Letters from Munich

Letter from Munich – the Joseph Affair – 24

EINE DEUTSCHE FASSUNG STEHT WEITER UNTEN.

22 June 2001

Dear Mr. Graf, dear friends,

A continuation of the letter from last week:

“All right,” one young man asked, “so the bank scandal in Berlin has been papered over by the Berling district attorney, and the few bank officials who were fined were reimbursed by the bank itself. And the only thing that happened to the chief culprit, Klaus Landowsky, was that he resigned his post with the Christian Democrats. So the Berlin district attorney is in the CDU’s pocket. But nowhere else in Germany do such things happen.”

I thought for a moment that Carlotta would lose her patrician composure. “Nowhere ELSE? The Bonn disrict attorney allows Helmut Kohl to get away with the greatest consitutional crimes since the end of the Third Reich. Then – even in the face of tremendous public outrage – the Bonn district attorney suspends its investigation of the destruction of thousands of government documents. The destruction was carried out by Kohl’s office on the eve of the transfer of power after the last election. It involved papers dealing with the Leuna affair, part of the incredible Elf-Aquitaine scandal that the French government is at least starting to look into. But – ah, my friends – do you really think such activities in the great Federal Republic of Germany are confined to Bonn and Berlin?”

“This is outrageous. I won’t listen to it. It’s an insult to me and everything I believe in,” said one of the older male guests, with Prussian uprightness, as he strode from the room.

“I never expect my guests to agree with me,” said Carlotta quietly. “But the fact of the matter is that the list of questionable activities on the part of the district attorneys here goes on. The district attorney in Augsburg ‘loses’ a computer hard disk with information relating to its investigation of Max Strauss, scion of Bavaria’s most powerful political dynasty, and again the investigation dies a slow death. And in Munich,” she added with a laugh, “in Munich, no investigation by the district attorney or even the opposition political party into the LWS scandal and Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber even gets off the ground.”

At this point, I too was shocked. How could Carlotta even think of criticizing Edmund Stoiber, the greatest Prime Minister Bavaria has ever seen, and the man likely to be Germany’s next Chancellor? But I said nothing.

“District attorneys in Germany,” said Carlotta, “aren’t exactly bought and paid for, but they know what’s expected of them. Look at Sebnitz, where the boy Joseph was murdered. Look how that investigation has been handled. The district attorney responsible knew what the Prime Minister of Saxony, Kurt Biedenkopf, wanted, and he gave it to him. Now the victims – the dead child’s parents – and not the perpetrators of the crime, are the object of the government’s prosecutorial fervor.”

We heard the Prussian gentleman’s car starting in the courtyard outside, and then the crunching sound of tires on gravel as his chauffeur turned the car around and started down the tree-lined mountain road from Carlotta’s home.

“And that,” Carlotta added with finality, “that is the country that is going to lead us all into the bright, new future of European union? It’s surely only a coincidence that it happened at this particular time, but it’s hardly a surprise that the Irish voted the way they did in their referendum on the treaty of Nice.”

Could be. I don’t know. I really know so little about politics.

Sincerely yours,

Robert John Bennett

Mauerkircherstrasse 68

81925 Germany

Telephone: +49.89.981.0208

E-Mail:  

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