Learning from Historical Injustice?

The history of human rights and human dignity is to be told as a legal history of the collective “processing” of experiences of historical injustice. The supposed “triumph” of these two ideas has been bought at the price of monstrous violence, countless victims of war and barbaric dehumanizing. However, a methodological difficulty arises if philosophical legal theory wants to claim such a “learning process”: the original historical experiences of war, violence and degradation are hardly accessible to analysis from today's perspective. Instead, academic discourse is always dependent on historical documentation, eyewitness accounts and, above all, literary-autobiographical memories in which these forms of injustice have already been interpreted. This is exemplified by recourse to the famous memoirs of Jean Améry, which reveal a philosophically revealing experiential connection between human rights on the one hand and human dignity on the other.