Ferdinand von Schirach Exposed the Nazis' "Second Guilt" — and Refuses to Trace His Writing Back to His Surname

"If you see maggots, write the maggots. If you see lividity, write the lividity."

Ferdinand von Schirach, born in 1964, is a household name in Germany.

For years his name has sat at the top of bestseller lists like Der Spiegel's. In 2009, at 45, he published his first book of short stories, Crime. It caused a sensation, sold several million copies, and now exists in more than 60 translated editions. A year later came Guilt, which won the Kleist Prize, one of German literature's major awards, that same year and made him Munich's Abendzeitung "Literary Star of the Year."

The crime stories come from cases von Schirach handled himself; he has worked as a criminal defense lawyer in Berlin since 1994. A review in The New York Times called them "a fascinating glimpse into Germany's legal system."

In 2011 von Schirach published his first novel, The Collini Case. It sold worldwide, but what drew extraordinary public attention was the judicial scandal at its core, one more than 50 years old — attention that pushed Germany's justice ministry to convene a new historical commission of inquiry. The story goes back to October 1, 1968, when the Bundestag passed, with almost nobody noticing, the Introductory Act to the Administrative Offenses Act, and overnight changed history.

Under West Germany's postwar judicial doctrine, only the Nazis' top leaders counted as "murderers"; everyone else was an "accessory." The new law went further: accessories would be charged with manslaughter rather than murder. Which meant that, overnight, the statute of limitations ran out on the crimes of everyone but the Nazi leadership. (Since 1960, every crime committed during the Third Reich had already lapsed, murder excepted.)

In von Schirach's words in the novel, "the officials who had worked at the Reich Security Main Office, who organized the massacres in Poland and the Soviet Union, who were responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, priests, communists, and Gypsies" were suddenly all pardoned, and some went on to hold senior posts in West Germany. Take Eduard Dreher, who drafted this "amnesty law." During the Third Reich he was chief prosecutor at the special court in Innsbruck, a past few people knew about. After the war he rose steadily through the justice ministry, and when he died in 1996 he was still revered as an authority; nearly every German lawyer owned a copy of his Judicial Interpretation (《司法解释》).

Germany has two public terms for this. If the direct harm done under the Nazis is the "first guilt" — what films everyone knows, like The Reader, examine — then the scandal The Collini Case uncovers is the "second guilt": the further harm caused by treating Nazi criminals leniently. Worth noting: Bernhard Schlink, who wrote The Reader, was one of von Schirach's law professors. In von Schirach's account Schlink was not only his teacher but also stood in for a father, and he says The Collini Case represents a younger generation's reckoning with German history.

Last October, in Wang Jing's translation from People's Literature Publishing House, The Collini Case reached Chinese readers for the first time. On April 18 this year, the film of the same name — produced and distributed by Constantin Film, directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner — opens in Germany; its lead actress, Alexandra Maria Lara, appeared in The Reader.

To promote the novel and the film, von Schirach came to China with Marcel Hartges, one of the film's producers. At a reader event held by People's Literature Publishing House on February 15, he said that writing this novel of fewer than 200 pages had taken him "a lifetime."

Everything About My Grandfather

There is no avoiding it: von Schirach's fame is bound up with an unusual surname. "Von" means nobility, and "Schirach" is also a household name in Germany — though for an inglorious family history.

Ferdinand's grandfather, Baldur von Schirach, was one of the 22 principal Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials, sentenced in 1946 to 20 years in prison for "crimes against humanity." He joined the Nazi Party at 18 and in 1931 became leader of Hitler's Reich Youth. One charge against him was drilling Nazi ideology into the young; another, just as serious, was that in 1942, as Gauleiter of Vienna, he carried out the deportation of 60,000 Jews and said in a public speech that this was "a positive contribution to European civilization."

Facing Chinese readers, von Schirach did not dodge his family's past. He said the name "von Schirach" is, for him, nothing less than "a birthmark" — "but far more obvious than a birthmark; it's stamped on my forehead. Wherever I go, people know I'm a von Schirach, a descendant of that family."

In fact he dislikes being asked about his grandfather over and over, and if a journalist's list of questions carries too many of them he will cancel the interview outright — even though he still has to answer, again and again, and sometimes raises the subject himself. In front of Chinese readers, for instance, he was generous with it.

In May 2011 he wrote an essay for Der Spiegel titled "Why I Cannot Answer Questions About My Grandfather." In it he recalled, in detail and in public for the first time, his grandfather and his own childhood, and declared that "this will be the last time."

