DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Remembering and Forgetting the Nazi Past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Bernhard Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and Ferdinand von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini Eva B. Revesz Denison College Abstract: This article uncovers numerous parallels between Schlink’s first detective novel Selbs Justiz (1987) and Schirach's bestselling novel Der Fall Collini (2011), arguing that Schirach is consciously stepping into dialogue with his older colleague Schlink in his approach to the Nazi past. Both novels deal with CEOs of leading German corporations who turn out to have been high-ranking members of the NSDAP with a murderous past, and both ex-Nazis are killed in an act of vigilante justice. I also suggest that Wolfgang Staudte’s 1946 rubble film Die Mörder sind unter uns, which still placed hope in the German judiciary for bringing mid-level Nazi perpetrators to justice, serves as a subtext in both novels. Schlink and Schirach demonstrate how misguided that initial hope was. Yet where Schlink’s approach to Vergangenheitsbewältigung ultimately serves to “normalize” the Holocaust and becomes as such representative of the conservative trend of placing an endpoint-a Schlußstrich -under the Nazi past, Schirach counters this tendency by insisting on the importance of Holocaust remembrance. He may as such be seen as part of the more recent “ethical turn” in memory discourse by placing himself squarely on the side of the victims. Keywords: Vergangenheitsbewältigung , Holocaust detective fiction, courtroom dramas, memory discourses, partisan shootings. 316 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Ich erinnere mich sehr genau und Professor Schlink war ein sehr guter Vortragender. Er hat damals über öffentliches Recht gelesen und ich glaube, das war mit ein Grund, warum ich danach Strafrecht gemacht habe. Ferdinand von Schirach im Gespräch mit Bernard Schlink und Thea Dorn, Literatur im Foyer , 16 September 2010 The first personal encounter between Bernhard Schlink and Ferdinand von Schirach, both practicing jurists by profession who have advanced to fame as crime fiction authors, took place in the talk show Literatur im Foyer on September 16, 2010, hosted by the well-known author and literary critic Thea Dorn. 1 That she had invited only these two guests to her show that evening reveals her purpose of wanting to bring the two authors into dialogue with each other. To her very first question, “Kennen Sie sich? ” both acknowledge-rather jokingly-that this was their first personal encounter, 2 though Schirach then became very serious and added that while they had not met before personally, he had attended one of his lectures at Bonn’s Law School. As Schirach’s comment that serves as my epigraph makes clear, hearing Schlink lecture on public law was one of the reasons he chose to take a different legal route and specialize in criminal law instead. Already as a law student, then, Schirach saw his professor in terms of a sparring partner. That Schirach would go on to engage critically with Schlink’s fictional work in his own oeuvre is thus not surprising. I argue here that Schirach engages with Schlink, especially in his debut novel, Der Fall Collini (2011), which I read as a direct response to Schlink’s own debut novel, Selbs Justiz (1987), co-authored with Walter Popp and the first of three novels that feature the aging detective Gerhard Selb (though the sequels Selbs Betrug and Selbs Mord were written by Schlink solo). 3 The wordplay on the protagonist’s name-Selb indeed becomes Self in the English translation-is obvious and serves the purpose of giving Schlink’s detective trilogy a type of self-reflexive psychological sophistication in working through his protagonist’s Nazi past. I shall return to this and to the detective genre to which both novels belong further on. Both novels also feature a Nazi criminal with a murderous past and as such, with a murderer at large who was able to escape justice due to the laxness of the postwar German government in prosecuting Nazi crimes. I suggest that Wolfgang Staudte’s 1946 rubble film Die Mörder sind unter uns, which still placed hope in the German judiciary for bringing mid-level Nazi perpetrators to justice, serves as a subtext to both texts. Both Schlink and Schirach demonstrate how misguided that initial hope was, albeit in very different ways. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 317 Especially telling in terms of the protagonists of Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and Schirach’s Der Fall Collini is that both are attorneys by profession, though on opposite sides of the legal system. Gerhard Selb is a former Nazi prosecutor who changes professions after the fall of the Third Reich to take up the job of private investigator. By contrast, Caspar Leinen in Der Fall Collini is a rookie defense attorney; this is in fact his very first case, assigned to him by the court when he finds himself thrown into the role of a private investigator in an effort to uncover the murder motive of his reticent client Collini. That Schirach chose to make his protagonist a young defense attorney in contrast to Schlink’s aging former public prosecutor certainly speaks for Schirach’s conscious engagement with Schlink, especially in light of Schirach’s revelation that he became a defense attorney himself as a reaction against his pedagogue Schlink, likely spurred on by Schlink’s conservative-leaning tendencies. These two novels correlate in numerous other ways as well. Both deal with CEOs of leading German corporations, who, as the mystery unfolds in both cases, were Nazi party members with a murderous past. Both also feature narrators who have close family ties with these former evildoers. In Schlink’s case, his narrator Selb is the close childhood friend and brother-in-law of Ferdinand Korten, the CEO of the RCW, the Rheinische Chemiewerke, who, the reader discovers, worked closely with the Nazi regime during the war. In Schirach’s case, his narrator Caspar Leinen is the close childhood friend of the grandson of Hans Meyer, founder and CEO of the MSF-the Meyer Maschinen Fabrike- who turns out to have been a former member of the SS. Both CEOs are murdered in an act of personal revenge: Ferdinand Korten at the conclusion of the novel, when the narrator Selb throws his childhood friend off the edge of a cliff in Brittany; Hans Meyer at the outset of the novel, when Fabrizio Collini shoots Meyer in Berlin’s posh Hotel Adlon. Both narrators develop romantic relationships: in Schlink’s case, with the sister of the Nazi culprit and, in Schirach’s case, with the granddaughter of the Nazi culprit. In this way, not only are the generational differences between the two authors and their respective protagonists brought into focus but also the complicated issue of familial bonds to loved ones who turn out to have had a criminal Nazi past. There can be little doubt that with this theme, Schirach is working through his own personal entanglement in Nazi history. He is the grandson of the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, who was sentenced in Nuremberg to twenty years in Spandau prison for crimes against humanity. He remains haunted by the statements his grandfather made publicly about the need to eradicate European Jewry: “Jeder Jude, der in Europa wirkt, ist eine Gefahr für die europäische Kultur,” his grandfather claimed. The grandson Ferdinand adds: “Vielleicht bin 318 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 ich auch aus Wut und Scham über seine Sätze und seine Taten der geworden, der ich bin” ( Kaffee und Zigaretten 47). The contrast to Bernhard Schlink is remarkable since Schlink’s own father was a pastor in the anti-Nazi Confessional Church in the Bethel compound of Großdornberg, Westfalen. His status as a Nazi resister can be compared to the father of his fictional protagonist Michael Berg in Der Vorleser , who lost his university post for announcing a lecture on the Jewish philosopher Spinoza. In short, the positions of Schlink and Schirach, the former untainted by a Nazi past while the latter inherited one, appear ironically reversed. Where one might expect Schirach to promote a more apologetic view towards Nazi perpetrators given his own grandfather’s involvement, it is rather Schlink who has become representative of such a “normalizing” trend in seeing Germans themselves as victims of Hitler. Not that one can generalize about descendants of Nazi perpetrators and their revisionist tendencies, as the excellent 2015 documentary by David Evans, What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy , clearly demonstrates. 