With my paternal grandmother having been a Jew who converted to the Christian confession, I am a „Viertel-Jude“ or else a second-order „Mischling.“ ¹ Under certain conditions, the Nuremberg Laws do not only apply to half- and full-Jews but also to quarter-Jews. According to these laws, I would not be allowed to marry a three-quarter Jew, because the remaining Aryan blood in my veins would be diluted in our children. My life is not in immediate danger, but the Nazi party can (with which procedure?) impose additional demands on me to safeguard my „blood purity.“ ² Shall I leave the country or shall I stay? I am confused by the skillful legal techniques that generate appearances of law and order via legal definitions, subsidiary clauses, transitional provisions and complex regulations concerning exemptions to rules.
Would I have been allowed to become (remain) a lawyer ³ despite the eradication of Jews from the legal profession by means of the fifth decree to the Reichsbürgergesetz (Reich Citizenship Law)? 4 Would I have tried to save myself by either complying to complex transitional rules or soliciting for particular, individual permission, even if most of my other (Jewish) lawyer colleagues have not been successful in doing so? Would I have stood up for fellow-lawyer Albert Drach from Mödling, who attempted to defy the commencing Nazi terror in his quirky but persistent way? ⁵ Drach was able to escape to France in October 1938, just two weeks before the Reichskristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), while the Nazi Heinrich Rumboldt was already pushing to have transcribed to his name first the property management, and ultimately the property itself of Drach’s house in Mödling. The widespread tactics of purposefully employing a Nazi lawyer to defend property, life and limb against Nazi attacks, pursued also by Drach, proved entirely useless.
Are there still lawyers today who accept mandates, although they are bound to be clearly aware of the utter hopelessness of the task? Nowadays, people seeking political asylum seem to be in a situation similar to that of many Jews at the time. In proceedings that are alarming for a democratic state ⁷, they get sentenced, humiliated, and tortured, ⁶ kept in detention centers with their deportation pending, and – in some cases – even murdered. What is it that motivates court physicians to twist the facts time and again to testify heart failure as cause of death in cases of police infringement? ⁸ Is it anticipatory obedience to the authorities, or the inner conviction that Black Africans are inferior people anyway? Aren’t they aware of the repercussions of their acts that go beyond the specific case? Don’t they realize that they are encouraging the ideas and actions of right-wing populisms uniformed henchmen?

Law functions – as a fig leaf to conceal conditions of power. A subtle interplay of both, legislation and judicial execution, has rendered the so-called, „de-nazification“ of Austria’s bureaucracy and legal system with a sly wink of the eye. Following Heinrich Gross’s prior conviction for manslaughter for his activities as a physician for euthanasia at the notorious pediatric clinic „Am Spiegelgrund,“ the sentence was revoked in 1950 by the OGH (supreme court) with reference to procedural violations and the trial came to a halt. ⁹ With the help of Austria’s Social Democratic Party (SPO, then the „Austrian Socialist Party“), Gross was able to pursue his career to become one of Austria’s most prominent psychiatrists in the 1950s and 1960s. For years, the SPO establishment had defended him against all attacks. Although, by 1981, an Austrian court had finally and conclusively determined that Gross had been involved in the murder of children, he continued his activities as expert and scientist without being bothered. It was only as late as 1997(!), that new prosecutions for crimes against Gross were taken up. However, the proceedings failed since the defendant had been declared mentally unfit to stand trial by then. ¹⁰