Baldur served his 20 years and was released in 1966, when Ferdinand was two. Soon after, he moved alone to the Moselle and lived on a small pension. Ferdinand saw him again only shortly before he died; he says he doesn't remember whether his grandfather spoke to him that day, but he made a point of remembering the line on the gravestone: "I was one of you." "A terrible verdict," he added.

Ferdinand's only firsthand impressions of his grandfather stop at age four or five: half-blind, a collector of walking sticks, once gave him a small silver knife, always beat him at games with the same trick. Only at 12 did he understand for the first time who his grandfather was: "There was a photograph of him in our history textbook: 'Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach.'" As a student he read everything about the Nuremberg trials, his grandfather's files included, trying to understand that period — "but when it's your own grandfather, a historian's explanations are useless."

"Countless times I came close, in every possible way: open, absurd, angry, admiring, sympathetic, excited... but when I think of what happened in Vienna, all of it stops mattering." He says he cannot answer anything about his grandfather for the simple reason that "I didn't know him, I can't ask him anything, and I don't understand him."

Journalists also like to ask whether he feels guilt because of his grandfather, whether his choice of profession has anything to do with him, and above all whether he wrote The Collini Case because of him. In another interview with Der Spiegel he answered: "I can't say whether my choice of profession is connected to my grandfather. If it is, it was unconscious." He refuses to reduce all these questions to his grandfather's influence.

At the February 15 event he also told Chinese readers that his writing began by pure accident. He couldn't sleep one night, so at 13 he wrote a play about a boy who dreams of becoming a royal fencer. He later became a lawyer and gave up the writing ambition because the people around him talked him out of it: writers go hungry.

He made one thing clear: "Rationally, in a society under the rule of law, a descendant does not go on bearing responsibility for a forebear's guilt. Guilt is not inherited; it isn't passed down like an estate." Then he added at once: "That doesn't mean a descendant can live lightly, as though nothing had happened. It isn't like that. You have to hold an extraordinary sense of responsibility toward this country, toward society today."

There seems to be a contradiction here: he refuses to tie himself directly to his grandfather, yet insists he must carry an "extraordinary sense of responsibility." Von Schirach handed that same divided sense of identity to the characters in The Collini Case.

The novel follows an Italian mechanic who spent most of his life in Germany without incident and who, to avenge his father, brutally kills Hans Meyer, the Nazi officer who once ordered civilians shot — 57 years on, a respected industrialist in his eighties. Collini had brought charges against Meyer back in 1968 and 1969; the court took the case but eventually dropped the investigation, which is how the judicial scandal enters the story.

At the end of the novel, Johanna, the officer's granddaughter, asks: "Am I one of those people too?" Leinen, the young lawyer defending Collini, answers: "You are who you are." In an interview with Die Zeit, von Schirach gave a journalist the same reply — "You are who you are" — when asked how the older generation's history shapes young Germans.

Von Schirach says he is more interested in the world today: "We believe now that we are safe, but this case shows the other side of that: we could lose our freedom again, and lose everything with it. That is our life now, that is our responsibility now."

On this trip to China, besides the February 15 reader event held by People's Literature Publishing House, von Schirach took part on the 16th in a reading and discussion of The Collini Case with the writer A Yi, organized by Ke Li, director of the Goethe-Institut in Beijing. QDaily has selected part of that conversation, and we also interviewed von Schirach one on one.

When the Law Is Unjust, What Should We Do?

(Abridged)

A Yi: The passage Mr. von Schirach just read is one I picked — I "ordered it off the menu," because I like it so much. Readers may well feel uncomfortable, because it sets out the autopsy directly. That is a way of writing I love: faithful aesthetic presentation. It reminds me of Alexandre Dumas fils's The Lady of the Camellias — Marguerite, the lover of the protagonist Armand, is dead, and he has her grave moved and the coffin opened, and sees something hard to bear. Reading that description set my own writing on the road it has followed to this day, the same road as Mr. von Schirach's way of writing: if you see maggots, write the maggots; if you see lividity, write the lividity. As for the "bitter coffee" school of aesthetics, comparing a wound to a rose, "death like a wisp of smoke" — I don't much agree with that. So I admire the faithfulness of Mr. von Schirach's writing very much.

