social law, contemporary legal history, and the history of public law Iran. InGermany, the argument about the interpretation of Nazism once again became a pressing issue (there was the Eichmann trial in 1960 and the huge Auschwitz trial in 1965), connected to the opposition to the Adenauer government and the publishing house Springer-Verlag. This was the background to studies about state criminality (Herbert Jäger), unlimited interpretation (Bernd Rüthers), and public good formulas in Nazi law (myself), to mention the first habilitations in 1967, 1968, and 1973 respectively.2 We three started together, so to speak. Later I was to publish a little book, Juristische Zeitgeschichte: Ein neues Fach? (1993), about whether contemporary legal history was a new discipline. The idea was to encourage legal historians to work with the entire twentieth century. This primarily meant that in the years after 1965 the roles of jurists and the law in the Nazi era had to be inspected – from every possible perspective. We found that the majority of our lecturers, especially those in Munich, had been members of the Nazi Party. The feeling of our generation was that we needed to talk about this! In a diffuse way, we felt guilty, even if we had been fortunate enough to grow up in times of peace and freedom. We wanted to know why and how one got to be guilty. What role did jurists play, if they spelt out the will of the state or the will of the Führer and translated it into reality – or if all too literally they executed it? How did normal jurists turn intofurchtbare Juristen, horrible jurists? What did the process of adjustment and active participation look like? How to assess the Schreibtischtäter, the armchair culprits, and especially the horrible jurists? These topics brought together a great many young people and there was a boom in studies of the Nazi era. Even if there were some weaker works, substantial progress was made in legal history, lifting the curtain on the dark field of Nazism. The younger generation went on to set up a network revolving around foreign Holocaust research in Berkeley, Toronto, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Jump twenty years and the Nazi era was one of the best-researched periods of German history. At the head of it was Holocaust or Shoah re2 Michael Stolleis, Gemeinwohlformeln im nationalsozialistischen Recht (Berlin: Schweitzer, 1974); see also id., Law under the Swastika, tr. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 161
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