Tis the season for shopping mall scuffles. A man with a red face prized the last Magimix (steel, 600 rotations per minute) from my hands yesterday, citing ‘the stress of January sales’. I got an apology, but not the blender. What is it that makes us so quick to flip?
In a far bleaker arena, this is a question that plagues Ferdinand von Schirach, the criminal defence lawyer whose most recent novel, The Collini Case, I reviewed here last year.
Von Schirach’s earlier books, Crime and Guilt – both bestsellers in Germany – are compilations of stories derived from real life offences. Von Schirach has been involved in literally hundreds of criminal cases. In none of those he sets out in Crime was the guilty party ever convicted before a court of law. At the heart of both books is apparently an attempt to understand, if not justify, what drove the people he met from apparent sanity to criminality.
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