The pressure of metaphors is great in Frankfurt, where the book fair is taking place in the middle of a nationwide storm. The leaves on the streets wind up towering, the publishers complain like Weimar about the lack of paper deliveries, world trade is stalling, inflation may not be temporary after all, a new government is forming in Berlin, and a young right-wing publisher offers practical advice in its program for the abolition of democracy for sale. This results in a shimmering expressionist atmosphere, which unfortunately was captured exactly 100 years ago by Jakob von Hoddis in his poem “End of the World”.
End-time panoramas in Germany cannot do without anti-Semitism, which is why a book, which was made available to the public for the first time on Thursday evening, fits into the mood of the day in a subtle way: “The Halle Trial: Mitschriften”, a book that is documentary tells of one of the most extensive terrorism processes in the recent history of Germany, which is not exactly poor in extensive terrorism processes.
On Yom Kippur in 2019, a young neo-Nazi tried to break into the synagogue in Halle in order to murder as many people as possible. He was tried in 2020. 80 joint plaintiffs alone had registered, and a total of more than twenty lawyers were involved. Shortly before Christmas, the terrorist was sentenced to life imprisonment and preventive detention.
In Frankfurt the publisher stated that the transcripts were made to the best of their knowledge and belief
Two activists and a political scientist followed every single day of the trial in the hall and took notes for the book. On November 15th they will appear in a volume of almost a thousand pages by the Leipzig publisher Spector Books. Because the sound recordings of the proceedings will be under lock and key for another 30 years, this bundle will be the only documentation of the proceedings that is publicly accessible for the time being.
In Frankfurt the publisher stated that the transcripts were made to the best of their knowledge and belief, but of course there is a subjective factor that is inherent in every act of writing. Sometimes moods and atmospheres in the hall would be noted that another recorder might have perceived differently. That hardly diminishes the documentary character of the text. The notes that the former judge Josef Perseke made during the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt in 1963 are of course part of contemporary historical research.
In Frankfurt there was now a sample of the staff who performed in Magdeburg and who can now be found in this book: co-plaintiffs who ask precise questions about the work of the investigative authorities and tell of their family’s Holocaust past; a past that fell over them again with all of its devastating power during the attack. In addition, the perpetrator’s family, who almost completely made use of their right to refuse to provide information, only an ex-boyfriend of the half-sister took the floor. His statement paints the picture of a family in the so-called middle of society: The terrorist’s mother worked as an ethics teacher at a primary school. Even now, four weeks before their publication, these transcripts are one of the most important books of this autumn.