4 Yet, the well-received study Opa war kein Nazi shows that indeed, the passeddown family narratives of Nazi perpetrators often exhibit strong revisionist tendencies. 5 But here Schirach holds a unique status compared to his German compatriots. In an interview with Die Zeit, Schirach has emphasized that this difference is one between public and private Vergangenheitsbewältigung : “In einer Familie mit diesem Namen ist es nicht so, dass man eines Tages auf dem Dachboden den SS-Ausweis des Großvaters findet. Bei uns war ja alles öffentlich, es gab keine Geheimnisse.” It seems apparent that Schirach wants to hold not only the top Nazi brass like his grandfather accountable for their crimes against humanity but also the many midlevel perpetrators who were able to escape justice due to the new Federal Republic’s lax pursuit of Nazi criminals . Schirach’s objective is clearly to uncover the extent to which Germany is guilty of a “zweite Schuld,” in the words of the late Jewish journalist Ralph Giordano, by failing to bring these perpetrators to justice. This is indeed the explicit target of Schirach’s Der Fall Collini , which immediately rose to the top of Der Spiegel’ s bestseller list in September of 2011, so exactly a year after Schirach and Schlink’s first personal encounter in September 2010 in Thea Dorn’s talk show. Appended to the novel is the text of the infamous Dreher Gesetz , the 1968 German law initiated by the ex-Nazi prosecutor Eduard Dreher that underhandedly granted amnesty to scores of midlevel Nazi perpetrators by reducing the existing statute of limitations. This law becomes the linchpin in the murder case against the title character, whose victim turns out to have been a Nazi criminal who was protected from prosecution thanks to it. Schirach’s novel made such an impact that former Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger cites Der Fall Collini as having influenced her DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 319 decision to set up an independent commission to research the involvement of former Nazi party members in the postwar German Justice Ministry, housed in the bucolic sounding “Rosenburg” castle from 1950 to 1973. 6 This interdisciplinary study (authored by historian Martin Grötemaker and legal scholar Christoph Safferling) was published in 2016 under the title Die Akte Rosenburg: Das Bundesministerium der Justiz und die NS-Zeit, a scathing, in-depth report regarding the nearly seamless continuity between this ministry under the Nazis and that of the postwar Federal Republic years: three-fourths of the new BMJ staff were not only former members of the NSDAP but held leadership positions within both the Reichsjustizministerium and within its successor the Bundesministerium der Justiz , some of whom had helped draft draconian antisemitic legislation. The study ascertains that a type of collective amnesty set the agenda of the BMJ. How the EGOWiG-now commonly known as Drehers Gesetz -came into being, also including its repercussions, are extensively analyzed in the last chapter of this study. 7 Where Schirach’s Der Fall Collini -turned into a successful feature film in 2019 8 -is aimed at uncovering the miscarriage of justice in the newly founded Federal Republic regarding its Nazi past, Schlink's Selbs Justiz serves rather to diminish perpetrator guilt. Not that Schlink’s novel isn’t also concerned with meting out justice for Nazi perpetrators, and in this sense, it previews Schlink’s runaway bestseller Der Vorleser, published in 1995 nearly a decade later. In both, a perpetrator-the SS guard Hanna Schmitz in Schlink’s Der Vorleser mirroring the ex-Nazi prosecutor Selb-is cast into the victim’s role. The exculpatory intent of Schlink’s Nazi-themed novels has been worked out in detail by William Collins Donahue in his insightful book-length analysis, The Holocaust as Fiction, on which I draw here. Selbs Justiz begins when detective Gerhard Selb is commissioned by his childhood friend and brother-in-law Ferdinand Korten, who has worked his way to the top of one of Germany’s leading chemical firms, to solve the case of a computer hacking scheme to which the firm has fallen prey. Not long after Selb solves the case by identifying the hacker, the latter dies under mysterious circumstances in an automobile accident. Selb suspects murder and, eager to solve this case into which he has been drawn, soon discovers that the hacker, a certain Peter Mischkey, had become privy to Ferdinand Korten’s ruthless machinations in taking over control of the Rheinische Chemiewerke during the Third Reich. Korten had achieved this by forcing the Jewish chemist Karl Weinstein, who had been recruited by the company as a slave laborer and who worked directly under him, to denounce Korten’s superiors Tyberg and Dohmke of a conspiracy to sabotage production. Both men are convicted of treason and sentenced to death; Dohmke was in fact executed by hanging while Tyberg managed to 320 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 escape. The narrator Selb then confesses that he was actively involved in the outcome of this very case, having served as the Nazi prosecutor who aggressively pursued the death sentence for both men, unaware at the time that the chemist Weinstein had been threatened by Korten to give false testimony under duress of his life. The problematic configuration of this Jewish character will be discussed further on. Selb had, in short, been duped into pursuing the death penalty for two innocent men that Korten wanted out of the way in order to callously pursue his own career goal. Once Selb realizes that he had been no more than a pawn in Korten’s murderous scheme, he takes personal revenge by pursuing his old friend to his vacation home in Brittany and after confronting him with his guilt, pushes him off a craggy cliff to his death. One cannot help but be reminded of the rubble film Die Mörder sind unter uns , in which the guilt-ridden Wehrmacht soldier Hans Mertens pursues his former captain Ferdinand Brückner with similar plans of killing him. That Ferdinand Korten shares Brückner’s first name may well be a purposeful allusion to this film classic, reinforced by the fact that the deadly encounter in Selb Justiz takes place on Christmas Eve, the day on which Brückner also had the Polish civilians murdered. But the difference between novel and film is telling. Hans Mertens is stopped in the nick of time from murdering Brückner by his sweetheart, Susanne Wallner, who, as the moral authority in the film, admonishes Mertens that we do not have the right to judge: “Wir haben nicht das Recht, zu richten.” No such rescue comes for Ferdinand Korten, or depending on one’s perspective, for Gerhard Selb, although he indeed gets away with murder in this curious novel. Ferdinand Korten thus becomes a victim of vigilante justice in contrast to Ferdinand Brückner, which one might read as a corrective to Wolfgang Staudte’s early 1946 film that still placed hope in the judicial system for bringing Nazi perpetrators to justice. That the film ends with a shot of Ferdinand Brückner behind bars makes this message perfectly clear . Of note here is the fact that Staudte’s original screenplay had Mertens murder Brückner, which was changed under the insistence of the DEFA Film Studio to give the film a better sense of hope in the (Soviet controlled) judicial system. 9 Today we know how futile that pursuit has proved to be for the large majority of criminal Nazi middlemen, whether in the GDR or in West Germany. 