Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory

Abstract

Reconciliation after the Armenian Genocide"A Question of Humanity in its Entirety" Armin T. Wegner as Intermediary of Reconciliation between Germans and Armenians in Interwar German Civil SocietyCHARLTON PAYNE Armin T. Wegner was a humanitarian writer and activist who witnessed the massacres and forced relocation of Armenian deportees while he was stationed in Ottoman Turkey during the First World War. This essay analyzes his efforts as an intermediary of reconciliation between Armenians and Germans within emerging conduits of civil society in Germany between 1919 and 1921. A look at the degree of apparent success, proximity to explicit political agendas, articulation and mobilization of narratives of suffering, and institutional sanction of his work is instructive for more general considerations about the role of intermediaries in acts of reconciliation in civil society. 1 The essay thus traces some of Wegner's activities within civil 1 I prefer the term 'intermediary' to that of 'mediator', and venture to follow here Michel Callon's definition of an intermediary as "anything passing between actors which defines the relationship between them"; hence, "actors define one another in interaction -in the intermediaries that they put into circulation".Whereas the term 'mediator' conforms to Wegner's self-presentation, the term 'intermediary' describes more aptly how his activities emerge out of processes of interaction between multiple agents and institutions, and with often unexpected results. Intermediaries include not only human agents but also published 46 Schaefgen, Schwieriges Erinnern, 42.

The Memory of the French Centurions: Asia-Europe Connections in the Tragic Memory of Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Films

“…In the introduction to her book, Reconciliation, Civil Society and the Politics of Memory, which analyzes the issues of appeasement and memory, Birgit Schwelling insists on the importance of the actors of transnational civil society to debate loss as well as of the reconciliation of forgetfulness (Schwelling, 2012). Colonization created memories of convergence experienced in a difficult past for some of the colonized.…”