Expanding the Archive of Show Trials

The theatricality of courtroom trials and law’s ambivalent relationship to spectacle have inspired both art and political philosophy since Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the trial of Socrates. On the one hand, as Hannah Arendt emphasizes in Eichmann in Jerusalem, “justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done” (p. 277). On the other hand, the artifice required for showing justice may be antithetical to doing justice.

In Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial, Agata Fijalkowski turns to twentieth century show trials in Albania, East Germany, and Poland to consider the tensions involved in the performance of justice and aesthetic representation. Fijalkowski’s empirical focus on these three countries usefully expands existing knowledge on women’s roles in these trials, the venues where they take place, and archival courtroom photographs, which are reprinted in the book.

Fijalkowski frames photographs presented throughout the book with a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s historiography, movingly describing how courtroom photographs may flash up as images of the past, collapsing time and space between then and now. In her discussion of Soviet legal narratives and photography, Fijalkowski writes, “aesthetics mattered. . . edits and variations to the image would affect the political consciousness of the spectator. The materiality of the print of the photo mattered; its reproduction and transformation would allow for the dissemination of the image imbued with the relevant message about law and justice” (p. 49). This is a crucial point. While the law deals in norms and generalizability, aesthetics is about the specifics.

The strongest parts of the book are the instances in which Fijalkowski attends to the specifics of photographs, for example: her analysis of a captivating photo of the Albanian dissident Musine Kokalari at her trial. Fijalkowski convincingly argues that, “visual footage is a source of data that works alongside legal sources. An examination of archival materials that to date have not been widely disseminated and/or analysed will yield vital information” (p. 159). However, I would have liked the author to provide closer analysis and information about more of the photographs included in the book, including their reproduction and dissemination. Additional details could have shown why the specific photos selected for inclusion were significant and how particular aesthetic choices challenged or affirmed official narratives of the trials. While the book stops short of offering these additional  insights, it may offer an entryway for others interested in completing this important work.

Throughout the book, the opacity of the writing—both on a structural and sentence level—makes it a challenging read and it is often hard to follow the thread of Fijalkowski’s arguments. Key terms go undefined or are used in different ways, e.g.: the term “performative” is alternately used in the academic sense (a performance that brings about what it performs), in the colloquial sense (merely theatrical, or fake), and simply to mean something that is performed for an audience. This slippage is in itself revealing: after all, one of the most striking characteristics of these trials may be the ways that they can be both fake and real at the same time. Fijalkowski notes several cases in which seemingly fantastical charges turned out to be true and a number of cases in which the truth may never be known. At the outset of the book, Fijalkowski defines the “show trial” as “a kangaroo court, sham trial, or judicial murder.” (p.2) But there is also a richer story that runs through this book about law’s performativity: one which more precisely defined terms and arguments could further illuminate.