10 As William Collins Donahue has argued in his commentary on the novel: […] by murdering Korten, Selb has achieved what he believes West German courts could not, or would not, have done. In taking on this role, albeit belatedly, Selb does not only rehabilitate himself. Perhaps even more importantly, he lifts this unwanted burden off the shoulders of the second generation - who […] are sometimes depicted DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 321 as “victimized” precisely by this unwelcome task, one they did not choose, of having to prosecute various kinds of Nazi-era crimes. ( Holocaust as Fiction 29) Selb’s personal reckoning with his childhood friend thus stands in for the reckoning of an entire nation, “duped” into having become complicit with a murderous regime. This is also underscored by the novel’s title, Selbs Justiz , in which the name Selb may be seen as a cipher for the German “self ” in general. When Selb reflects on his murder by invoking the very term Vergangenheitsbewältigung -“was hatte ich getan? ”, Selb questions after committing the act, “Meine Vergangenheit bewältigt? ” (336)-he invites his German readers, perhaps even ironically, to see Selb’s murder of Korten as just retribution for their own collective guilt. That Selb never regrets his murder of Korten is made explicit in Selbs Mord , the third and last novel in the Selb detective series, when he insists in reference to his act of murder “ich habe es nie bereut” (223). In other words, he never looks back and as such, successfully places a Schlußstrich -that commonly used catchword to refer to a successful mastering of the past 11 -under his own Nazi past. Bernhard Schlink may thus be seen to represent the long-established conservative tendency to “normalize” the crimes of the Third Reich with its often-accompanying plaidoyer to place such a Schlußstrich under the Holocaust. By contrast, Schirach represents the equally long-standing liberal reaction against such a politics of forgetting by identifying with the victims. Schirach thus partakes in a culture of remembrance, while Schlink aligns himself, at least on some level, with the aspired desire of the perpetrators to forget. In the words of Aleida Assmann in her groundbreaking 2006 study Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit , such a tension between those who want to forget (the perpetrators’ perspective) and those who want to remember (the victims’ perspective) has long characterized Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung : “Während der eine auf Vergessen und Vertuschen ausgerichtet ist, hat sich der andere der Spurensicherung, dem Erinnern und Erzählen verschrieben.” (72) Gerhard Selb’s clear attempt at “Vertuschen” by keeping his own Nazi past hidden from public scrutiny lines up neatly with such a politics of forgetting, while Caspar Leinen’s goal to uncover the crimes of his forefathers speaks for the subsequent generation’s conscious reckoning with the Nazi past. He therefore follows in the footsteps of the ‘68er student movement in their demand to bring the crimes of the generation they inherited into public view. Schirach strategically counters Schlink’s “Kultur des Vergessens” with what Assmann has termed an “Erinnerungskultur.” This becomes particularly apparent in the way in which Der Fall Collini goes much further in uncovering the specific failings of the Federal Republic’s judicial system in prosecuting Nazi 322 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 crimes. That vigilantism is deployed in an ultimately reversed sense in comparison to Schlink’s novel underlines this failing. While the victim is once again a CEO of a leading German corporation, the vigilante is in this case the sole family survivor of a massacre carried out in retribution for a partisan shooting, for which his father, a partisan resistance fighter, had been a suspect. Here again, one might well see Staudte’s film Die Mörder sind unter uns as supplying the subtext for the novel since Ferdinand Brückner was a Wehrmacht captain responsible for a massacre of innocents on the Eastern Front. The vigilante Collini is thus a victim of Nazi evil in quite a different sense from the ex-Nazi Selb-or to stay with my analogy-from the Wehrmacht soldier Hans Mertens in Die Mörder sind unter uns . Where Schlink presents a former Nazi prosecutor as a Mitläufer who was ultimately duped into complicity with the Nazis, thereby obfuscating the clear distinction between victim and perpetrator, Schirach takes up the victims’ side in this tale of getting even with a Nazi perpetrator, allowing us to imagine a survivor of Brückner’s massacre as the vigilante. Der Fall Collini also blurs the distinction between victim and perpetrator insofar as Fabrizio Collini is himself also clearly a perpetrator when he murders Hans Meyer at the beginning of the novel. However, he takes recourse to vigilante justice only after the German courts turn their backs on his attempt to press charges against Meyer: they dismiss the case against former SS Sturmbannführer Hans Meyer on the grounds that the murder of Collini’s father now exceeds the statute of limitations. One must, in other words, make a clear ethical distinction between Selb’s and Collini’s recourse to murder. It is this necessary distinction between victim and perpetrator that Christine Berberich, in her article that compares Selbs Justiz and Der Fall Collini entitled “Detecting the Past: Detective Novels, the Nazi Past, and Holocaust Impiety,” sidesteps. I am thus not the first to compare Schlink (and Popp’s) Selbs Justiz with Schirach’s Der Fall Collini. Arguing for the complexity of these two novels, which she selects as representative of “trans-historical crime fiction,” 12 she counters the tendency of dismissing detective fiction as popular trivial fare . Berberich rather posits that both novels should be read as representative of a new trend of “impious” Holocaust representations, following here Gillian Rose and specifically Matthew Boswell’s notion of “Holocaust impiety” that breaks with the usual clichés and familiar tropes of “pious” Holocaust literature. Theoretically astute as her discussion of such impious Holocaust detective fiction in contemporary German literature is, she does not, however, apply it convincingly to Selbs Justiz and Der Fall Collini . Her treatment of these novels (which comprises only the final three pages of her eleven-page article) remains very cursory, making her conclusion that both texts “move away from the established meta-discourse of prescribed victimhood and instead, makes readers question DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 323 their own preconceived notions of right and wrong, law and order” (9) largely unsubstantiated. What Berberich fails to consider is that the blurring of distinctions, especially between victim and perpetrator, is of a very different order in these two novels. 13 By aligning himself with the victims’ perspective, Schirach may be seen to join those authors who partake in what has come to be known as an “ethical turn” in memory discourse. In Assmann’s words: Wir erleben derzeit eine ethische Wende von sakrifiziellen zu viktimologischen Formen des Erinnerns, die mit dieser pauschalen Geste der Vereinheitlichung freilich wenig zu tun hat. Die ethische Bedeutung dieser Wende besteht nicht in der inklusiven Beteuerung, dass wir alle Opfer sind, sondern darin, die Opfer anzuerkennen, sie beim Namen zu nennen und ihre Geschichte zu erzählen. ( Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit 76—7) Schlink’s Selbs Justiz participates precisely in the type of generalized inclusivity of a victim culture that Assmann warns against by turning not only Gerhard Selb but by extension the German population in general into victims of the Nazi regime. Schirach, by contrast, concretizes the juxtaposition between perpetrator and victim “by name,” so to speak, referring to Assmann’s quotation above. He does so by basing his novel historically on the true case of Friedrich Engel, the former SS chief of police in Genoa, Italy, also known as “The Butcher of Genoa.” Engel had ordered the execution of over two hundred suspected partisan fighters in retaliation for a partisan attack on a German military movie house, in which two German soldiers were killed. He was tried in Hamburg in 2002 and was initially sentenced to seven years in prison, although-given his advanced age of 95-was never actually incarcerated. 14 Then in 2004, Germany’s highest court, the Bundesgerichtshof , overturned the ruling on the grounds that, to quote Schirach in his interview with Die Zeit , “das Mordmerkmal der Grausamkeit nicht ausreichend bewiesen sei. Engel wurde als Mordgehilfe eingestuft, nicht als Mörder, und als Mordgehilfe war seine Tat verjäht.” He was, in other words, retroactively considered only an accessory to murder since his deed did not reach the level of cruelty to deserve a first-degree murder charge. So too does the case against the fictional Hans Meyer fall beyond the statute of limitations when the charge against him is reduced from murder to manslaughter. It is ironic that in Selbs Justiz we have the reversed scenario in that Selb develops from “Mordgehilfe” in his former role as NS prosecutor to a first-degree murderer. Such a reversal is also at play in the juxtaposition of victim and perpetrator in Der Fall Collini . The title character is first introduced to the reader as a ruthless brute when he murders his victim in cold blood at the outset of the novel. In typical fashion for Schirach’s undeniable fascination with the lurid, Hans Mey- 324 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 er’s murder is rendered in graphic, gory detail. After Collini kills Meyer with four gunshots to the head, he crushes the skull of his victim with his shoe in splatter-movie mode. This gives the reader the initial impression that Collini is a veritable monster, which