A few notes on Der Fall Collini.
1. A slightly similar and later case was that of Friedrich Engel, who was 95 when treated leniently because of his age but would have been found guilty of murder of 59 Italian partisans under the law in 2004.
2. There are useful links and further points in online reviews too.
Rachel Ward mentioned the blog Mrs Peabody Investigates, by Katharina Hall, which was new to me and very interesting. Useful further links there too. I have the book Crime Fiction in German, which she edited and much of which she wrote. She also translated Schirach’s Strafe.
3. There is a film of Der Fall Collini, directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner, certainly worth watching. The great thing about it is that it shows the Berlin courts and lawyers. It does not show the archives in Ludwigsburg (the plot is slightly changed so that Leinen’s father does the work there). I found it odd that instead of Leinen growing up as a boarding-school friend of Hans Meyer’s grandson, he was shown as a Turkish child and Meyer as particularly admirable for treating him like a German child. The actor wasn’t Turkish either. Some scenes show the events in Italy in 1944.
4. Anthea Bell translated Austerlitz by Sebald. Hannah Scheithauer led a seminar on translating Sebald at an Oxford University summer school in 2022 (I think). An essay by Bell was quoted:
Bell opens her essay by questioning the necessity of her own role. She notes that Sebald was completely fluent in English and could easily have self-translated, or indeed written in English in the first place. It was due to personal preference alone, then, that he let his texts pass into the English language through the hands of a translator. In the seminar, we asked ourselves what might have been the reasons for this choice….
Bell suggests that Sebald saw failures in translation as the expression of a more fundamental break within language itself. A sense of deep-seated untranslatability, which is not limited to a text’s movement between languages but relates to all forms of linguistic expression – paradoxically – emerges at the very core of what Austerlitz seeks to express.
Austerlitz is written in German, but its protagonist is a speaker of English (who has forgotten his native language, Czech), and when he reads H.G.Adler’s German account of Theresienstadt, he has difficulty with some of the technical and bureaucratic terminology used by Germans:
Und wenn ich die Bedeutung von Bezeichnungen und Begriffen wie Barackenbestandteillager, Zusatzkostenberechnungsschein, Bagatellreparaturwerkstätte, Menagetransportkolonne, Küchenbeschwerdeorgane, Reinlichkeitsreihenuntersuchung oder Entwesungsübersiedlung…endlich erschlossen hatte, so musste ich,….
Bell’s translation:
When I had finally discovered the meaning of such terms and concepts as Barackenbestandteillager, Zusatzkostenberechnungsschein, Bagatellreparaturwerkstätte, Menagetransportkolonne, Küchenbeschwerdeorgane, Reinlichkeitsreihenuntersuchung and Entwesungsübersiedlung…
Leaving the words in German is certainly a valid strategy. A German reading the text in German might, as Scheithauer writes, pass over the terms too quickly. For a German-speaking reader of the English, the general meaning of the terms can be gathered. This would not be the case for other readers. It is likely that this approach was discussed with Sebald.
It’s a long time since I read Austerlitz, and i cannot remember the importance of language in it. I just present this as something to think about.