"No Charges" is the third part of Christiane Mudra's trilogy on Nazi ideological continuities. The performance is based on investigative research and uses game elements in the urban space of Munich. It deals with the perversion of justice in Nazi times, the undisturbed post-war careers of Nazi judges, and the collective silence in the young Federal Republic.
In Munich's urban space, the audience meets actors and augmented reality clips with eyewitnesses specially interviewed for the production. „No Charges“ illuminates historic examples of Germany´s post-war justice and encourages the audience to deal with the legal processing as well as the achievements and weaknesses of criminal law.
Thanks to the judge Georg Neithardt, the putschist Hitler was able to return to his circle of supporters after only a few months in prison. In 1924, the successor party to the temporarily banned NSDAP became the strongest force in Munich. In 1943 the President of the People's Court, Roland Freisler, sentenced numerous members of the White Rose to death in two show trials. His widow, who lived in Munich, received an increased pension until the 1990s. After 1945, lawyers from special criminal courts and the People's Court worked at the Munich Higher Regional Court. The trial against Philipp Auerbach (1952) had antisemitic traits and led to the suicide of the accused. Not a single prosecutor or judge was convicted by a German court in post-war Germany.
Theodor Maunz, who had sought to give the Nazi regime legal legitimacy and had argued away the separation of powers in favour of the Führer's power, took part in the Constitution Convention in 1948. He became Bavarian Minister of Education and professor of law at the Ludwig Maximilian University. After his death in 1993 it became known that he had written anonymous articles for a right-wing extremist newspaper for years. The standard commentary on the German constitution still bears his name today.
The Federal Minister of Justice, Engelhard, wrote in 1989 that he considered the "silent drift into National Socialism" to be "the failure of the Federal German judiciary". In a landmark ruling in 1995, the Federal Supreme Court sharply criticised the "downright bending of the law" of post-war justice.
On 11 July 2018, the verdict in the NSU trial was delivered. To this day, trial participants and observers are still wondering why the court, in the case of the two active right-wing extremists among the accused, remained far below the Federal Public Prosecutor's penalty. The signal was disastrous. The final chord in one of the most important post-war trials was the yelling applause of the neo-Nazis, in which the sobbing of the bereaved mixed.
Against the background of the above-mentioned examples, "Kein Kläger" examines sites, judgments and legal careers, as well as cases of successful processing. The key question in "No Charges" is: What indispensable role has the judiciary played in the past, present and future in containing right-wing extremist and antisemitic violence?
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