is also underlined by the repeated references to his gigantic physique. Kreuzpaintner’s film too presents Collini, played by Franco Nero, as “ein Finsterling, von dem man meinen könnte, er stünde für das pure Böse.” 15 Whether intentionally or not, Schirach-and following him Kreuzpaintner-adopts, if only ultimately to invert, the paradigm that underlies Schlink’s novel and which Schlink has formulated repeatedly in interviews: “People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy.” 16 Accordingly, Ferdinand Korten is introduced to the reader in Selb Justiz as the narrator’s esteemed best friend at the top of the social scale, who rightfully enjoys all the privileges of his hard-earned success and is a recipient of the German Bundesverdienstkreuz to boot. His baseness and moral depravity become apparent only over the course of the novel. Schirach, by contrast, presents us with an apparent monster at the start, thus inverting Schlink’s paradigm. Collini, an Italian tool and die maker at the bottom of the social scale, develops over the course of the novel into a man of utmost moral integrity. It is not until after his unsuccessful recourse to the German legal system in trying to have Meyer prosecuted for having ordered the murder of his father that he decides to take justice into his own hands. Especially the brutal rape and murder of his older sister by soldiers under Meyer’s command, which the young Collini witnessed, places Collini’s recourse to vigilante justice on an entirely different plane than Selb’s. Moreover, Fabrizio Collini immediately confesses to his crime and turns himself in to the police, and in this sense too he appears to be cast as a foil of the vigilante Selb, who flees the murder scene with every intention of getting away with his crime. Indeed, the suspenseful, final portion of Schlink’s novel revolves around the question of whether Selb has gotten away with his murder of Korten or if the police may be on his trail. By contrast, Collini willingly lets himself be arrested and charged with murder, at which point Caspar Leinen is assigned to the case as his court-appointed defense attorney. The mystery of this courtroom drama revolves around Collini’s staunch refusal to disclose his motive for murdering the prominent industrialist Hans Meyer, significantly complicating Caspar Leinen’s attempt to defend his client. Even more difficult for Leinen is the discovery that the murder victim, first identified by his birth name Jean Baptiste Meyer so that Leinen does not immediately recognize the identity of the victim, turns out to be the grandfather of Caspar’s childhood best friend, Philipp Meyer, who acted as a type of surrogate grandfather to Caspar. Leinen’s dilemma as DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 325 to whether to take on the case despite his conflict of interest is heightened all the more when Meyer’s granddaughter Johanna, with whom Caspar had been (and is once again) romantically involved, beseeches him to relinquish the case. It seems evident that Schirach incorporates his own personal soul-searching in coming to terms with his grandfather’s legacy by means of this plot element. The novel significantly concludes with Johanna’s introspective and troubled appeal to Caspar, asking him if she too is like her criminal grandfather: “‘Bin ich das alles auch? ’ fragte sie. Ihre Lippen zitterten.” Caspar assures her: “Du bist wer du bist” (192—3). Schirach thus ends his novel on a very personal note, categorically rejecting the notion of an inherited guilt. By basing his novel on the case of the real-life perpetrator Friedrich Engel, Schirach anchors his novel historically in ways that Schlink’s playfully fictional novel does not. This is underlined all the more by the central role that Dreher’s Law plays in Schirach’s novel. Significantly, the law was passed during preparations for what was slated to become one of the most extensive trials against Nazi perpetrators, namely against the members of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA, the organization under the direction of Heinrich Himmler responsible for fighting all “enemies of the Reich,” which included Jews and all other undesirables, both racial and political. With the passage of Dreher’s Law, an immediate stay was ordered in the trial against these RSHA perpetrators. This is explained in detail in Der Fall Collini when the director of the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltung zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen , located in Ludwigsburg just north of Stuttgart, takes the witness stand. This agency, commonly referred to simply as the Zentrale Stelle, is a comprehensive Third Reich archive responsible for leading preliminary investigations into Nazi-era crimes. Founded in 1958 and still active to this day, its declared goal “ist auch heute noch lebende Täter und Gehilfen der massenhaften Morde ausfindig zu machen.” 17 In a pivotal scene in the novel, the director Dr. Sybille Schwan 18 explains to the court how this law that granted amnesty to vast numbers of Nazi criminals was able to fly under the radar: Dieses Gesetz von Dreher, das EGOWiG, änderte die Verjährungsfristen. Das kleine Gesetz klang so harmlos, dass keiner bemerkte, was vor sich ging. Die elf Landesjustizverwaltungen, die Mitglieder des Bundestages, der Bundesrat und die Rechtsauschüsse - jeder verschlief es. Erst die Presse deckte den Skandal auf. Und als alle wieder aufwachten, war es zu spät. Sehr vereinfacht gesagt, bedeutete das Gesetz, dass bestimmte Mordgehilfen nur wie Totschläger und nicht wie Mörder zu bestrafen sind. […] das hieß, dass ihre Taten plötzlich verjährt waren. Die Täter kamen frei. Stellen Sie sich vor: Zur gleichen Zeit wurde in Berlin von der Staatsanwaltschaft ein gewaltiges Verfahren gegen das Reichssicherheitsamt vorbereitet. Als das EGOWiG 326 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 erlassen wurde, konnten die Staatsanwälte ihre Sachen wieder einpacken. Die Beamten in diesem Amt, die die Massaker in Polen und der Sowjetunion organisiert hatten, die Männer, die für den millionenfachen Tod von Juden, Priestern, Kommunisten und Roma verantwortlich waren, konnten nicht mehr zur Verantwortung gezogen werden. Drehers Gesetz war nichts anderes als eine Amnestie für fast alle. ( Der Fall Collini 182) This raises the question of whether Ferdinand Korten in Schlink’s novel would also have been given legislative amnesty under the EGOWiG. According to the official wording of the law as appended to Schirach’s novel, Korten’s crime of wrongfully implicating Dohmke and Tyberg of sabotage would not have made him an accomplice to murder (“Teilnehmer”) so much as the culprit (“Täter”). Hence, he would not have been exempt from prosecution. Indeed, Selb explicitly refers to Korten’s “Mord an Dohmke” as “unverjährt und unverjährbar” (326). Ironically, it is rather Selb who would have been protected as an NS prosecutor responsible for death sentences, one of the so-called Schreibtischtäter , who were the large majority of those who received immunity thanks to the EGOWiG. It is further ironic, as has already been point out, that Selb develops from “Mordgehilfe” in his former role as Nazi prosecutor to a first-degree murderer. But Schlink never even allows the novel to move into this realm of legal guilt, as Selb’s self-serving murder of Korten demonstrates. Rather, Selbs Justiz becomes a type of wish-fulfilling revenge fantasy in which Selb’s personal coming to terms with his Nazi past is lifted onto a symbolic plane beyond any historical verisimilitude or specificity. This ultimately mirrors the ending in Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns when we see Ferdinand Brückner placed behind bars since this too would not have been the fate of Nazi middlemen such as Brückner. By having Selb take justice clandestinely into his own hands, he rights the wrongs of the past in highly questionable ways. Schlink’s Selb may in this sense be seen as turning Susanne Wallner’s dictum from Staudte’s film, “Wir haben nicht das Recht, zu richten” into its opposite: since the legal system has neglected its duty to judge the guilty, that right (the double meaning of the German word ‘Recht’ as ‘right’ and ‘law’ is noteworthy here) now rests with the victims. But while Selb’s murder of Korten may be seen to show Selb’s complete disillusionment with the postwar legal system, one cannot overlook that Selb also protects himself from public scrutiny and even possible legal action against him in terms of his own Nazi past. As Katharina Hall has rightly claimed in her reading of the novel, “by stopping the case from becoming public, his own involvement in events remains concealed” (“Neue