Ke Li: The language of The Collini Case, and the method Mr. von Schirach found for it, give the investigation a panoramic quality. It opens from a criminal defense lawyer's point of view, probes the motive for the crime, then goes deeper and deeper into historical and legal justice, and into how people seek help within the framework of the law. Could you tell us how you handle your material, and how you draw on personal experience to build the plot?

Von Schirach: It began when I was at school. I heard about this business vaguely, and didn't look into it closely at the time. Later, talking about it with some journalists, I started trying to reconstruct it. ...(Note: the explanation of the "second guilt" is omitted here) To write this book I went through a great many Nazi-era archives and commentaries. When it came out, Germany's Federal Ministry of Justice set up a commission specifically to re-examine the judicial scandal the book describes, and in the course of that review they also drew on the scenes and views I had laid out. This may sound alarming, and people may assume the book is complicated, but the novel actually reads smoothly and is easy to follow.

Ke Li: The novel contains extremely complex legal questions — sentencing for war crimes, legal procedure, judicial fairness — and yet readers slip into the characters without noticing, examining guilt by way of an individual's fate. It prompts us to think about Germany's historical guilt, or about guilt in our own daily lives.

Von Schirach: The question I set out to explore in the book is a common human one: if a law is unjust, if the legislation itself is wrong, must I, as a citizen of the state, still obey it?

This is a very old question, and the earliest example is the story of Socrates. Under Athens's unjust laws of the time, Socrates was tried and sentenced to death, which was in fact a miscarriage of justice. As the story goes, his friends tried everything to break him out and urged him to flee, but Socrates preferred to stay in his cell. He said the laws a state makes stand above any single person's life, and that even when we know a law is unjust, everyone must still obey it; otherwise the whole of society collapses and the state comes apart.

The "second guilt" of Nazi history reflects the same question. The "amnesty law" was deeply unjust, and it trampled on human rights. This sort of thing can happen in any country in the world, and it deserves hard thought.

Today's Federal Republic of Germany has not inherited the guilt of Nazi Germany, but the country does have a duty to carry on a commitment: to keep fighting against war, to keep exposing crimes. That is a fairly humane and rational way of dealing with history and guilt.

A Yi: I think it was Arendt who said, "Our guilt lies in our obedience." The greatest value of The Collini Case, to me, is that it makes you think: within the scope of your job, should you obey an order that harms other people? It's like the famous story of the Berlin Wall, of "raising the muzzle an inch." I think a bad but loyal executor bears more responsibility than the person giving the order. Chinese history is the same: some people, while trampling on others, could say they were obeying orders from the organization above them and so shrug off responsibility, but I have always believed they were committing crimes too.

As for why a person commits a crime, in my view there is no such thing in this world as an evil person; nobody is born to become a criminal. I tend to agree with the view that something is missing in him — sometimes reason, sometimes self-control. I think the only reason I have made it to today safely, without turning to crime, is that the people around me have been tolerant, because I am an irritable, hot-tempered person myself.

A man leaving the house in the morning, knotting his tie and getting dressed, has no idea he will be in a detention cell that night. Many criminals, or suspects, commit their crimes by accident. Legal scholars in Europe and America have thought about this a great deal, and there has been thinking in China too, but I don't think it reaches far enough — not enough thoughtful people take part in the discussion. Many of us today are, in essence, flammable objects: one chance event sets us alight, and we may not even know how we became criminals.

Von Schirach: I agree with A Yi entirely. In my working life as a criminal defense lawyer I have never once seen a purely evil person, or a purely good one. People are all mixtures; only the degree of evil differs. Deal with these criminals often enough and you find one thing they share: inside the situation they are in, they can see no other way out. It is like walking down a long tunnel.

But please understand that committing a crime does not make a man less than human, nor does it mean he is evil at bottom. We have to treat them with their dignity intact. Guilt differs from person to person; the court has to look at what this particular person actually went through. Calling someone to account for guilt according to the law of culpability is a great advance in the development of justice, and an expression of the human-centered thinking Europe has held since the Enlightenment.

Crime Is Like "Walking Down a Long Tunnel"

(Q = QDaily; A = Ferdinand von Schirach)

(Translated from the German by Zhang Yan)

Q: For Collini's trial, you have him "kill himself" before the verdict, which leaves an open ending and effectively hands the power to judge to the reader. I understand that your play Terror also brings the live audience into a courtroom trial. Do you think public opinion has the right to intervene in a professional judicial process led by elites?

