Book Review: The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945 by Eve Worth

Abstract

tives in the ground to preserve images they had composed. The Nazi films projected an alien narrative onto a captive people, but these hidden images speak to us directly, their authors transformed from victims into witnesses. Geopolitical entanglements often contorted humanitarian ideals. Helmut Philipp Aust’s account of the Russian diplomat and lawyer André Mandelstam’s high-minded pronouncements alongside his rank anti-Turkish racism reminds us how much the ‘conscience of mankind’ and the ‘community of civilized nations’ informed the Hague Laws and to a lesser extent the Geneva Conventions. Realpolitik also drove efforts by Friedrich Kaul, East Germany’s most famous post-war lawyer, to insinuate himself into the trial of Adolph Eichmann. Lorena De Vita notes that Kaul’s presence in Jerusalem was especially curious since the Marxist reading of the Second World War downplayed the murder of Jews as a defining crime of the Nazi regime. While the West German lawyer Robert Servatius represented Eichmann, Kaul would claim to represent Eichmann’s victims. But his intervention was really designed to score political points by drawing supposed parallels between the Nazi regime and the West German government, and seeking to undermine the West’s advances in international law. A danger of biography is that it can individualize broad historical currents, suggesting, in this case, a kind of great-lawyer view of history. Despite the book’s constitutive claims about Jewish identity and experience, that social milieu often remains in the background. The authors recognise the contributions of neglected figures like Jacob Robinson and Oscar Mintzer, and revive forgotten women’s voices like those of Rachel Auerbach and Helen Silving. But other figures are missing. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, the German-American lawyer who led the way in exposing the Armenian Genocide, doesn’t appear at all. In other ways, however, biography is crucial. In his closing essay on ‘useful biographies,’ Daniel Stahl describes how Benjamin Ferencz, the young lawyer who assisted Telford Taylor at Nuremberg, and Raphael Lemkin became the patron saints of the International Criminal Court and the revival of liberal internationalism, respectively. As Stahl puts it, the two men were refugees who ‘found no home but in the law’ (p. 199). The authenticity of their experiences resonates as loudly as the doctrines they espoused.