Guilty Hearts

Guilty Hearts

By OLEN STEINHAUER

Published: January 21, 2011

In the preface to this mesmerizing story collection, Ferdinand von Schirach recalls his uncle, a judge who lost his left arm and right hand in World War II. The uncle, he tells us, began his own stories by stating, “Most things are complicated, and guilt always presents a bit of a problem.” This line also began his suicide letter.

Illustration by Jens Bonnke

CRIME

Stories

By Ferdinand von Schirach

Translated by Carol Brown Janeway

188 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

To say that Germans and guilt have a special relationship would be to dive into the deep end of platitude, but in von Schirach’s case it’s difficult not to raise the issue, and not only because he’s titled his preface “Guilt.” His grandfather, Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth for most of the 1930s and later the wartime governor of Vienna, was convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. Perhaps influenced by his family history, the younger von Schirach became a criminal defense lawyer, and in the mid-’90s sprang into the national consciousness by defending Günter Schabowski, a senior East German official, against charges of complicity in the shoot-to-kill policy along the Berlin Wall.

In “Crime,” von Schirach is concerned less with the mass guilt of political movements than with what he sees daily in court, the individual guilt of the heart. As he states in his preface: “Jim Jarmusch once said he’d rather make a movie about a man walking his dog than about the emperor of China. I feel the same way.” The result is a slim, utterly absorbing collection of 11 stories plucked from his legal career and told in a cool, patient voice that immediately draws the reader in. Von Schirach guides us through the unpredictable sequences of events that can maneuver regular, flawed people into unbearable positions, leading them to abhorrent acts. He presents only the facts he has access to, leaving u to our imagination. “The Germans...