Law functions—to legitimize suffered injustice. A great number of laws were enacted to compensate the coerced transfers of properties under Austro-fascist and Nazi legislation of the period between 1934 and 1945. A collection of laws dating 1948 is entitled „Die österreichischen Wiedergutmachungsgesetze“ (Austrian reparation laws). ¹¹ The legal experts involved had certainly retained their talent for euphemisms. In the terms of jurisdiction, the expropriators and executors have now become „repairers.“ By no coincidence, the success of the laws has so far been modest. Why to make reparations if no wrongdoing had occurred? It was only in 1998, that a commission of historians appointed by the Austrian federal government systematically researched and documented the true extent of the plundering and exploitation of Jewish and other „inferior“ population groups during the Nazi regime. ^12/13 Too late for Albert Drach ¹⁴ who returned to Austria in 1948 and had to fight until 1955 for the comprehensive restitution of his house in Mödling ¹⁵ In 1998, eventually, the necessary legistic repairs have been conducted ¹⁶ And once again, legal experts have built in abundant obstacles to hinder effective restitution of property. In 2006, a private arbitration court has decided in favour of the legitimate heirs in the „Bloch-Bauer“ case whereas the law itself (once again) had not even provided for the setting up of a constitutional procedure. ¹⁷

Nazi racial legislation has not only become a reality in the form of the „Reichsgesetzblättern“, the publication of the Reich laws with their Gothic print having become the icons for many die-hards; it has also become effective in utmost brutal forms. In order for the laws to become effective, it has always needed protagonists to carry them out, protagonists, who – in the frameset of a pseudo-constitutional procedure – have been called „law practitioners.“ All the people who executed NS law as judges or hangmen could fall back upon legal sources for legitimation; whereever the laws originated from, whatever effects they brought with them – this was none of their business, and most of them weren’t interested anyway. They either acted on the basis of beliefs, or else they were indifferent, or among the minority of utterly disgusted people who had no alternative but to participate. Yet, it wasn’t Adolf Hitler who first corrupted the constitutional state, the German judiciary system had already had a tradition of an anti-democratic and anti-Semitic attitude long before Hitler’s seizure of power. ¹⁸
The reality of crime is preserved in pieces of art: no alienating adding-ons, no false idealizing, just the bare nature of the text. For the project „Law and Crime“, Herwig Steiner has used materials from five original sources, including the two central documents of Nazi racial legislation, which have entered history as the „Nuremberg Laws.“ The Nuremberg Reich party convention on 15 September 1935 had passed both, the „Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre“ (Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, or the „blood protection law“) and the „Reichsbürgergesetz“ (Reich Citizenship Law). The programmatic explanation at the beginning of the „blood protection law“ is notorious: „Thoroughly convinced by the knowledge that the purity of German blood is essential for the further existence of the German people and animated by the inflexible will to safe-guard the German nation for the entire future, the Reichstag has resolved upon the following law unanimously, which is promulgated herewith …“ These two laws were concretized by way of numerous edicts for implementation and police regulations, which in most cases lead to an intensification of their impact. A particularly savage example is the „Polizeiverordnung Ober die Kennzeichnung der Juden“ (Police regulation for identifying Jews) of 1 September 1941, by which Jews, when in public, were coerced to wear the Star of David – pejoratively dubbed „Judenstern“ (Jew star) by the Nazis. Again, it is amazing, by which pseudo-constitutional precision of the legislators intended to plug up any potential loopholes in the law in order to carry out the führer’s will as completely and efficiently as possible: „[The star] is to be worn visibly on the left breast of the article of clothing, sewn on permanently.“
The new „law“ was immediately taken up in the scientific discourse and published. Legal scholars and legal publishing houses tendered the system thus procuring it with an additional aspect of legitimation. Dr. Helfried Pfeifer, who advanced from public servant at the administrative academy to university professor through the change of regime, published a systematic historic collection of laws called „Die Ostmark – Eingliederung und Neugestaltung“ (The Eastern March – integration and reorganization). ¹⁹ This collection was dedicated „To the Eastern March students, public servants, and upholders of the law, in reverent and loving memory of our liberator and fuhrer.“ The work contains a scrupulously compiled collection of speeches by Hitler and other Nazi dignitaries, quotes from Hitler’s „Mein Kampf‘: excerpts from the Nazi Party program, historical documents from the German national conventions in Frankfurt, to the fiihrer’s diverse edicts for integration of Austria into the German Reich, and the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws, introduced into Austria by decree on 20 May 1938.
In order to help the Austrian lawyers to understand the German Reich laws, the Nazi terminology was explained in great detail. The term „Aryan origins“ was made more precise by the Reich citizen law and now read: „German and racially related blood.“ But Pfeiffer went into even greater detail: „German blood is composed, in terms of blood, of all of the following: the Nordic, Phalian, Western, East Baltic, Eastern, Alpine, and Sudeten races. The racial core of the German folk comprises the Nordic and Phalian races. Of related blood are the members of those peoples who come essentially from the same races as does the German folk, although the blood composition in the individual races — the racial mixture — may vary. Considered to be of related blood may therefore also be the French, the English, the Czech…, not, however, the Jew or the Gypsy.“ ²⁰

