“Madness alone was lord of all this land.”

“Madness alone was lord of all this land.” is a line from Albrecht Haushofer’s Moabit Sonnets, which Caspar Leinen discovers on a plaque near the courthouse. Its placement connects the words to the history of the place and to Leinen’s struggle to make the war’s violence feel real rather than remote.

Origin and Inscription

The line appears on a memorial plaque fixed to a high brick wall in Wilsnackerstrasse. Haushofer wrote the poem while imprisoned; the Nazis shot him in 1945. The plaque thus brings the words of a prisoner facing death into the present-day scene, where Leinen has not noticed them before.

The Courthouse and the Memorial

Leinen sees the plaque after leaving the courtroom, passing reporters who are questioning Richard Mattinger. He ignores a reporter who briefly follows him, drops his briefcase in a side street, and leans against a building while trying to ease a cramp in his thigh. The plaque lies by a side building of the courthouse complex, at the entrance to a tiny park that had once served as a cemetery.

Inside the park, a tall concrete memorial records that people died in combat, in air-raid shelters, while searching for necessities, by execution, or by suicide. Three hundred people who died in the final days of the war are buried there. Leinen sits on a bench among these markers of death; Haushofer’s line is part of a landscape where historical violence is not an abstraction but a presence memorialized in the city.

Significance in Leinen’s Reflection

The line’s stark description of madness resonates with the memorial’s account of deaths in radically different circumstances. Yet the scene does not suggest that Leinen can fully enter the past. He recalls his father’s accounts of cold, sickness, dirt, deprivation, death, and fear, as well as the films, books, essays, and school lessons through which he encountered the Third Reich. Even so, the war remains a distant world to him. He closes his eyes and tries to relax. The plaque offers a forceful phrase for historical catastrophe, while Leinen’s response preserves the distance between reading and remembrance.