Constructions of Victimhood:

Remembering the Victims of State

Socialism in Germany David Clarke
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PA L G R AV E S T U D I E S I N C U LT U R A L H E R I TA G E A N D C O N F L I C T

CONSTRUCTIONS
OF VICTIMHOOD
REMEMBERING THE VICTIMS OF
STAT E S O C I A L I S M I N G E R M A N Y

David Clarke
Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict

Series Editors
Ihab Saloul
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

Rob van der Laarse

University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Britt Baillie
Centre for Urban Conflicts Research
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and
conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war
and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series
editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the per-
spective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well
as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations,
and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address
topics such as the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma,
mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and
intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as
the mediated reenactments of conflicted pasts. Dr. Ihab Saloul is associ-
ate professor of cultural studies, founder and research vice-director of the
Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM)
at University of Amsterdam. Saloul’s interests include cultural memory
and identity politics, narrative theory and visual analysis, conflict and
trauma, Diaspora and migration as well as contemporary cultural thought
in the Middle East. Professor Rob van der Laarse is research director
of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture
(AHM), and Westerbork Professor of Heritage of Conflict and War at
VU University Amsterdam. Van der Laarse’s research focuses on (early)
modern European elite and intellectual cultures, cultural landscape, her-
itage and identity politics, and the cultural roots and postwar memory
of the Holocaust and other forms of mass violence. Dr. Britt Baillie is an
Honorary Research Fellow at the Wits City Institute, University of the
Witwatersrand and a founding member of the Centre for Urban Conflict
Studies at the University of Cambridge. Baillie’s interests include the pol-
itics of cultural heritage, urban heritage, religious heritage, living herit-
age, heritage as commons, and contested heritage.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14638
 David Clarke

Constructions
of Victimhood
Remembering the Victims of State Socialism
in Germany
David Clarke
School of Modern Languages
Cardiff University
Cardiff, South Glamorgan, UK

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict

ISBN 978-3-030-04803-7 ISBN 978-3-030-04804-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04804-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962746

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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 Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Department of Politics, Languages and International

Studies at the University of Bath for funding research trips that were
crucial to the completion of this book. Many current and former col-
leagues have offered their encouragement along the way, in particular
Dr. Nina Parish, Professor Anna Bull, Professor Hanna Diamond and
Professor Bill Niven.
My thanks go also to interviewees and others in Germany who shared
their experiences and expertise, as well as providing me with valua-
ble access to archive material: Dr. Gerhard Sälter of the Gedenkstätte
Berliner Mauer; Ingolf Notzke of Initiativgruppe Geschlossener
Jugendwerkhof Torgau e.V.; Sylvia Wähling and Dr. Ralf Marten of
Menschenrechtszentrum Cottbus e.V.; Stefanie Kröger of the Archiv der
sozialen Demokratie (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung); the staff of the library of
the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur.
I am grateful to the publishers of the following earlier versions of
material that appears in this book for their permission to re-use it here:
“Compensating the Victims of Human Rights Abuses in the German
Democratic Republic: The Struggle for Recognition,” German Politics
12 (1), 2012: 17–33.
“Constructing Victimhood in Divided Germany: The Case of the
Association of the Victims of Stalinism (1950–1989)”, Memory Studies.
Online. 13 January 2017.

v
vi    Acknowledgements

“Understanding Controversies over Memorial Museums: The Case of

the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum, Potsdam”, History and Memory
29 (1), 2017, 41–71.
“Representing the Experience of Victims at the Berlin Wall Memorial
Museum,” in Cultural Practices of Victimhood, edited by Martin
Hoondert, Paul Mutsaers and William Arfman, 83–103 (London:
Routledge, 2019).
Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Malcolm Allison. He kept
telling me to finish this book, which is dedicated to him.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Thinking About the Victims of State

Socialism 1
Considering Victimhood 1
Coming to Terms with the GDR 5
Reconsidering the Victims of the State Socialism 11
Policies for the Past 20
The Structure of the Book 24
Bibliography 26

2 Victimhood in the Politics of Memory and Transitional

Justice 33
The Politics of Memory and Transitional Justice 33
Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory and the Constructivist
Paradigm 43
Victims and the Political System 52
Victimhood and Protest 57
Bibliography 65

3 Victims’ Organizations and the Construction

of Victimhood 71
Organizations Between Politics and Protest 71
The Association of the Victims of Stalinism in the Cold War 79
The VOS in the Era of Détente 92

vii
viii    Contents

Challenges to the VOS 103

Social Democrats as Victims of State Socialism in the Cold War 112
Victims of State Socialism in the SPD in the Era of Ostpolitik 119
Social Democrat Victims of State Socialism and the
Reunification Process 129
Victims of State Socialism in the SPD after 1998 134
Conclusion 136
Bibliography 139

4 Compensating the Victims of State Socialism 145

Compensation and Transitional Justice 145
Compensating the Victims of the Second World War
in the 1950s 148
From the HHG to the “Victim Pension” 162
Compensating Young Victims of the SED Regime: Reframing
Victimhood 181
Fighting for Compensation for Forced Labour 195
Conclusion 207
Bibliography 209

5 Memorial Museums for the Victims of State Socialism

Controversies and Conflicts 221
The Memorial Museum as an Instrument of Transitional
Justice and Memory Politics 221
Museum Professionals, Historians and System of Science 224
Commemorating the Victims of the Berlin Wall 234
The Conflict Between Victims’ Organizations and Museum
Professionals at the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum in
Potsdam 258
Victim-Led Memorialization at the Cottbus Prison Memorial
Museum 273
Conclusion 284
Bibliography 286

6 Conclusion: The Future of Victimhood 297

Bibliography 303

Index 305
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction:
Thinking About the Victims
of State Socialism

Considering Victimhood
This is a book about constructions of victimhood. It intervenes in two
fields of contemporary academic enquiry, in which the figure of the vic-
tim is of central importance: the politics of memory and transitional
justice. The centrality of the victim to these research areas, which both
analyse the various means by which societies “come to terms” with dif-
ficult pasts, also needs to be seen within a wider cultural context, in
which victimhood has become a status both aspired to and often fiercely
contested. This is not to say that individuals in the contemporary world
aspire to suffering, but rather that those who have suffered seek recogni-
tion of victim status (both individually and collectively) from the politi-
cal system and from society more widely when pursuing their claims for
justice.
Joseph A. Amato argues that suffering has not always been read-
ily convertible into a victim status that has such political potency.
Particularly in the context of a pre-secular Europe, Christianity, he pro-
poses, provided a framework within which individual hardship could be
understood and accepted. Great amounts of suffering could be experi-
enced by ordinary people without this necessarily being converted into
a demand for political action. With the advent of secularized moder-
nity, however, no one authority can give meaning to suffering. As we
see with the coming of the First World War in particular, the alienating

© The Author(s) 2019 1

D. Clarke, Constructions of Victimhood,
Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04804-4_1
2 D. CLARKE

functionality of the various social systems, whether they be political,

military or economic, appears to create un-legitimated suffering which,
for want of a meaning-giving authority either within or beyond society,
demands redress (Amato 1990, pp. 43–72).
The power of the victim role in terms of formulating such demands
is evident from identity-based social movements of the latter half of the
twentieth century, in which marginalized groups have sought to resist
their persecution by converting their degraded status, which others had
previously regarded as in itself a justification for discrimination, into an
argument for fairer treatment on the basis of unjust victimization (Torpey
2005, p. 41). Particularly in the United States, ideological conservatives
have fought hard to resist the power of such claims to victimhood, argu-
ing forcefully that they represent unfounded demands from the undeserv-
ing, directed against the normative majority, who in their turn become
the victims of a kind of emotional blackmail from groups who are alleg-
edly unwilling to take responsibility for their own destiny (Rothe 2011,
p. 23). This is hardly a new argument, reactivating as it does the claims of
Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1887 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1996):
for the philosopher, this elevation of the victim figure in Christian religion
is a conspiracy of the weak against the strong who oppress them. In the
contemporary German-speaking countries, too, the perception that the
adoption of victim status has increasingly become a vehicle for attracting
“money and attention” is also evident (Breitenfellner 2013, p. 30).1
When the suffering addressed by the adoption or attribution of vic-
tim status is historical in nature, the figure of the Holocaust victim often
serves as a model, at least in the Western world. The duty to remem-
ber the Holocaust and its victims, both those who survived the hor-
ror and those who did not, increasingly became a focus of attention in
Western Europe and the United States following the Eichmann trial in
the early 1960s. This trial gave prominence to survivor testimony above
and beyond the need to establish the nature of Eichmann’s activities,
ushering in what Annette Wieviorka has defined as the “era of witness”
(2006, p. 56). In this new epoch, the Holocaust survivor offers a point
of moral orientation for the contemporary world. By commemorating
their suffering in various ways, societies not only attempt to address the
continued traumatic suffering of the survivors and the bereaved, but also

1 All translation from the German are my own.

 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 3

demonstrate their commitment to the lessons of that suffering in terms

of the values of democracy and human rights. In a similar vein, Erica
Bouris argues that the conception of victimhood that emerges from the
context of the Holocaust is that of the “moral beacon” (2007, p. 32). In
other words, these are subjects deemed not simply to bear witness to the
horrors of the past, but whose suffering accords them the status of moral
guides for those who come after.
Despite the apparently overwhelming imperative to remember vic-
tims of egregious human rights abuses, whether in the Holocaust or in
other cases, there are several reasons to be wary of this model. Firstly,
as a number of commentators have observed, the act of conferring a
purely moral and innocent status on victims of such abuses elides much
of the historical reality of their experiences, when horrendous circum-
stances often confronted them with terrible choices that were necessary
for survival, yet which left their own sense of morality comprised (Levi
1989, p. 59; Spelman 1997, p. 74; Enns 2012). Secondly, it has been
argued, the elevation of the victims of historical injustice may allow those
who have not suffered such harm to enter into a trivializing and highly
emotional form of over-identification with the “pain of others” (Sontag
2004), rooted more in the individual or group psychological needs of
those expressing such “mourning” than in any real understanding of the
situation of those persecuted others (Jureit and Schneider 2010; Rothe
2011). Thirdly, where identification with victims of more distant atroc-
ities is involved (for example in the prominence of Holocaust memory
in the United States), such memory has been described by some schol-
ars using Freud’s notion of “screen memory,” arguing that a concentra-
tion on sometimes distant traumatic events for which one cannot be held
responsible can be a means of side-stepping engagement with more trou-
bling local histories (Levi 2007, pp. 125–126).
The division implicitly proposed above between claims to victimhood
based on present suffering in the case of social issues, on the one hand,
and historical claims to victimhood that seek redress in the present, on
the other, is clearly also porous. In a post-Cold War political climate
that has been characterized by the ascendancy of a neo-liberal consensus
that seeks to “roll back” the state’s role in promoting social justice, an
ascendancy that has been paralleled by the rise of concerns about histor-
ical memory, it is arguable that issues of historical justice have come to
stand in for claims for social justice in the present that can no longer be
so easily articulated (Thompson 2015, p. 46).
4 D. CLARKE

