So justice has been accused of thrashing, I’m diving in a collection of twelve new on punishment and forgiveness. I had already read of Ferdinand von Schirach Crime (Gallimard, 2011), and Guilty (Gallimard, 2012). The writer and German lawyer, grandson of a high dignitary nazi, tells, each time, the deep springs of the guilt. Can we just forgive us ? In Sanction, the specialist in criminal law shows the way in which the justice system responds to the strangeness of men. It happens, sometimes, to the side of the truth. The style of the writer is clear, concise. In a language of great clarity, drawn from the practice of law, Ferdinand von Schirach gives us to see the depths of human behavior. The title carries the meaning of the twelve stories : that one is guilty or innocent, there will be punishment.
Twelve stories. Violence against women, lynching of an old man with a disability, prostitution networks or in love with a doll with a human appearance. Ferdinand von Schirach is a writer feminist. In The Sworn, Katharina finds himself sworn to and must decide on a man already condemned for violence against women. The trial opens. The lawyer wants to object to Katharina for fear of bias. Katharina cried by hearing the testimony of the wife who is abused. “She was crying because the story of the witness was his story to her, because she understood this woman’s life and because that solitude was in the whole thing. “Katharina is going to regret her tears. A criminal defense lawyer admitted, at the end of twenty years, his compassion for the human condition : “I thought of those I had defended, their loneliness, their strangeness, and their dread to face with themselves. “
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The loneliness and the absurdity
Each story is haunted by loneliness and absurdity. Schlesinger has been a great lawyer. In The Bad Side, it therefore follows the path of a lawyer estimated whose life turns after defending a man accused of torturing his children. The father torturer is acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence. The lawyer starts to drink, to lose large amounts of money to cards, to limp along small business. It divorce. It no longer recognizes itself in what it has become. Schlesinger is committed to office. It is brought in to defend a woman accused of killing her husband with a pistol. Everything argues against it. The lawyer will seize an opportunity to rehabilitate themselves in their own eyes.
In Subotnik, the young Seyma went to the hearings of the tribunal de grande instance. One day, she attends a trial where an old lawyer defends a client for tax evasion. During a search, it was found in the safe of the accused a packet of Viagra. During the trial, a police officer in pleasant. The old lawyer looks up from his folder and said with a blank voice and low : “You think it’s correct to take up the other’s weaknesses ? “Under the pen of Ferdinand von Schirach, the phrase is overwhelming. It is free, therefore, essential. Seyma decides to send his nomination to the old lawyer. He stated : “You know, Seyma, I do not believe the diploma. “Everything, his home, going in the same direction.
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In Lydia, a man meets the love with a inflatable doll. He finds himself before the court for assaulting his neighbor, responsible, in his eyes, to have trashed the doll. The psychiatrist explains that a man’s love for her doll is similar to that of a woman for a prisoner. The relationship is much more robust than it will ever know the test of reality. Beyond the intrigue exciting, we finish each new one with the same question : the current justice system does it work well ? The writer and the German lawyer does not, in any case, the trial of justice. He wondered about the complexity, the forgiveness, the guilt. We do not know the other, but it does not know itself no longer. Here, love and hatred do not arise in a rational manner. A man of hand-algerian entrusts to the lawyer, Schlesinger a, about whose correctness strikes me : “One day, I saw a movie where people kept saying non-stop : “It’s nothing personal.” I did not understand, because basically all life is personal. “It seems to me to have understood the essence of human relations : all life is personal.
Sanction, News, Ferdinand von Schirach, trans. Pink Labourie, Gallimard, 170 pages, 16 euros.
