Letter from Munich – 042
Letter from Munich – the Joseph Affair – 42
EINE DEUTSCHE FASSUNG STEHT WEITER UNTEN.
26 October 2001
Dear Mr. Graf, dear friends,
The continuation of the letter from last week:
Jacqueline lay the newspaper on the table and picked up the programm magazine for the Franco-German channel, ARTE. “’On 17 October 1961,’” she read, “’a peaceful demonstration of 25,000 citizens of France moved through the streets of Paris. Twenty-four hours later dozens of demonstrators (the exact number will never be known) were lying dead. The bodies of many of the missing have never been found. The victims were all from Algeria, they were people who had officially been French citizens since 1958. The demonstration had been called as a protest against the curfew that had been imposed eleven days earlier by the Paris Prefect of Police, Maurce Papon (who later, in 1998, would be sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for collaborating with the Nazis during the German occupation). How could such a thing happen almost forty years ago in the capital of a western democracy?’”
Jacqueline looked at us all, one at a time. “How could such a thing happen? Perhaps the real question is ‘How could such a thing not happen?’ in a Europe where an exaggerated respect for authority is still rooted deep in the conscious and unconsciour mind of the average citizen and where it is so very easy to intimidate most people?”
She picked up a piece of paper. “I have here a report from the Dresden police headquarters about an attack on a certain Jens May in Sebnitz. Jens is the brother of Rene May, whose statement in court is already familiar to you. ‘A connection with the Kantelberg-Abdulla case cannot be ruled out,’ the Dresden police wrote. ‘May is the brother of a witness in the above mentioned case.’ And what exactly happened during this attack? The police reported, ‘The victim was waylaid by four suspects. Two of them held him down while the others hit him with their fists. The victim suffered facial lacerations and abrasions on the arm.’”
Jacqueline lay the paper down on the table. “And was a formal complaint filed with the police? No, the police wrote in their report, because the victim had ‘a blood alcohol level of 1.26 parts per thousand.’”
She sat there, thinking, and said nothing for a moment. Then she went on, “Yes, that’s the European concept of justice. The powerful and influential are protected at any price, and in this case that means Joseph’s killers and their family and relatives are all protected. All of them have a close connection with the CDU, the largest conservative – some would say ‘right-wing’ – political party in Germany, which hold power in Saxony, the German state where Joseph was killed. And in circumstances like these what happens to the victim, to the brother of a witness to murder? One must, of course, blame the victim, or at least silence him.”
Then she added, “Perhaps in the current fight against terrorism the authorities can somehow develop a better concept of justice.”
But what do I know about such complicated topics? I’m only a simple, relatively uneducated man. I don’t know nearly as much as my friends and acquaintances do.
Sincerely yours,
Robert John Bennett
Mauerkircherstrasse 68
81925 Germany
Telephone: +49.89.981.0208
