One of the most colorful Berliners of the Weimar period is a criminal lawyer. Erich Frey makes a name for himself through his mandates in sensational processes. He defends the mass murderers Friedrich Schumann and Carl Grossmann, helps the leadership of the ring club "Immertreu" to acquittal or ridiculously low sentences and can also keep Lola Bach, Germany's first nude dancer, before a longer prison stay.
Frey prepares his defense strategies in a psychologically clever way and masters the full range of legal instruments. He knows how to set himself in the media with skill. He leads his processes with a mixture of sincerity and, where possible, subtle humor.
ullstein picture / Atelier Jacobi
Erich Frey
His trademarks include an almost dandy clothing style - heavy furs, striking checkered coats with giant shifts, bright vest to dark suit - and his monocle. The rimless inlaid Frey clings to the right eye. Like a theater prop, he drops his hand in eyewitness testimony or pleading with a raised eyebrow, then uses it again, perhaps in an argument with the prosecutor, and pulls his eyes together.
His father Siegfried, a wealthy merchant, enabled him to study law in Berlin, Munich and Lausanne. However, Frey does not want to take over the export business. "With Justitia as a companion," he writes later, he seems to be open to innumerable occupations.
But like Bismarck, he falls through the first legal exam. The university is now much less attractive than the girls' boarding schools around Lake Geneva, the soft armchairs of the pastry shops enticed more than the hard wooden benches of the lecture halls - confessions of a bon vivant, which he decorates in his memoirs flowery.
"Even in the most incomprehensible criminal is a human being"
After ten years, Frey did all the exams and even got two doctorates, "Dr. jur." and "Dr. phil.". In 1911, at the age of 29, he began his work as a defense lawyer in Berlin and in 1914 married Marie-Charlotte Wetzel, also Jewish; both convert to Protestantism. In the same year Frey volunteers for military service and serves as an officer.
His experience in Flanders makes him an inexorable opponent of war: the war represents a mass murder, his glorification by the policy contribute to the decline in values and brutality of society. Back from the front, after the November Revolution of 1918, Frey defended many members of the Marxist Spartakusbund.
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Star lawyer Erich Frey: The Dandy and his heavy boysIn his autobiography, "I Request Acquittal," Frey describes many cases with an emotional eye. In conversations with the accused, he seeks in his personal fate for mitigating circumstances. With his book, Frey wants to arouse understanding for his clients and show that "even in the most incomprehensible criminal there is a human being".
In addition to the mass murderers Schumann, Großmann and Haarmann as well as "crooks in tails and sweaters", a chapter is dedicated to the "Women in Moabit", the Berlin district where the Criminal Court is located. In court, Frey also represented Germany's first nude dancer whose story touched him deeply. He introduces his chapter on Lola Bach with pensive words:
"Every post-war period produces crimes of some kind, not only the most terrible excesses, the mass murderers, the assistance required, but as a lawyer, an independent servant of justice and justice, I also had to help others who threatened to ruin the turmoil of the times ,
I will now report on some of these cases. Women's fates are. They are as different as life itself, but immediately in one: people in need. "
Lola is a talented ballet student as a teenager when she met the much older "private scholar Dr. Römer" in Dresden - a pseudonym chosen by Frey. Lola falls for the playboy "Dr. Römer", flies out of the ballet school, and her parents put her out the door.
Ortstermin: Can beauty be immoral?
The young woman follows "Dr. Römer" to Berlin, who encourages her to stage her own naturalistic dance theater with other young beauties - naked. "Dr. Römer" takes care of the premises and the paying public. In the spring of 1921, the "Lola Bach Ballet" premieres with raging applause. But behind Lola's back, the enterprising Galan Lolas sells dancers to rich patrons. He counteracts Lola's anger and disappointment with cocaine.
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Her former companion and friend Marlen is now the mistress of an older, rich publisher, but as Marlen by cocaine consumption clearly loses its charms, her patron loses the desire for her. Desperately, Marlen kills herself; Lola must identify her in the morgue. For the 21-year-old, a world collapses. She is ashamed, complicit in her girlfriend's death - but does not have the strength to break away from "Dr. Römer" and the cocaine.
