(This post is a recreation of one that was originally dated 14.11.25 and was lost)
This novel was recently discussed online by the ITI GerNet book group run by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson. I did write a review of it for the ITI Netzblatt, but if anyone likes reading crime fiction, go ahead and try it. It is well paced and easy to read. From the start we know who the murderer was – the novel is about why Collini killed.
Spoilers may follow.
Schirach was a 45-year-old lawyer when he first published fiction. He wrote short real-crime stories, and he also created theatre productions with audience involvement. All were widely translated and globally successful. But this was his first novel.
The novel was well received in the UK and USA. Reviewers liked the plain style. (This huge success outside Germany as opposed to more complex treatment inside reminds me of the praise heaped on Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos).
But rather than repeating my own review and giving away most of the story, I am interested in two points which need not hold the reader up.
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Change in German law
Firstly, the main focus of this novel was probably the 1968 German law that changed the time limits for prosecution of accessories to Third-Reich crimes. Suddenly, some time limits were reduced to 20 years, meaning that no prosecutions of these offences could be started later than 1965-ish. Thus, for example, if Italian partisans were killed by Germans as revenge, the only person guilty of murder was the person who ordered the killing; the actual killers were seen as accessories to murder and after twenty years had passed, they were now exempt from prosecution.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to embed this law in a crime novel.
And it would be good for readers first to have an overview of the approach of criminal law to Third-Reich atrocities from the very beginning. In both West Germany and East Germany.
The change in time limits is known as the Dreher-Gesetz, after Eduard Dreher, a former Nazi judge who was an official in the Justice Ministry. It was smuggled into a multi-purpose statute called Einführungsgesetz zum Gesetz über Ordnungswidrigkeiten (Introductory Act to the Act on Administrative Offences), which dealt with criminal offences too. It was mainly intended to decriminalize trivial offences, but in fact it also decriminalized some more serious ones.
This is the subparagraph (Absatz) inserted in 1968, as quoted at the end of the novel:
(2) Fehlen besondere persönliche Eigenschaften, Verhältnisse oder Umstände (besondere persönliche Merkmale), welche die Strafbarkeit des Täters begründen, beim Teilnehmer, so ist dessen Strafe nach den Vorschriften über die Bestrafung des Versuchs zu mildern.
In Andrea Bell’s translation:
2. If none of the special personal qualities, circumstances or conditions (special distinguishing features) forming grounds for the penal liability of the perpetrator of a crime are present in an accessory to it, then the accessory’s penalty is to be mitigated in line with the regulations on the penalty for an attempted crime.
The situation was more complex than stated here, in that the West German parliament was in the process of changing the law on limitation: this subparagraph undermined this process, though it was voted through by the Bundestag in 1968, its effect being downplayed or overlooked.
An excellent and full source of information is Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung – here is an article on this subject, Amnestie von NS-Tätern – Das “Dreher-Gesetz” von 1968.
An article by Richard A. Fuchs, Germany’s Justice Ministry and its Nazi past.
This refers to the Rosenburg files, the 2016 result of an investigation into the change of law initiated by Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger in 2012, the year after Der Fall Collini was published.
Translation difficulties
Comments on the English translation of the novel follow in the next post.