Lesbarkeit” 446). Katharina Hall as well as William Collins Donahue have already elaborated on the problematic characterization of the ex-Nazi Gerhard Selb, who is presented to the reader as “fundamentally good” (“Neue Lesbarkeit” 454) and DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 327 as a “distinctly likable figure” (Donahue 26). Selb’s moral superiority becomes especially evident insofar as he is portrayed as the foil of his former best friend Ferdinand Korten, who clearly emerges as the unscrupulous villain of the novel. Yet this reductive good guy/ bad guy novelistic construct is highly problematic in that it is Selb who, in contrast to Korten, was the enthusiastic Nazi supporter. Korten is rather portrayed as someone who became a party member only out of opportunism and never out of conviction to Nazi ideology. Selb, on the other hand, freely admits that he had been an ideologically committed Nazi and a dedicated public prosecutor for the Nazi cause: “Ich war überzeugter Nationalsozialist gewesen, aktives Parteimitglied und ein harter Staatsanwalt, der auch Todesstrafen gefordert und gekriegt hat. Es waren spektakuläre Prozesse dabei. Ich glaubte an die Sache und verstand mich als Soldat an der Rechtsfront” (146). As Donahue remarks in reference to this passage, we are certainly not dealing with any “cowardly evasion here” ( Holocaust as Fiction 25). But, Donahue continues, “this admission actually conceals, precisely in its stalwart assertiveness” that “broad statements stand in for the enumeration of specific crimes and individual responsibility” (25). What has yet to be pointed out and more closely examined in the secondary literature on Selbs Justiz is the problematic erstwhile antisemitism of Schlink’s protagonist Selb. His admission involving the case of Korten’s superiors Dohmke and Tyberg for which he had advocated and also received a death sentence was not, Selb reveals, the only case in which he became an accomplice to judicial murder. When he admits in his confession quoted above that he believed in National Socialism with the vague words, “ich glaubte an die Sache,” the “thing” he believed in entails a concealed reference to antisemitism. This becomes clear further on when we find out that the Dohmke/ Tyberg case did not simply involve sabotage but also a violation of the racial laws at the time: Die Sabotagegeschichte hatte damals große Empörung hervorgerufen. Der zweite Anklagepunkt der Rassenschande hatte mich schon damals nicht überzeugt; meine Ermittlungen hatten keinen Anhaltspunkt dafür ergeben, daß Tyberg mit einer jüdischen Zwangsarbeiterin verkehrt habe. Man hatte ihn auch deswegen zum Tode verurteilt. (257) What Selb concedes with this revelation about his lacking conviction when it came to the Nazi racial laws is not that he was against them on principle, but that he had found no evidence that Tyberg had engaged in sexual intercourse with a Jew. In other words, had he found the evidence necessary that Tyberg had been guilty of such “Rassenschande,” Selb does not deny that he would have prosecuted Tyberg for it. Yet, through his use of the imprecise “ man hatte ihn 328 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 auch deswegen zum Tode verurteilt” (emphasis mine), he strategically removes himself from responsibility in having pursued the death sentence for Tyberg. Selb explicitly admits his past antisemitic persuasions with reference to the well-known political theorist Carl Schmitt, whom Schlink fashions into one of Selb’s former law professors. He claims that after listening to Schmitt’s lectures, “ alle waren überzeugt und fühlten sich in ihrem Antisemitismus gerechtfertigt” (100, emphasis mine). By speaking not just for himself but by claiming that “alle” fell victim to Carl Schmitt’s sophisticated theory regarding the threat of the Jews, which he grounds in a necessary distinction between “dem politischen und dem persönlichen Feind” (100), Selb not only exonerates himself but also speaks for the Germans as a whole. Here again, one can detect Schlink’s attempt to diminish German guilt by claiming that everyone-even highly educated law students-was “duped” into a type of brainwashing that justified seeing the Jews as a political threat to German nationhood. 19 At the same time, by invoking Carl Schmitt, who remains to this day widely discussed and considered one of the important political theorists of the twentieth century, Schlink gives antisemitism a kind of implicit legitimacy. While one might also argue that Schlink’s reference to Carl Schmitt delegitimizes antisemitism given the controversy surrounding his ultra-conservative political theories, Schlink’s attempt to justify the antisemitism of his protagonist is apparent in the novel on several other counts as well. The very fact that the arch-villain Ferdinand Korten is portrayed as not antisemitic speaks for itself. Korten explicitly tells his best friend Selb: “Du weißt, Gerd, daß wir in der Judenfrage schon immer verschiedener Auffassung waren. Ich habe noch nie etwas vom Antisemitismus gehalten” (275). There is, in other words, a problematic reversal at play here in that not the “bad guy” but the “good guy” is the antisemite. This brings us to the troubling portrayal of Karl Weinstein, the Jewish professor of chemistry whose false testimony against Tyberg and Dohmke led to Selb pursuing the death sentence for both men. That Weinstein is already deceased when the novel opens and remains as such an absent character throughout the novel contributes to his problematic configuration. It is rather through his common-law wife Sarah Hirsch, whom Selb will later visit in San Francisco in order to gain clarity about Weinstein’s involvement in the Tyberg/ Dohmke case, that Selb even discovers that he had pursued the death penalty on unfounded grounds. Weinstein’s perjury is as such directly responsible for Dohmke’s execution. Excusing his recourse to perjury as the only way to survive, his wife further makes the point that he was not even promised his life, just a prolongation of it: “Sie haben ihm dafür nicht einmal das Leben versprochen, sondern nur, daß er noch ein bißchen überleben kann” (253). But one of the DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 329 ironies in the configuration of Weinstein’s character, whose wife tells us here that he was doomed to a certain death regardless of his collaboration with the Nazis, is that he, against all odds, survives Auschwitz and then goes on to a successful career as a professor of chemistry at Stanford University (“Wußten Sie, daß [Weinstein] in Stanford noch mal eine große Karriere hatte? ” 261). Especially the cursory way in which Schlink embeds Weinstein’s Auschwitz experience into his narrative deserves a closer, critical look. We find out from his common-law wife Sarah that she met Karl Weinstein during their deportation to Auschwitz and then reunited with him after the war: “Ich habe Karl auf dem Transport nach Auschwitz getroffen. Und dann erst wieder nach dem Krieg“ (252). These two laconic sentences leave the reader to imagine a couple meeting and falling in love on a cattle car destined for Auschwitz. Whether one finds this scenario far-fetched or not, given the known hellish conditions on these overcrowded trains, Schlink’s elision of what actually happens to Karl Weinstein after his deportation to Auschwitz is even more problematic. We only hear of his deportation and then of his fortuitous survival in 1945. As the Flemish-born Sarah Hirsch tells Gerhard Selb in her somewhat flawed German, their serendipitous reunion after the war was due to Karl’s steadfast determination to find the woman he had fallen so madly in love with on his way to Auschwitz: Wir hatten ausgemacht, wo wir uns treffen, im Fall einmal alles vorbei ist. In Brüssel, auf der Grand-Place. Ich bin dann nur bei Zufall dort gekommen, im Frühjahr 1946, hatte gar nicht mehr gedacht von ihm. Er hatte seit dem Sommer 1945 dort für mich gewartet. Er hat mich sofort erkannt, obwohl ich die kahle, alte Frau geworden war. Wer kann so etwas widerstehen? Sie lachte. (253) A closer scrutiny of what is described in this passage simply defies belief. Karl Weinstein apparently stationed himself at Brussel’s Grand-Place for nearly an entire year on the lookout for his fellow Auschwitz deportee Sarah Hirsch. We are left to imagine his daily, year-long wait for her at Brussel’s famous square, when then one day she in fact crosses the square completely by chance, admitting that she had as good as forgotten about him. When he recognizes her (despite her severely aged appearance due to the medical experiments carried out on her in the camp), we as readers are asked to imagine a romantic reconciliation of long-lost lovers. That both Sarah and Karl survive Auschwitz is implausible; that Karl actually finds Sarah in his steadfast determination to reunite with his Auschwitz deportee after his liberation even more so. By framing Karl and Sarah’s Auschwitz experience as a love story, including its fairytale ending, Schlink once again downplays the atrocities of Nazi evil. 330 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 By contrast, Schirach’s Der Fall Collini expands Nazi evil beyond the common and clichéd Holocaust narratives by focusing on one of the lesser-known atrocities committed by the SS, namely the widespread practice of rounding up and murdering what were often innocent bystanders in retribution for partisan shootings. 