My year as a murderer
My year as a murderer is a biographical novel by Friedrich Christian Delius from 2004. It takes place in the post-war period until 1969 in Germany and addresses the acquittal of the judge at the People's Court, Hans-Joachim Rehse, and the fate of Anneliese Groscurth , widow of resistance fighter Georg Groscurth . The book has been translated into several languages.
It takes up the question of whether one can retrospectively convict people who complied with the applicable laws but violated fundamental human rights or who murdered.
My year as a murderer was included as optional required reading in the 2007 book list of the Goethe-Institut 's Great German Language Diploma .
content
On December 6, 1968, a Berlin student heard on the news of the radio station RIAS that the former judge of the People's Court, Hans-Joachim Rehse, had been acquitted of the charge of multiple murders. The press is outraged by the verdict. Together with Roland Freisler , Rehse sentenced the members of the EU resistance group , including the Berlin doctor Georg Groscurth, to death. His son Axel has been friends with the first-person narrator since they were children in Wehrda and once told him when the boys were “twelve or thirteen years old”: “You chopped off his head with such a machine a hatchet. "And a few pages further on it says:" Here, if I had told the psychological expert at the court, you have my original experience. "
An inner voice urges the first-person narrator to kill Rehse, whom he usually only calls R., and to write a “book on murder” based on interviews with Groscurth's widow and his own research.
Anneliese Groscurth is initially negative, but then tells the young man about the activities of her husband, who as a doctor and confidante of Nazi greats like Rudolf Hess was able to collect information and help those at risk. The exposure of the Groscurth resistance group is reconstructed on the basis of the interrogations, which have been accessible since 1989.
The fate of Anneliese Groscurth comes to the fore, who was left in the dark by her husband about many events in the resistance so as not to be forced to give testimony, and who joined the Nazi women's group during the Third Reich as a camouflage. In the post-war period, Anneliese Groscurth, also a doctor, was defamed as a communist, lost her recognition as a politically persecuted person and the orphan's pension for her sons and was not given permission to have a passport issued. Due to her public statements on political issues and the formation of the Groscurth committee initiated by Robert Havemann in coordination with the SED party leadership in West Berlin after violent clashes during the World Youth Festival, she is repeatedly defamed by the press and by a trial the other as well as driven into economic hardship; it was not rehabilitated to some extent until the 1970s. The examination of the role of Havemann, who was also one of the four founding members of the EU and by whom Anneliese Groscurth was urged to take over the chairmanship of the Groscurth committee, plays another important role in Delius' work.
Meanwhile, Rehse lives undisturbed in Schleswig . The student and first-person narrator, prepared and ready to go to prison for a few years for his act, scouts out Rehse's residence and lifestyle, arranges for mitigating circumstances by visiting a neurologist and pretending to be mentally ill, and plans to buy one Weapon. But before he can carry out his planned murder, Rehse is taken to a clinic in the Allgäu and succumbs to a heart condition.
Catherine, a young photographer and the student's friend, who has traveled to Mexico alone with a friend, is stabbed to death by muggers there. With these two deaths, the story ends in September 1969. The book project that was started, which should have appeared parallel to the planned murder, remains unfinished and will only be resumed after decades as the present My Year as a Murderer , also motivated by a sentence from the diary of the narrator's mother, who had noted at the time "I stood apart from them".
International editions
- English: My Year as a Murderer , translation by Isabel Cole
- Arabic: قاتل لمدة عام, translation of سمير جريس
- Chinese: 杀 心 萌生 的 那 年, translation of 黄晓晨
Web links
- Short synopsis in the ZUM wiki
- Brief content notes and press reviews on the novel