2023-07-24 06:33:59
The Austrian Kathrin Röggla, who lives in Germany, is one of those authors who combine contemporaneity and literature, politics and linguistic avant-garde to constantly create new experiments. However, her new book, which will be published today, is not convincing. “Ongoing proceedings” is identified as a novel and deals with the Munich NSU trial without naming it. The gain in knowledge is small.
The trial once morest the right-wing extremist terrorist group National Socialist Underground (NSU), which took place over 438 days from 2013 to 2018, is considered the longest and most expensive court case in post-war Germany. Since then, the mammoth process has been documented and analyzed in numerous books, films, radio plays and plays. Five years following the verdicts, the Austrian reader has to recall the deeds and the trial, which were never as widely received in this country as in our northern neighbor, in order to be able to establish connections. Because Röggla does not provide any basic information. She assumes. She abstracts. She composes.
“Ongoing proceedings” is not a conventional courtroom report, although the scene of what is described is almost always the Munich-Neuhausen-Nymphenburg criminal justice center, more precisely: the visitor’s balcony of its courtroom. The main focus is on the people and circumstances there. It is a biotope from which it is actually difficult to follow what is happening, instead there are exchanges with other observers who block your view, but which are sometimes not advisable or at least tricky – for example, if they clearly belong to the right-wing scene phenotypically.
In a process of distancing and generalization, which at times is strongly reminiscent of Elfriede Jelinek, Röggla does not deal with guilt and innocence, nor with the perpetrators. Her focus is on the procedure, which sometimes seems absurd in its hypertrophy, and its reception and commentary in the audience tiers, where, given the enormous length of the procedure, there is soon a feeling of confidentiality, almost something like a mood of loafing around the battlefield.
There is the “grandmother’s right”, the “court grandfather”, the “original sound lawyer” or the “blogger clan”, who complains violently towards the end of the book that he is called that. There’s “the woman from the Turkish embassy,” of whom nobody knows whether she’s really here on an official mission, and there are always people whose clothes, demeanor and demeanor show a certain ideological distance from the state that holds court here. Most of the time, people talk disparagingly regarding the conduct of the process and talk shop regarding the details of the process. Actions, motives and responsibilities remain empty spaces.
In the end one has to ask oneself: Does this “ongoing process” contribute to finding the truth? Rather not. But to be clear: if the judgment is “In the name of the republic” and “we” are the people, then this we is an extremely polyphonic one. Or, to use current terminology: there are a lot of “normal” people, but just as many who aren’t.
“The law must follow politics, not politics the law,” said an Austrian politician who has the aspiration to become the next federal chancellor not too long ago. Including that would have added some exciting legal and democratic political aspects to Rögglas’ “Roman”. But appealing is pointless. The book is available and the “ongoing process” is complete. Incidentally, the same applies to the NSU trial. The guilty verdicts are final.
(SERVICE – Kathrin Röggla: “Ongoing proceedings”, S. Fischer Verlag, 208 pages, 24.70 euros)
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