In summary, we can observe that, while remaining a key feature of

contemporary Western culture, victimhood is defined and made signif-
icant in a complex context, in which questions of morality, (collective)
identity, justice and power are invoked. Against this background, it will
be the key task of this study to consider from a theoretical point of view
how it is possible to understand the meaning attached to the figure of the
victim in the more specific contexts of memory politics and transitional
justice. Both of these fields, whether in terms of their practice or in terms
of their academic analysis, refer to the figure of the victim in various ways,
yet the ways in which they do so remain to be fully understood. In fact,
although both theory and practice attribute a central role to victims, the
various means by which such victimhood is constructed, and the conse-
quences that follow from such constructions in terms of the formulation
of policy for dealing with difficult pasts, is very often passed over.
The specific historical context for exploring these issues will be
Germany’s coming to terms with the fate of the victims of state socialism,
both under the Soviet occupation of the territory that became the German
Democratic Republic (GDR; also known as East Germany) in October
1949, and subsequently under the rule of the Socialist Unity Party
(Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) until 1990. Bracketing
these historical periods together under the term “state socialism” is argu-
ably problematic, given that the Soviet occupation and the early history
of the GDR were qualitatively different historical periods in comparison,
for example, with the post-Stalinist GDR of later decades, not least in
terms of the differing forms of political repression that were common in
those periods. However, in Germany today it is common for the victims
of historical injustice under Soviet and SED rule to be treated if not as a
single group, then as a series of groups who have important commonali-
ties; whether by the institutions created to preserve the memory of their
experiences, or by the compensation schemes that have been put in place
to make good their suffering. Victims’ organizations, too, often encom-
pass individuals from different phases in the development of East Germany
from the Soviet occupation onwards, even if specific groups do exist to
focus on particular forms of historically more specific suffering.
Although in the German context it is not common to speak of all of
these individuals as victims of “state socialism,” it is a practical term to
use here as it encompasses basic shared features of all of the phases of
communist rule in eastern Germany after the end of the Second World
War. Here David Lane’s definition of state socialism is a useful one:
 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 5

a society distinguished by a state-centred, more-or-less centrally adminis-

tered economy, controlled by a dominant communist party which seeks,
on the basis of Marxism-Leninism and through the agency of the state, to
mobilize the population to reach a classless society. (Lane 1996, p. 5)

To this I would only add that the “mobilization of the population” cited
by Lane must also be understood here in the negative sense that those
citizens who could not be co-opted into the state socialist project, or
who were perceived as a threat to that project, were subject to various
forms of repression from the period of the Soviet occupation until the
demise of the SED regime; repression whose key aim was to maintain the
communists’ hold on power. Although those forms of repression evolved
over time, they were nevertheless always instruments in the service of the
state socialist project as outlined in Lane’s definition.

Coming to Terms with the GDR

Following German unification, considerable resources were invested
in the attempt to address the wrong-doing carried out in the name of
the socialist experiment in East Germany. The first post-revolution gov-
ernment of the GDR, still headed by a member of the ruling SED, had
already begun to formulate measures to rehabilitate and compensate the
GDR’s political prisoners and others who had been persecuted by the
regime, and the first democratically elected parliament (Volkskammer)
and the last government of the GDR continued to develop these meas-
ures; which were, however, only partly incorporated into the Unification
Treaty with the Federal Republic (Widmaier 1999, pp. 106–164). At the
same time, initial steps were taken by GDR courts to prosecute officials
of the regime, for instance those who had been involved in rigging local
elections of May 1989, who were charged under GDR law with corrup-
tion and misuse of public office (Marxen et al. 2007, p. 11).
From the civil rights movement (Bürgerrechtsbewegung), which had
provided one of the sparks that ignited the revolution against the rule
of the SED, came the demand to investigate the human rights abuses
that had characterized the GDR regime. The most important prod-
uct of these demands, expressed most spectacularly in the occupation
of Ministry for State Security (MfS) premises in Berlin and elsewhere
to stop the destruction of secret records, was the establishment of an
office dedicated to allowing the public access to their personal files: the
6 D. CLARKE

Agency of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (Behörde des
Bundesbeauftragten für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der
ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, or BStU). The establish-
ment of the BStU, however, led to considerable debate about whether
the exposing of informants who worked for the MfS and the right of
individuals to see their files might be harmful both to the individuals
concerned and to the general social climate (Miller 1999, pp. 19–34).
The early 1990s were characterized by a series of attacks on prominent
figures who had informed for the MfS at various points in their lives, and
many came to see such attacks as a weapon with which primarily western
commentators sought to delegitimize not just the GDR state, but social-
ist ideas in general (Sa’adah 1998, p. 101).
Even though debates about the MfS and its informants tended to
dominate the media, the final months of the GDR’s existence and the
early years of unification were also characterized by a process of uncover-
ing a whole range of aspects of GDR society and its history that the con-
trol of the SED had either kept hidden or elided from East Germany’s
official account of history. This process of revelation included the pub-
lication of censored texts and the showing of censored films, particularly
those banned during the cultural freeze ushered in by the 11th Plenary
Session of the SED’s Central Committee in December 1965. There
was also open discussion of political persecution, such as the jailing of
Walter Janka and other socialist intellectuals in the aftermath of the failed
Hungarian uprising of 1956, and a breaking of the taboo the SED had
placed on discussing the Soviets’ internment of German citizens both in
the Soviet Zone of Occupation, but also in labour camps in the Soviet
Union itself (Klonovsky and von Flocken 1991).
The early years of German unification were characterized by attempts
to prosecute those who had run the socialist state, a project that was to
become one of the most controversial strands of the unified German
state’s dealing with the GDR past. The main obstacle was the legal prin-
ciple that nobody can be prosecuted for an action that was not criminal
at the time they committed it, or nulla poena sine lege (“no penalty with-
out a law”). As Paul Cooke points out, by acknowledging the legality of
the GDR state in the Unification Treaty, the Federal Republic was forced
to regard actions taken in the service of the SED regime as essentially
legal, unless they would have represented a breach of the GDR law at
the time (Cooke 2005, p. 30). Although prosecutors attempted to mod-
ify this principle via recourse to the so-called Radbruch formula, which
 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 7

allows for the punishment of actions regarded as clearly in contraven-

tion of human rights even if they are formally legal when committed,
this approach was soon dropped in favour of prosecuting GDR officials
according to the laws of the now defunct East German state (McAdams
2001, pp. 32–33; Cooke 2005, pp. 31–33).
Views on the success or otherwise of these judicial endeavours remain
divided, but the large gap between the number of cases investigated,
which James A. McAdams estimates at over 62,000 (2001, p. 2) and
the small number of cases actually brought to court, numbering just
over a thousand, left may Germans sceptical about whether the time and
resources invested had been justified (Borneman 1997, p. 100). In par-
ticular, former civil rights movement activists and victims of the regime
felt that their cause had been betrayed. Bärbel Bohley, a prominent fig-
ure in that movement, and later a champion of victims’ rights, famously
declared that, while opponents of the GDR had demanded “justice,” all
they got was “the rule of law” (Jahn 1992).
By 2005 this judicial coming to terms with the GDR past was com-
plete (Marxen et al. 2007, p. 3), yet it by no means represents the
only approach by which the unified Germany, and the German state
in particular, still attempts to deal with the GDR’s legacy. Projects to
provide public education about the GDR past and to attempt to form
the nation’s collective memory of the Soviet occupation and state
socialism in East Germany have been and remain an important area
of state activity, channelled through a number of institutions, such as
the Federal Centre for Political Education (Bundeszentrale für poli-
tische Bildung), its regional counterparts (Landesstellen für politische
Bildung), and the state-subsidised Federal Foundation for the Study
of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany (Bundesstiftung
zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur), founded in 1998 using capi-
tal confiscated from SED organizations (Sack 2016, p. 82). The lat-
ter is particularly significant because it distributes funds to grass-roots
organizations with an interest in the GDR, such as the civil soci-
ety organization that runs a museum and archive in the former MfS
headquarters in the Normannenstraße in Berlin (Baron 2000). In
general, as Thomas Lindenberger has noted, this officially sponsored
memory culture has been characterized by its focus on power struc-
tures and ideology, political domination and repression, themes that
are often juxtaposed with representations of opposition and resistance
(Lindenberger 2001, p. 45).
8 D. CLARKE

Although it might appear that the post-unification German state

has made considerable efforts to propagate an image of the GDR as an
oppressive dictatorship, representatives of victims’ organizations never-
theless frequently express a sense of betrayal both by the political class
and by their fellow citizens, who they regard as playing insufficient
attention to the victims’ plight. Writing in 2008 in Der Stacheldraht
(Barbed Wire), the journal of the umbrella victims’ organization, the
Union of Victims’ Organizations of Communist Dictatorship (Union der
Opferverbände kommunistischer Gewaltherrschaft, or UOKG), its then
president Rainer Wagner summed up his members’ feelings as follows:

It is against the spirit of the times to openly refer to the bloody legacy
of Marx, Engels and Lenin. … 20 years after the peaceful revolution of
1989, we unfortunately have to recognize that our resistance has only been
superficially integrated into the collective memory of the German people.
(Wagner 2008)

