Ages of Compensation: Indemnifying Mass Violence from the 19th to the 21st Century

Abstract

This talk draws on my current research into the modern and contemporary history of financial compensation following revolutions, wars, migration, genocides, and emancipation processes, from the Age of Revolutions to the present. From a European vantage point—and in line with ongoing political debates—large-scale compensation is typically associated with the reparations set in the post-First World War treaties, the politics of Wiedergutmachung/Shilumim after the Holocaust, and the indemnification of expellees from East-Central Europe in the two German states.

Such a twentieth-century focus, however, obscures the longer history of settling violent disruptions of ownership in the post-revolutionary societies of Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas during the nineteenth century. Across this period, states sought to resolve material losses stemming from emigration, warfare, and slave emancipation through indemnification schemes designed to restore legal certainty and stabilize societies after upheaval. In this sense, the “Age of Revolutions” also functioned as an “age of compensation.”

Seen against this backdrop, the twentieth century appears as a “second age of compensation.” This perspective highlights both continuities with earlier practices and the tensions they generated—between perpetrators and victims, and among competing claims for redress of human and material losses. In both “ages,” compensation operated as a material mechanism for foreclosing any return to the status quo ante.

Since the late twentieth century, a “third age of compensation” has taken shape. Drawing on but also challenging earlier models, it is oriented toward repairing historical injustices and, in some cases, questioning or undoing nineteenth-century settlements. These critiques and activist demands confront contemporary postcolonial societies with new legal, economic, democratic, and international dilemmas. They also intersect with controversies surrounding colonial and Holocaust memory and with the politics of remembrance in migration societies. At the same time, current calls for compensation reflect a longstanding set of political and social expectations surrounding reparative justice.

About Dr Pestel

Dr Friedemann Pestel is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Freiburg. He studied history, French literature, and educational sciences at the University of Jena and the École normale supérieure in Paris. In 2013, he obtained his PhD from the University of Freiburg with a study on French émigrés in the Age of Revolutions. Since 2013, he has been teaching European history at Freiburg.