Introduction

Judicial trials are a crucial step when modern societies are trying to come to terms with terrorist attacks. And yet, trials are not processes that can settle the matter of justice once and for all. In her book The Faces of Injustice (1990), American philosopher Judith Shklar draws our attention to a broader social understanding of justice by distinguishing between ‘validated injustice’ and other forms of injustice that do not ‘match the rule-governed prohibitions’ (Shklar, 1990: 7). In this respect, trials can be conceived as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for justice. They constitute an interval in a broader social dynamic in which literature also plays a part. What this part can be, and what literature can do, is precisely what will be discussed here.

Contrary to trials, the aim of literature is not to reach a final decision that will be enforced by public constraint but to shed light on what is still to reflect upon and maybe even to contribute to reparation. Three literary texts belonging to three different national traditions, Norway, France, and Germany, will be analysed in the following pages. This diversity aims at introducing several degrees of variation: between languages and judicial cases as well as between literary genres and ways to proceed once judicial justice has been done.

One might think that these literary texts come definitively too late: after the attacks, after the outpour of collective emotion and the public demonstrations, after the trials, after the pain, the despair and the grief. Only derisory words in the aftermath of ruthless violence. But if the goal of terrorist attacks is to violently discourage any political dissent through fear in order to reinforce unanimous polarisation, literature is on the contrary a place where multiple voices can be heard. It is this capacity to restore and develop further place for speech and common elaboration that is at stake here. Literature has indeed many roles and functions, but it can be one of these extra-judicial means. By transforming the very idea of judicial justice into an ongoing reflection on what justice and injustice do to individuals and groups, it contributes in its specific way to deepen the notion of justice, making it restorative in yet another way.

The three authors under scrutiny here, Endre Ruset with the poem Prosjektil (2012), Yannick Haenel with the autobiographical narrative Notre solitude (2021), and Kathrin Röggla with the theatre play Verfahren (2022), continue to elaborate on materials, questions, and unsolved problems that come from the judicial trials on terror after the judicial judgement has been passed. ‘We are not done yet’, they all seem to claim.

Endre Ruset—Forensics Made Poetry

Endre RusetFootnote 1 is a Norwegian poet whose long-poem Prosjektil relates to the terror attacks perpetrated in Oslo and Utøya in 2011.Footnote 2 It was on 22 July 2011 that a 950-kg fertiliser bomb exploded close to the government building in Oslo. Eight people were killed and many more were injured. Some hours later a massacre began on the island of Utøya, where the Labour Party Youth League was holding its annual political summer camp. Sixty-nine people were killed there, most of them youths or children, and many more were wounded and traumatised.

The perpetrator of both attacks was a Norwegian citizen, Anders Behring Breivik, at that time 32 years old. In his manifesto, distributed on YouTube and by email shortly before the attacks, he declared that his aim was to protect Norway and its Christian values against the threat of Islam. He pointed out that terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Baader-Meinhof Group were sources of inspiration for him. He explained that the Norwegian Labour Party was targeted because they had contributed to the spreading of multiculturalist ideas and to allowing migrants into the country. Breivik was convicted of mass murder and terrorism and was sentenced to the maximum penalty of 21 years of imprisonment in a trial that took place in the Oslo district court from April to June 2012.

Endre Ruset takes material presented in court which was instrumental in elaborating the final legal decision as the base for his literary work. He uses the forensic reports from the trial as the only material for his own poem and this extraordinary feature may explain why the poem was so little circulated. The author himself read the poem at several public events, but only abroad, not in Norway, and both him and the Norwegian publisher kept a low profile related to this part of Ruset’s writing. When he was asked directly about this, Ruset explains it as rooted in his own feeling of anxiety to be perceived as speculative or as capitalising on a terrible disaster through literature’ (Folkvord, 2020: 142). His concern seems to be that the very use of sensitive material for literary purposes could be conceived of as disrespectful.