In retrospect, a text like this appears perfectly grotesque. Yet, on the basis of a concept elaborated in the 1960s, the exhibition room XVII of Vienna’s Natural History Museum displayed a permanent „rassenkundliche“ (racial anthropological) exhibition, which did not seriously bother anyone until 1993. Then, the federal minister in charge sent directive to redesign the exhibition room, which continued to be ignored for a further four years until, eventually, public pressure, especially by the Green parliamentary fraction, enforced theclosure of the exhibition. ²¹
In the face of frequent and deliberate quotes of the „lessons learnt“ from the Nazi regime, the manifest resistance and reluctance to true learning exposed by today’s politicians and the political system is bewildering. No evidence of „Beware the beginnings,“ or „Stop it before it gets out of hand“, but rather, „Whatever has worked before will work again!“ In May 2006 again, pseudo-scientific stereotypes against foreigners have become the topic of widespread public disputes and critical minds have been personally attacked and defamed. It looks like the dilettantism ²² that Adolf Hitler has made socially acceptable still functions as the dominant political principle. The results of academic research are being manipulated and misused by politics and the media. ²³

Two worlds of art: one on the theme of the Nazionalsozialismus, one on the theme of the death penalty in the U.S. Some people might accuse the artist of comparing the Holocaust with mis judgments of the U.S. judiciary. We know that the Holocaust has no historical or political parallel. Jews will be insulted by the comparison as they will see a belittlement of the genozid. But also those who are being compared will feel insulted: they are by far not as atrocious as what the Nazis did. However, Herwig Steiner, the artist, is not concerned with either Nazi regime or capital punishment, he is not interested in comparing one to the other. His attention is dedicated to universal aspects of law and injustice:
a) Terror sometimes appears as law.
b) Capital punishment is state torture and state murder, even if it is carried out in a democratic state.
A terror regime embellishes the industrialized mass extermination of humans by means of a complex pseudo-constitutional legistic structure; a bureaucracy conscientiously implements what is desired, ordered, or decreed top down. The top has a name: the führer.“

But racial laws have also been passed after 1945, in the USA, South Africa, and elsewhere. Nowadays, the abolishment of constitutional and democratic principles for the sake of supposedly higher reasons of state ^24/25 is not rationalized by the battle for „purity of blood,“ but instead, with the demands for „national security“; the enemy is no longer called a „Jew,“ or „Bolshevik,“ but instead, „international terror“ and „Al Kaida“. Once again, the purpose justifies the measures and means; ²⁶ This comprehends systematic dis-regard for human rights, torture, sanctioned by the state if not even encouraged by the state; the operation of concentration camps ²⁷ and offensive wars for the sake of „protecting the nation“. ²⁸

The two works of art are no political manifestos in the narrow sense. They are not aesthetic museum objects, but instead, permanent provocations. They demand that we doubt the reliability of everyday perception and they raise doubt, precisely with regard to lawyers‘ concrete responsibility for their decisions. The hand of the lawyer does not always threaten with the death penalty, but no less brutal is the encroaching upon people’s lives through the social death of imprisonment or homelessness resulting from an eviction or from extremely limited income in the context of personal bankruptcy. Lawyers have the advantage of not being the ones to execute their decisions themselves. As long as the procedure is in accordance with the law, lawyers are guaranteed legitimacy and keep their hands clean. Others become dirty (bloody): the bailiffs, the police officers, the jailors and the hangmen. Would the legal system be more humane if lawyers had to enforce their decisions themselves?