Book Review: Guilt

Ferdinand von Schirach is a successful and experienced criminal lawyer working out of Berlin. Every lawyer who dreams of being a writer would love to have written the stories that fill this slim volume (178 pages).

The writing is sparse and economical. Just enough detail is provided to introduce and sketch the key characters. The narratives are developed with a minimum of elaboration. The sting in the tail of each story is delivered without fuss.

The epigraph of the book is: “Things are as they are”, a quote from Aristotle. The stories carry that acceptance of the unfortunate and the terrible that such words suggest. Lessons and commentary may be found, however, hiding behind the narrator’s inscrutable face. Some criminals are, themselves, victims. The bureaucracy of the system can produce injustice. Some victims, either of crimes or injustices in the system, can recover a semblance of happiness.

The author’s grandfather, Baldur von Schirach, was one of only two defendants at the Nuremberg trials who were prepared to disown and condemn Hitler. He was sentenced to and served twenty years imprisonment.

The author’s inspiration for the stories, however, seems to be drawn from observations made as a practising defence lawyer. The stories capture the unthinking ordinariness of even bizarre criminal acts. They retain and describe the human stories of both victim and perpetrator. The reader, having been desperate to finish one story, immediately embarks upon the next.

Gritty, realistic crime stories.