But once Prosjektil has been read and experienced, it becomes clear that violence is its main theme. The poem foregrounds the vulnerability of the victims, but it also, we will argue, allows for a reflection on what is socially binding and how this becomes recognisable through literature. Ruset’s poem was first published in 2012 as one little black book, and we are quoting from its beginning:

Verse

Verse through the neck in the back, penetrating the right lung into the upper part of the chest straight through the brain into the back, through the chest and the left lung further into the left section of the throat through the base of the skull into the left ear out of the right side of the chin re-entering via soft tissue in the upper chest

(Ruset, 2016: 1)Footnote 3

Through the title of this ‘long-poem’, which is the label Ruset uses himself, these short verses are already embedded in a larger structure: Prosjektil paratextually names the impersonal agent of the poem. It is the movement of a projectile, in and through a fragile human body which is depicted, verse after verse, page after page. Eleven new verses follow on the next page, operating according to the same pattern, rhymeless verses with no apparent lyrical I:

Verse

Verse into the left side of the abdomen passing through the stomach and the lung on the right side leaving through the chest wall on the right side of the chest through the right lung out at the right side of the back through the left cheek into the right cheek through the brainstem and the upper vertebra through the head and out at the left side

(Ruset, 2016: 2)

The poem continues over 26 pages. The structure is the same: on each page ten to 14 verses, most of them opening with a preposition which is then followed by the naming of the part of the body that the projectile has gone into, through, out of, or via. The descriptions of how a bullet penetrates body tissue, bones, and organs are all taken from the forensic report on the Utøya massacre and reorganised into this literary text which was first published as a little black book with silver letters that resembles a traditional book of prayers (Ruset, 2016).Footnote 4

The forensic report as it was presented in the trial dealt with the victims of the massacre individually, one by one. In the report, the persons were anonymised, but kept separate by a number, then followed by their year of birth and a short description of the site where he or she was found. For instance: ‘N024 born 0.0. 1994. She was in front of the Café building and was shot twice in the head’ (Oslo Tingrett, 2012). Ruset’s literary transformation leaves everything out except the three last words, ‘in the head’. This minimisation confronts the reader with the violence as a sheer penetrating force. The forensic report is already scarce, technical, and standardised, but the poem reduces it even further. By leaving out all the textual markers that relate body parts to individuals and to places, and by connecting the large amount of textual sequences that have in common that they all describe how a projectile penetrates bodily parts, Ruset creates a densified literary text that is hard to read in one go. The massive violence depicted in the poem is simply difficult to endure. It is experienced as something that just keeps going on, and it is as if the projectile penetrates something that is not the bodies of individuals any longer, but a larger self in which the reader is comprised.

The aesthetic effect is generated through the very changing of institutional frames—from law to literature—and in the monotonous and repetitive descriptions of violence. The poetic principle, the minimising montage technique, can be conceived of as a work on a collective trauma, and the poem does something: it exposes the reader to violence without making the violence spectacular, and develops its own aesthetic efficiency without drawing any attention to the perpetrator. The latter has been an important issue in the attempts to come to terms with contemporary terrorist attacks, in Norway and elsewhere.Footnote 5

The poem ends with the verse ‘into the rear chest wall’ (Ruset, 2016: 26). It is as if the projectile remains within a body, which is no longer the body of this girl who was listed in the forensic reports, killed on the shore on the southern part of Utøya, at the age of seventeen. Whereas contemporary definitions of terrorism emphasise how the violent acts reach beyond the immediate victims and also target ways of living together and by this seek to destabilise the entire society that is attacked (Schmidt, 2011: 86f), Ruset insists on the violent negation of the other as the core aspect. Through this use of the forensic reports, after the trial has ended, one gets the impression that his literary intervention re-opens the case towards another sense of justice. He insists on a transformation into a social dimension of what first seems to belong to a purely objective one. Beyond the objective description of bodies penetrated by a projectile lies a connectedness with others, a social tie, and the literary work on the violent event makes this painfully perceivable.

Yannick Haenel: How to Do Justice with Words

Yannick Haenel is a well-known French novelist as well as an occasional journalist at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. On the day of the terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo (7 January 2015), Haenel was not attending the editorial meeting in the newsroom and he survived the attack, while eight people from the newspaper’s editorial staff did not. Before the trial started in September 2020, he had agreed with Laurent Sourisseau, ‘Riss’, the then director of Charlie Hebdo, that he would follow the trial for the newspaper and report on it daily. His columns would appear every day on the website of the newspaper until the end of the trial in December 2020. They were also published later as a book together with the drawings François Boucq had made during the hearings, as no photographs were allowed in court (Haenel & Boucq, 2020). But Haenel found himself compelled to write again once the trial was over and this is precisely on this dense and very personal autobiographical text, Notre solitude, published in October 2021, that we will focus our attention on.

