Justice in Luritz: Experiencing Socialist Law in East Germany

by Inga Markovits

As a child, Inga Markovits dreamt of stealing and reading every letter contained in a mailbox at a busy intersection of her town in order to learn what life is all about. When, decades later, working as a legal historian, she tracked down the almost complete archive of a former East German trial court, she knew that she had finally found her mailbox. Combining her work in this extraordinary archive with interviews of former plaintiffs and defendants, judges and prosecutors, government and party functionaries, and Stasi collaborators, all in the little town she calls "L�ritz," Markovits has written a remarkable grassroots history of a legal system that set out with the utopian hopes of a few and ended in the anger and disappointment of the many. This is a story of ordinary men and women who experienced Socialist law firsthand--people who applied and used the law, trusted and resented it, manipulated and broke it, and feared and opposed it, but who all dealt with it in ways that help us understand what it meant to be a citizen in a twentieth-century Socialist state, what "Socialist justice" aimed to do, and how, in the end, it failed. Brimming with human stories of obedience and resistance, endurance and cunning, and cruelty and grief, Justice in L�ritz is ultimately a book about much more than the law, or Socialism, or East Germany.

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Will Rowe · Rating 2 out of 5]

While at times effective in demonstrating the (sometimes ineffective) particularilities of East German law and the deficiencies of the Party leadership in the country, the author's tendency towards a condescending tone and use of speculation, indicating underlying bias and negative assumptions about the GDR, damaged the analysis. The argumentation would have been stronger by taking the subject material in better faith and looking at macro trends instead of picking and choosing cases over the course of 40 years to make broad claims about the country and its legal system.

[Mitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's really well done, but most people probably just need a chapter or two. It is very clear how cruel and uncaring the DDR was though.