A: In plays and in literature, letting readers take part in this kind of discussion matters a great deal. It helps people view criminal cases more rationally and understand the law better. And such discussion ultimately strengthens a country's legal system, because when the public joins in, it keeps a country's laws alive.

But I would never allow the public to vote on a verdict. That would lead only to extremely cruel and terrible outcomes. I'd also like to correct one thing: the "elite justice" you mention doesn't exist, because legal professionals are simply doing their job, deciding cases by a very rigorous procedure.

I agree that judicial procedure should not be disturbed by public opinion. In Germany it works like this: if a judge's feelings are too much affected by outside factors, such as opinions in the media, or if he has formed a preconceived bias, the hearing of that case will certainly be suspended; if a lawyer can prove it, he can ask for the judge to be replaced.

An example: when I was young I helped defend one of postwar Germany's biggest cases, concerning the political situation in the former East Germany. It drew wide international attention and a large number of reporters. The day before the trial opened, someone pushed a booklet under the door of our law office. It was a periodical printed by a church, and it carried an anonymous piece giving the presiding judge's views on the case due to open the next day. I drafted an application that night to have the judge replaced, and in the end we got him replaced.

Q: The novel actually involves two acts of revenge. One is Collini's: he sought help from the law at first, but because of the "amnesty law" the charges were dropped, and years later he had no choice but to take private revenge. The other happened during the Second World War, when the German army, to punish a terrorist attack by Italian civilians and avenge two dead German soldiers, killed 20 ordinary male civilians at a ratio of 1 to 10 — Collini's father among them. In your view, which of these two acts of revenge is more just, or more unjust? How do you see acts of revenge?

A: Let me try to answer from a legal angle.

In a modern legal society, legal punishment has three aims. The first is specific prevention: you steal a can of chewing gum from a supermarket, I convict you, and the point is to stop you stealing again. The second is general prevention: the judgment in your case serves as a warning, to stop other people stealing chewing gum.

Then there is a third aim that legal punishment in modern society tries to reach — a very old one — human atonement. Atonement is the least effective of the three, because real atonement is impossible. The scene we imagine, or see in films, of a criminal sitting sorrowfully in prison regretting what he did, does not occur in real life. Even when people do regret their crimes, it doesn't take that form. Punishment alone cannot make a person atone.

Revenge and atonement are, to some extent, very similar, and sometimes the same idea. Revenge as a concept may be older in human history than atonement. When we meet something unjust in life, or want to see justice done, we often want to strike back; but speaking legally, I hope everyone will take a step back. A very strong urge for revenge is, in my view, foolish.

Both acts of revenge in the novel brought terrible consequences. What I wanted was to give a warning: don't hold thoughts of revenge, and don't act on them. Fighting evil with evil is never rational, at any time. Better to drop the idea of revenge and go drink some tea, or do something else.

Q: Behind "the Collini case" lies complicated German history, but on the subject of revenge it also reminds me of a recent case in China, the Zhang Koukou murder case. At 13, Zhang Koukou watched his mother beaten to death by an enemy family; 22 years later, home for the Lunar New Year, he stabbed three men of that family to death and then turned himself in. Like Collini, Zhang Koukou never married and was an ordinary migrant worker in daily life. The court sentenced him to death, and many people online said he had been wronged, some even glorifying him as a filial and righteous "gentleman," because there is an old Chinese saying: "For a gentleman to take revenge, ten years is not too long."

A: I don't know this case well. In any event, this man is not a "gentleman," because killing someone by such means is a crime. That said, if I were the judge I probably would not have sentenced him to death; I wouldn't hand down so heavy a sentence. I would consider the reasons behind it, his motive for killing. Very often that kind of motive accumulates over years. As I said in the conversation with A Yi, this man may have spent his whole life thinking about one thing only: revenge.

He is like someone running down a long tunnel, unable to see another way out — revenge is the only exit that can save him. But as a judge I would also ask a psychological expert to assess him; if he has the capacities of a normal person, he certainly has to be sentenced. He should not have gone and killed people himself. He should have used legal means and let the law convict his mother's killer.

I do not support the death penalty. Handing down a death sentence is like the state behaving as a person: you killed someone, so I kill you. In the end the result is completely meaningless.

There is actually a similar saying in Spain, meaning that revenge taken once the soup has gone cold is still in time (laughs). But in real life we can't act on that reasoning.

Long lead image credit: Wikipedia; cover image and banner: Goethe-Institut China, photo by Wu Chenghuan