Victimhood and Acknowledgement

The Other Side of Terrorism

Petra Terhoeven

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110579208
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

The history of terrorism has been largely a history of perpetrators, their motives and actions. The history of their victims has always seemed to be of secondary importance. But terrorism is communication by violence, and its efficiency depends significantly on the selection and the treatment of the victims by the perpetrators, on the one hand, and the perception and acknowledgement of victimhood by the public, on the other. How does it affect our picture of the history of terrorism then, if the victims are moved centre stage? If the focus is put on their suffering, their agency, their helplessness, or on how they are acknowledged or exploited by society, politics and media? If the central role is taken into account which they play in terrorist propaganda as well as in the emotional response of the public? The contributions to this edition of the European History Yearbook will examine such questions in a broad range of historical case studies and methods, including visual history. Not least, they aim at historicizing the roles of survivors and relatives in the social process of coming to terms with terrorist violence, a question highly relevant up to the present day.

List of Contributors

Marie Breen-Smyth has held academic posts at Universities in the US and the UK. She is a founding editor of the Taylor and Francis journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism and an initiator of the field of critical terrorism studies. She founded the Institute for Conflict Research in Belfast. She was 2002–2003 Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and has worked with the Special Representative of the Secretary General of United Nations for Children and Armed Conflict. She publishes on political violence and its impact, ethics and methods in violent contexts, the Northern Ireland conflict, truth recovery and managing violent pasts, victim politics and counting casualties of political violence. She has also made two documentary films.

Anna Cento Bull is Professor of Italian History and Politics at the University of Bath, UK. She has published widely on political terrorism in Italy, including Italian Neofascism. The Strategy of Tension and the Politics of Nonreconciliation. New York and Oxford 2007, and Ending Terrorism in Italy, Abingdon and New York 2013 (with Philip Cooke). She is currently a partner in a Horizon 2020 project entitled Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe (http://www.unrest.eu/).

Gregor Feindt is a Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History. He studied Eastern European and Modern History, and Slavonic Studies in Bonn and Cracow (Jagiellonian University) and completed a PhD at Bonn on national discourse in Central European Samizdat. In 2015/2016, he was Visiting Professor for history and culture of East Central Europe with a focus on Poland at the University of Bremen. His research interests centre on Central Europe and the transnational history of the 20th century, especially with regard to Czechoslovakia and Poland. He is currently working on the experience of work and labour in industrial towns in Czechoslovakia. His recent publications include Sport under Unexpected Circumstances: Violence, Discipline, and Leisure in Penal and Internment Camps, edited with Anke Hilbrenner and Dittmar Dahlmann (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018).

Anke Hilbrenner is professor for East European History at the University of Göttingen. She studied in Bonn and Bochum and taught at the Universities of Bonn, Bremen and Munich. Among her research interests is violence in the Imperial history of the Russian and Soviet Empires, reaching from East Central Europe to Siberia and Central Asia. She focuses on marginalized and subaltern groups, such as Jews or women. Her topics are sport, sciences, and terrorism. Among her recent publications are: The Perovskaia Paradox or the Scandal of Female Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Russia, in: pipps.org. The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies Issue 17, 2016: Women in Arms. From the Russian Empire to Post-Soviet States, https://pipss.revues.org/ 4169, (8.5.2016); Hirš Lekerts Rache. Gewalteskalation an der Peripherie des Zarenreiches um 1900, in: Osteuropa, 66 (2016), Heft 4, S. 7–18 and: Sport und die jüdische Suche nach Gemeinschaft in den (ost-)europäischen Metropolen der Zwischenkriegszeit, in: Aschkenas 27 (2017/1), S. 71–92.

Florian Jessensky is Research Assistant for European Cultural and Contemporary History, Georg-August University, Göttingen since 2013. He is currently working on a dissertation with the working title, “The Role of Lawyers in the Conflict between the RAF and the State in the 1970s.”

Charlotte Klonk is Professor of Art History and New Media at the Institute of Art History and Visual History at Humboldt University Berlin. She currently researches the history, role and dynamic of images in acts of terror. Her publications include Science and the Perception of Nature (Yale University Press, 1998), Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800–2000 (Yale University Press, 2009) and most recently, Terror: Wenn Bilder zu Waffen werden (S. Fischer Verlag, 2017).

Tillmann Lohse is Research Fellow and Privatdozent for Medieval History at the Humboldt University Berlin. In 2017, he was Visiting Professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt; in 2018, he was fellow at the DFG Center for Advanced Studies “Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages” (Tübingen). His research interests cover the cross-cultural and inter-epochal comparison of pious endowments, the knowledge system and mediality of liturgical instructions as well as the global history of ascetical migrations during the medieval millennium. His publications include “Pious men in foreign lands. Global-historical perspectives on the migrations of medieval ascetics, missionaries and pilgrims”, in: Viator 44/3 (2013) pp. 123–136.

Martin Rupps is a political scientist, historian and journalist, author and editor at Südwestfunk. His publications include: Die Überlebenden von Mogasischu (Berlin 2012); Der Lotse Helmut Schmidt und die Deutschen (Zurich 2015); and Kanzlerdämmerung. Wer zu spat kommt, darf regieren (Zurich 2017). He initiated the effort to return the former Lufthansa airliner “Landshut” to Germany in the fall of 2017. It will be preserved as a commemorative space in the Dornier Museum, Friedrichshafen.

Petra Terhoeven is Professor for Eur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Victimhood and Acknowledgement: The Other Side of Terrorism
• Of Heroes and Villains – The Making of Terrorist Victims as Historical Perpetrators in Pre-Revolutionary Russia
• Suffering, Victims and Survivors in the Northern Ireland Conflict: Definitions, Policies, and Politics
• Reconciliation through Agonistic Engagement? Victims and Former Perpetrators in Dialogue in Italy Several Decades after Terrorism
• “May the burden of your ordeal gradually fade from memory”: Dealings with former Hostages of the Hijacked Lufthansa Aircraft ‘Landshut’
• In Whose Name? Visualizing Victims of Terror
• Conclusions
• Forum
• List of Contributors