It has indeed proved more difficult than one might have expected
to establish a negative image of the GDR in post-unification Germany,
given that this was a state that, while it existed, enjoyed only limited
legitimacy among its population, who were eager to overthrow both
the government and the state itself as soon as historical circumstances
allowed. A number of scholars have made the case that the phenomenon
of Ostalgie, a misty-eyed or ironic celebration of all things GDR-related
that focuses particularly on East Germany’s popular and consumer cul-
ture, can be read as “a kind of counter-memory” (Berdahl 1999, p.
202). In other words, such nostalgia for state socialism is understood
as a reaction to what are perceived as western-inspired attempts to dis-
credit the GDR (and its population) in toto, thereby failing to take
into account the “normality” of the lives of many citizens, who found
ways to accommodate themselves to the prevailing political conditions
without necessarily supporting them (e.g. Cooke 2005; Naughton
2002, p. 19; Sierp 2009, p. 51). As Mary Fulbrook has argued, “[a]
ctively sustaining the state, feeling one could live a ‘perfectly nor-
mal life’ within the GDR, and ultimately critiquing it and contribut-
ing to its downfall, were not … mutually incompatible” (Fulbrook
2005, p. 20). Furthermore, in the harsh economic climate of the early
1990s, as western-driven privatization of GDR industry and con-
sequent deindustrialization proceeded apace, former GDR citizens
 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 9

quickly began to miss the benefits of full employment, generous social

provision and the various forms of state-sponsored sociality that the
GDR had provided.
The strategy of transitional justice adopted in the immediate after-
math of unification, whether it dealt with SED officials, members of the
security services, or with collaborators with the MfS, was notably focused
on dealing with the perpetrators at every level of the system, from the
Politburo to the ordinary border guard at the Berlin Wall. Among West
German political elites, there was a clear perception that this rigorous
approach to wrong-doing under the state socialist regime was an answer
to the perceived failure of the post-war Federal Republic to properly
punish those who had committed crimes under the National Socialist
regime (Offe and Poppe 2006, p. 243). At the same time, however,
some commentators, such as Daniela Dahn, warned that prosecutions
of state officials would only contribute to East Germans’ sense of being
“colonized” by the Federal Republic, especially as it tended to obscure
the fact that West Germany had itself deployed political prosecutions and
administrative measures targeted at left-wingers and communists dur-
ing its post-war history, albeit on a much smaller scale (Dahn 1998, pp.
132–148; Gössner 1994).
Unsurprisingly, members of the SED elite who had to stand trial
after unification were quick to mobilize such claims of victors’ justice
(Siegerjustiz) (Ahonen 2011, p. 36). However, the evident failure to pro-
duce widespread judicial punishment or even consistent civil lustration
of those who played important roles in the regime or informed for the
hated MfS left many victims of the SED regime with a sense of injustice
and, in many respects, material disadvantage in relation to those who had
persecuted them. Conservative commentators have also pointed to the
relative prosperity and influence of former regime loyalists in the years
since unification, and to the failings of transitional justice in dealing with
perpetrators (e.g. Knabe 2007; Müller and Hartmann 2009).
This dissatisfaction among conservatives with the failure to punish
those responsible for perpetuating the SED regime was accompanied,
in roughly the first decade and a half after unification, by a tendency
to warn of the danger of GDR socialization in terms of the alleged
alienation of GDR citizens from the core values underpinning the
political, economic and social status quo, in particular in terms of atti-
tudes to personal freedom, self-reliance, individualism and democracy.
The term “conservative” should not be understood exclusively in the
10 D. CLARKE

party-political sense here, although many such voices have originated

from Germany’s conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union
(CDU). It should rather be understood in its literal sense, in that those
who took up such positions were keen to defend what they regarded
as the established values of the pre-unification Federal Republic, often
now referred to as the “Bonn Republic,” as valid for unified Germany
as a whole. Conversely, cultural values associated with the GDR, such
as an anti-individualist emphasis on collectivism, which featured heav-
ily in the propaganda and official language of the SED regime, or the
authoritarianism allegedly bred into GDR citizens by the GDR’s social
institutions, such as its kindergartens and schools, were held to be
incompatible with this consensus (Clarke 2002).
This discourse on the GDR and its inhabitants developed in parallel
with a return to the interpretative paradigm of “totalitarianism” among
a number of conservative historians in the early to mid-1990s, a move
echoed on the political level by the stance of Helmut Kohl’s government
(Niven 2002, p. 58). Such currents had a strong influence on the delib-
erations of the first Parliamentary Investigation (Enquete-Kommission
des Bundestags) set up in 1991 to provide something like an official state
position on the GDR past (Cooke 2005, pp. 41–45). In its academic
context, totalitarianism as a model for understanding both National
Socialism and the GDR’s state socialism, which had had its heyday in
the 1950s and 1960s, attempts to analyse different forms of modern
dictatorship by identifying common features of fascism and communism
under the umbrella of totalitarianism or Gewaltherrschaft (despotism, or
literally, rule by violence).
In the context of post-unification politics, however, the return to such
a paradigm has been seen by those on the left as part of a wider strategy
of delegitimizing the GDR, which could spill over into a delegitimization
of socialism per se, both by drawing parallels with National Socialism
and stressing the oppression of the population and the lack of individual
self-determination implied in the totalitarian model (e.g. Wippermann
2009). Coming to terms with the GDR following this approach, which
still has a considerable influence on conservative thinking, was therefore
very much a way for Germany to put the GDR (and socialism) behind
it as something from which nothing good could be salvaged; or an
Abrechnung, to use the German term often mobilized in this context
(Faulenbach 1999, p. 35).
 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 11

Reconsidering the Victims of the State Socialism

Such discourses were hardly likely to make former GDR citizens more
receptive to the plight of those who had suffered persecution under state
socialism, given the apparent instrumentalization of such victimhood
by those who sought to emphasize the dictatorial aspects of GDR state
and society in an undifferentiated way. To this extent, the perception
among victims of the GDR regime that their past and present plight has
been afforded insufficient attention by their fellow citizens is not espe-
cially hard to explain. Nor is this lack of attention an entirely post-uni-
fication phenomenon. As I will discuss in Chapter 3, while the victims
of the Soviet occupation and the subsequent SED regime were given a
prominent place in the West German political culture of the Cold War,
the development of détente between the two post-war states from the
mid-1960s onwards had a profound effect on perceptions of those perse-
cuted under state socialism. Many of these individuals who had escaped
to the Federal Republic now felt that West Germans no longer recog-
nized them as victims of political oppression deserving of sympathy and
support. Among the hundreds of autobiographical accounts by victims,
many express a sense of disappointment with the lack of interest and
even hostility they experienced on resettling in the Federal Republic. So,
for example, Eva-Maria Neumann, who attempted to flee the GDR in
1977, and who was arrested and imprisoned before being bought free
by the Federal Republic, describes in her autobiography the attitude of
West Germans to her continued activism against political oppression in
the Eastern Bloc:

Our campaigns are regarded by many of those around us as a threat to

the much-praised policy of détente. … Why are people here blind either
to the dangers of the far right or to those of the far left? Can one not,
must one not protest against right-wing and left-wing ideologies in the
same way? … I am deeply disappointed. This is not how I imagined things
would be. (Neumann 2007, p. 273)

Ellen Thiemann, writing about her own experience of arriving in the

Federal Republic in the mid-1970s in a memoir originally published
in 1984, reports on a sense of hostility against those who had fled the
GDR, for example in this encounter with the representative of a housing
association:
12 D. CLARKE

“People from the GDR always think they are going to get something for
nothing!” Well, I’ve heard people talk like that before. I simply cannot
understand why people here, who had the good fortune not to end up
under Soviet occupation after the war, are so hostile towards people from
the GDR. (Thiemann 2008, p. 309)

Not only have victims of state socialism failed to receive what they
regard as proper recognition of their suffering from their fellow citizens,
but scholarship has also had difficulties in accounting for and address-
ing their experiences. If we follow Fulbrook’s approach to GDR society,
which entirely properly seeks to recognize a complex picture of accom-
modation, compromise and relative autonomy in the lives of GDR cit-
izens, the very notion of victimhood becomes less clear-cut. From this
perspective, is it not the case that everyone became complicit with such
a system on some level, since not even those who resisted did so in every
aspect of their lives? Yet, at the same time, all citizens were disadvantaged
to some extent by the regime, even if this only amounted to their being
required to parrot its official doctrines in certain situations or being
unable to travel where they chose, so that all of those people who lived
under state socialism could potentially claim victim status. As Jon Elster
argues, referring to state socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe
more generally

[u]nder “mature” communism, there was a genuine sense in which more

or less everybody was at the same time victim and co-perpetrator. Roughly
speaking, everybody knew that nobody believed in the tenets of the official
ideology, and yet everybody was compelled to talk and behave as if they
did. (Elster 2004, pp. 109–110)

Here Elster agrees, for example, with the perspective of Czech dissident
(and later president) Václav Havel, who pointed to the general complic-
ity of the subjects of state socialist regimes in their everyday interactions
with power (Havel 1991).
This assertion seems at first glance to set the bar pretty high for rec-
ognition of victim status. However, what is more important is to note
the implicit assumptions that underpin this judgement. Here, com-
plicity apparently rules out the attribution of victimhood, drawing on
a discourse of blameless or perfect victimhood that is only one (argua-
bly flawed) way of constructing that category. This points to a central
difficulty in discussing the victims of any political system that produces
 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 13

widespread harm, a difficulty that hinges on the very notion of “con-

struction.” While political systems may produce many kinds of harms
(“victimization”), Tasmin Amanda Jacoby argues that this is not synony-
mous with “victimhood,” which is a socially constructed identity (Jacoby
2015, p. 513). In a similar vein, Vincent Druliolle defines victimhood as

the identity, meaning and status of victims in society … [V]ictimhood

is not given. Rather, it is historically and socially constructed, which of
course does not mean that victims’ suffering is not “real.” The argument
is simply that the status of victims in society is not directly related to the
harm suffered. (Druliolle 2015, p. 319)