Haenel explicitly asks why he felt compelled to write about the trial again although he had written about it for so many days. At the beginning of this essay, which consists of eight numbered parts, he recalls that at the end of the first week, he read the notes he had taken during a particular trying day again. The CCTV videos of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo’s offices had been shown for the first time in court, and he realised that it was impossible for him to write about what he had seen, that is the very moment when his colleagues, some of whom his friends, were shot at close range by automatic rifles:

Violence paralyses language – it ridicules the words. […]. I was not going to describe the bodies and their impacts. There are things that are better left unsaid, details that should be forgotten: sometimes precision is obscene. So how to do it? Write what? (Haenel, 2021: 19–20)Footnote 6

Contrary to Ruset, Haenel does not make use of the judicial material that documented the violence in the literary text itself. For him, this material belongs to the world of the dead. This world exists only as ghostly traces in the recorded images. On the contrary, one gets the impression that Notre solitude is an attempt to come back from the world of the dead that had been publicly shown in court. Haenel’s goal is primarily literary, namely, he tries to bring back into language what for him seems to be definitively lost to it and he describes this as a process of restoration: ‘[T]hrough the daily account of the trial, I was trying to develop an ethics of speech, so that we could recover from the crime’ (Haenel, 2021: 129). This is where ethics as much as literature comes into the picture. Haenel takes the opposite view of Wittgenstein’s famous motto and declares: ‘what you can’t say, you have to say it anyhow’, so that ‘the crime does not have the last word’ (Haenel, 2021: 129).

The whole book project was thus triggered by classified forensic material (CCTV videos) that served as evidence disclosed in court for the first time. But in Haenel’s perspective, it is not the evidence as such which is central, but the consequences these videos have on his capacity to reintegrate an unnamable act into the circle of speech through writing. Having started the essay by describing the intense crisis that paralysed his writing the day he saw the images of the massacre in court, he goes so far as to say at the end of it that, should he had diverted his attention from the trial for even an hour while it was held, the whole case would have been dropped (Haenel, 2021: 129).

The format of the column was not suited for his deeply literary purpose. Aimed at the daily report of the trial development, the column lacks the distance and the space for reflection made possible by an essay to further explore how literary writing can contribute to a definition of justice in its own way. Through this re-appropriation of judicial material, Notre solitude manages to see something different from evidence in the various testimonies made in court: the feeling of being overwhelmed by these deadly images can be warded off. For Haenel, this is a contribution to the experience of justice that literature makes possible, and he is well aware of his own almost insane ambition when he sets out to rescue the dead through writing:

I had had the feeling, admittedly a little crazy, that there had to be, in addition to the judicial narrative, another narrative, an instance entirely devoted to the invisible, which would welcome [the dead] in its filigree, protect them, transport them to the end of the trial. This narrative, which went beyond the strict dimension of the facts, and which perhaps escaped reason, or at least the evidence that supports it, was for me to write. (Haenel, 2021: 22)

Confronted with the silence which was imposed on him after watching the damning images, Haenel relies on the possibilities of narration. He does not invest himself in a trauma-framework which is very common when terrorism is dealt with in literature- and culture studies. As pointed out in several critical approaches, this is a frame that draws our attention to the individual psyche in ways that can limit the social and political understanding of the phenomenon.Footnote 7 Yannick Haenel explores the capacity of narration to contribute to justice and resistance:

By asking themselves the question of the proper use of speech, the narrators displace the notion of justice: it is experienced through sentences. The desire of criminals is that all speech should die, because only speech escapes crime and prevents it from reigning over the world. (Haenel, 2021: 129)

Something similar could be said of Endre Ruset and of Kathrin Röggla as well. We are dealing with three authors who, in a way, appear to be ‘writing back’ after politically motivated violent acts that aimed at silencing and polarising. But as far as finding the right words is concerned, Yannick Haenel’s repertoire is significantly different from the two others: one gets the impression that anything goes, from the realistic rendering of the trial proceedings to the back-stage mobilisation of magical rituals and the use of religiously laden figures.

