"Witness to the Execution," a story by Joachim Frank

My nephew tells me that my father, after returning from his service to the nation in the trenches of Verdun -- where he lost part of his left hand and acquired an extreme phobia of germs, having had to spend weeks in an infirmary next to less fortunate comrades with gangrenous limbs -- was forced to watch an execution.  Apparently, the reason my father shared this story only with my nephew half a century later but never with me nor my siblings was that they had both studied law and talked about matters of jurisprudence in excited professional terms whenever they would meet.  The reason my father was forced to watch an execution was that it was mandated, toward the fulfillment of the requirements of his legal certification in the Weimar Republic, and there was no escape. 

My father used his elbow to open doors.  He washed his hands ten times a day.  My whole family thought he was nuts.  I imagine his ordeal as a witness, almost a hundred years ago, in this approximate way:

Having been escorted into the décor-less, barren room, Wilhelm found himself with the prisoner eye to eye. The man, dressed in a grey prisoner smock, had been convicted of killing a retarded ten-year old girl entrusted to his custody. No rape charges were pressed, though, and the motive was much in question. Wilhelm looked for signs of brazenness and depravity, or the total absence even of a flickering of soul. Instead, he was surprised to find a scared man, a man as fearful as he himself had been in the trenches of Verdun, who blinked with what seemed a nervous tic. Wilhelm looked into his eyes for a long second. He found his own assignment difficult to contemplate, the period of indefinite length that lay in front of him.

In his capacity as Referendar, a lawyer trainee, Wilhelm had seen the court papers. He was supposed to study them thoroughly. The idea behind his compulsory duty assignment as a witness to the execution was that he would see, as a new apprentice of the distinguished profession, the majestic grinding of the law in its entirety, from the beginning to end. Witnessing this irrefutable, irreversible act of the State would immunize him against any wavering in his determination to uphold the Law. If it had been in the court’s power, following this logic, he would have been forced to witness the killing of the little girl as well, as the very start of this exemplary process. 
  
The young Weimar Republic had begun with a fresh slate; it abhorred Kaiser Wilhelm’s displays of power and masculinity, which had led to the slaughter of millions, but the death penalty had nevertheless survived the scrutiny resulting from the renewed quest for humanity in all civil affairs.

Sometimes Wilhelm reminded himself that he, as many others of his age, owed his name to the brief popularity of the Kaiser just before the turn of the century. Even to this day, his parents were firm believers in the authority concentrated in the person of the Kaiser, and if they’d had their way, it would have been the original extent of it, unclipped by Parliament and Chancellor -- the unsavory design of sharing power Fürst Otto von Bismarck had invented. So Wilhelm had replaced Friedrich as popular appellation for a first-born male – Friedrich having been a product of the 1848 wave of nationalism sweeping over the German Reich, with its sentimental reminiscence of Friedrich Barbarossa a Millennium before.

The court papers, which included a photograph of the girl, depicted the defendant as a passive, almost docile man prone to sudden bouts of impulsiveness. Newspaper clippings about the trial, which were attached to the court file for his, Dr. iuris Wilhelm Schreiner’s benefit, spoke of episodes of total passivity, with the man’s eyes glazing over, or even closing shut as though he were taking a nap – a behavior which had incensed the audience since he seemed to be mocking the court in disregard of the seriousness of the offense.  But then these long episodes of complacency were interrupted by explosive actions, as at one point in time when he’d shot up from his seat in protestation against a certain accusatory phrase in the prosecutor’s triumphant soliloquy, a phrase that seemed quite innocuous to everyone else in the courtroom.

On the photograph, the girl looked at the camera expressionless, without (that was how his mother would have put it) a sign of “someone home.” The picture reminded him of his law school mentor’s admonition to judge a case not on the basis of empathy but pure justice, since the girl’s face was lacking certain elements that would have inspired a deep sense of human fraternity – the eyes grey and flat, each like the crater of an inactive volcano, the mouth half-open and askew as though frozen in a permanent sneer.  Wilhelm, as he took in these signals, grew restless since he found himself unable to live up to his mentor’s maxim. 