Not everyone who has suffered a harm under a dictatorship (or even a
democratic regime) will consider themselves a victim, nor will they nec-
essarily receive social recognition of that status, nor furthermore official
recognition of their victimhood by the state. However, to assume the
identity of victim is to stake a claim, whether through public activism or
not, on some response from the wider society and from the state in par-
ticular. It is to stake a claim, in the case of the victims of former regimes,
for the recognition of the legacy of that regime as a social problem, that
is to say of a problem that demands remedy from state and society (Best
1990). Victims also seek official recognition from the state to bind it into
obligations to create and promote such remedy, but state and society can
only acknowledge victim identity and legal victim status by making a dif-
ference between individuals who have suffered in particular ways and the
rest of the population, even though the rest of the population may also
have suffered harms. In this way, as Christiane Wilke has observed, while
a range of individuals may subjectively identify themselves as victims, vic-
timhood increasingly becomes a legal status attributed to specific groups
by the state (Wilke 2007, p. 481).
Clearly, a case could be made that there are harms affecting some
individuals within a given society, in this case in contemporary Germany
as a result of the legacies of persecution under Soviet occupation and in
the GDR, which are in and of themselves deserving of special treatment.
Claudia Card, for example, has devoted a considerable body of work to
attempting, from the point of view of a moral philosopher, to draw dis-
tinctions between what she calls “atrocities” or “evils,” on the one hand,
and the harm experienced by many people as a result of unjust socie-
ties, on the other. Card seeks to make that distinction in terms of the
14 D. CLARKE

outcomes for victims, pointing out that some indignities or injustices

“leave permanent or deeply disfiguring scars” while others do not nec-
essarily do so (Card 2002, p. 105). She proposes that, where harm is
“intolerable” and makes a decent life impossible (or severely impairs that
decent life), then it is appropriate to talk of a different class of injury:

Evils do intolerable (radical) harm. Harm becomes radical when it gravely,

irreversibly, or irreparably jeopardizes access to the basics that are needed
to make a life (or death) tolerable or decent, from the point of view of the
person whose life (or death) it is. (Card 2010, p. 46)

In the case of the GDR, there are certainly those who define them-
selves as victims of the SED regime who have suffered in ways that did
not affect the generality of the population. These were individuals who
were deemed to have inadequately adjusted themselves to the require-
ment to participate in the regime, or who actively resisted it, and who
were punished as a consequence. They were arrested, subjected to psy-
chologically damaging interrogation techniques at the hands of the
MfS, and imprisoned for attempting to exercise rights such as free-
dom of movement and freedom of speech. Although such rights were
undoubtedly denied to others, only some individuals actively sought
to exercise those rights and they suffered severe punishment, as well
as social and economic disadvantage, as a consequence. What is more,
psychologists working with those who identify themselves (and are
often officially recognized) as victims of the SED regime note that
they frequently experience physical and psychological after-effects of
their persecution that are not associated with the generality of the
population.
Discussing the situation of former political prisoners, for example,
Kornelia Beer and Gregor Weißflog summarize as follows:

The global quality of life of former political prisoners is noticeably lower

than for the general population. In general, a lower level of functioning
and a greater number of reported symptoms can be observed. According
to their own reports, those questioned by us felt themselves to be psy-
chically less capable and less adequate in carrying out their daily roles. In
addition, they experience reductions in their emotional functions, as well
as in their cognitive and social functioning. (Beer and Weißflog 2011,
p. 131)
 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 15

More specifically, therapists have noted a consistent set of symptoms

among those persecuted in the GDR, such as a lack of self-worth, an
over-sensitivity to perceived injustices, and an over-whelming sense of
dissatisfaction and embitterment, which is not only the result of the per-
secution itself, but also of the perceived inadequacy of the redress they
have experienced since German unification. This sense of injustice leads
to a sense of double-victimization:

Those affected [fear] that their suffering could have all been for noth-
ing. For many, the lack of or inadequacy of social recognition, which is
often a source of complaint, seems to call into question the fact of their
own suffering. They need external support in order not to end up in
position in which they are the only source verifying their own suffering.
(Trobisch-Lütge 2004, p. 25; cf. Trobisch-Lütge and Bomberg 2015,
p. 37; Plogstedt 2014)

Apart from the mobilization of such symptomatology, it might also

be possible to draw distinctions between victims and non-victims in the
context of the GDR by making categorical differences between the kinds
of harmful treatment that people were subject to. This move would
acknowledge that the experience of victim of political oppression, in the
GDR or elsewhere, can be understood in the context of certain societal
norms. As with the victims of crime, there has to be a commonly accepted
understanding of how citizens would normally be treated by the state and
by other citizens, and victims themselves would have to be in a position
to recognize themselves as having been treated in ways that demand res-
titution, for example through punishment of the offenders. While by the
standards of international human rights it would be possible to claim that
all GDR citizens were to some extent restricted in the exercise of funda-
mental freedoms, for example in so far as they were unable to travel to the
Federal Republic or express themselves freely, the treatment of particular
individuals, who were persecuted by means of imprisonment, politically
motivated discrimination, interference of the MfS in their private lives,
and so on, were subject to an unacceptable “violation of their society’s
normative framework” (Jacoby 2015, p. 521). In terms of the psycholog-
ical effects of such treatment, its traumatizing nature is linked precisely to
this violation of normal expectations, which are “shattered” by the expe-
rience of persecution (Janoff-Bulman 1992). In this vein, the first of the
Federal Parliament’s commissions of enquiry into the GDR proposed to
16 D. CLARKE

limit the status of victim of the SED regime to those who had been sub-
ject to dictatorial measures that went beyond everyday experience, and
which were implemented for specifically political reasons: what the com-
mission’s report called diktatorische Willkür, or arbitrary and dictatorial
measures (BT-Drs. 12/7820, p. 229).
While the SED regime may have restricted or disregarded human
rights on a wide scale in order to control the population, for instance
by opening their post and listening to their telephone conversations,
it reserved particular repressive measures for those it considered to be
(potential) enemies of the system and, more importantly, a threat to
the SED’s power within that system. That treatment was, furthermore,
of a kind that would have been considered cruel or unjust by the social
norms of the time: it is no accident that the regime sought to suppress
details of its violence towards its own citizens, for example, by refusing
to reveal to relatives of those killed at the border how their loved ones
had died and refusing to let them see the bodies before these were cre-
mated (Nooke 2011, p. 175). The SED regime was clearly aware that
its treatment of those it considered a threat would not be considered
acceptable by the mass of its own population.
Further, as Leonore Ansorg (2005, p. 14) observes in relation to
political prisoners in the GDR, the motives of the individual victim did
not have to be consciously political, “rather it was the state that attrib-
uted political opposition to him.” In line with Ahnsorg’s judgement,
Ansgar Borbe (2010, p. 12) reserves the term “victim” for those whose
treatment at the hands of the GDR state and its institutions not only
contravened dominant societal norms, but which was also motivated by
the belief on the part of the state that such treatment would serve the
political goal of securing the socialist system and SED power.
The possible definitional strategies outlined above offer various poten-
tially plausible means of drawing distinctions between those who we
might want to categorize as victims of state socialism in East Germany
and others who experienced the dictatorship. However, even as we sym-
pathize with those who suffered and continue to suffer special harms,
both under state socialism and in its aftermath, it is necessary to rec-
ognize that such discursive constructions of the distinction between
“ordinary” citizens and victims are precisely that: constructions. In
opposition to such an approach, this study adopts a constructivist posi-
tion, interrogating the conditions under which particular groups of indi-
viduals come to be regarded (and to regard themselves) as the victims
 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 17

of state socialism, in the sense of acceding to an identity, and possibly

also an officially recognized status, which brings with it certain rights, for
instance to compensation, representation of particular kinds in memorial
museum projects, and so on.
Clearly, it is impossible to abstract that claim for recognition of and
compensation for those considered victims of the SED regime in post-uni-
fication Germany from the wider political connotations of the notion of
victimhood in Germany’s post-war history. The genocide against Europe’s
Jews has become a touchstone for such politics in post-1968 Western
Europe, bolstering an entirely laudable agenda of anti-racism and liberal
(or even social) democracy. From a left-liberal perspective, to emphasize
the suffering caused by state socialism can look like an attempt to under-
mine the moral capital of the Holocaust and rehabilitate the kinds of ide-
ology that caused it. This is particularly difficult terrain when the victims
in questions are Germans, some of whom were alive during the National
Socialist period or were even members of the Nazi Party.
Asserting that any severe abuse deserves the same prominence as any
other ignores the ideological uses to which the very notions of human
rights and victimhood have been put and which they continue to serve.
As I will discuss further in Chapter 3, following the period of détente in
the 1970s, the United States in particular sought in the 1980s to delegit-
imize the Soviet system with reference to its failure to guarantee freedom
of speech and other rights (Moyn 2010, pp. 121–175). In the German
context, the so-called Historians’ Debate (Historikerstreit) of the mid-
1980s was evidence of a conservative move to break free of the moral
constraints that remembrance of the Holocaust had allegedly placed on
the expression of national sentiment and the apparent moral advantage
such remembrance gave to the left. By positioning Soviet communism
as the original horror, to which National Socialism was allegedly a mere
reaction, right-wing conservative intellectuals effectively instrumental-
ized the notions of victimhood and suffering to their own agenda, insist-
ing that the misery caused by the Soviet Union (to its own people and
later to others) should not be distinguished from the crimes of National
Socialist Germany (Schmitz 2006, pp. 96–99).
Although the outcome of the Historians’ Debate can ultimately
be said to have further secured Holocaust memory in German politi-
cal culture, such revisionist projects were revived across Europe follow-
ing the end of the Cold War, as conservative intellectuals and politicians
called for a parallel commemoration of the Holocaust and the crimes
18 D. CLARKE

