What are human rights? The technical answer is that they are norms of international law that are formulated in abstract, universally applicable terms. For example, Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” Such a norm contains no reference to any context or circumstances that might justify limiting those rights – and therein lies the power of human rights language. When lawyers or activists attach a particular situation to a human rights norm, they seek to persuade others to see that situation in isolation from its historical context and usual justifications, as a violation. Human rights norms are ahistorical and decontextualized, and that is the point of invoking them.

After the Second World War, activists around the world hoped that people would think ever more in terms of human rights norms, and the Allies encouraged that hope. However, the use of the ahistorical language of human rights in occupied and West Germany – the subject of this essay – was difficult and inevitably controversial. In practice, the language of human rights in West Germany highlighted the tension between the Federal Republic’s most prized moral claims: to have enshrined timeless, universal human rights, and to have accepted the specific historical responsibility of Nazism. While the former asks listeners to set aside context, the latter depends on a specific context for its significance.