Haenel first recalls that, after this doomed day in court where videos were shown, he was in a state of total panic at the idea of betraying the promise he had made to the remaining staff of Charlie Hebdo that he would write a daily column in order to honour the dead. He describes how he, unable to deliver the piece on time, ended up completely drunk in the garden of his house the following night. But there was enough energy left in him to practise an unprecedented ritual he had imagined on the spot to find a way towards writing:

I went to the fig tree, under which I dug a small hole with a spoon; the cat came closer to smell the damp earth. I poured in a little water, some milk, a few drops of wine; and before the mixture was completely absorbed by the earth, I don’t know what came over me (I probably felt that an act was needed), I tore the page from Kafka’s Trial into small pieces and dipped them into the little crater, then made a ball of it and put it in my mouth. I looked at the moon while chewing on this ball of paper. It was difficult to chew such a paste, I took a glassful of wine by holding the neck of the bottle and Kafka’s text slipped out by itself: that’s how I swallowed the parable of the law. (Haenel, 2021: 64–65).Footnote 8

The ritual in the garden is centred on a text by Kafka. Literary scholars have pointed out how canonised literary texts and established genres serve as cultural resources in the sense that they are ‘re-read’ and ‘re-written’ in new social and historical contexts (Erll, 2011a: 177), but Haenel moves beyond these modalities of textual reception by incorporating the page from Kafka’s novel, he actually eats it. In a state of frenzy, after a ritual which appears as a mixture of Christianity and black magic, he is then able to write the long-awaited column at full speed which can be sent early enough the following morning for the Charlie Hebdo webmasters to publish it. The nightly ritual appears as an invention there and then, the only observer is Haenel’s cat, but with some temporal distance, and through writing, this back-stage ceremony can be shared with others. What is then shared is an intense struggle to find ways of speaking after violence.

Haenel would also find ways to use testimonies given in court, not as pieces of evidence but as signs of life (Haenel, 2021: 155). Where Ruset’s minimises and displays the death as a way to get access to vulnerability and social bonds, Haenel explicitly addresses the reader when he expands on the basis of the testimonies that were given by survivors of the attacks. ‘I move from testimony to testimony, through a chain of words that pass on their trust. The word, you feel it with me, is what passes between the worlds; it is what makes the connection’ (Haenel, 2021: 154).

One of these testimonies has a special place in Haenel’s narration, that of Zarie Sibony. She was one of the two cashiers at the ‘Hyper Cacher’ supermarket where another terrorist, before being shot down, had carried out a hostage-taking operation that was linked to the first attacks. After escaping being shot by the terrorist herself, Zarie Sibony managed to engage with him and keep him away from the basement of the supermarket where some customers had been hiding, thus saving many lives. In his essay, Haenel describes her as a saint, a supernatural figure able not only to stop the spread of evil but to keep it within herself and testify: ‘And not only did she live through this fight, but she won it, and she came back to tell us about it’ (Haenel, 2021: 156). He finds the reason for this courage in Sibony’s own Jewish faith, but he himself also mobilises the Greek mythical figure of Persephone who would return from the world of the dead. Through this mythical figure, Zarie Sibony can be understood as somebody who came back from the world these deadly images gave a glimpse of, and made speech possible again.

Notre solitude is the second step in Haenel’s writing about the trial, as he first reported from it in the already mentioned columns for Charlie Hebdo. In this second step he does not take writing for granted, to say the least. On the contrary, he shows the readers what kind of ordeal it is to try and design a language that would fit the task of making the dead speak again. For Haenel, this is the literary definition of justice in a case like this one:

I had sworn to myself never to forget the dead. I saw in this the secret purpose of justice, perhaps even its true nature: not only to judge faults and to right wrongs, but to put oneself in the place of others, the accused, of course, the survivors, but also the disappeared, and so deeply that through the repetition of testimonies one could hear their hearts beating and find their voices. That was what thinking about the dead was all about: doing the right thing, to the point of granting them the existence that the crime had taken away from them. In the end, it was a way of mourning: the way you put yourself in the place of someone who has lost a loved one is the measure of the progress of justice in yourself. You may think this is impossible - a ‘demented presumption’, as Hegel would say - but it is also the beginning of ethics: supporting the mourning of others. Listening to the dead: this ethics of silence is called literature. (Haenel, 2021: 23)

In this sense literature appears to be part of a collective memory work which is at the same time work for justice. We are inclined to think that speech has a natural capacity to refer to absent things or people. But as Haenel points out, this is not the case, and in Notre solitude he manages to clarify something of the matter by exploring how we might refer to this absence. This capacity is only possible if it is first grounded in an instituted framework in which dialogue as an intersubjective performance is the foundation. The capacity to speak has therefore to be thought of as first grounded in a relational attitude which allows everyone, even the dead, to speak and be heard. According to Haenel, doing justice through literature consists therefore in using language to bring the dead back into the field of speech, making it possible to tell what happened to them and to suggest how they should be remembered.