of socialism, particularly in the context of EU-level memory discourses

(Clarke 2014). The reception of the mammoth volume The Black Book of
Communism, published by a team of French historians in 1997 and widely
translated, exemplifies this trend. The analyses contained in this book pres-
ent the crimes of communist-run states as an inevitable consequence of
communist thought and make explicit parallels between the “racial gen-
ocide” of the National Socialists and the so-called “class genocide” of the
communists (Rassen-Genozid and Klassen-Genozid in the German transla-
tion; Courtois et al. 1998, p. 21). However, the book also seeks to high-
light the deforming effect of communist rule on civil society.
For example, in a contribution to the expanded German edition,
Ehrhart Neubert, a former GDR civil rights activist and a historian of
opposition in East Germany, characterizes the SED’s rule in terms of a
“liquidation” of individuality and a “de-politicization” of society, in
which citizens had become incapable of “political thought and action”
(Neubert 1998, p. 845). While the view that the Holocaust was a unique
event in human history and thus deserving of special commemoration
still largely holds sway in contemporary Germany (Beattie 2006, p. 162),
some conservatives and others on the right clearly view this as a handicap
for the expression of their political ideas, and Bill Niven (2002, pp. 45
and 56) has suggested that some victims of state socialism have allowed
themselves to become complicit in such relativization of the Holocaust.
Such concerns might arguably play into the reluctance that Anthony
Glees has claimed to observe among Anglo-Saxon scholars to address
human rights abuses under state socialist rule, both before and after
German unification (Glees 1998).
In this fraught and highly politicized context, it should be stated that
this book does not seek to adopt a position of advocacy for any group of
victims or for any one interpretation of the past. This may appear to be a
ducking-out of the moral responsibility of partisanship on a terrain where
much appears to be at stake. I have often found the testimony of victims
deeply moving, just as I have equally been troubled by some of the his-
torical interpretations that are put forward in the names of those victims.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that any prescription of mine about how
their experience should or should not be remembered, although mor-
ally self-gratifying for me, would not change the situation with regard to
their place in the memory culture of the unified Germany; nor do I pos-
sess a position of superior insight into how that memory culture should
be formed. More importantly still, such an approach would also leave
 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 19

unquestioned a fundamental assumption implicit in any claim for the

importance of one kind of memory of victimhood versus another. That
is the assumption that, as a society, we need memory of victims to do
moral work. Such a position would assume that it is necessary to achieve
a “proper” memory of past suffering in order to express particular values
and in order to produce desirable outcomes.
Such a stance would equally leave unquestioned the situation of aca-
demic researchers in relation to any such fight for “proper” memory and
better outcomes for the victims, an advocacy approach that has been
a consistent feature of scholarship on the victims of the SED regime
(Schweizer 1999; Siegmund 2003; Guckes 2008). This study will draw
for its concrete examples on a number of mechanisms and strategies that
have been employed to promote memory of abuses under Soviet occu-
pation and in the GDR. However, what I hope to show is that the aban-
donment of an advocacy position allows me to analyse not how victims
of the SED should be dealt with in contemporary German, but rather to
understand how debates about specific constructions of the significance
of such victimhood feed into the formulation of policies of transitional
justice and historical memory. The reader will note the plural use of the
term “constructions” here. As will be set out in Chapter 2, this study
proceeds from an avowedly constructivist position in relation to the
function of victimhood in relation to the politics of memory and tran-
sitional justice, which examines not how victimhood is constructed for
society as a whole (if such a thing were possible), but rather analyses how
competing constructions of victimhood are produced by the different
social systems that contribute to the development of such politics.
In passing, although by no means incidentally, I will note here that
the fact that victims of state socialism draw comparisons with the sit-
uation of the victims of National Socialism in staking their claim to
material and symbolic recognition need not necessarily be analysed in
terms of moral condemnation, and indeed that we run the risk of miss-
ing something important about victims’ own construction of victim-
hood when we do. There are doubtless individuals among the victims
of state socialism who subscribe to conservative, right-wing and even
far-right ideologies, and victims’ organizations have at times struggled
since German unification with charges against members and officials
that they have expressed such views (Sachse 2012, pp. 58–59; Jander
2013). Leaving aside the plausible suggestion that some of these individ-
uals may have become radicalized through their traumatizing treatment
20 D. CLARKE

at the hands of the GDR state (Alisch 2014, pp. 148–150), it remains
a leap of logic to assume that every time a victim of state socialism or
an organization representing them makes reference to the treatment of
victims of National Socialism or National Socialist crimes more widely,
their purpose is to downplay or relativize the suffering of the victims of
National Socialism.
As Bettina Greiner has suggested, we need to recognize that victims
of Soviet occupation and the SED regime communicate their sense
of victimhood in a context in which, as already noted above, National
Socialist persecution has become a model and a yardstick for remember-
ing other crimes. References to National Socialism in victims’ discourse
are arguably as much evidence of victims responding to widely circulated
conceptions of victim status as they are evidence of unacceptable intent
(Greiner 2006, p. 132; cf. Wüstenberg 2017, p. 237). Nevertheless,
it will still be important to point out when such comparisons are his-
torically tenuous, and when they may have unfortunate unintended
consequences.

Policies for the Past

In light of the discussion above, the central question explored in this
book is not: “how should Germany remember state socialism in East
Germany and its victims?”; but rather: “how is victimhood constructed
by social systems engaged in the formulation and implementation of
policies for transitional justice and historical memory in the aftermath
of the East German dictatorship?” Secondarily, but no less importantly,
I aim to analyse how the constructions of victimhood put forward by
these social systems can be said to impact the kinds of policies that do
get implemented, therefore having specific effects on the outcomes for
victims. While, on the face of it, the process of developing such policy
is driven by moral imperatives, I will demonstrate the ways in which sys-
temic factors drive certain kinds of what both Erik Meyer (2008) and
Andrew Beattie (2011) call “policies for the past.” This will be set in the
wider context of political debate about these policies (what Beattie and
Meyer both call “the politics of the past”), but the focus of the research
presented here is very much on outcomes in terms of policy implementa-
tion, not just directly by the state (“official memory” in Beattie’s termi-
nology), but also by state-sponsored institutions and organizations (what
he calls “state-mandated” memory).
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 II
THE NATURE OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION

In the whole vocabulary of politics it would be difficult to point out any

single term that is more frequently employed than the word
“corruption.” Party orators and writers, journalists, “muck rakers,” and
reformers all use it with the utmost freedom, and it occurs not
uncommonly in the less ephemeral pages of political philosophers
and historians. Transactions and conditions of very different kinds
are stigmatised in this way, in many cases doubtless with entire
justice; but apparently there is little disposition to inquire into the
essential nature of corruption itself and to discriminate in the use of
the word.
Detailed definitions of corrupt practices and bribery are, of course,
to be found in every highly developed legal code, but these are
scarcely broad enough to cover the whole concept as seen from the
viewpoint of political science or ethics. The sanctions of positive law
are applied only to those more flagrant practices which past
experience has shown to be so pernicious that sentiment has
crystallised into statutory prohibitions and adverse judicial decisions.
Even within this comparatively limited circle clearness and precision
are but imperfectly attained. Popular disgust is frequently expressed
at the ineptitude of the law’s definitions and the deviousness of the
law’s procedure, as a result of which prosecutions of notoriously
delinquent officials, politicians, and contractors so often and so
ignominiously fail in the courts. If once we step outside the circle of
legality, however, we find extremely confused, conflicting, and even
unfair states of moral opinion regarding corruption. Public anger at
some exposed villainy of this sort is apt to be both blind and
exacting. Reform movements directed against corrupt abuses are no
more free than are regular political organisations from partisan
misrepresentation and partisan passion. With all their faults,
however, it is largely from such forces and movements that we must
expect not only higher standards of public morality, but also a clearer
and more comprehensive legislative and judicial treatment of corrupt
practices in the future. For this reason it would seem to be desirable,
if possible, to formulate some fairly definite concept of corruption,
broader than the purely legal view of the subject and applicable in a
general way to the protean forms which evil of this sort assumes in
practice.
Certain verbal difficulties must first be cleared away. Chief among
these, perhaps, is the extreme levity with which the word is bandied
about. One word, indeed, is not sufficient, and a number of slang
equivalents and other variants must needs be pressed into service:
graft, boodle, rake-off, booty, loot, spoils, and so on. With all due
recognition of recent achievements in the way of gathering and
presenting evidence, it is lamentably apparent that charges of
corruption are still very frequently brought forward, by party men and
reformers alike, on slight grounds or no grounds at all, and also that
in many of these cases no intention exists of pushing either
accusation or defence to a point where a thorough threshing-out of
the matter at issue is possible. In “practical politics” insinuations of
the blackest character are made jestingly, and they are ignored or
passed off with a shrug or a smile, provided only that they be not of
too pointed or too personal a character. Very serious evils may follow
reckless mudslinging of this sort. Even if the charges are looked
upon as the natural and harmless exuberances of our current
political warfare, their constant repetition tends to blur the whole
popular conception of corruption. Insensibly the conviction gains
ground that practices which are asserted to be so common can
scarcely be wholly bad, since public life goes on without apparent
change and private prosperity seems unaffected. If, on the other
hand, the current accusations of corruption are to be taken at
anything like their face value, it becomes difficult to avoid the
pessimism that sees nothing but rottenness in our social
arrangements and despairs of all constructive reform with present
materials.
A second verbal point that demands attention is the metaphorical
character of the word corruption. Even when it is distinctly qualified
as political or business or social corruption, the suggestion is subtly
conveyed of organic corruption and of everything vile and repugnant
to the physical senses which the latter implies. It need not be
charged that such implications are purposely cultivated: indeed they
are so obvious and common that their use by this time has become a
matter of habit. Witness in current writing the frequent juxtaposition
of the word corruption, used with reference to social phenomena,
with such words as slime, filth, sewage, stench, tainted, rottenness,
gangrene, pollution, and the frequent comparison of those who are
supposed to profit by such corruption to vultures, hyenas, jackals,
and so on. Side by side with the levity already criticised we
accordingly find a usage which, however exaggerated and rhetorical
it may be, appears to indicate a strong popular feeling against what
are deemed to be corrupt practices.
Escape from such confusion can hardly come from the accepted
formulas of the dictionaries. Their descriptions or periphrases of
corruption are in general much too broad for use in exact discussion.
Bribery, indeed, is defined with sufficient sharpness by the Century
Dictionary as
“a gift or gratuity bestowed for the purpose of influencing the action
or conduct of the receiver; especially money or any valuable
consideration given or promised for the betrayal of a trust or the
corrupt performance of an allotted duty, as to a fiduciary agent, a
judge, legislator or other public officer, a witness, a voter, etc.”
Corruption, however, is by no means synonymous with bribery. The
latter is narrower, more direct, less subtle. There can be no bribe-
taker without a bribe-giver, but corruption can and frequently does
exist even when there are no personal tempters or guilty
confederates. A legislator may be approached by a person
interested in a certain corporation and may be promised a definite
reward for his favourable vote on a measure clearly harmful to the
public interest but calculated to benefit the corporation concerned. If
the bargain be consummated it is unquestionably a case of bribery,
and the action involved is also corrupt. But, if current reports are to
be believed, it sometimes happens that legislators, acting wholly on
their own initiative and regardless of their duty to the state, vote
favourably or unfavourably on pending bills, endeavouring at the
same time to profit financially by their action, or by their knowledge
of the resultant action of the body to which they belong, by
speculation in the open market. In the latter instance they have not
been approached by a personal tempter, and the brokers whom they
employ to buy or sell may be ignorant of the motives or even of the
identity of their patrons. Clearly this is not bribery, but equally clearly
it is corrupt. The distinction is perhaps sufficiently important to justify
the coinage of the term “auto-corruption” to cover cases of the latter
sort.[15] Corruption in the widest sense of the term would then
include both bribery and auto-corruption, and may be defined as the
intentional misperformance or neglect of a recognised duty, or the
unwarranted exercise of power,[16] with the motive of gaining some
advantage more or less directly personal.
It will be observed that none of the terms of the foregoing definition
necessarily confines corruption to the field of politics. This is
intentional. Corruption is quite as possible elsewhere as in the state.
That it has so frequently been discussed as peculiarly political is by
no means proof that government is subject to it in a greater degree
than other social organisations. One might rather conclude that the
earlier discovery and more vigorous denunciation of corruption as a
political evil showed greater purgative virtue in the state than in other
spheres of human activity. For surely the day is gone by when the
clamour of reformers was all for a “business administration” of public
affairs. Since that era business has had to look sharply to its own
morals—in insurance, in public utilities, in railroads, in corporate
finance, and elsewhere. Revelations in these fields have made it
plain that much of the impetus to wrong-doing in the political sphere
comes originally from business interests. This is not to be taken as in
any sense exculpating the public officials concerned; it simply
indicates the guilt of the business man as particeps criminis with the
politician. Moreover business can and does suffer from forms of
corruption which are peculiar to itself and which in no way involve
political turpitude. Such offences range all the way from the sale by a
clerk of business secrets to a rival concern, and the receipt of
presents or gratuitous entertainment from wholesalers by the buyers
for retail firms, up to the juggling of financial reports by directors, the
mismanagement of physical property by insiders who wish to buy out
small stockholders, and the investment of insurance or other trust
funds to the private advantage of managerial officers.
Besides business and politics, other spheres of social activity are
subject to corrupt influences. Indeed wherever and whenever there
is duty to be shirked or improperly performed for motives of more or
less immediate advantage evil of this sort may enter in. This is the
case with the church, the family, with educational associations,
clubs, and so on throughout the whole list of social organisations. To
ingratiate himself with wealthy or influential parishioners, for
example, a minister may suppress convictions which his duty to God
and religion requires him to express. A large proportion of the cases
of divorce, marital infidelity, and childless unions, reflect the
operation of corrupt influences upon our family life. In the struggle for
endowments and bequests colleges and universities have at times
forgotten some of their high ideals. If corrupt motives play a smaller
part in the social organisations just mentioned than in politics or
business it is perhaps not so much due to the finer fibre of
churchmen, professors, and the like, as to the subjection of the more
grossly gainful to other motives in clerical, educational, and similar
circles.
While the possibility of corruption is thus seen to be extremely
broad, our present concern is chiefly with political corruption. To
adjust the definition hazarded above to cover the latter case alone it
is necessary only to qualify the word “duty” by the phrase “to the
state.” Further discussion of the various terms of the definition, thus
amended, would seem advisable.

