeat, the poet states that sweg up astag, ‘a music arose’ (782), also referring to Grendel’s cries. Although certain sections of early medieval English society had the use of Latin and thus the term musica, Old English, like many world languages, did not have a cognate for Modern English ‘music’, which entered the language in the Middle English period. A modern reader is thus unable to ascertain with confidence that an Old English identifier for performance refers to a song, story, poem, piece of music, or some combination of these elements. As this chapter intends to show, such issues of interpretation and classification extend to vocabulary relating to performers and their instruments.

The resort to international criminal justice after the Second World War has recently been reassessed by a body of creative scholarship that is looking into the foregrounding attempts to design an international justice, transnational dynamics, or longer-term processes. The emergence of new legal definitions and judicial instances (e.g., International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg and IMT for the Far East) has been increasingly studied within a wider framework, both in time and in space, without losing its unique character, while the respective parts played by the governments and the professional actors directly involved have acquired further nuance and deliberation.

Yet the year 1943 remains a turning point, when the idea of resorting to justice to legally qualify and punish the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers and their local accomplices was asserted and effectuated. Admittedly, the St. James Declaration that the Allied powers signed in January 1942 had already expressed their collective appreciation of the particularity of the violence deployed by the occupier in Europe. It also affirmed their determination in the future to punish severely these infringements of extant rights and customs of war as well as of the international conventions adopted since the middle of the nineteenth century that governed wartime behavior. But the Soviet success at Stalingrad also marked a turning point in this respect: not even waiting for final victory, the governments in exile in London and Stalin in Moscow passed the first laws to punish invaders and indigenous traitors found guilty of unprecedented crimes against the nation.

There is now an extensive literature looking at the intersection of law, war, and postwar consequences. This includes, in particular, the history of war crimes prosecution and the creation of new postwar legal systems and institutions, but also questions of retribution and repatriation. The last two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in the postwar efforts of European governments to come to grips with citizens who collaborated with the Nazis in their countries and in subsequent scholarship on the topic, including a debate on the issue of Jewish forced cooperation during the Holocaust and the role of the postwar discussion around it in the formation of a post-Holocaust collective of Jews from Poland. While this chapter fits into the scholarship by looking at how justice and accountability were understood in the aftermath of war, it will focus in particular on incorporating into the narrative those Jews who stayed in Poland, and it links postwar justice sought outside courtrooms (demonstrating the initiative and agency of survivors) to that within the official legal system. This will be done by analyzing rehabilitation requests addressed to the Jewish Civic Court in Poland and on this basis demonstrating creation of public knowledge regarding collaboration during the Holocaust, formation of audiences, and circulation of the information on this topic. Central to this chapter, therefore, will be noncombatant victims, who were stigmatized by those surrounding them, both from within and from outside their community.

The chapter will look at the pursuit of justice and accountability in the aftermath of the Second World War, focusing on the case of wartime Jewish collaboration with the Nazi authorities, as investigated by the Jewish Civic Court (known in Polish mainly as sąd obywatelski or sąd społeczny, and in Yiddish as folks-gerikht). The Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce)—the central representative body of Polish Jewry— operated the court from October 1946 to early 1950. During the time of its existence, the Civic Court investigated 147 cases of members of the Polish Jewish community, who “during the Hitlerite occupation [were suspected of activity] unbefitting a Jewish citizen, through participation and harmful activity on ‘Jewish councils,’ in the [ghetto police], in the administration of concentration camps, or any other type of collaboration with the occupier to the detriment of society.”

Llewellyn Woodward was a member of All Souls for 34 years. He is nowadays most remembered as the Professor of International Relations in Oxford who was appointed in 1944 as editor of the hefty series of Documents of British Foreign Policy, which began publication under official auspices in 1947. He had an influential detractor in A. J. P. Taylor, who damned him with faint praise as ‘technically competent and conscientious’, and called him ‘a great operator’, meaning toady, who protected the reputations of officials.

Woodward, in turn, considered Taylor to be dishonest. The references of twenty-first century scholars to Woodward remain grudging. Jonathan Haslam wrote in 2021 of the ‘complacency’ of those ‘knights of the realm’ who were chosen by Whitehall committees ‘to write elegant official histories or edit Foreign Office documents with due diligence, such as Sir Llewellyn Woodward.’ Martin Ceadel, in his account of the academic specialization of international relations at Oxford, shows as much respect for Woodward’s humour as for his professional qualifications. Woodward’s research into diplomatic history began in the autumn of 1918 when, after being invalided from the army, he was recruited to the Foreign Office’s Historical Section. There, among other tasks, he wrote a monograph which was published, under the title Congress of Vienna 1878, by His Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1920. After Hitler withdrew Germany from the Disarmament Conference in 1933, he was given privileged access to Foreign Office documents, which were closed to other scholars, and thus enabled to write a study of the Anglo-German naval armaments race before 1914. The resultant book, published as Great Britain and the German Navy by Oxford University Press in 1935, served official ends. During the war of 1939–45 he compiled an internal Foreign Office narrative of British diplomacy: an abridgement was published as British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (1962); the full six volumes were released during the 1970s. Undeniably, Woodward was a diplomatic historian who had the trust of senior diplomatists. Yet, although for ten years from 1951 he held a professorship at New Jersey’s version of All Souls, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, he had only remote kinship with English academic students of the developing discipline of international relations. His ideas and procedures seem remote from those of Alastair Buchan or Adam Roberts.