20 Hans Richard Brittnacher, in an insightful article entitled “Das Recht vor Gericht: Ferdinand von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini und die Tradition des Justizromans,” praises precisely this aspect of the novel. He also lauds its sophisticated narratological approach. Distinguishing between the “whodonit” detective story and what he posits as the more complex “whydunit” courtroom drama, Brittnacher argues that Schirach’s novel both reinforces the fundamentally affirmative nature of crime fiction (with its ultimate triumph of justice) while at the same time subverting it. That the novel’s very premise rests on a perversion of justice by allowing Nazi perpetrators to escape punishment due to Dreher’s Law sheds light on how the legal system became itself complicit with the perpetrators and as such criminally culpable. In Brittnacher’s words: “Indem die Justiz einer Gesellschaft durch ihre Rechtsprechung Solidarität mit den Tätern übt, hat sie auch teil an deren Verbrechen” (16). Such an obstruction of justice that rests at the heart of the novel may be viewed in terms of the asymmetrical cultures of forgetting and remembering that characterize Germany’s long tradition of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Dreher’s Law demonstrates how strongly the postwar memory of the Holocaust was shaped by a culture of forgetting-of placing that notorious Schlußstrich under the Nazi past. The fact that this law was passed in October 1968 and as such at the height of the ‘68 student movement exhibits what Schirach has, following Ernst Bloch, referred to as “Die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen”-the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous (“Das Dreher Gesetz”). But even more importantly, it demonstrates how ineffective the ‘68ers rebellion with their insistence on the necessity of bringing Nazi criminals to justice ultimately was when it came to official policy in Germany. Germany’s predominant legal mandate of “moving on”-however much behind the scenes it was being carried out-nevertheless prevailed. It was not until the Historikerstreit of 1986 that the conflicting politics of forgetting and remembering the Nazi past came once again to a head. This intellectual debate regarding the historization of the Holocaust was sparked by revisionist historian Ernst Nolte when he published an op-ed piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in June of 1986 entitled “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will.” Arguing against the singularity of the Holocaust and lamenting, as his title insinuates, a “past that will not pass,” Nolte and his neoconservative cohort rejected the notion that the crimes of the Nazis were unique and morally more reprehensible than those of the Allies. He highlighted in particular DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 331 the crimes of the Soviet Union, claiming that that Nazi concentrations camps copied Stalin’s gulags. Nolte’s primary opponent was Jürgen Habermas, who criticized this revisionist standpoint as an attempt to provide Germans with an alternate history as a means of alleviating their sense of guilt. In his 1986 speech, “Keine Normalisierung der Vergangenheit,” Habermas reprimand precisely this tendency of Germans to want to put the Holocaust to rest, again activating the metaphor of an end point in launching his critique, namely against “diejenigen, die sich […] darum bemühen, endlich einen Schlußstrich zu ziehen” (Habermas 75). Selbs Justiz appeared in 1987 in the immediate aftermath of the Historikerstreit . At least to an extent, Schlink can be seen to follow in Nolte’s footsteps with his aim of unburdening his German readers from responsibility for the Nazi past, a past they were only too happy to put behind them. In this sense, Selbs Justiz figures as one of the early works of fiction to promote the kind of “normalization” of the Holocaust that has increasingly become one of the defining features of contemporary German literature dealing with the Nazi past, as Bill Niven, Stuart Taberner, and others have convincingly argued. 21 The clash between the opposing cultures of forgetting and remembering came to a head once again in 1998 with the so-called Walser/ Bubis debate. This was instigated by the highly polemical address Martin Walser gave on receipt of the prestigious Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels in Frankfurt’s Pauluskirche October 11, 1998, in which he harshly criticized the ways in which the Holocaust had become omnipresent in the media and instrumentalized into a “Moralkeule” and a “Dauerpräsentation unserer Schande.” 22 He thus spoke once again for all those who finally wanted to draw a line under the past - the position Bernhard Schlink also clearly promotes with his Holocaust novels. Indeed, Walser’s speech received a standing ovation with only (the since late) Ignatz Bubis, president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, and his wife reputedly remaining seated and then leaving the church in protest. The very fact that they were visibly the only ones to take exception to Walser’s talk exemplified the blatant asymmetry between an Erinnerungskultur and a Vergessenskultur in Germany. The Walser/ Bubis debate made amply clear what Aleida Assmann has identified as “the fundamental discrepancy between official and private memory that has defined the German postwar era.” (“Limits of Understanding” 33). I would go so far as to argue that public and private memory discourses coexist in a complicated dialectic. While legally, Germany’s record for bringing Nazi criminals to justice is not the best, there can be little question that the official public memory discourse in Germany has been in the name of commemoration and remembrance. This has prompted the kind of resentment against official 332 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 remembrance that Martin Walser’s speech made so obvious. As a result, even official Holocaust commemoration meanwhile contributes to the increasing normalization of the Nazi past. As Jeffrey Olick has observed, the “commemorative apparatus has become a rather well-oiled machine,” (“What Does it Mean to ‘Norrmalize’ the Past” 554), having been largely domesticated into “normal” German life. This type of normalization clearly characterizes Bernhard Schlink’s use of the Holocaust in Selbs Justiz. Through its protagonist Gerhard Selb, the novel pays “lip service” to engaging with the Nazi past without grappling in any significant way with the legal issues his collaboration with the Nazis raises. Nor does it engage in any serious way with the ethical issue his recourse to vigilante justice raises when he becomes a murderer himself. One could of course argue that taking this novel too seriously disregards its purpose as pure U-Literatur to which the conventions of detective fiction predestine it. Yet as much as Der Fall Collini is certainly also U-Literatur , it far exceeds Schlink in the seriousness of its engagement with the Nazi past. In terms of style, one might see Bernhard Schlink’s mastery of the craft with his “rare double accomplishment of commercial and critical success” (Hall, “Neue Lesbarkeit” 447). as having directly influenced his younger crime author colleague. Yet even here, the different styles of Selb Justiz and Der Fall Collini are telling. Katharina Hall’s analysis of Schlink’s Selbs Justiz (and by extension his bestseller Der Vorleser ) in terms of his adherence to the trend of “Neue Lesbarkeit” that emerged towards the end of the millennium aims at uncovering Schlink’s problematic foreclosure in both novels as far as any serious engagement with the Holocaust. