To call a trial “a show trial” implies that the end point is preordained, and that this conclusion will serve the powers behind the court. In Spectacles and Spectres, Basak Ertür develops a performative theory of the political trial, arguing that political trials are significantly different from show trials. The ends a political trial may serve are not necessarily the powers that be, nor is the outcome given. Ertür takes the legal twists and turns of the Armenian Genocide as her central case study, and provides a nuanced and compelling reading of the different states and individual actors who have jurisprudentially engaged with this event, both resisting and affirming power structures.
The book begins with the author's own judicial summons before a Turkish court for signing a petition calling for peace. In a move that even Kafka might be tempted to fictionalize, all signatories of the petition were charged with circulating terrorist propaganda. Ultimately, the charges were dismissed after a number of appeals, but not before issuing charges against more than 900 people, illustrating that dissent is not welcome in the Republic of Turkey.
After this forward, Ertür provides three theoretical chapters, engaging with different theories of performativity and jurisprudence to assemble the grounds for the readings of trials in the final three chapters. The first chapter looks at the scholarship surrounding the Eichmann trial, primarily through a close reading of Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Judith Shklar's Legalism: Law, Morals and Political Trials, and Otto Kirschheimer's Political Trials: The Use of Justice for Political Ends. Ertür's engagement with these texts is crisp, and she aptly points out the historical circumstances that created this set of texts in the early 1960s. During the 1950s and 1960s the goal of reconciling the horrors of the Holocaust with the present and future of law was difficult work. Yet preserving—even amplifying—the ability of law to bound power felt crucial for the future of humanity. How to acknowledge the reality of political-legal structures without losing the law as a potential force for good? I could not help but contrast this era to our own. Consider the recent battles being fought between legal regimes and power structures today in presumably liberal locales such as Poland, Israel, and the United States. Did the reconstruction efforts of the last century fail? Ertür's argument offers another option; the difficult dance between power structures and legal institutions is always an open question and therefore the performances must be repeated, even (or particularly in?) in supposedly liberal regimes that have settled the matter.
Chapter 2 moves into theories of jurisprudence, performativity, and politics including readings of Austin, Butler, Felman, Derrida, and Benjamin, placing this volume very squarely within the tradition of critical legal theory. Ertür offers a definition of a political trial; “[T]he political trial can be defined as a legal proceeding whose performative structures are publicly exposed.” (p. 70) What this means is that the more a trial is understood to be political, the more the performative mechanisms that are generally used to render trials as apolitical become visible. As Ertür points out, one of these performances is to eliminate the perception of uncertainty in the outcome; in Austinian terms, the performative appears as constative.
Chapter 4 takes on the trial and subsequent acquittal of Soghomon Tehlirian, the man who assassinated Mehmet Talat in Berlin, the person established as largely responsible for ordering the massacre of Armenians. The Berlin trial included testimonies of personal and collective suffering for the world to hear, and the presence of ghosts urging that justice be served through Talat's death were also invoked. If you assumed that the case was largely about establishing the truth of the genocide, you would be wrong. I will not spoil the diverting series of twists and turns that Ertür unveils over the course of this chapter. But I will repeat the evidence that suggests that the verdict was driven by the need for German reconciliation with its European allies. In 1921 during the trial, Kurt Niemeyer argued that, “If a German court were to find Soghomon Tehlirian not guilty, this would put an end to the misconception that the world has of us. The world would welcome such a decision as serving the highest principles of justice.” (p. 129).
The historical record of the Armenian genocide continued to be a fraught matter, and Ertür establishes it as a lightning rod in both Turkish and European politics in the following two chapters. Over the course of the 21st century, the Armenian Genocide ended up in the European Court of Justice, the Swiss Courts, and as an utterly repressed memory in Turkey's national courts. As one might imagine, each of these contexts offers a different constellation of political actors and interests at work.
Ertür provides incredibly rich jurisprudential readings of this series of trials that document a continual struggle over the historical record, the question of who can establish the history that rulings should be based upon, collective memory, and the uniqueness of the Holocaust in relation to the jurisprudence of genocide. This book provides insights to anyone interested in the relation between law and politics, and a riveting introduction to the issues surrounding the Armenian genocide to those who are less familiar with this event. I am already hoping that Ertür's follow up book will provide an account of political trials in Turkey more broadly; Spectacles and Specters demonstrates that she is just the scholar for this task.
