Free Guilt about the Past by Bernhard Schlink Page B

organisation for German constitutional and administrative law academicians. Practically all professors and private lecturers who teach public law at German, Austrian and German-speaking Swiss universities are members of it. Whoever is not recommended for membership, or is not accepted despite recommendation, suffers long-term damage to, if not complete ruin of, his or her career. To be invited to make a presentation and to give a decent presentation at an annual conference are crucial steps for one’s career. The topics of the presentations, sometimes more political, sometimes more doctrinal and practical, sometimes more theoretical, reflect what the association and often the society are concerned about at the moment. The presentations are conservative rather than innovative in tone, and this corresponds to the conservative undertone of German public law academicians. Indeed, lawyers never march at the forefront of change. An appreciation for tradition and its power to keep order and stabilise is inherent in the teachers of public law as well as in those who teach civil and criminal law. Constitutional and administrative jurisprudence is, however, traditionally especially conservative. Jurisdiction in matters of constitutional and administrative law was created substantially later than jurisdiction in civil or criminal law. Fighting in court over matters of administrative law only came in the late ninteenth century, and over matters of constitutional law in the mid twentieth century, while in other areas of the law it has been common since the middle ages. Therefore, in the exchange of ideas between academia and practice, in civil and criminal law, the academic has always had, besides the judge, the conflict-happy practising attorney as their partner. In public law the academic’s partner was and prominently still is the conflict-averse civil servant whose concern is the smooth functioning of the state and its government and administration.
    The by-laws of the Association of German Constitutional Law Professors regulate admittance. The process is commenced through written recommendation of at least three members. Thereupon, the executive committee offers membership to the recommended scholar, except if there are doubts about whether the membership requirements have been fulfilled, or if at least five members raise an objection or request an oral debate concerning acceptance. The debate then takes place at the annual membership meeting.
    There were forty-nine objections or motions for oral debate filed with the executive committee in response to the recommendation signed by eight of the Frankfurt members to accept Volker N for membership. This was an astoundingly large number of members who became active against Volker N’s admittance. There had never been anything like it.
    Professor S and the colleague who had accompanied him at that time on the way to class raised the first two objections. Their objections described the blockade, stated that Professor S had been ‘injured’ and an ambulance ‘had to be’ found. That Professor S had slapped or even beaten a female student beforehand, that the liquid was harmless and that Volker N was no more involved in the blockade than hundreds of other students was not mentioned. Professor S argued that because Volker N could be characterised as a ‘conniving political functionary . . . exhibiting consistent ruthlessness [and] cold recklessness’, who ‘had practised illegal uses of force against members of the association’ and had ‘violently fought against the academic freedom to teach’ he would be ‘intolerable’ as a member.
    The objections that followed sometimes employed even stronger language. What Volker N had done, one said, would imply ‘a fundamental negation of our constitutional law’, and whoever acts as he did would place himself ‘outside every civilised society and is especially incapable of taking part in the scholarly pursuit of law’. Some