Kathrin Röggla: Waiting for the Rule of Law

Kathrin Röggla’s theatre play Verfahren, which was first put on stage in Saarländisches Stadttheater in Saarbrücken in April 2022, relates to the judicial trial against the extremist right-wing terror cell ‘Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund’ (NSU). In contrast to the poem by Endre Ruset and the essay by Yannick Haenel, the play relates to attacks that took place over a longer period of time, between 2000 and 2007. During this period, the NSU-terror cell carried out a series of attacks in different German cities. They killed nine civilians, all of them with migrant backgrounds from Turkey and Greece, and one German policewoman. The violence was motivated by racism and the perpetrators also robbed banks and conducted assaults and bombings that injured many more civilians.

The title of the play can simply mean ‘trial’ and refer to the legal trial itself, but without a determining article as in das Verfahren, it can also refer to something stuck or derailed, which conveys the notion of an unsuccessful trial. This double entendre makes sense: unlike the trials after the 22 July terror attacks in Norway and the Charlie Hebdo, Montrouge and Hyper Cacher attacks in Paris, the lengthy NSU-trial that lasted from 2013 to 2018 did not create a collective sense that the criminal offences had been sufficiently investigated and dealt with. There are several reasons for this. Both the investigation and the judicial trial itself left the impression that the victims of the attacks were seen as suspects and made responsible for the violence they had been subjected to. The lengthy proceedings were disturbed by several interruptions and ambiguities related to access to case documents and impartiality. Most dramatic for the public, however, was the uncovering of far-right networks within branches of the German police and the ‘Verfassungsschutz’, that is, the office for the protection of the Constitution.Footnote 9

In the traditional legal drama, we get involved in the assessment of causes and questions of responsibility, justice, and guilt, whether in ancient dramas such as Aeschylos’ Eumenidia or in contemporary plays such as Ferdinand von Schirach’s Terror (2015), in which the audience is invited to vote for a decision in the end. In order to be able to evaluate and judge, the audience gets information about conflicts that have taken place prior to the trial. Röggla’s Verfahren is different in this respect: the murders of Süleyman Taşköprü, Mehmet Turgut, or any of the other victims of the NSU terrorist cell are never explicitly described. Neither is anything further said about Beate Zschäpe nor about the other defendants, their background and motives. Kathrin Röggla relies on the audience already knowing the story of the NSU-terror and centers her piece on a group of people, seven of them, who have in common that they are all spectators to a trial.

The temporality of the play is ambiguous. Sometimes one gets the impression that the characters on stage are witnessing a trial that is still ongoing. At other times, they seem to comment on a judicial process that has already ended. But simultaneously, the dialogues and the interaction that take place between them are experienced as a process in itself, and this process does not really make any progress. It does not seem to move towards anything that could be felt like an ending. In Röggla’s work on the NSU-trial, this lack of progression appears as a crucial dimension of her literary attempt to redirect the public attention to the NSU-terror. She draws our attention not towards the suffering of victims or the motives of their perpetrators, but to fellow citizens as observers, stuck with a drama that has not found an end yet.

‘What do we hope for when we think of the court’ (Röggla, 2022: 1)Footnote 10 asks the legal servant in the prologue to the play. When Verfahren was put on stage in Saarbrücken in 2022, the role was played by a young Black woman and the play was performed on and around a white, multi-level stage that emphasised her Blackness and the whiteness of the place. In the centre of the stage was a large white dress that she occasionally put on as a shell that stands on its own on stage and was moved around. She would herself put a white wig on and be the one who called for order, but sometimes she would pass the wig on to one of the others as if roles and functions were interchangeable. The impression of interchangeable roles was taken one step further when the legal servant moved around on a bike. Through the bike she is connected to the stories of perpetrators who would leave the crime sites on bikes. Hence, the theatrical play with roles relates to one of the most problematic aspects of the historical NSU-trial, namely that the State itself appeared to be involved in racist networks, in ways that could not be sufficiently clarified through the trial.