In August 1921, her misfortune is accused of "causing public annoyance." Police spies have attended their dance performance, Lola threatens a prison sentence. Lawyer Frey is supposed to defend her. How much the first encounter with Lola impressed him in the dance theater, shows his passionate memory:
"What came next was magic, it was not a dance anymore, it was an intoxicating, uninterrupted episode of everything that had ever been danced anywhere in the world, from the Kazochok of the Russian steppes to Spanish flamenco, from the Balinese temple dance to the love dance of the harem , to the waltz, to the tango ... I was enchanted, as if dizzy. "
This art should be a punishable public nuisance? Frey persuades the 6th Criminal Division of the district court in Berlin-Moabit to the local date. His calculus: Men should realize that beauty can never be immoral. Lola performs a veil dance with her ensemble, a "fashion ballet" with hats and high heels and finally her specialty, "the nun", completely naked.
Small notes with white powder
Thanks to Frey, Lola receives only one month probation. Later, she toured with her dance troupe through Germany, but apparently will not let go of her cocaine addiction. She falls ill with tuberculosis and dies at the age of 30.
Not only Lola Bach struggled with this fateful addiction in the twenties. Frey describes the availability of cocaine, especially in the chic areas of Berlin:
"'Please please coke!' There was a whisper, whispering all around, when, after dark, they pushed their way through the crowd of people on the streets.At Alexanderplatz, under the subway arch of Bülowstrasse and around the Gedächtniskirche, the main markets were the cocaine exchanges out, roosting the pubs, serving bartenders, bar-girls, coat-robbers, and doormen with little notes in which the white powder was preserved-cocaine. (... ...) There they sat in front of a cup of coffee with trembling hands and empty, searching eyes , counted their last bills, over and over again, hoping that a merciful cocaine pusher would give them a pinch at half the price, because prices rose with the erratic demand and the rapid decline of the pound. "
Obviously, Erich Frey, a good observer, often drives himself through the extravagant Berlin nightlife. He describes his city as the "fairground of Europe, which had become the center of an erotic international".
The defense lawyer owns a ten-room house in the villa colony Teltow-Seehof. In a flat in Bellevue Street 21/22, his growing law firm Frey's exquisite taste thanks to bubbling attorney's fees: Smyrna carpets, "in which the visitor's foot sank, numerous pretty secretaries, their busy in my office To go wrong ". Frey receives his clients through a "boy" with an embroidered F on his light green livery.
The media darling lives his eccentric egomania quite unabashedly. Frey describes himself as a workhorse obsessed by the Moabit Criminal Court: "But I could not resist the urge to pull, the urge to move me to the place that had become the scene and epitome of my thinking." In addition to legal writings Frey also writes plays, should also have worked for politicians as a consultant.
The star defender has to flee
In sensational processes, the Berlin press regularly reports "tumultuous scenes" in which the courthouse needs to be closed on a large scale. The crowd splenches excellently when the dandy-style star lawyer Dr. Dr. Frey strides to the main portal, the monocle clamped in the right eye, the best possible defense of his clients firmly in view.
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Even before the National Socialists came to power, Frey made enemies in right-wing circles and from January 1933 came under increasing pressure, also because of his Jewish background. For savvy defense lawyers, one has little use anyway in the "Thousand Year Reich". In the last chapter of his memoir, Frey describes his escape:
"I owe the salvation to a legal colleague, a member of the Detective Union, whose syndic was I. On October 20, 1933, he asked me what I would advise a politically undesirable client against whom an arrest warrant was issued during that time The way he looked at me was unmistakable.
I hope he reads these lines and knows that I am grateful to him today. I did not go to my apartment, because they would expect me there; I took a taxi to Anhalter Bahnhof to get to Paris via Zurich. The German Railwaymen's Association had also made me his syndic.
The conductor at the platform barrier knew me. He whispered to me, 'You lucky ones can get away!' With a ticket for 10 Pfennig I entered the train. That was the farewell to Berlin. "
Frey is 54 years old when fleeing Germany. His path takes him to Santiago de Chile, where he lives until his death at the age of 82. He can never work again in his beloved profession as a defense lawyer. And in exile, he writes, he longed for his homeland.
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