Historische Gerechtigkeit auf dem Rechtsweg? Walter Schwarz und die Zeitschrift Rechtsprechung zum Wiedergutmachungsrecht (1949–1981)

Abstract

he article analyses the importance of the German legal journal Rechtsprechung zum Wiedergutmachungsrecht (RzW), literally translated as ›Jurisdiction on the right to reparations‹, which was published in the Federal Republic between 1949 and 1981. Sponsored initially by the state and later also financially supported by the United Restitution Organisation (URO), a Jewish legal aid organisation, it was the only legal journal specialised in matters of reparation and redress. As such, it had a vital role in communicating the developments in this field to jurists, bureaucrats and politicians. When the German Jewish lawyer Walter Schwarz took over the editorship in 1957, the journal also became a forum for legal and judicial criticism. Taking clues from the sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s important study Legitimation durch Verfahren (1969), the article traces the editorial development of the RzW and demonstrates the impact and the limits of what can be called justice-compliant judicial criticism, a criticism that is brought forward in a way that it can be addressed by the legal system without raising more fundamental moral and legal questions. In the three decades of its existence, the RzW contributed to the establishment of restitution law in the Federal Republic of Germany, but its jurisprudential interventions often went unnoticed. When the journal ceased publication at the end of 1981, Schwarz and his colleagues were proud of the achievements of the West German Wiedergutmachung, but they also recognised that the administration of justice in this field had remained a marginal area of the law that had received little attention let alone recognition from the public.