Paul Schlesinger

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Paul Felix Schlesinger (born May 11, 1878 in Berlin ; † May 22, 1928 there ) was a German court reporter and the most famous of the Weimar Republic . He published his reports under the acronym Sling .

Life

Schlesinger initially did an apprenticeship in a textile company. According to his own account, the house servant "Justav" sometimes took him to the nearby Moabit Criminal Court during his breaks . Schlesinger later broke off the training. In Munich he did cabaret and worked as a journalist for Ullstein Verlag . After stops in France and Switzerland, where he headed the Bern office of the Vossische Zeitung during the war , Schlesinger returned to Berlin and in 1921 became a court reporter for the Vossische Zeitung. He also tried his hand at comedy and comedy poetry, as a children's book author and as a music and theater critic.

On May 22, 1928, a few days after his 50th birthday, Schlesinger died unexpectedly of a heart attack. He found his final resting place in the south-west cemetery in Stahnsdorf .

plant

Schlesinger shaped a whole genre with his columnist court reports. He avoided the protocol style as well as the lurid colportage, but designed his trial reports like miniature dramas from everyday judicial life, interspersed with irony and occasional ridicule. Schlesinger deliberately renounced the claim of objective representation :

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“I am certainly able, I have learned to write the report, which is basically called objective because it expresses the judge's view or at least tries to come close to it. But this official judge’s report is not 'correct' because nothing is right in court any more than anything else in life. How often do you want to interfere just because the defendant does not understand the language of the judge who does not understand the language of the defendant. "

Schlesinger's strength was his understanding of the weaknesses of all those involved in criminal proceedings and his skepticism towards the penal system. He summed up his doubts in 1926 in a text that has been quoted repeatedly for the Vossische Zeitung:

“The person who shoots is just as innocent as the cauldron that explodes, the railroad track that bends, the lightning that strikes, the avalanche that spills. Everything kills man, man kills man too. [...] The coffee kettle that explodes is sent to the plumber, the person to prison. For a while it was imagined that man could take the opportunity to improve himself in prison. However, it has been made the experience that this opportunity is rarely used, that in most cases people return to humanity completely depraved. When applied to the coffee kettle, the effect was as if one had not sent it to the plumber, but had now more than trampled it with the feet and thrown it in the garbage. [...] The uselessness of the punishment (in the sense of reform) and the innocence of the human being would actually give us cause to tear up this penal code; but we don't, because there was still one punitive purpose left: deterrence. Since then we have been punishing innocents in order to deter other innocents from the explosion. "

Schlesinger found differentiating words for the work of the lawyers as well as for the judges . Under the heading “The Exhausted Judge,” he described a chairman who tried to resolve disputes between the parties through comparison: “He 'compares' with as much passion as others insult themselves. He has to give his last in kindness and philanthropy in order to keep the repulsive in check. "

At the same time, Schlesinger did not shy away from demanding and enforcing personnel changes in the Berlin-Moabit regional court in individual cases, for example in 1927 in connection with the trial of the “ Steglitz school tragedy ”. In numerous articles he also turned against the common oath practice of the time. It was customary to swear witnesses in principle - even in simple trials involving petty crimes. The result was numerous perjury trials against people who - overwhelmed by the situation at the trial - allowed themselves to be carried away to make false statements and swore them down. They faced sentences of one to ten years. Schlesinger's reports eventually led to a change in this practice and a reduction in the range of sentences.

This is how Schlesinger became the most influential court reporter of the 1920s. His demeanor earned him the reputation of being the “conscience of Moabit”. Shortly after his death, a selection of the reports he had published between 1921 and 1928 under his well-known abbreviation Sling appeared under the title “Richter und Richtete” . The editor was Robert MW Kempner , later the US prosecutor in the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi war criminals. Former Justice Minister Gustav Radbruch wrote the foreword . These and similar collections of works by Sling were later published in the Federal Republic and the GDR. Heribert Prantl , who specializes in legal issues at the Süddeutsche Zeitung , wrote about Sling: "His trial reports were miniature dramas from everyday judicial life, interspersed with ridicule, irony and clever instruction." Gerhard Mauz , a long-time Spiegel court reporter, called Schlesinger the "only truly legendary court reporter in Germany."

Item collections

  • Sling: Judges and Judges , ed. by Robert MW Kempner . Foreword by Gustav Radbruch , Ullstein. Berlin 1929.
    • Judges and judges . Newly introduced and commented on by Robert MW Kempner, Rogner & Bernhard, Munich 1969, Taschenbuch dtv 1977.
  • Sling: The nose of the Sphinx or How we Berliners are , ed. by Ruth Greuner . Berlin. Book publisher Der Morgen 1987. ISBN 3-371-00064-8 .
  • Sling: The facade climber from the "Kaiserhof" , ed. by Ruth Greuner. Berlin. Verlag Das Neue Berlin 1988. ISBN 3-360-00240-7 .
  • Sling: The person who shoots. Reports from the courtroom . (Ed. Axel von Ernst, afterword Hans Holzhaider ), Lilienfeld Verlag, Düsseldorf 2013, ISBN 978-3-940357-27-4 ; E-book: ISBN 978-3-940357-40-3 .

Plays

  • Peter, dead three times . A comedy based on old Pitaval. Berlin, Propylaea 1927

literature

  • Sace Elder: The Conscience of Moabit. In: Message - International magazine for journalism. 1/2004, p. 108.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heribert Prantl, Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 10, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Schlesinger, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schlesinger, Paul Felix; Sling (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German court reporter of the Weimar Republic
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 22, 1928
Place of death Berlin