Since the end of the Second World War, restitution in Germany – Wiedergutmachung – has been mainly understood as part of state or private law. This book offers a different approach, arguing that authors and artists have also taken up a responsibility for restitution. Deploying the literal translation 'making-good-again', this book focuses on the 'making' of law, literature and visual art to argue that restitution is a practice which is found in different genres, sites and temporalities. The practices of restitution identified are dynamic, iterative and incomplete: they are practices of failure. Nevertheless, in this book, the question of how to conduct restitution emerges as a material question of responsibility asked through the making of texts and objects in different genres, including law. The resulting text is a unique expansion and re-conceptualisation of the practices of jurisprudence, restitution and responsibility in the context of the aftermath in Germany. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
By:
Laura Petersen (University of Lucerne)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Weight: 551g
ISBN: 9781009514910
ISBN 10: 1009514911
Series: Law in Context
Pages: 270
Publication Date: 22 January 2026
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
1. Practices of Restitution in the Aftermath: An Introduction; 2. Glossing Restitution: Walter Schwarz and Re-forming the Practice of Law; 3. Literary Restitution: W. G. Sebald, Alexander Kluge, Heimrad Bäcker and the Responsibilities of Writing; 4. Artistic Restitution: Institutions and the Limits of Art by Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter; 5. Memorial Restitution: A Walking Tour of Berlin's Memorial Landscape; 6. Making-Good-Again? A Conclusion.
Laura E. Petersen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne, Switzerland. She is the winner of the Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature and Justice (2021) and the Harold Luntz Prize (2023).
