Historians are the embalmers of people's political and moral convictions. As soon as historiography begins to take an interest in an issue, they can be certain that it no longer possesses a self-evident presence in their society. Some questions and problems only become objects of history after society has become historically conscious of them. The history of workers boomed in the 1970s, for example, when industrial labor was in the process of disappearing, just as memory and its sites became a mode of inquiry for historians in the 1980s precisely at the moment when lived memory of `the age of extremes' (Eric Hobsbawm) was disappearing together with its last generation. Here, Hoffmann develops three interconnected arguments that seek to determine the place of human rights in the crises and conflicts of the recent past.