In addition to the legal servant, there is a ‘court-granny’ and a ‘court-grandpa’ on stage, a leftist blogger, a lawyer, a ‘so-called-foreigner’, and a woman from the Turkish embassy (Röggla, 2022: 1). These figures all appear as types. They are observants and commentators with characteristic modes and ways to relate to the trial, be it the court-granny with her eagerness to grieve and her ‘constant amazement’ about ‘nazis’, or the lawyer who is defending the trial and is tired of ‘judicial bashing’ (Röggla, 2022: 1). In the dramatic text Röggla points out how similar types constitute the real theatre audience. According to the theatre text, the audience consists of law people and people from the State Criminal Investigation Office but is also described as mental types such as ‘know-it-alls’, ‘nitpickers’, ‘indignants’, ‘expectants’, and ‘transformables’ (Röggla, 2022: 1). Thus the audience, be it in Saarbrücken or elsewhere, is made part of the play, while the players on stage also constitute an audience.

As in her previous work on the NSU-trial, in the radio play Verfahren (2020), Röggla’s theatrical work stages the role of observers and dramatises the NSU-trial as something that is still ongoing. One gets the impression that it has to go on because it has not been concluded in a satisfactory way, but also because justice is a never-ending social process. The trial ‘is NEVER finished’ (Röggla, 2022: 39), the woman from the Turkish embassy says, referring to the everyday racism and the Nazi-jokes in German companies. She points to social problems of another order from the murder cases that were dealt with in the trial, and yet in Röggla’s Verfahren symbolic and physical violence are interconnected.

Throughout the two hours of the theatre play the seven persons discuss and debate how to relate to the trial. One can recognise typical ways of thinking about the NSU-trial as it has been debated in the German public: for instance the critique of its shortcomings and flaws versus the counter argument that one expected too much from it, more than any judicial trial could have fulfilled; the claim that the trial was biased versus the argument that a judicial trial should not be politicised, the need to move ahead, put the violence behind versus the feeling of being haunted by a past that invades the present.

Critics have pointed out that Verfahren gets boring and ‘tiring’ (Erdmenger, 2022). One could criticise this as a weakness of the play itself, or maybe as a shortcoming resulting from Marie Bue’s direction. But the boredom, or the ennui, can in this case also be taken as an aesthetic effect and a way to problematise a specific post-trial reality. According to Kathrin Röggla, a literary work on the NSU-trial might have to free itself from the very expectation that the theatre should show its audience something ‘exemplary’, and instead try to uncover discursive entanglements and knots (Röggla, 2017a).

In Verfahren, some of these entanglements are presented through the exploration of specific expressions related to the legal domain and their social impact. One example has to do with the very notion of equality before the law and is brought to the fore by the ‘so-called-foreigner’. The presentation of his person is already twisted right from the beginning since he is ‘called’ as someone different from what he is. He is a German citizen of Türkish origin, but the label put onto him makes him somebody who does not quite, at least not for everyone, belong to the country in which the NSU-trial took place. He tells how he was struck by the violence, that something like this could happen to ‘meinesgleichen’; ‘my equals’. At the same time, he is struck by his own use of language, the expression ‘my equals’: ‘I hated it right away. I wanted to get rid of it immediately’ (Röggla, 2022: 13).

A friend urges him to go to the trial, to see what ‘the Germans’ are doing there (Röggla, 2022: 13). He goes only once, but similar to the man from the countryside in Kafka’s fable ‘Before the Law’, he has difficulties getting access to the law. Whereas Kafka presents the law in an allegorical way, and as some kind of riddle, Röggla’s ‘so-called-foreigner’ operates in a more realistic setting. From the context one gathers that it is due to his Turkish origin that he runs into difficulties getting into this specific trial, and in this sense the law appears as an institution unable to recognise its own citizens as citizens. In this sense the trial, in Röggla’s work, is never primarily revelation, it always takes part in a precarious ‘Unsichtbarkeitsproduktion’, a production of invisibility also (Röggla, 2016).

