Ferdinand von Schirach: Crime
Ferdinand von Schirach is a Berlin criminal lawyer who (like Bernhard Schlink before him) has turned his courtroom experiences into fiction. This collection of short stories became a runaway best seller after it was published in Germany in 2009. Von Schirach comes from a well-know family – notorious might be a better way of putting it. His grandfather Baldur von Schirach was for a time a member of Hitler’s inner circle. After he was replaced as the leader of the Hitlerjugend, he was appointed gauleiter of Vienna, where he supervised the deportation of the city’s Jewish population. At his trial at Nuremberg he claimed not to have known anything about the death camps. He served 20 years in Spandau prison for crimes against humanity.
At first blush, that family history does not seem to have much bearing on these short, often vivid pieces based on von Schirach’s work as a defence lawyer. Nevertheless, his Preface (“Guilt”) hints at a tenuous link between these stories of contemporary crime and what must be for the writer a paradoxical, troubling past. It describes von Schirach’s uncle, a judge in the criminal justice system, a humane and upright man. He served in the Navy during World War II; a grenade blew off his left arm and right hand. Despite that his love of hunting remained undiminished. “One day,” his nephew writes, “he went into the woods, put the double-barrelled shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.” The letter he left behind began with the words “Most things are complicated, and guilt always presents a bit of a problem”.
For several of the characters in these stories, guilt proves to be more than a small problem. Despite their good intentions, their altruism, their sense of honour and probity they commit acts with terrible consequences. A dedicated and highly respected doctor observed to the letter his marriage vow that he will never abandon his neurotic wife. After a lifetime of nagging, suspicion and bloody-mindedness, he asked his wife to go with him to the cellar where he kept his gardening tools. He hacked her to pieces with an axe – fulfilling, therefore, a promise he had made half a century earlier.
In another story, a young woman, a gifted cellist, dedicates her life to her brother after he suffers dreadful injuries in a road accident. One night, she prepares his favourite food, laces it with sedatives and drowns him in the bath. Afterwards she hangs herself in her prison cell. Their father, a coarse, near-sadistic millionaire, blows out his own brains.
By contrast, some of the stories reveal how villains can get away with the most villainous crimes. A Japanese connoisseur leaves behind a trail of death and destruction to get his hands on a piece of antique pottery that a gang of Turkish and Greek hoods had stolen from him – without their having the least notion of its value. A young prostitute is found dead in an influential industrialist’s hotel room. The industrialist manages to clear himself by means of a complicated argument about the change from summer to winter time at the end of October in the northern hemisphere. Much later, the investigating detective realises how adroitly the murderer had pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.
Some of the most effective stories deal with the psychopathology of certain types of criminality. One particularly striking tale is set in an isolated village where the son of the local squire goes around killing sheep. The claustrophobic atmosphere of this fine story reminded me of Thomas Bernhard’s novels and tales about dank villages where all manner of weird things go on. Another of the stories starts on a railway platform where two skinheads attack a seemingly defenceless middle-aged man. What follows brings Kafka to mind. One particularly macabre story tells the tale of a young man who tries to cut bits out of his girlfriend to find out what she tastes like. A wonderfully off-beat story (also reminiscent of Kafka) is about a museum guard who, thanks to a bureaucratic bungle, spends the whole of his working life in the same room in the museum. After years and years of such solitary confinement he becomes totally obsessed with the room’s one exhibit: an antique statue of a youth trying to remove a thorn from his foot.
Not every one of these stories is wholly successful, some (like the tale hinging on the last day of daylight saving) seem contrived, despite the likelihood that these too grew out of von Schirach’s professional life. On the whole, however, this is an absorbing and memorable collection about guilt and the guilty in contemporary Germany. Baldur von Schirach’s world seems a long way away, but I think that the ambiguous feelings the gauleiter’s grandson must experience when thinking of his family’s past have left their mark on these often troubling stories. Certainly, paradox and ambiguity seem to have been uppermost in Ferdinand von Schirach’s mind. His collection begins with a quotation from Heisenberg: “The reality we can put into words is never reality itself”. It ends with the title of Magritte’s celebrated painting of an apple: “Ceci n’est pas une pomme” – “This is not an apple”.
The Book
Ferdinand von Schirach: Crime / translated by Carol Brown Janeway - Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2011. - 184 pages. ISBN 9781921656903
Original title: Verbrechen (German)