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s contrast between the complexity of the modernist “open” text and the simplicity of the conventional “closed” text, she demonstrates how Schlink’s texts remain essentially “closed.” By contrast, I claim that Schirach’s Der Fall Collini -for all of its easy “Lesbarkeit”-remains an “open” text. Fabrizio Collini’s surprising suicide at the end of the novel, resulting in a suspension of an actual verdict regarding Collini’s guilt for his murder of Hans Meyer (given all the extenuating circumstances Caspar Leinen’s sleuthing has uncovered) resists giving this novel any sense of closure. One might well compare his suicide with Hanna Schmitz at the end of Schlink’s Der Vorleser, but again, it is the difference between Schlink and Schirach that seem to put them into an intertextual dialogue with each other. We as readers are left to decide for ourselves whether we would exculpate Fabrizio Collini for his revenge murder of SS Sturmbannführer Hans Meyer, especially given his failed attempt to have Meyer tried in a court of law. That the young boy Collini was also forced to witness the rape and murder of his older sister further increases our sympathy for his character. His DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 333 undeniable traumatization as a completely passive, innocent victim remains beyond question. This adds yet another dimension to Schirach’s promotion of remembering the victims by activating the concept of trauma. It becomes clear over the course of the novel that Collini suffers from a severe posttraumatic stress disorder, thematized by his staunch refusal to speak out and finally, by his suicide. It is significant that Der Fall Collini was published in 2011, the very year that John Demjanjuk, known as “Ivan the Terrible,” was convicted in Munich at age 91 as an accessory to the murder of 27, 900 Jews at Sobibor Concentration Camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. His case set a precedent in prosecuting Nazi criminals. Following his trial, it was no longer necessary to prove the murder of individual inmates; serving as a camp guard has now become grounds alone for the conviction of abetting murder. The 2016 trial and conviction of Reinhard Hanning, an SS guard in Auschwitz, has followed suit, as has the trial of Oskar Gröning, known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” in the same year; of Bruno Dey in July 2020, ironically tried at age 93 in juvenile court since he was only 17 when he served as a guard at the Stutthof Concentration Camp in Germany; and most recently, of Josef Schütz, convicted in June 2022 on 3,518 counts of being an accessory to murder as an SS guard in Sachsenhausen at age 101, the oldest man to date to be convicted of Nazi war crimes. Woefully delayed as these convictions may be, they nonetheless manifest Germany’s political will in righting the wrongs of its past. They thereby uphold Ferdinand von Schirach’s insistence on a Nazi past that is never over and on the importance of giving the victims of these horrific crimes a sense of closure. Their symbolic significance is thus beyond question. And yet, time is indeed running out for convicting Nazi perpetrators, and it will not be long before the Zentrale Stelle will officially relinquish its role as “Nazi hunter.” Plans are to turn it into a research institute and education center. Hence, the last chapter in prosecuting Nazi perpetrators is coming to an end. But this by no means spells an end to Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung . To quote Aleida Assmann with her insistence on the continued importance of postwar generations in keeping the memory of the victims alive: “An Stelle von Vergessen als eine Form der Vergangenheitsbewältigung muss […] als einziger von den Nachgeborenen noch zu leistender Ausgleich die gemeinsame Erinnerung und Vergangenheitsbewahrung treten” ( Der lange Schatten 107). It is Schirach who has continued this legacy, placing himself opposite Schlink in the ongoing confrontation between the cultures of forgetting and remembering Germany’s Nazi past. 334 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Notes 1 I am grateful to my peer reviewers, whose commentary and suggestions were very helpful in revising my manuscript. I am also grateful to those who gave me valuable feedback after I presented a shorter version of this paper at the Jewish German Studies Workshop at the University of Notre Dame in February 2024. 2 After Dorn asked them if they knew each other, Schlink’s and Schirach’s first responses make clear that they had met backstage before the show and that Schirach had already told Schlink that he had been his student in Bonn: Dorn: Beide Juristen, beide ganz weit oben auf der Bestseller Liste. Kennen Sie sich? Schirach: Ja, ich habe bei Professor Schlink gehört, als ich Student war. Dorn: Oh! Schirach: Das hat er auch gesagt! Dorn: Erinnern Sie sich an ihn? Schlink: Nein, er erinnert sich auch nicht an die Vorlesung. The audience thereupon burst into laughter. Schirach then continued with the comment that serves as my epigraph. At the time of the talk show, Schlink’s short story collection Sommerlügen was on Der Spiegel’s bestseller list as well as Schirach’s Schuld . 3 Having found no information as to Popp’s contribution to the novel ( Selbs Justiz is the only fictional text he has published to date) and given that Schlink and Popp ended their collaboration after its publication, I am taking the liberty of referring only to Schlink as the novel’s author here in order to avoid naming both authors each time. 4 David Evans’s documentary features international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, who interviews and juxtaposes the testimony of two sons of high-ranking Nazis, one of whom, Hans Frank, General Governor in German occupied Poland, was sentenced to death by hanging at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Over four million people were killed under his jurisdiction in Poland, having also overseen four extermination camps. Serving under him was Otto von Wächter, who became the governor of Krakow and responsible for the expulsion of 68,000 Polish Jews and the creation of the Krakow ghetto for the remaining 15,000 Jews. While Hans Frank’s son Niklas is abhorred by his father’s actions and fully recognizes his father’s guilt, Otto von Wächter’s son Horst staunchly refuses to accept his father’s guilt, seeing him as “the good Nazi” who was forced against his will to carry out his DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 335 actions. Film critic Nick Allen, writing for RogerEbert.com, comments that “the degree of his denial is disturbing.” https: / / www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/ what-our-fathers-did-a-nazi-legacy- 2015 5 Opa war kein Nazi encompasses interviews with the members of forty families of mostly low-level Nazi perpetrators, meaning none were “hunted” or stood trial for their actions during the Third Reich. While Otto von Wächter from the film, What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy, held a much higher position than any of the Nazis investigated in this study, it is nonetheless interesting to note that Wächter was never put on trial and hence never convicted of any criminal action or wrongdoing, having been able to escape justice by going into hiding in Rome. His son Horst’s repeated insistence that he was “a decent man” who had no choice but to comply with his superiors and his claim that if he had been put on trial, he would not have been convicted, stands in sharp contrast to Hans Frank, who was convicted of crimes against humanity in Nuremberg. In this sense, he resembles Baldur von Schirach, who was also convicted of crimes against humanity in Nuremberg. In other words, their descendants-Horst and Ferdinand respectively-cannot “cover up” and attempt to excuse what their father and grandfather were proven in a court of law to have been responsible for. This contrasts with son Horst and those family members of Nazi perpetrators on which Opa war kein Nazi is based. 6 See Katharina Hall’s article, “Historical Crime Fiction in German: The Turbulent Twentieth Century” in her edited volume Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi. She states that “in January 2012, Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger cited the novel when announcing an independent commission to examine the Federal Ministry of Justice’s engagement with the Nazi past,” 118. See also the epilogue in the English translation The Collini Case which cites the novel as having influenced Leutheusser-Scharrenberger’s decision to set up the commission. N.p. 7 For an overview of this study, see Philipp Austermann’s positive review in Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen . 8 The film Der Fall Collini, directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner, stars the teenage heartthrob Elyas M’Barek (of Fack ju Göthe fame) as the defense attorney Caspar Leinen along with Alexandra Maria Lara as Johanna Meyer, granddaughter of Hans Meyer and his first love interest with whom he rekindles their romantic relationship during the trial. 