I. To begin with, corruption is intentional. The political duty involved

is perceived, but it is neglected or misperformed for reasons
narrower than those which the state intends. Failure to meet a
recognised duty is not necessarily corrupt; it may be due to simple
inefficiency. The corrupt official must know the better and choose the
worse; the inefficient official does not know any better. In either case
the external circumstances may appear to be closely similar, and the
immediate results may be equally harmful. No doubt what is often
denounced in the United States as corruption is mere official
stupidity, particularly in those spheres of administration still filled by
amateurs and dominated by the “rotation of office” theory. Thus a
purchasing official unfamiliar with his duties may prove the source of
large profits to unscrupulous dealers. So far as the official himself is
concerned no private advantage may be sought or gained, but the
public interest suffers just the same. In another case the official
understands the situation thoroughly and takes advantage of it by
compelling the dealers to divide with him the amount by which the
government is being defrauded, or he may go into business with the
aid of office boys or relatives and sell to himself as purchasing agent.
The latter are clear cases of bribery and auto-corruption respectively,
but so far as immediate results are concerned the state is no worse
off than with the official who was merely ignorant or careless. To one
not in full possession of the underlying facts all three cases may
appear very similar.
Successful corruption, however, tends to become insatiable, and
in the long run the state may suffer far more from it and from the
spread of the bad moral example which it involves than it can easily
suffer from simple inefficiency. On the other hand inefficiency also
may spread by imitation, although perhaps more slowly, since it is
not immediately profitable, until the whole service of government is
weakened. Moreover inefficiency may develop by a very natural
process into thoroughgoing corruption. If not too stupid, the
incapable official may come to see the advantages which others are
deriving from his incapacity and may endeavour to participate in
them. Because of his failure to obtain promotion so rapidly as his
more efficient fellow-servants, he may be peculiarly liable to the
temptation to get on by crooked courses. Practically, therefore,
inefficiency and corruption are apt to be very closely connected—a
fact which civil service reformers have long recognised. It would also
seem that the two are very closely connected in their essential
nature, and only a very qualified assent can be given to the doctrine
that inefficiency, as commonly understood, is morally blameless. To
be so considered the incapable person must be entirely unaware of
his inability to measure up to the full requirement of duty. In any
other event he is consciously and intentionally ministering to a
personal interest, be it love of ease or desire to retain an income
which he does not earn, to the neglect of the public duties with which
he is intrusted. Now, according to the definition presented above, this
attitude is unquestionably corrupt. It is, however, so common on the
part of both officeholders and citizens that its corruptness is seldom
recognised.

II. Political duty must exist or there is no possibility of being

corruptly unfaithful to it. This statement may seem a truism, but the
logical consequences to be drawn from it are of major importance.
Among other things it follows that the more widely political duties are
diffused the more widespread are the possibilities of corruption. A
government which does not rest upon popular suffrage may be a
very bad sort of government in many ways, but it will not suffer from
vote-buying. To carry this thought out fully let us assume an absolute
despotism in which the arbitrary will of the ruler is the sole source of
power.[17] In such a case it is manifestly impossible to speak of
corruption. By hypothesis the despot owes no duty to the state or to
his subjects. Philosophers who defend absolute government
naturally lay great stress on the monarch’s duty to God, but this
argument may be read out of court on the basis of Mencius’s dictum
that Heaven is merely a silent partner in the state. The case is not
materially altered when responsibility under natural law is insisted
upon instead of to the Deity. Now since an absolute despot is bound
to no tangible duty, he cannot be corrupt in any way. If in the conduct
of his government he takes account of nothing but the grossest of his
physical lusts he is nevertheless not unfaithful to the principles on
which that government rests. Viewed from a higher conception of the
state his rule may be unspeakably bad, but the accusation of
corruption does not and cannot hold against it.
 Conversely corruption necessarily finds its richest field in highly
organised political communities which have developed most fully the
idea of duty and which have intrusted its performance to the largest
number of officials and citizens. The modern movement toward
democracy and responsible government, beneficent as its results in
general have been, has unquestionably opened up greater
opportunities for evil of this sort than were ever dreamed of in the
ancient and mediæval world. Economic evolution has co-operated
with political evolution in the process. There is a direct and well-
recognised relationship between popular institutions and the growth
of wealth. It is no mere coincidence that those countries which have
the most liberal governments are also to-day the richest countries of
the world. With their growth in wealth, particularly where wealth is
distributed very unequally, materialistic views of life have gained
ground rapidly. Thus while the liberal development in politics has
opened up wide new areas to the possibility of corruption, the
corresponding development in the economic world has strengthened
the forces of temptation.
Viewed in this light it must be admitted that our representative
democracy with its great international obligations, its increasing
range of governmental functions, its enormous and unequally
distributed wealth and its intense materialism, is peculiarly subject to
corrupt influence. This does not necessarily mean that the republic is
destined to be overwhelmed by selfishness. It does mean, however,
that we cannot rest secure upon the moral achievements of our
ancestors and the institutions which they have transmitted to us. We
must develop a more robust virtue, capable of resisting the greater
pressure that is brought to bear upon it.
But even if it be conceded that there is a greater measure of
successful temptation among us than in the European nations which
twit us with corruption as our national vice, it does not follow that we
are inferior in political morality to these, our self-appointed moral
censors. Reverting to the illustration of vote-buying, it is evident that
we could stop this particular form of corruption at once by the simple
and obvious, although practically impossible, measure of abolishing
popular suffrage. Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that this
could be accomplished, we might readily find ourselves burdened
with greater political evils than venal voting—for instance, the
development of an arrogant oligarchy and the growth either of a
sodden indifferentism or of a violent revolutionary spirit among the
masses. A large percentage of Prussian citizens of the poorer
classes sullenly refrain from voting, nor are they in the habit of
selling their votes. Presumably some of them would be venal if they
had the opportunity, but the plutocratic three-class election system
makes their political influence so minimal that their ballots are not
worth either the casting or the buying. Neither do Prussian municipal
officials engage in boodling, but the ascription of superior virtue to
them on this account must be tempered by a knowledge of the fact
that the local government of the country is kept closely in leading
strings by the state. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is none the less
true that political corruption implies the existence of political virtue; it
implies trust in the performance of duty, widespread obligation to
perform it, and confidence that in the great majority of cases it will be
performed in spite of the derelictions that such conditions
occasionally entail. If monarchies are less corrupt than democracies,
it is also true that monarchies do not repose so much faith in the
fundamental honesty of their citizens as do democracies. At least
they do not put it to such severe political tests.

