Part 1
On the essence of the H.
Chapter 1
At another time it could have cost her her life, and under such circumstances she would not have been allowed to roam free at the time. Now she not only entered the courtroom freely but also camera-friendly through the door. Although she was a bit stooped, she took a seat in the dock without hesitation. She was on par with the panel. Two lawyers are sitting next to her; in casual robes and with longer, natural hair, they somehow seemed young at heart, modern. They had nothing to say to each other now. They were followed by Chain and his wife, the joint plaintiffs, who sat apart from them and to the side of the judge's podium. In other words, only Chain, as she wants to call him, present himself as a joint plaintiffs in this hearing.
At another time she would hardly have been allowed to speak, if she had been heavily guarded and placed behind bars, where she would have had to listen in silence to the accusation, the testimonies of the witnesses and their reproaches. In the run-up to this hearing, Chain at least regretted that she had at least broken her silence from back then and had at least declared herself ready to make a statement. Still, it didn't seem enough to him. He believed that if the accused had been more willing to testify, the facts could have been clarified more thoroughly and more truthfully.
She didn't want to admit it and she felt that further covering up important facts in a whole spate of lies and bad cover-ups would only take a sad continuation with this trial, allowing others to get away and innocents to serve time for a murder they did not commit. But the public prosecutor's office did not bring any murder charges against her, even though, according to Chain's plea, this would even be a triple murder for which innocent people have long since disappeared behind bars, even though she was the alleged perpetrator. It's up to Chain and it's typical for him. The crime was now thirty-two years ago and how should she remember April 7th, 1977 if she could no longer reliably say where she was on that day. But she didn't think she was in Germany.
In fact, it began thirty-three years before she was born in 1919, a year of revolution. At that time it was not an act of violence that forced the overthrow, but its complete opposite, namely the abandonment of the war, the cessation of fire in the positions of Verdun. The surrender led to a return to the negotiating table. The emperor had capitulated to the enemy. After all, army officers went over to the people as a whole. The people were shocked: the workers, the peasants, the military, the women, all employees, all officials, the press. First the mood that followed the event was the abdication of the emperor and with his disappearance the authoritarian state disappeared. From the German Reichstag in Berlin, Scheidemann proclaimed the German Republic, which from now on is one emanating from the people.
Immediately there was a dissenting voice, that of Karl Liebknecht, on the square in front of the palace, and he proclaimed the free, socialist republic as the leader of the Spartacus League, the fraction of revolutionary communists with a Moscow orientation that the German bourgeoisie believed it to be. In Russia, a coup led to mass extermination and the murder of the Russian tsar family. In Germany, many people were afraid that the same could now happen here too, with the formation of a revolutionary council, which was finally made up of all the existing parties in the country and appointed a nobleman, Prince Max von Baden, as the first Reich Chancellor, who initially gave the people a made the reassuring message: there will be no shooting. The Reich Chancellor had ordered that no use of arms should be made by the military. So this revolution proceeded tamely and without further bloodshed, and thus became an example of the fact that things could be done differently.
And it was quick with that. A constitution was quickly put in place that essentially continued the liberal and democratic tradition of 1848, with which the central political organ, the new Reichstag, was founded. From now on, the chancellor and every minister are bound by their confidence, which can be withdrawn. And the representative part of the Kaiser was replaced in the form of government of the monarchy, which had been replaced, by a Reich President, who was given extensive powers, above all supreme military command and