Tribunals. Literary representation and means of legally processing war crimes in a global context.

From April 25 to 27, 2012, the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” and the University of Bonn’s Institute for German Studies, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies will host a conference with international experts, artists and academics on the topic of “Tribunals. Literary representation and means of legally processing war crimes in a global context”.

It will be debated, what distinguishes the historically established and pejoratively connoted “tribunal” as a legal and legal-cultural establishment from other institutions of processing injustice. In the course of globalization of normative orders, the focus increasingly shifts towards international institutions that are breaking up the monopoly and procedural logic of nation states’ domestic criminal jurisdiction. The particularities of tribunals faced with the legal processing of war crimes are to be approached comparatively, also taking account of historical cases of “tribunalization” (such as the Eichmann trial). At the same time, the question of how war crimes are documented, constructed and reconstructed through different narratives on the level of literature, film, and mass media observation, will also be addressed.