The condemned man’s name was Walther Ohnesorg, a name that added a touch of irony to this terrible affair, since ohnesorg meant “worryless” in German.  In Wilhelm’s opinion, which he did not dare to share with anyone else, it was the habit of erratic moves, more than the prosecutor’s plea, that had doomed Ohnesorg in the jury’s eyes.   A man as impulsive as this might do anything.  No doubt such a man would be capable of killing a slow-witted girl in a sudden onslaught of wrath. 

In the grand arithmetic of justice, the worst offenders were those deemed sheer animals, entirely devoid of a moral fiber, as well as those on the other side of the scale, who were brilliant and knew right from wrong but used all their talents for scheming.  Those in between, displaying the charming inconsistency of true mortals, had a chance to get away with murder, but they had to play it right.  Ohnesorg, it seemed, was a man without a playbook. He had no social skills, and their total lack had already put him several times at odds with the public defender. He was simply not likeable, even before considering that he’d strangled an innocent child.

Ohnesorg was standing just a few feet away from Wilhelm, staring at him pleadingly, as though he was convinced the mysterious bystander dressed in a suit held his fate in his hands. There was a certain irony in the fact that one of Wilhelm’s hands had been cut in half by a grenade, and that it was of little use in holding anything of substance, much less fate.  The other irony was that his namesake, the now dethroned Kaiser, was inflicted with a disabled arm, as well. Thus one Wilhelm, the former ruler, was crippled from birth, while the other Wilhelm’s arm was crippled as a consequence of the terrible War the former had unleashed.

(Twenty-five years later I would look at the thumb which was all that was left of Wilhelm’s fingers, going with his fingers over the light-pink tapering flesh negotiating the diameter of the thumb with that of the wrist, and the serrated scars left by the surgeon’s saw and finely finished with stitches, and ask him what it was like to be cut like that, but Wilhelm would never give his son an answer, not even a wrong one.  All that memory of the infirmary filled with screams of his compatriots, operated on without anesthesia to sever a gangrenous arm or leg, was buried away). 

Wilhelm, of course, sensed that his own presence at the execution was inexplicable to the prisoner.  The other people present had well-defined ceremonial or practical roles that were ingrained in the lawful implementation of the death sentence: there was Ohnesorg’s appointed public defender, a little man with thick glasses; there was a representative of the regional government from the prefecture of Ahrensberg, a man who conveyed the airs of a Prussian officer; there was the deputy major of the town, a nondescript obese man whose only duties seemed to attend public ceremonies, whether cheerful or grim; then a doctor with a worn-out leather satchel in his hand who conducted himself importantly; and a representative of the clergy, a man who hid behind thick glasses that magnified his small eyes. Last not least, there was the executioner himself, who had one attribute that distinguished him from all others present but was difficult to accept under the circumstances: he was the only one with a persistent smile on his face.  
Wilhelm suddenly realized that in a way, since all the others present had perfunctory roles, he was the only true witness here. The realization produced little beads of sweat on his forehead, which he hoped would go unnoticed on account of the bad lighting in the room.

He was also wondering whether Ohnesorg had been informed of the intricacies of the protocol.  Since all this kind of information, about who was present and why, would cease to exist in the victim’s mind at the moment of execution, the insistence on protocol regarding the sharing of information with him seemed unnecessary and even exceedingly silly. Still, ignoring it would be considered inhumane, since doing so would treat the man to be put away as a cast-off, as a man devoid of any value and dignity, well ahead of the execution.  This assessment was not much off the mark, but it was not acceptable to acknowledge the fact in public. What Wilhelm saw with his trainee’s eyes was the incongruity of human institutions, and the way it was papered over and concealed, to keep the appearance of a civilized society in the face of unmistakable barbarity.
There was commotion around the man after he declined to see the designated pastor.

“I was brought up a Calvinist, and will not recognize the Lutheran pigs,” he protested loudly.

The court protocol said that he had stated being a Protestant, without the fine distinction he was now in the process of making. Since Wilhelm knew that with no exception, every man on death row was informed of his right to have a priest or pastor of his denomination, he became convinced the man was just playing for time. The jurist in him was indignant, but the other part of him sided with the condemned man even though he was not a believer himself.

