Juristische und Epische Verfremdung. Fritz Bauers Kritik am Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess (1963–1965) und Peter Weiss’ dramatische Prozessbearbeitung Die Ermittlung. Oratorium in 11 Gesängen (1965)

Beginning with the influences of Schiller’s humanist ideals on Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer’s expectations of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial as legal working through of the past, this article compares the Holocaust narrative created by the West German criminal trial to Peter Weiss’s reworking of the transcripts Die Ermittlung. Oratorium in 11 Gesängen. The article aims to show that literature is able to convey and commemorate aspects of the Holocaust that German criminal law misrepresents and omits.