Thus, the ethnic bias is thematised, but in a different key than in several of the other literary and filmic pieces that deal with the NSU-trial. In Fatih Akin’s Aus dem Nichts (2017), for instance, there are victims shouting out their complaints to the legal authorities and to the audience, and the movie ends with Akin’s own statement, that the fictional plot relates to the victims of the NSU-terror, victims who were themselves suspected of being perpetrators, due to their ethnic background (Akin, 2017). In Röggla’s Verfahren nobody shouts out, we don’t hear affectively charged ‘individual voices of injustice’ in the sense pointed out by Judith Shklar. Skhlar emphasises how such voices ‘cry out in anger’, but also how they can ‘ring loud and true’ through literary texts (Shklar, 1990: 83). In Röggla the sense of injustice is made available through the subtle (and sometimes boring) depiction of a group of citizens struggling with forms and institutions, that divide society into ‘us’ and ‘them’ and of their lacking capacity to produce something that would be more just.

The theatre text is dense, and it plays, in a variety of ways, with the possibilities to belong to a social group and to a society, and so did Marie Bue’s seemingly plain dramaturgy when Verfahren was put on stage in Saarbrücken in 2022. At times it is as if the white stage holds the seven actors together, and in Röggla this very capacity of assembly seems to be recognised as a social resource, both in the trial and in the theatre: it makes it possible to gather and explore a problem collectively, and in her own poetic reflections Röggla describes the contemporary literary interest for the ‘judicial’ as a search for ‘residues of the enlightenment’ (Röggla, 2017b). In Bue’s dramaturgy several of the figures tried to leave the stage, or were about to fall off it, but one got the impression that they had to return. Also in this way, the play on stage conveyed an impression of a community under pressure, and that there was no easy way out. Thus, there is something deeply relational and realistic about Röggla’s take on the NSU-terror and the question of justice. The rule of law appears as something citizens tend to locate in an external institution they are not directly part of. But at the same time, the law is here explored as part of deeply rooted social imaginaries and thereby as part and parcel of our interaction with fellow human beings.

Conclusion

Even if the final decision of a terrorist trial is in some respect already known because the perpetrators, dead or alive, have claimed responsibility for their acts right from the start, there is still more to investigate if one wants injustice to be acknowledged and not only justice to be done. For the harm done to victims is also a harm done to the social capacity to relate to one another in a community, and if living together is a shared concern, this has to be restored too. Literature, in the broadest sense, plays a fundamental role for that purpose.

One of the most striking features of the three texts we have looked at is the literary capacity to use the various documents, images, and situations that were first part of the judicial trial in a completely different way. In our context we would go as far as to consider this capacity to work and re-work pieces and versions of reality as a specific literary capacity to appeal for a revision of judgement. This appeal takes various forms. In Ruset’s poem it is about transforming the forensic report into a novel way of making the violence directly perceivable to the reader. It produces an intensification that accentuates the social dimension, the vulnerable ‘we’. Haenel’s literary approach involves evoking the dead observed in CCTV footage. He thereby delves deeper into the notion that, in his view, the true significance of the trial is something that cannot be fully conveyed through the formal legal proceedings but demands other, more expressive dimensions. Röggla’s way of interpreting the notion of an appeal could be understood as a more traditional critique of the law, since she points out that the historical NSU-trial, as it was held, has been thoroughly unsatisfactory. More specifically, it has failed to deliver answers: too many questions were left open and in the theatre play, a new form of discourse has to follow suit by staging the shortcomings of the trial as well as the expectation that there could be something worthy of being called justice.

The comparative study of such attempts to come to terms with terrorism generates a focus on literature, not first and foremost as an aesthetic experiment, but just as much as a social resource and a tool for restoration and reflection. This also has consequences for the ‘law and literature’ divide. In the expression ‘law and literature’, literature sometimes only appears as a supplement to the soul, the real thing being the judicial dealing of the case. We have argued that this is not the case. The ‘and’ in the expression ‘law and literature’ shows how one supplements the other by deepening the concepts of justice and injustice without which the very sense of community is damaged. Law and literature are instituted practices and genres with different social functions and aesthetic affordances. They are therefore symbolic forms in their own right: they both intertwine tradition and innovation in order for collective norms to be maintained and reworked according to unexpected crises such as terrorist attacks.