Redeeming Rape

Since the 1990s, feminist activists committed to the policy project of addressing wartime sexual violence through international criminal prosecution have deployed a specific historical narrative about the failure of international law to adequately punish sexual crimes perpetrated by Allied forces at the end of the Second World War. This ‘feminist failure narrative’ (FFN), however, can be contested on historical and normative grounds. Instead of being silenced throughout the post-war period, German women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence were in fact mobilized by both East and West German state-building projects that, in part, sought to minimize ordinary German complicity in the horrors of the war by emphasizing German suffering. Often, women had a vested interest in participating in the construction of these new nationalist stories. I argue that in foregrounding female sexual victimization the FFN depoliticizes women’s wartime agency, thereby dangerously shifting our gaze away from the politics of war.