Free Guilt about the Past by Bernhard Schlink Page A

a more and more dangerous timbre. The faculty of the law school stated that Professor S ‘was forced to submit himself for medical treatment’, he himself insisted that he was ‘injured’, and a magazine reported that ‘suddenly the professor felt a horrible burning sensation on his back. He doubled over in pain.’ Everyone waited for the official statement of the attending physician, a professor in the medical school; he chose to remain silent citing the doctor–patient privilege of confidentiality.
    One of the students who wanted to block Professor S’s entrance to the university on 24 June was Volker N. Professor S and other professors later accused him of being the ‘ringleader’ of the Basis Gruppe and of ‘plotting’ the blockade. But the Basis Gruppe was a loose association of students without official members and official leaders and the blockade had been planned at a plenary meeting. Yet among the members and supporters of that group, Volker N was certainly the most theoretically advanced and the most articulate.
    I got to know him as an interesting opponent in seminars and then later when we sometimes met privately to spar over questions of state and constitutional legal theory, about the role of law and the use of force and about the writings of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. I was a law clerk and not a student any more, but still attended some seminars at the university and in the law school. For the left-leaning students I was a ‘damned liberal’, meaning one of those who recognised the necessity of reform but who accepted the political and economic system and put faith in the law to solve problems equitably. I rejected violence and also forcing discussions in the middle of lectures, blockading them and disrupting them. But I was also appalled by the legal aggressiveness that the law school professors used to fight against everything that did not suit them politically. They found the political mandate of the students’ representation legally acceptable as long as the students took positions that were against communism, in favor of a unified Germany and European unification. But they were not above exploiting the law to resist the students when their opinions were against the Vietnam War or in favour of governmental and societal reforms. As the students became more radical, the professors regarded themselves as increasingly surrounded by enemies against whom they could only win or lose. They had lost their confidence in the reflective and constructive strengths of the university, and instead relied on the state and the police.
    The student movement came to an end in the early seventies, in the middle of the eighties it became the subject matter of historical study, and by the early nineties it was only a distant, weak memory. Heidelberg had long since returned to being the peaceful, pretty university town it had been at the beginning of the student movement. Germany was no longer divided or subject to the tensions of straddling East and West. We know today that the world did not see a reduction in political tensions and catastrophes at the end of the Cold War. But in the early years of the nineties it seemed for a while as if it had and as if most of its problems could be solved through diplomacy and law enforcement.
    In the meantime Professor S, along with most of the other professors who had been at the centre of the conflict in 1970, had become professor emeritus. Volker N passed his first and second state exam, wrote a doctorate, started a career as a lecturer, and at the end of 1991 completed his habilitation in public law at the law school of the University of Frankfurt. I was teaching at the University of Frankfurt at the time and, along with my Frankfurt colleagues, I signed the recommendation to admit Private Lecturer Dr Volker N to the Association of German Constitutional Law Professors.
    The association, founded in 1922, disbanded in 1938, and re-established in 1949, is the leading