GDR lawyer: Obituary for Friedrich Wolff: Quiet and knowledgeable

On his 101st birthday, the crowd of well-wishers was, unlike the previous year, very small. Apart from neighbors and relatives, there were actually only two. Gregor Gysi, coming from vacation on the island of Usedom, brought some bars of chocolate and the publisher brought printed material. Even though Fritz Wolff himself could hardly read anymore, his wife Iris always read the texts that she was convinced would interest him to the still politically wide-awake man. And then she reported on his lively reactions.

In my opinion, Wolff suffered more from the world than from his own problems that had arisen over the years. The decline of the left particularly bothered him. After the end of the war he joined the KPD, came with it into the SED, then followed it into the PDS, and for a while he was also a member of the Left’s Council of Elders. With his Jewish humor, he would probably have commented on Sunday’s election disaster, if he had still been able to, with the remark: That finished me off.

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Fritz Wolff mastered the art of self-irony, which can easily be read in his books. Before his 100th birthday, he sat down with Egon Krenz, and the title of the volume of discussions already revealed his attitude: “Don’t tell me about the rule of law.” With palpable annoyance, he commented on what was sometimes invasive, not just of the judiciary. And he particularly liked to quote the remark of the then Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who had complained that he was not living in a constitutional state but in a judicial state. And in a “legal process state,” Wolff had added.

The Federal German justice system has jurisdiction over criminal and civil matters, as well as labor, social, financial and administrative courts, a labyrinth of legal channels. »In the GDR there was a simple and manageable court structure – district court, district court and the supreme court. “They were responsible for everything – civil, family and labor law matters as well as criminal cases,” he said. After the fall of the Wall, he often heard from clients that everything was now much more bureaucratic than in the GDR. The legal thicket is hard to see through and understand, simply scary.

Friedrich Wolff had many clients, both prominent and less well-known. Voluntary or as a public defender. Nazis were also included. He sometimes had difficulty explaining to critics that he was not defending the crime, but rather ensuring that the defendant was not treated unjustly, no matter how guilty he was. How could he defend a mass murderer like the Federal Minister for Expelled People Theodor Oberländer, who killed thousands of Jews and hunted down partisans in Ukraine? Or Hans Globke, the desk clerk from the Nazi Interior Ministry who co-authored and commented on the Nuremberg racial laws? Wolff patiently explained what he believed.

After almost six decades, he had retired from day-to-day business and into his private life in Wandlitz, even though his name was still attached to the law firm on the former Wilhelm-Pieckstrasse, now Torstrasse, for a long time. One of his three daughters worked in the partnership. After the turn of the millennium, he revealed that he had been chased by deadlines and appointments all his life. »You get tired of something like that at some point. The judges always know everything better anyway.”

Only those who didn’t know Wolff saw this as resignation, even capitulation. Which it wasn’t. He was combative to the end, so the Berliner Zeitung was not wrong when it described Wolff as a “lawyer of the century” in its obituary. And that was meant to be ambiguous. The lawyer and avowed communist Friedrich Wolff is one of the most important German lawyers. And he didn’t stand out from the crowd by screaming his way to the media outside the courts, as is common practice these days, but rather quietly and skillfully doing his job.

He would have been 102 years old on July 30th. He was looking forward to it. It was not meant to be. Friedrich Wolff died on Monday.

“Lost Trials” and “Unity and Law” were published by Friedrich Wolff in Edition Ost.