German Autumn

The Course of Justice

The Course of Justice There is a lack of happiness in post-war Germany but no lack of entertainments. Every day the cinemas run their films to packed houses, all day until nightfall, and they have introduced standing-room in order to meet the demand. On their programmes we can find Allied war films, while in the meantime American experts in militarism search with magnifying glasses for militaristic tendencies in German literature. The theatres probably have the best repertoire in northern Europe and the most eager public in the world, and the dance halls, where for the sake of hygiene the Allied military police make a couple of raids per evening, find their square metres of floor-space overpopulated. But amusing oneself is expensive. Theatre tickets cost cheap time and dear money. Free amusements are rare and must be taken where they are to be found. A fairly common amusement, in its way, in the American zone, is to attend a Spruchkammershzung, that is, a session of a denazification court. The man with the rustling sandwich-paper, who with unfailing interest watches case after case rolling past before his seldom wearying eyes, is one of the regulars in the 73 naked courts in half-bombed palaces of justice which lack even a relic of the sadistic elegance with which justice otherwise loves to surround itself. It would be wrong to think that the man with the sandwiches is drawn to the court to savour the tardy triumph of definitive justice. He is more likely to be a theatre enthusiast who has come here to satisfy his craving for the stage. At its best, that is when the prosecutors and the defenders are sufficiently interesting, a Spruchkammersitzung is really a stately and engrossing piece of drama: with its rapid shifts from past to present, its endless questioning of witnesses where not one tiny action on the part of the accused in the course of the relevant twelve years is considered too trivial to be passed over, the performance can seem like an example of applied existentialism. The atmosphere of dream and unreality in which this ransacking of a whole nation's regrettable or terrifying memories is carried out has literary associations too. We could well have been transported to the scenes of Kafka's The Trial: these court-rooms with their half brickedup windows, their bomb-damaged furniture, and their position high up under the holed roof, are like an illustration from reality of the desolate attic offices where The Trial unwinds. It is characteristic of the entire situation that a matter so fundamentally serious as denazification should immediately become an event for a theatre critic. But for a stranger, of course, these brief trials, as a rule concluded in a few hours, generate a special interest because with a rare sharpness they give a picture of conditions in the Hitler years, of the motives of those who became Nazis and the courage of those who did not. From the questioning of the 74 witnesses we can feel a cold draught from the time of terror, a fragment of history so far invisible can flare into life for a few short, charged moments and make the air tremble in the raw court-room. For anyone not personally caught up in those desperate years these trials have a terrible documentary fascination, but as a means of denazification they are quite useless. On that point we must accept an opinion universally held by the Germans themselves. There is indeed a touching unanimity as to the ridiculous and infuriating forms taken by this process. The former Nazis talk provokingly about a barbaric collective punishment. Others think that fines of a few hundred marks are hardly the depth of barbarity but maintain that it is a pure waste of labour keeping this giant apparatus functioning for the sake of minor Party members when the big ones run free. The conveyor-belt technique also undoubtedly gives a dangerous air of the ridiculous to the whole principle of denazification. It was typical of the resulting attitude that in their election propaganda the Communists , parodying the title of Fallada's well-known novel - Kleiner Mann —was nun} became Kleiner Pg — was nun^ —should turn to the small fry of the Nazi Party whose dislike of denazification they tried to collect. According to current usage, moreover, Spruchkammer is no longer called Spruchkammer, but either Bruchkammer (Bruch meaning...