9 See Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film 200—1. 10 While the infamous 1965 GDR publication of the Braunbuch exposed the high number of West German ex-Nazis who remained in leadership posi- 336 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 tions, the evidence to date shows that the GDR government was just as lax in bringing its ex-Nazis to trial. See Mary Fulbrook, “Reframing the Past: Justice, Guilt, and Consolidation in East and West Germany after Nazism.” 11 For a good overview of this “Schlagwort” in the debate surrounding Vergangenheitsbewältigung , see Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert in their monograph, Geschichtsvergessenheit und Geschichtsversessenheit, especially 53—59. 12 The term is used by Bruce Murphy in his The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery . 13 For one, Berberich does not see the many obvious parallels in the plotline of the two novels that I work out here. Furthermore, her article is weakened by numerous misreadings. She mistakenly claims, for example, that Gerhard Selb was a member of the SS. She further claims that in the course of Selb’s investigations, “two men are murdered,” although only Mischkey is killed. Perhaps she is also referring to the execution of Dohmke during the Third Reich, though this important line of the plot is never addressed and remains as such unclarified. In Schirach’s case, Berberich’s misreading is particularly grave. She ignores the incorporation of Dreher’s Law into Der Fall Collini , which leads her to overlook the central conceit of the novel, namely that Collini had unsuccessful attempted to bring charges against Meyer; only after the legal system failed him did he take justice into his own hands by murdering Meyer. Yet in Berberich’s erroneous assessment of the novel, “law and order are turned upside down; the real and original perpetrator, Meyer, can no longer be legally and formally prosecuted and punished because the former victim, Collini, has taken the law into his own hands and has effectively become a perpetrator himself ” (8). This is incorrect: Meyer can no longer be legally and formally prosecuted not because Collini had murdered him, but because his crime had exceeded the statute of limitations. She goes on to assert that “Leinen finds himself defending a clearly guilt man, arguing for his innocence in a way that suggests that there is a hierarchy to crime: one murder deserves punishment, while another, due to circumstances, does not.” This is precisely what Leinen-and through him Schirach-is arguing: that a “hierarchy to crime” does indeed exist, whereby the mitigating circumstances of Collini’s murder relieve him of the greater part of his guilt. In order to avoid the complicated issue of Collini’s legal guilt, Schirach has Collini commit suicide the night before the court is due to render the verdict. 14 See the LA Times article published upon his death: https: / / www.latimes. com/ archives/ la-xpm-2006-feb-15-me-passings15.4-story.html 15 Rebhandl, Bert. “Aus Magel an Ideen”. FAZ, 21 April 2019. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini 337 https: / / www.faz.net/ aktuell/ feuilleton/ kino/ ist-die-romanverfilmung-derder-fall-collini-gelungen-16148921.html. 16 https: / / m.facebook.com/ bernhardschlink/ posts/ 117989298251154 17 https: / / zentrale-stelle-ludwigsburg.justiz-bw.de/ pb/ ,Lde/ Startseite 18 She is the fictive director of the Zentrale Stelle. When Schirach published his novel in 2011, Kurt Schrimm was the actual director of the agency. The current director is Thomas Will. 19 Schlink relativizes Selb’s guilt in having fallen victim to Schmitt’s theorizing and, with his usual tactic of raising his morally superior protagonist over his more unprincipled colleagues, has Selb claim that “schon damals hatte mich beschäftigt, ob die anderen die Unsauberkeit ihrer Gefühle nicht aushalten konnten und bemängeln mussten oder ob meine Fähigkeit, zwischen Persönlichem und Sachlichem gefühlsmäßig eine klare Grenze zu ziehen, unterentwickelt war.” (100) 20 In Kreuzpaintner’s cinematic adaptation of the novel, he turns Collini’s father into just such an innocent bystander, while in the novel he was indeed a suspected partisan resistance fighter. Kreuzpaintner’s dramatization of the execution of Fabricio’s father is heightened by having Hans Meyer, before he executes the suspected partisans, single out the young boy Fabricio from the crowd of spectators and ask him to point out who his father is. The innocent lad Fabricio tragically does so, upon which Fabricio’s father is ordered to join the other suspected resistance fighters, who are then executed in cold blood. In short, the film turns Fabricio’s father into a completely innocent victim, which also clearly heightens Fabricio Collini’s sense of guilt for the role he played in his father’s execution. 21 See especially Bill Niven’s Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich, in which he argues that this tendency has become especially pronounced since German reunification in 1990. He attributes this sea change to the fact that while the GDR and the FRG had long engaged in blaming each other for Germany’s fall into fascism (the East Germans equating fascism with capitalism; the West Germans equating it with communism), this mutual blame game understandably ceased after reunification, giving rise to a much more conciliatory, all-encompassing historical approach to the Nazi past. See also Stuart Taberner’s Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic , who pursues a similar argument. 22 https: / / hdms.bsz-bw.de/ frontdoor/ deliver/ index/ docId/ 440/ file/ walserRede.pdf 338 Eva B. Revesz DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0015 Works Cited Assmann, Aleida and Ute Frevert. Geschichtsvergessenheit - Geschichtsversessenheit . Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999. —. Der Lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006. —. “Limits of Understanding: Generational Identities in Recent German Memory Literature.” Victims and Perpetrators: 1933—194. Ed. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006: 29—48. Austermann, Philipp. Review of Die Akte Rosenburg: Das Bundesministerium der Justiz und die NS-Zeit. Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen . Ed. Martin Grötemaker and Christoph Safferling, 49. 2 (2018): 443—5. Berberich, Christine. “Detecting the Past: Novels, the Nazi Past, and Holocaust Impiety.” genealogy 3.4/ 70 (2019): 1—11. Boswell, Matthew. Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2012. Brittnacher, Hans Richard. “Das Recht vor Gericht: Ferdinand von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini und die Tradition des Justizromans.” Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge, 23 (2004): 1—17. Brockmann, Stephen. A Critical History of German Film . Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Donahue, William Collins. Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s ‘Nazi’ Novels and Their Films. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Fulbrook, Mary. “Reframing the Past: Justice, Guilt, and Consolidation in East and West Germany after Nazism.” Central European History , 53/ 2 (2020): 294—313. Der Fall Collini. Dir. Marco Kreuzpaintner, Constantin Film, 2019. Habermas, Jürgen. “Keine Normalisierung der Vergangenheit.” Eine Art Schadensabwicklung - Kleine Politische Schriften VI. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. 11—17. Hall, Katharina, ed. Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi. Cardiff: U of Wales Press, 2017. —. “The Author, the Novel, the Reader and the Perils of ‘Neue Lesbarkeit’: A Comparative Analysis of Bernhard Schlink’s S elbs Justiz and Der Vorleser .” German Life & Letters, 59/ 3 (2006): 446—467. Giordano, Ralph. Die zweite Schuld oder von der Last, Deutscher zu sein. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2000. Grötemaker, Martin and Christoph Safferling, eds. Die Akte Rosenburg: Das Bundesministerium der Justiz und die NS-Zeit. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2016. Literatur im Foyer . Host: Thea Dorn. Guests: Bernhard Schlink and Ferdinand von Schirach. SWR, 16 September 2010. Die Mörder sind unter uns. Dir. Wolfgang Staudte. DEFA, 1946. Murphy, Bruce. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery , New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Niven, Bill. Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich. London: Routledge, 2001. 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