Intro: Fabrizio Collini is a hard working, quiet and respectable man. Until the day he visits one of Berlin’s most luxurious hotels and kills an innocent man in cold blood. A murder. A murderer. No motive

ONE

IT was routine during the Second World War that both Germans and the Allies shot civilians in reprisal for attacks on their armed forces. One would be alarmed to think that a ratio could even be set at which such killings could be deemed legitimate. Yet, in 1941, Hitler set the bar at 100 civilians per soldier. Indifference aside, one would be tempted to ask how high is too high?

It is this question which fundamentally plagued the defence of an Italian man, Fabeizio Collini, some sixty years later. The Collini Case, by Ferdinand von Schirach, is based upon that historical trial.

Since the Nazi regime ended in cataclysmic defeat, like many of his generation, and some contemporaries even with a comparable heredity, von Schirach (born in 1964) is, not surprisingly, still dealing with the fall-out. That seems implicitly written into this philosophical legal thriller.

Collini, a very large man, purports to be a journalist. He walks into a luxury hotel suite in Berlin and murders Hans Meyer, the old man he has arranged to interview. Located near the Brandenburg Gate, he repeatedly shoots him from behind, and stamps his skull until it no longer resembles a skull. Collini sits in the hotel lobby and waits to be arrested by the police. Von Schirach describes the killing and post mortem with an entirely appropriate, but eerie economy and use of words.

Collini admits he did it, but the motive for doing so is unapparent. He refuses to say why he committed murder, and indeed says next to nothing.

A young and recently graduated defence lawyer, named Caspar Leinen, is assigned the case. It is his first, but it seems hopeless. His client refuses to say anything, except that he is not interested in being defended. Leinen discovers that the murdered man was a rich industrialist, who was also the grandfather of Leinen’s closest school friend, Philipp, who is now dead, killed in a car crash. Leinen used to spend holidays on the Meyer’s country estate, and fell in love with Philipp’s sister, Johanna. She insists he can’t defend this monster who had murdered her grandfather, the benign old man with whom Casper used to play chess. Leinen considers withdrawing from the case given the conflict of interest that arises, but is deterred from doing so after a conversation with a famous and highly respected defence lawyer, Mattinger, who made his name by successfully defending members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, and was a strong believer and advocate of the constitutional state (founded on law). Leinen is convinced and commits himself to Collini’s defence. As it happened, Mattinger becomes recruited by the Meyers Corporation as an accessory prosecutor, and becomes Leinen’s main opponent in the trial.

TWO

WERE it not for the fact that the trial had to be unexpectedly interrupted due to the illness of one of the judges, the case would have been briskly concluded and Leinen would have lost. Instead, he has an extra ten days to pursue a line of inquiry that, if successful, might well mean Collini being discharged.

All at once, the novel becomes a meditation on the law, a discussion of the difference between judicial guilt and moral culpability. Von Schirach’s characteristically spare prose could have been written with an icicle. He uses fewer adjectives than the opening by-line to this novel by Hemingway, resolutely refusing to impose emotions on the reader. Although the spectre of the Nazi past broods over this book, it is not about then, but now. In an article in Der Spiegel, written a few years ago when the book was first published in German, von Schirach maintained that he was more interested in the present than of the generations before him. In the author’s own words The Collini Case is a ‘book about the crimes committed in our state, about vengeance, guilt and the things we continue to fail at even today.’

Nevertheless, we cannot detach that the things we do today have a history. The law in any country is a complex historical document and the past it embeds continually reaches out its cold fingers to touch the present. A note at the end of the book informs the reader that this novel was a point of reference for a public inquiry into the mark left on the German Ministry of Justice by the Nazi past.

The impact of the novel’s 180 or so pages, in which not a word is wasted, is far greater than any legal thriller treble its size. The importance of the ideas contained within the narrative, combined with the meticulous unemotional prose, provides the reader with a book that is both fascinating and moving.

THREE

THE CASE draws upon the Statute of Limitations, but the existence of that law raises a philosophical point which von Schirach doesn’t really address: to what extent do we remain responsible for acts committed long ago? Is a man in his seventies like Hans Meyer the same person in his twenties? Statutes of limitations, which are found in most European legal codes (but not in ours) recognise that liability for even terrible crimes may expire.

The novel is written in a dry, flat style, but it is extremely persuasive. The trial scenes are excellent and well-thought through, and von Schirach confronts the question of the limitations of the law by inviting us to ask what justice is. Mattinger tells Leiten that ‘judges can’t decide according to what seems politically correct. If Meyer acted correctly by the standards of the time, we can’t blame him for it today.’ Leiten disagrees, believing that we can judge the past because ‘we’ve made progress.’ Mattinger says this opinion is an expression of the ‘zeitgeist’: ‘I believe in the laws and you believe in society. We’ll see who turns out to be right.’

It would take a dull reader of this tense and taut book not to ponder over the questions being asked: are we entitled to judge the past? If so, how far back should that extend? The Collini Case is disturbing precisely because there is no conclusive answer to be given. Even with Collini, who has acted with certainty, ends by saying ‘sorry for everything’. Yet, he accompanies this apology to Casper Leinen with a photograph which asserts that his act of revenge was indeed just. The reader may agree, while remaining aware of the implications of going beyond the law to rectify the failures, or apparent failure, of the Law and the legal system.

The German legal system of the mid twentieth-century was often described as being knotty, tangled and convoluted, perhaps because many of its secrets stemmed directly from the War. Or, maybe, because the contemporary German legal system is so dramatically unlike that which exists in Britain, one could easily find oneself forgetting that Collini’s trial is set in the twenty-first century.

As a character, Leinen would seem more at home in the 1930s. The reader could qualify this through his daily routine which, to all intent and purposes, is fairly grey and timeless. His legal colleagues may speak in court of the zeitgeist, but that zeitgeist is rarely on show in this novel. For Leinen, for the prosecutor Mattinger – and conceivably too for von Schirach, himself a prominent German defence attorney – the reader may deduce or feel inclined to think that the long hours spent in chambers has precluded their full immersion in society. It is this lack and deficiency which contributes to the oppressive, grey mood that weighs down on the pages of this book.

The narrative isn’t a comfortable story, but it is an important one. It is well documented that von Schirach’s late grandfather, Baldur, was the Reich Youth Leader of the Nazi Party, sentenced to 20 years imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials. The Collini Case clearly resonates on a personal, but also on a more universal human level. Like the central hall of the law court itself, with the allegorical figures and lofty walls and high ceilings which overawe Leiden, which make him feel small relative to the law, the reader is likely to find him or herself surprisingly sucked into the perturbations of justice unfurled in this case.

Like the best murder and crime fiction novels, The Collini Case has a twist to it. The reader is left to think given the legal arguments that are presented from either side. Ferdinand von Schirach has a family history that lends a particular poignancy to this brief and compelling novel.