It starts with a noisy courtroom. You can hear the backs of chairs and the clicking of buckles on leather bags; Rustling through the pages of the rules of procedure and through those of the new edition of the Nuremberg daily newspaper. Two technicians from Bayerischer Rundfunk snap the joints of a tripod into place. The loudspeaker, which is mounted above them, on the ledge of the wood paneling, cracks and then thumps dull. And Richard, who interrupted his law studies in Göttingen to come here and who is watching one of the defendants tighten his tie, thinks of the greed for music after the war. According to knowledge, according to broad worlds of thought and their standards, which the law faculty only conveys to them in clauses and paragraphs, “mostly without much context”.The more closely he pays attention to details in the space in front of him, the less he can grasp it as a whole. This will be about the big picture. And about how everything relates to everything.
Julia Encke
Responsible editor for the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.
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It is November 1947 in Nuremberg, in the “Wilhelmstrasse Trial”, in which Richard von Weizsäcker, working alongside Hellmut Becker, defends his father, Ernst von Weizsäcker, who is accused here as a war criminal. The father joined the NSDAP on April 1, 1938, and two days later was appointed State Secretary of the Foreign Office, under Foreign Minister Ribbentrop the highest diplomat in the country. On April 23, 1938, he signed his application for membership in the SS and was assigned to the personal staff of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, who four years later promoted him to SS Brigadführer and awarded him the skull ring of honor and the SS sword. Richard looks at his father, who has been made gaunt by imprisonment, his chin even more receding, and whose suit, which has grown too large, resembles a costume. Or better:The writer Fridolin Schley describes this view of the son on the father.
Father son constellation
Because Schley, who is doing his doctorate on the writer WG Sebald and has already published several novels, most recently the novella “Die Ungesichter”, wrote a novel about this process. It is called “The Defense” and is one of the most disturbing books of this autumn because it reveals the whole process again in a provocatively sober language with which he completely dismantles the formulas of the National Socialist 'diplomacy' and that of the defense in Nuremberg. He takes on the father-son constellation and the limited period of the trial - the verdict is announced on April 11, 1949 - and in this way not only leaves the Nazi crimes in the figure of the father and the emerging Federal Republic in the figure of the son meet. By showing the process through recordings,Documents and a long list of secondary literature (including Richard von Weizsäcker's "Four Times", the "Memories" that Ernst von Weizsäcker wrote in prison or the standard work "The Office and the Past - German Diplomats in the Third Reich" co-edited by Eckart Conze) ), he shows in breathtaking condensation that moment in Germany when those who knew were supposedly ignorant, those who were jointly responsible became self-declared “postmen in all those hideous affairs”, and perpetrators so-called resistance.which Ernst von Weizsäcker wrote in prison or the standard work "The Office and the Past - German Diplomats in the Third Reich", co-edited by Eckart Conze), he portrays in breathtaking condensation that moment in Germany in which the knowledgeable became the supposedly ignorant Jointly responsible self-declared "postman in all the hideous affairs", from perpetrators so-called resistance.which Ernst von Weizsäcker wrote in prison or the standard work "The Office and the Past - German Diplomats in the Third Reich", co-edited by Eckart Conze), he portrays in breathtaking condensation that moment in Germany in which the knowledgeable became the supposedly ignorant Jointly responsible self-declared "postman in all the hideous affairs", from perpetrators so-called resistance.