Why is language the most important element in Humboldt’s thought? The key lies in Humboldt’s response to a central paradox in the idea of enlightenment, of which the best-known formulation is Kant’s famous essay What is Enlightenment?

In that essay, written in response to a theme set by the Prussian academy in 1784, Kant resoundingly defines enlightenment as “humanity leaving behind its own self-incurred immaturity” (der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit) and its motto as “Have the courage to use your own understanding!” (Habe Mut, Dich Deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen!). For Kant, this is an imperative to be liberated from the tutelage of intellectual guardians who tell us how to think, priests who tell us what to believe, doctors who tell us what to eat, and soldiers who tell us only to obey. The freedom he enjoins us to realize is logically negative: it is freedom from the constraint of authority external to ourselves, not the freedom to attain any specific object that Kant wants to define. Yet its consequences are far-reaching and of great political and social import. First, it is worth noticing that Kant’s idea of maturity (“Mündigkeit”) has a double meaning. As the adjective “self-incurred” (selbstverschuldet) suggests, it clearly means the intellectual or psychological immaturity that is our own fault, because we lack the courage to emancipate ourselves from it. However, it also means the legally defined and enforced condition of majority and its opposite (“Unmündigkeit”), the status of a minor, who has tutors or guardians (“Vormünder”; ibid., 453) set over him or her. The two meanings are linked by Kant’s assertion that many people, having reached the age of adulthood, behave as if they were still minors because they voluntarily accept the tutelage imposed on them.

In the course of Kant’s essay, it becomes clear that this dual emphasis has social and political as well as intellectual consequences. If Kant’s argument was only about the idea of enlightenment, then our failure to realize that idea could only be a consequence of a lack of knowledge or courage. Once we had understood the imperative to use our own understanding, it would simply be up to us—Kant’s original or modern readers—to carry it out in reality: the actual social and political world.

Harpsichord

Solo Organ

Organ with Other Instruments

Organ and Orchestra

The first music by Samuel Adler that I ever heard was two movements of his Third String Quartet, played in Kilbourn Hall at Eastman in the fall of 1966. The occasion was an all-school convocation to introduce faculty members new to the school that year. To a junior-year piano student who composed but was very put off by most of the contemporary music he had heard, this quartet came as a revelation of something that I could not explain but to which I responded with huge excitement. Right here was new music, barely two years old, that for some reason I could follow. Its emotional communication came straight through to me. This experience was the first of two exciting surprises; the second was learning that this composer was going to be my teacher. My lessons (Thursdays at 8:00 a.m.) were wonderful, treasured times. My interest in Adler’s music, especially his piano music, began quite naturally at that time and has continued to this day.

Because he is such a prolific composer, I imagine Adler is the only person who has heard every composition he has written. His notes surely run by now into the millions! I offer my thoughts in this book, therefore, not as an expert on his music but as one who over time has studied his piano compositions deeply.

Samuel Adler’s music is thoroughly modern without being beholden to any of the many fashions and “isms” that have come into use over the last several decades. Adler has said of his work: “I have been labeled a composer of the ‘radical center,’ and I rather like that classification. I am a happy eclectic who has never been anxious to pursue novelty or the avant-garde, but who tried to be open to all stylistic trends.” His piano music invites the player to project a wide spectrum of emotions and their gradations. It is by turns joyous, frenetic, simple, direct, intellectually complex, lightweight, deeply moving, intense, contemplative, energetic, wild, beautiful, kaleidoscopic, and serene. Musicians who experience a wide variety of his works will recognize that they arise from one irreducible spiritual element: that of affirmation.

In the last two chapters I explored the application of Humboldt’s idea of translation to the languages and cultures of Asia, especially the Kawi language of Java and the religious texts of ancient India. In the next two chapters I will explore the relevance of that idea to the second central theme of this book: communication between different faith traditions in the contemporary world. In this chapter I will examine some of the difficulties as well as the promises of applying Humboldt’s idea of translation to communication between the three great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. My argument will be exemplified by an examination of the relationship between faith commitment and dialogue between religious traditions in the work of three modern representatives of those traditions. In the next chapter I will look in detail at one contemporary attempt at interfaith communication—the practice known as Scriptural Reasoning—to which, I will suggest, Humboldt’s understanding of translation as dialogue is especially relevant.

Translation and Faith: Concepts and Problems

The point of this chapter is not to argue that any of the figures it will consider are conscious or unconscious heirs to Humboldt’s legacy, nor to suggest that Humboldt’s idea of translation should explicitly be invoked in the practice of interfaith dialogue. It is to suggest that the Humboldtian framework can illuminate what happens in interfaith communication at its best and clear away some of the misunderstandings that often prevent such communication from succeeding; and that it has some decisive advantages over some influential alternative ways of understanding translation between faith traditions and between such traditions and the secular public sphere. Some of the theories of translation that I will consider are relatively constrained by the tradition of which they are a part; others are more open to alternative perspectives.