Just then Ohnesorg turned to him, eyes almost white from scorn, and yelled:

“You there! Yes, I mean you there; don’t turn around! I need your help in this travesty of justice.  I’m surrounded by murderers.” And when he realized, apparently, that there would be no answer, he showed off his classic education by adding Schiller’s classic Goetz von Berlichingen citation, 

“Ach das ist ja völlig nutzlos! Leck mich doch am Arsch – Well this is totally useless! Just lick my ass.”

The two constables flanking the prisoner’s side grabbed him by the arms and subdued him while Wilhelm lowered his eyes, wishing to disappear, wishing himself back into the privacy of his office at the provincial court, behind the thick walls of the 16th century castle in which -- rumor had it -- several of the original masons had lost their lives as they could not escape nor make themselves heard while the massive stones of the confining walls were being set.  Replying to this outburst and breach of protocol was out of the question, but even if Wilhelm had found the stamina and presence of mind to respond, he would not have known what to say.  The truth was, he felt pity for the doomed man, to a degree that was almost sickening.  A man whose vocabulary included the word travesty could not be simply put to death; surely someone would step in at the last moment and put a stop to it, declaring the sentence a bad mistake.

The sickness in his stomach he felt now, which he knew would only worsen as these interminable minutes marched on, reminded him of the moment of his decision, just four years before, to go into law, and forgo his beloved mathematics as a career.  It was a decision influenced by his father, an unhappy teacher who wanted to spare the same fate for his son. With math, he would undoubtedly have faced many problems, but having to watch a healthy man being put to death would not have been one of them.

As a man interested in math, he saw the problem of capital punishment exacerbated by the dictum, mandated by the State’s law, that it had to be carried out by hanging.  That the mass of the body would determine the gravitational pull, and hence the force with which the neck would be engaged by the rope, made this particular method nothing but immoral.  It was an issue of fairness, he concluded, and in his mind, in the little time that was left, he came up with a radical remedy: to strap weights to the death row candidate’s arms and feet, in the amount complementing the man’s weight to an exact standard, which Wilhelm thought should be set at 100 kilograms, or 200 pounds.  Featherweights would forever be grateful for being spared prolonged agony, while heavy-weighters would have the satisfaction of having set the standard that reduced everyone’s suffering.

But the pleading eyes of the prisoner, just then directed at him, reminded him of the fact that the compensation system was not yet in place.  Ohnesorg’s body weight was a bit on the wanting side, which would have made the prisoner appreciate Wilhelm’s ingenious invention if he had known Wilhelm’s outlandish ideas.  But there was no talk, no chit-chat, only the prescribed protocol, which included the sentence being re-read (the first reading having been in court), the pulse being re-taken, the prayer being re-offered (and again refused), the opportunity to say a final word which would be properly entered into the court’s minutes, for coming generations to see, and the hanging, “until certified dead.”

Afterwards my father Wilhelm was made to sit on a chair in front of a cheap desk and sign a document testifying he had indeed witnessed the execution of the man identified by name and prisoner’s number and the grim deed he had been convicted for; and that the execution had been humane and in accordance with the statues of the Weimar Republic.  The physicality of paper and fountain pen in front of him, and the evident causality linking the marks on the paper with the movements of his hands and the ink flowing from the pen both restored some measure of balance in him. But presently the thought about the coming days and weeks, and the need to talk with his fiancée about the successful completion of his assignment cast him in despair. For he could not imagine telling her about the pleading of the man. He could not imagine telling her about his novel idea of equality at the gallows, even though he knew she appreciated his rational mind, his rootedness in math. And so he decided, against his own wish, that the story about witnessing the execution had to be locked away and sealed forever.  

When he made this determination, he had no way of knowing that one of his grandsons, my nephew, would take up law, and would spend hours with him as Wilhelm’s health started to fail at old age. Talking about the essence of Roman law and its European manifestations two Millenia later with the newly minted lawyer made him feel young again, and in the process he spilled the secret that had haunted him all his life