Word: wiedergutmachung
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This legacy of harm generates a resounding claim for recompense. When Germany announced its “moral responsibility” for the Holocaust reparations (Wiedergutmachung) in 1954, the Federal Republic of Germany’s first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, stated that Germany was culpable for the “state-sponsored” crimes of the Nazi regime. Likewise, the U.S. government admitted its complicit nature in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 for the Japanese interment camps in this country during World War II, and found that with governmental culpability comes the need for repair. Black reparations models...
...most remarkable effort in history to treat sin as crime and then atone for it in cash. In absolute terms, the whole idea is preposterous: How can one recompense a man for his own death? And though payments, of course, are made to next of kin, the Wiedergutmachung (literally "making good again") is a legal anomaly that intentionally permits all sorts of quasi-legal advantages to the claimants. It is a "beautiful piece of liberal and humane legislation," as one of Lionel Davidson's German characters sums it up, that "any crook who puts his mind...
...from the past, and so dispose of the problem? Clearly not. Cleverly, wisely, Davidson offers no final solution. Instead he slowly turns the book into a rueful seminar on the possibilities that men have of ever "making good again" after various sorts of failure. In the process, the word Wiedergutmachung becomes a kind of pun that can be read on a number of levels, some hopeful, some somber: restoring to virtue a society that has lost its virtue; paying old debts; returning to success after losses in life or love...
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