The Administration of Normality – Law and Society 1944–1952 (Freigeist-Fellowship)

To begin with there is a file. Ludwigsburg state archive, stock F 264 II, AG Esslingen, Reference Number C 115/44, a banal case from civil law: The landlord is annoyed with his tenant, reproaches her for leaving the apartment in a bad state, not keeping the yard and stairs clean and not raising her children properly. Both parties hire an advocate; epic motions to take evidence, and detailed statements from neighbours follow. An irreconcilable struggle. On 22 December 1944 the parties meet before the court. The unusual about this file is that it should not exist at all. Legally speaking, since the courts were by 1943 instructed to defer “any matter not strategically vital”. Ordinary neighbour disputes, one might assume, were not of sufficient military importance. Sociologically speaking, the existence of record C 115/44 is bewildering as the case reflects an untarnished normality that does by no means correspond to the collective memory of this period. But above all: the file is a historiographical oddity. Downfall, break, zero hour, new beginning? None of this is portrayed in the record. The landlord became a prisoner of war in 1945, returned in 1948, finds conditions in the building still untidy and continues his legal dispute, unmoved; the legal threads from the collapsed dictatorship are taken up again and tied together before the new, forcefully democratised judiciary. A chance find? The responsible expert at the archive categorically rules out that there were any such epoch-spanning proceedings. Inga Markovits, who examined the entire archive of an East German court for her “Justice in Lüritz” informed me that she did not find one single proceeding from the period before the capitulation among her sources. But the file sits on the table in front of me. I came upon it during the research for a project regarding the so-called “standstill of justice” (Code of Civil Procedure, sec. 245) at the end of the Second World War, funded by the Daimler-Benz Foundation. The astonishing result: the German judiciary has hardly ever come to a complete standstill. Instead there seems to have been a comprehensive transfer of law between the ‘Third Reich’ and the post-war order in all four occupation zones. In my next project, I want to examine in detail how this took place.