‘Good morning,’ she said, ‘please sit down.’ She didn’t sound the same as usual today. She waited, still standing, until everyone involved in the proceedings as well as the press and the spectators had quietened down.
‘Your honour, my client isn’t here yet. He hasn’t been brought up. We can’t begin,’ said Leinen.
‘I know,’ she told him quietly, almost gently. She turned to the lawyers, officials and spectators in the courtroom. ‘The defendant, Fabrizio Collini, took his own life in his cell last night. The forensic pathologist puts his time of death at two-forty.’ She waited until everyone had taken it in. ‘I therefore have the following decision to announce. The trial of the defendant is discontinued. Costs and necessary expenses will be borne by the state.’
Someone dropped a pen somewhere; it rolled over the floor, the only sound in the room. The court reporter began typing. The presiding judge waited. Then she said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this session in the 12th Criminal Court is now concluded.’ The judges and lay judges rose at almost the same moment and left the courtroom. It all happened very fast. Senior Public Prosecutor Reimers shook his head and wrote something in his file.
The journalists were racing out of the courtroom to call their newspapers, their radio and TV stations. Leinen sat where he was. He looked at the empty chair where Collini had sat; its fabric was wearing thin at the sides. A police officer gave Leinen an envelope with the words ‘For defending counsel’ written on it. It was still sealed.
‘From your client. It was found lying on his table,’ said the usher.
Leinen tore the envelope open. It contained only a photograph, a small black-and-white snapshot, brittle and faded, with a jagged white border. The girl in the picture was about twelve years old, she wore a pale blouse and she was looking intently into the camera. Leinen turned it over. On the back a note in his client’s clumsy handwriting said, ‘This is my sister. Sorry for everything.’
Leinen stood up, passed his hand over the back of the chair and packed up his things. He left the courthouse through a side entrance and drove home.
Johanna was sitting on the steps outside his building. The collar of her thin coat was turned up and she was holding it together in front. Her hand was white. Leinen sat down beside her.
‘Am I all those things too?’ she asked. Her lips were quivering.
‘You’re who you are,’ he said.
In the playground in front of the building, two children were squabbling over a green bucket. In a few days’ time the weather would be warmer.
In January 2012, a few months after the publication of this novel in the original German, the Federal Minister of Justice appointed a committee to reappraise the mark left on the Ministry of Justice by the Nazi past. This novel constituted one of the points of reference.
Appendix
Until 30 September 1968, § 50 of the Federal German Criminal Code ran:
1. If several persons take part in a crime, each of them has committed a punishable offence, without regard to the guilt of any other person.
2. If the law decides that special personal qualities or circumstances call for a more severe or more lenient penalty, or exclude a penalty altogether, that applies only to the offender or accessory to the offence concerned.
Clause 1 No. 6 of the Introductory Act to Administrative Offences came into force on 1 October 1968 (Federal Law Gazette I, 503). Thereafter § 50 of the Federal German Criminal Code ran as follows.
1. If several persons take part in a crime, each of them has committed a punishable offence, without regard to the guilt of any other person.
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.
3. If the law decides that special distinguishing features call for a more severe or more lenient penalty, or exclude a penalty altogether, that applies only to the offender or accessory to the offence concerned.
Acknowledgement
My thanks to Klaus Frings. Without his ideas and his research I could not have written this book.
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