The radical late-Weimar attorney, Hans Litten, has enjoyed numerous lives in Germany since his suicide in Dachau in February 1938. Through the determined effort of his mother, Irmgard Litten, who began her struggles to free her son after his arrest on the night of the Reichstag Fire and to preserve his memory in a published wartime account, and the moving 1973 memoir by his lifetime friend, Max Fürst (Gefilte Fisch. Eine Jugend in Königsberg), Litten's life and work survived his death and the collapse of the National Socialist regime to play important symbolic roles in the German Democratic Republic, the Bonn Federal Republic, and the Berlin Republic. This perceptive and useful volume is the third biography of Hans Litten since 2008, and it provides extremely revealing insight into the fraught and tumultuous times and trends of Litten's short adolescence and professional career, as well as the workings of the National Socialist state from 1933 to 1938.
Born in 1903 in Halle to a bildungsbürgerlich family, Hans Litten grew up in Königsberg, where his father, Friedrich Julius (Fritz) Litten taught Roman and civil law at the university, serving as dean of the legal faculty and as Rector. Litten's life and thought were shaped by tense family dynamics and generational conflict as well as the tumultuous era of war, revolution, and transition from monarchy to republic. Fritz Litten's father, Joseph (a merchant and banker) had served as chair of the representative committee of the Jewish community, but Fritz converted to Christianity while working on his Promotion in Halle, pursuing a common Jewish path of assimilation for career advancement. Fritz's politics were national conservative, even in a Königsberg milieu that was left liberal. Hans's mother, Irmgard, daughter of an engineering professor at Halle, immersed him in bildungsbürgerlich values and doted on him even as Hans began to clash with his more distant and aloof father.
The ferment of war, revolution, and the early republican Wandervogel youth movement shaped Hans Litten and encouraged his rebellion against his father's values. Where father rejected Judaism, son identified as Jewish; where father remained national conservative, son embraced the radical wing of the youth movement (the Schwarze Haufen or “Black Mob”), tending toward syndicalism, so extreme that the group he helped form was expelled from the national movement. Yet at the same time that Hans embarked upon a lifelong Oedipal revolt against his father, he pursued law studies, first state examination, practical legal training, and second state examination, gaining admission to the bar in 1928.
Litten's law practice in Berlin paralleled his political convictions. Representing many clients referred to him from the Rote Hilfe, the KPD organization that connected Party comrades who ran afoul of the law in the political violence of the late Weimar Republic with legal representation, Litten never joined the KPD, uncomfortable with its subservience to the Comintern. His communist and syndicalist sympathies led him to work hard for workers caught up by the police of Berlin. But Litten was an equal opportunity gadfly, defending communists from charges brought by the Social Democratic government in Berlin after the May 1, 1929 “Blutmai” police action against banned political demonstrations, while most famously representing clients in high-profile cases of political violence involving the National Socialists in Berlin, particularly the Eden Dance Palace trial in 1931 and the Felseneck trial in 1932. In the former, Litten subpoenaed Adolf Hitler as witness and cross-examined him intensely, entangling him in the dishonesty of his avowal that the party would only pursue power by legal means even as the SA was embroiling Berlin in massive political violence. This cross-examination, carefully analyzed in this book (and elsewhere by Benjamin Carter Hett in Crossing Hitler [2008]), earned Litten Hitler's lasting enmity, landing him on a list of opponents who were rounded up on February 28, 1933.
A large part of this biography details Litten's travails in the prisons and concentration camps of the Third Reich, from his arrest until his suicide. The brutality of the SA's arrests in February 1933 emerges with rare clarity, as Litten suffered intensely despite his mother's heroic efforts to secure his release from “protective custody.” From the “wild” beatings at the hands of the SA outside of the normal prison system or nascent concentration camp system, to his end in despair at Dachau, Litten remained in contact with his mother and friends, despite a failed escape attempt and frequent transfers. This biography provides a graphic and sobering account of the calculated power of the camps to cow or eliminate enemies of the Nazis.
This volume's final contribution, shared with the Hett biography, is to trace the symbolic use of Litten after 1945. In the German Democratic Republic, Irmgard Litten's 1940 English-language volume, A Mother Fights Hitler, appeared in German in 1947, with cuts to sections dealing with Litten's politics. In 1951, the street in front of the Amtsgericht Berlin-Mitte in the Nikolaiviertel was renamed Littenstraße; it survived post-reunification efforts to return its name to what it had been before the GDR. In 2001, the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer renamed its headquarters at Littenstraße 9 the Hans-Litten-Haus, combining what Hett calls the “political Litten” with the “lawyers’ Litten.” This apotheosis of Litten completed the work of Irmgard Litten and left-leaning lawyers of the 1970s Federal Republic to celebrate the leftist lawyers of the Weimar Republic and anti-Nazi resistance. The year 2008 saw the appearance of Hett's biography and a predecessor volume by the authors of this updated biography, on the seventieth anniversary of Litten's death (Denkmalsfigur. Biographische Annäherung an Hans Litten, 1903–1938). And in 2020, Litten achieved fictionalized immortality as a recurring character in the television series Babylon Berlin, which, together with the discovery of new archival material, occasioned the publication of this revised biography.
This perceptive, sensitive, comprehensive study of the formative influences, personal qualities, and courage of Hans Litten is a broadly useful illustration of the ferment, diversity, and promise of early-twentieth-century Germany, and the tragedy of its self-destruction.