III. In attempting to define corruption, emphasis was laid upon the

condition that the duty misperformed or neglected for personal
reasons must be recognised. The latter word needs further
elucidation. Political duties are defined at great length, of course, in
constitutions, laws, and charters. Yet with all our care in providing
laws to govern our governors it cannot be maintained that political
duty is always so clear as to be easily recognisable. It may indeed
be the case that we have at times clouded the situation by the very
number and complexity of our legislative acts. Able lawyers
frequently differ, for instance, in their views regarding the powers and
limitations affecting the action of a mayor under a city charter in a
given case. Again, the amount of work required of limited bodies of
men is sometimes so great that its full performance is physically
impossible, even if we assume perfect comprehension and perfect
efficiency on their part. Thus our municipal police forces, it is often
asserted, are quite insufficient to execute all the laws and ordinances
which it is their duty to enforce. The discretion which they must
therefore exercise is an extremely dangerous one, and the
continuance of its exercise, suggesting the possibility of suppressing
this or that law for personal reasons, is very apt to be provocative of
corrupt manipulation.
Apart from the difficulty of clearly perceiving duty, owing to the
number and complexity of our legal requirements, certain degrees of
difficulty, varying with the nature of the political service required,
deserve consideration. A public official whose work is purely
administrative and ministerial would supposedly have a relatively
clear path before him. Deflection from it should be easily
recognisable and punishable. Thus the making of inspections or the
granting of permits by authorised officials would seem to be too open
for corrupt influences to tamper with. Yet even here the complexities
and volume of the business presented and the material interests
involved lead to many dishonest practices, as shown in the granting
of liquor licenses and building permits, the inspection of life-saving
devices, and so on. Judicial authorities have statutes and precedents
to guide them, but every new case presents peculiar circumstances
which may furnish opportunity or concealment for a sinister
deflection. When we come to superior executive officers who are
intrusted with large discretionary powers, and to legislators whose
main function is the determination of policy, it is evident that the path
of duty is frequently indefinite. To officials so situated personal
advantages may offer themselves on both sides of a given question.
Amid so complicated a play of motives as must assail these
authorities, it becomes at times a matter of almost infinite difficulty to
distinguish and disentangle those more or less remotely personal
and venal and to give proper weight to those only that make for the
welfare of the state.
 In discussing the question of the clearness with which duty
presents itself we have thus far assumed that relatively exact
positive norms are available. The question is greatly complicated,
however, by the reflection that we must deal not only with the law but
also with the prophets. What of those who, like the socialists, dream
of a future state to which they owe allegiance rather than to the
present state? Or of those whose elevation to power, as not
infrequently happens under representative government, is due to a
certain class in the community, the ideals of which they feel bound to
support, be they levelling or aristocratic? Assuming that officials or
voters of this kind seek no personal advantage whatever, the
accusation of corruption would not hold against them, although those
injured by their action would most certainly make such charges.
On the other hand advanced reformers do not hesitate to charge
with corruption many existing social institutions of apparent solidity.
Periods of confusion in constitutional arrangements, as Professor H.
J. Ford has pointed out,[18] are apt to be corrupt, or at least filled with
charges of corruption. Doubtless the same observation would hold
true for periods of class feeling or moral unsettlement, which, after
all, are only the precursors of constitutional reform. At times when all
kinds of conflicting views of duty are current, it is of course easy for
different individuals and classes to form extremely divergent views of
the morality or immorality of given acts or institutions. Thus, among
us, property of various sorts and property in general, government in
certain forms or in all forms, marriage, the church, medicine, and
law, and those who represent them, are all denounced by small or
large groups as graft and grafters. And indeed one need not be a
thoroughgoing radical to observe that in some instances narrow and
selfish interests have crept into these institutions, warped their
highest ideals and crippled their efficiency. There seems to be little
justification, however, for the employment of the word corruption in
such sweeping fashion. Those who so employ it cannot pretend that
any general consensus of moral opinion supports their usage. No
doubt many propositions for social change which are now
considered extremely radical will gradually gain converts and will
ultimately be enacted into law; but not all reforms can appeal
unerringly to the future for justification. Institutions hotly assailed in
times past have not infrequently outlived their detractors and
developed new possibilities of social utility. The formation of modern
nationality itself wore the appearance of corruption to many
contemporary observers. With all due respect for unfledged reforms,
we may fitly remind their advocates that the force of a hard and
stinging word like corruption is materially weakened by employing it
in senses familiar only to the members of a small circle. Such
reckless usage is similar to that of the party politicians criticised
above, and it is similarly adapted to produce either a callous levity or
a sour distrust of social integrity which in the end must react
unfavourably upon every constructive effort for social betterment.

IV. The motive of a corrupt act must be some advantage more or

less directly personal. The grosser the nature of the advantage
sought and the more directly selfish the purpose, the worse from the
moral point of view is the transaction. Thus in the case of venal
voters or boodling aldermen we have direct transfers of money or its
equivalent, to be employed later, it may be, solely to the advantage
of the men who sell themselves. Or still more reprehensible, high
police officials or even mayors of cities may be in receipt of sums
which they know were paid originally by criminals or prostitutes for
license to disobey the law. Perhaps we are too prone to think of all
political corruption as consisting essentially of such gross cases and
sordid transactions. In one way it is unfortunate that this is not the
case, for, if it were, the task of defining and uprooting the evil by law
would be comparatively easy. As a matter of fact we have to deal
with every possible nuance of corruption, shading off from the most
palpably illegal and immoral acts to apparently harmless transactions
that are of everyday occurrence even in circles that would hotly deny
the least imputation of wrong-doing.
Let us consider first the various gradations of corrupt action with
reference to the advantages offered and sought. There are crassly
venal persons, of course, whose itching palms are held open to
receive cash bribes, but after all these are the small and stupid
minority of the army of corruptionists. Many who would scorn a direct
bribe are, however, quite willing to accept considerations more
tactfully offered but almost as purely material in character—shares of
stock, railroad passes, salaried positions, etc. In pointing out the
distinction between bribery and corruption, the large possibilities of
“auto-corruption” have been touched upon. The absence of a
personal tempter seems very often to veil the real nature of a corrupt
act, and contemporary usage completes the illusion of innocence.
Tax-dodging is a case in point. Here the citizen is seeking, not a
bribe, of course, but merely to cut down as far as possible an
inevitable deduction from his income. He may depend upon his
political influence, his friendship with assessors, his contributions to
campaign funds, or upon the misrepresentation of facts in obtaining
the reduction, but he would refuse indignantly to offer a cash bribe to
secure action which he knew would be disadvantageous to the
government. He might refuse with equal heat to accept a cash bribe
to secure his continued allegiance to a party or his continued support
of particular politicians. It hardly occurs to him that in a sense he is
bribing himself with a part of his own income. Of course this case
leaves open the question of the justice of the tax and of the failure of
the state to provide suitable technical safeguards to prevent evasion.
Unjust or ill-constructed tax laws do not, indeed, justify corrupt action
on the part of individuals, but they do transfer part of the moral guilt
to the state. Other instances of veiled corruption readily suggest
themselves—the intrigues of banks to secure the deposit of public
funds, the devices employed to escape tenement-house, sanitary, or
life-saving inspections, the appropriation by officials of government
supplies or services as “perquisites” of office, and so on.[19]
Besides material inducements almost every object of human
desire may tempt to corrupt action. Social position, personal
reputation, office, power, the favour of women, the gratification of
revenge—all these have been artfully adapted by corruptionists to
bear with the greatest weight upon the tempted individual. Far more
often, however, temptations of this kind originate within. They are the
more dangerous because they prevail with men of much higher type
than venal voters or boodling aldermen. But it will be objected that
these are not necessarily objects of corrupt desire; that on the
contrary they are currently recognised as part of the necessary
driving power of political and other human activities, and praised as
such by contemporaries and historians alike. The point is well taken
in so far as it is maintained that such rewards are not necessarily
sought by corrupt means. So far as that is concerned, the money
which a corrupt legislator accepts is not bad in itself, nor need it be
put by him to other than very creditable uses. The major evil lies in
the deflection from duty which the money bought, in the resultant
deterioration of character and in the contagion of bad example.
Precisely the same thing may be said of the so-called higher objects
of desire to gain which men sell their political honour. This distinction
goes far toward disposing of the objection that such motives are not
corrupt because they are currently recognised as necessary and
beneficial in political life. So far as their effect is the reinforcement of
the influences which make for the performance of public duty there is
no reason why they should not be regarded as good. To regard them
in the same way when they have a directly contrary moral effect is a
pernicious perversion of a true idea.
Nevertheless the fact must be faced that the public conscience is
often deceived on this point; and that as a consequence practices
are tolerated which will not bear the most cursory moral inspection.
Sometimes these practices become so common that all
consciousness of wrong-doing is lost. On this ground it might be
maintained with reason that they are not corrupt according to the
conventional morality of the time. It is this condition of affairs which
makes the subtler aspects of corruption so much more dangerous
and so much less easy to cope with than common bribery. Yet even
here the outlook is hopeful. Corruption in its more insidious forms is
not the vice of low intellects. Hence in many cases education of the
public conscience will either suffice to banish these forms of evil or
may be depended upon to find the legal means of destroying them.
Our own recent experience with the abolition of railroad passes is a
case in point, although passes can hardly be considered an
extremely subtle means of corruption.
 Corruptionists usually offer rewards of one kind or another to those
whom they wish to make their tools. What if the same end is
compassed by means of threats or injuries? Obviously the latter may
be far more potent in a given case than the most alluring promises.
Sometimes the two are employed together, enormous bribes being
offered for compliance, and political, social, or financial ruin
threatened for recalcitrance. Coercion of the latter sort may be used
either to procure corrupt action or to check honest action. It is related
of Governor Folk that shortly after he embarked upon his relentless
prosecution of the St. Louis boodlers, the latter combined and
employed detectives to delve into every act of his life from the time
of his boyhood in Tennessee up to his election as Circuit Attorney.
Absolutely nothing was developed that could be used against him.
The incident is suggestive, however, of what may have happened in
the case of other men who desired to be honest politically but were
handicapped by the fear of some forgotten scandal, perhaps of a
purely personal character, in their past lives. Thus the strength of the
moral condemnation visited by our society upon offences of a certain
sort may become the most potent weapon in the hands of an
unscrupulous boss or clique. The question remains whether the
neglect or misperformance of duty procured by threats or injuries
comes properly under the definition of corruption. The case is similar
to admitted corruption in that both involve the idea of personal
advantage. Morally, however, it would seem more reprehensible to
seek or accept something desirable as the price of disregarding
public duty than to disregard it under the threat of deprivation of
some advantage already secured by honest effort. In the latter case
the individual who is coerced may deserve some sympathy, but the
individual who uses coercion adds a very ugly form of blackmail to
the general guilt of his act. Whatever answer be given to the
question of definition raised above, it is worth noting that in speaking
of corresponding virtues a distinction is made. Honesty in politics is
insisted upon, but so also is courage. “It is, of course, not enough,”
writes President Roosevelt, “that a public official should be honest.
No amount of honesty will avail if he is not also brave.... The
weakling and the coward cannot be saved by honesty alone.”[20] To
this it might be added that under existing conditions courage in the
sense of power to attack or withstand, must be coupled with an
almost perfectly clean record in every way to be available as a
political asset of any value in the fight against corruption.

