What role do legal trials have in collective processes of coming to
terms with a history of mass violence? How does the theatrical
structure of a criminal trial facilitate and limit national processes of
healing and learning from the past? This study begins with the widely
publicized, historic trials of three Nazi war criminals, Eichmann,
Barbie, and Priebke, whose explicit goal was not only to punish, but
also to establish an officially sanctioned version of the past. The
Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South America and South Africa
added a therapeutic goal, acting on the belief that a trial can help
bring about a moment of closure.
Horsman challenges this belief by reading works that reflect on the
relations among pedagogy, therapy, and legal trials. Philosopher Hannah
Arendt, poet Charlotte Delbo, and dramaturg Bertolt Brecht all produced
responses to historic trials that reopened the cases those trials sought
to close, bringing to center stage aspects that had escaped the confines
of their legal frameworks.