V. Just as the advantages sought by corrupt action may shade off

from the more to the less material, so also the personal interest
involved is susceptible of numerous gradations from egoism to
altruism. It may be entirely selfish, as in the case of a bribe credited
directly to the bank account of the bribe-taker. It may be extended to
include the welfare of relatives—a form of corruption so common as
to have acquired a name of its own. It may be broader still,
appearing as favouritism to friends. Finally, it may be so extended
that the individual interest is merged in the interest of certain groups,
such as the party, the church, the labour union, the secret society,
and so on. The state is by no means the only sufferer by this
process, any more than it is the only social group afflicted by corrupt
practices. An official sentimentally mindful of the needs of Mother
Church may cheerfully consent to burden the public treasury with a
large part of the cost of maintaining an orphan asylum mismanaged
by ecclesiastical officials. Political influence may be brought to bear
upon Rome to secure the creation of a new American cardinal
acceptable to certain influential classes in this country. Desire to
placate the labour vote has paralysed the employment of the police
power by governors or mayors to put down violence during strikes.
And labour leaders, seduced by promises of office, have consented
to misrepresent and betray their followers. Complementary
illustrations of this sort might be cited indefinitely.
It is not maintained that the larger part of the interrelations of
social groups is tinged with corruption. Directly the contrary is more
nearly true. Thus the interests of the state and of the family are so
largely coincident that the latter is frequently spoken of as the unit of
the former. Nevertheless family interests may be cultivated very
greatly to the detriment of political life. Many flagrant examples of
nepotism and the all too prevalent neglect of the duties of citizenship
to cultivate those of the family circle are cases in point. It is no mere
coincidence that one of the most soddenly corrupt municipalities in
the United States is peculiarly distinguished as the “City of Homes.”
Again, a business man may be vastly more efficient as citizen or
public official because of his experience in business, but, on the
other hand, he may make use of this experience to plunder the state,
or he may allow himself to become so thoroughly engrossed in
money-making that others plunder it with impunity. Knowledge
gained by social intercourse with parents may enable the teacher to
perform his work with far greater discrimination as to the individual
peculiarities and needs of the children under his tuition, but it may
also tempt him to gross favouritism and toadyism.
In discussing cases of corrupt action procured by inducements not
directly material in character it was pointed out that current moral
opinion does not clearly recognise the evil involved. Similarly it may
be indicated that many of the less somber nuances of corruption
resulting from the selfish interrelations of social groups hardly
deserve condemnation, because they are not commonly recognised
as deflections from duty. This may be conceded so far as the present
conditions of morals is concerned; but under any sharper analysis
than is currently employed the element of corruption contained in
such actions is manifest. The difficulty of the situation is enhanced
by the fact that it is extremely hard to separate and define duty and
self-interest in many of the relations of social and individual life.
Nevertheless the effort must be made. We must distinguish and
define economic interest, family interest, public interest. We have for
our guidance the great general principle: “Render to Cæsar the
things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” It is
no valid plea in avoidance that it is hard to distinguish the things that
are Cæsar’s and the things that are God’s. Rather would it seem to
be enjoined upon a robust morality incessantly to search the heart
regarding all the details that arise in following the commandment.
The most perplexing questions that arise in this interrogation of
duty spring from the conflict between fundamental and general moral
ideas and the customs of various social groups. It is considered
entirely allowable and laudable, for instance, that a father should
encourage his son to succeed him in business, even if the business
be not his but that of a corporation in which he is simply an official.
Many of the means employed to this end—education, travel,
apprenticeship, and so on—are beyond reproach. Others involve
gross favouritism and disregard of the merits of employees not
connected with the family. The most noteworthy point involved in this
illustration is that a procedure which passes without question in
business and family circles is recognised as reprehensible in politics.
From this discrepance in social judgments it follows, however, that
the man who has made a success in politics may find it very difficult
to see anything but the far-fetched morality of the “unco-guid” in the
proposition that he may not provide places in the public service for
his relatives and dependents, just as the man who has been
successful as a merchant or manufacturer is in the habit of doing in
his store or factory.
It would be possible to point out many similar divergences
between the fatherly and motherly indulgence of family life, the
charity, long-suffering, and forgiveness of Christian faith, the easy
tolerance of social life on the one hand, and, on the other, the ideal
of justice, cold and impassive, which we associate with the state. In
her admirable discussion of “Friendship and Politics,”[21] Mrs.
Simkhovitch has given us what is, on the whole, a very sympathetic
picture of the poor man who would scorn to sell his vote outright but
who delivers it blindly to the “big hearted” ward leader, whose kindly
interest and protection he so constantly needs to secure work and
avoid oppression. It is hardly fair to characterise his attitude in
slightly ironic phrase as dominated by the principle of the
“sacredness of the job.” Hard, continuous labour and the support of a
family under such conditions are virtues of no small proportions. In
large part, as Mrs. Simkhovitch has pointed out, devotion to the ward
leader may be much less the expression of selfishness than of the
traditional loyalty of a race, class, or neighbourhood. Such loyalty,
within limits, must also be accounted a virtue. Finally, in attempting
to judge the case, we must inquire into the opportunities which
voters of this sort have had for acquiring high ideals of civic conduct.
Are the best attainable results secured by our systems of education,
poor relief, correction, and taxation? Need nothing further be done to
prevent child labour, to furnish better housing conditions and to
safeguard the public health?
If we concede the necessity of social reform in these or any other
directions, we impliedly recognise either the failure of society to live
up to its own ideals or the necessity of new and higher ideals of
social conduct. And this recognition involves the assumption of part
of the moral guilt of existing corruption by society itself. Mr. G. W.
Alger has noted the current dissatisfaction with the ideal of pure cold
justice.[22] He also insists, correctly enough, that justice is the rock
upon which alone generosity can safely build. The two ideals should
not, however, be dealt with as fundamentally incompatible. Not since
the time when Thomas Aquinas first recognised the caritative
function of the state has such a view been tenable. More and more
the state has endeavoured in modern times to live up to this duty of
protecting the poor and weak. Its fuller realisation will mean the
disappearance of many of the existing causes of corruption.
One aspect of corruption for motives not entirely personal must be
dealt with separately, both because of the moral casuistry involved
and because of its practical importance. This is the acceptance and
use for party purposes of money paid to bosses or other leaders for
the corrupt use of their political power. While the personal interest of
the politician as a member of the party organisation is usually
involved to some extent in such transactions, the purely selfish
element may be extremely attenuated. Thus Floquet, accused of
having accepted money for his favourable vote as member of the
French Chamber of Deputies on the Panama canal scheme,
defended himself on the ground that every centime of the sum paid
him had been used for the benefit, not of himself, but of the party to
which he belonged.[23] Thurlow Weed is alleged to have used his
political control of the New York state legislature in 1860 to secure
the granting of several franchises for street railways in New York city
to a gang of lobbyists, and to have spent the four to six hundred
thousand dollars of “campaign contributions” obtained in this manner
to back the candidacy of Seward for the presidential nomination at
the Chicago convention of the Republican party. In such cases not a
cent of the corruption fund may stick to the hand of the party chief
receiving it. Indeed it is not inconceivable that his devotion to party
ends or to a party leader might induce him to pursue a corrupt
course of conduct even though he foresaw his own ruin, politically or
otherwise, as the certain result of his action.
Cases of the foregoing sort force us to a recognition of the fact
that when political passion has reached its climax, as at the end of a
hard fought campaign involving great principles, all considerations
besides party success are apt to sink into nothingness. Properly
considered, of course, the party organisation is a social institution
subordinate to the state, but it differs materially in one way from
other social groups of the same rank, such as business associations,
the church, the family, etc. The latter accept their subordination more
or less passively, but the party avowedly seeks to gain control of the
government. Of course it professes its intention to conduct public
business honestly and for the benefit of the whole people, but fine
distinctions such as these are apt, in the heat of the conflict, to be
lost sight of by practical politicians. Not unnaturally they identify the
interests of the state with the interests of their party, and the
acceptance of dishonest money, with the possible danger which
such an act involves, may easily seem to them a patriotic duty rather
than a heinous offence. In all their corrupt bargaining they are
conscious of a certain devotion to ideal ends. They may sell
franchises, but they would refuse to betray a candidate. They may
allow a local gang whose support is essential to loot a city
government, but they would not abandon a fundamental party
principle. On the contrary they would defend their conduct as
designed to secure the triumph of a great right by the commission of
a small wrong.
This argument is perhaps the most subtle that can be offered, and
the form of corruption for which it finds a quasi-justification is
assuredly the most dangerous with which we are confronted to-day.
It will be observed, however, that the foregoing illustrations involve a
higher range of motives than can be ascribed to our ordinary political
bosses. Doubtless there have been exceptional cases of party
leaders who, for minor but corrupt governmental favours, have