Moabit Criminal Court

Moabit Criminal Court is the Berlin courthouse that frames two decisive stages of the case: Caspar Leinen’s first practical steps as court-appointed defense counsel and the opening of Fabrizio Collini’s murder trial. The building is at once a workplace crowded with files and hearings, a protected professional meeting place, and a monumental public setting designed to make the authority of the law visible.

A working courthouse

Leinen reaches the court shortly after eight, having taken a suburban train. His arrival begins not in a courtroom but in the administrative machinery behind one. The Capital Crimes Department of the public prosecutor’s office occupies the third floor, its corridor-facing windows fitted with steel-framed armoured glass. Leinen knows the department from three months of work experience there and recognizes most of its prosecutors by sight. The setting therefore brings him back into a professional world he has already encountered, but now as a defense lawyer assigned to a murder case.

The court registry gives that machinery its physical form. Files fill pigeonholes, shelves, desks, and the floor, reaching up to the ceiling according to an arrangement Leinen cannot make sense of. Cases involving violent death all pass through this office: murder and manslaughter sit within the same broad institutional landscape as deaths connected with suicide bombings and hostage-taking. The crowded, difficult-to-decipher filing system contrasts with the formal order expected in court. It also makes clear that a trial depends on a mass of records and routine administrative work, not only on the proceedings visible to spectators.

When Leinen provides the file reference and shows the document appointing him as counsel, the clerk hands him a thin folder. She remembers him from his earlier work experience and wishes him luck, while warning that the defense will face a difficult case. She also tells him that Richard Mattinger will appear for the accessory prosecution and that the autopsy is scheduled for one o’clock at the Forensic Institute. Within the courthouse, a few administrative exchanges thus establish the immediate professional and procedural circumstances confronting Leinen.

The lawyers’ common room

The lawyers’ common room offers a sharply different interior from the registry and the public court. It is reserved for defense lawyers: clients, judges, and interpreters are not allowed in. The room has existed since the Weimar Republic and was frequented in the 1920s by prominent defense lawyers such as Max Alsberg. By the time of Leinen’s case it has changed little, retaining the feel of an old professional institution embedded within the modern courthouse.

Its daily uses are practical and social. Lawyers read newspapers, call registry offices, write pleas, or wait for proceedings to resume. A robe can be hired for one euro; a secretary records phone calls and sometimes offers sweets to lawyers she likes. More consequentially, defense counsel exchange information and advice, discuss judges, prosecutors, trials, and petitions, and form or dissolve alliances. This is where they may learn that a judge has not honored an agreement or that a prosecutor has withheld information. The room’s restricted access makes it a distinct working space within the court, where professional knowledge circulates away from clients and the public.

That informal exchange has its own weary tone. Lawyers speak frankly about failures and successes, describe clients differently from the way they might in open court, and joke about crimes as a way of coping with professional stress. The shabby sofas, threadbare upholstery, and vending-machine coffee made with powdered milk do not resemble the grandeur of the public hall. The contrast places two sides of legal work within the same building: public ceremony and private, often unglamorous professional routine.

Monumental public spaces

The courthouse presents a more imposing face to visitors. Leinen enters through the main entrance after showing his pass and passing a long line. The central hall rises thirty metres and is described as cathedral-like. Six stone figures above the stairwell represent Religion, Justice, Belligerence, Tranquillity, Falsehood, and Truth. Their arrangement makes the building’s legal symbolism conspicuous, while the stated intention behind the design is to make defendants and witnesses feel small before the power of the law.

Even the floor carries an institutional mark: the tiles are engraved with KCG, the initials of Königliches Criminal Gericht, the Royal Criminal Court. The building’s scale and imagery make law appear durable and authoritative. Yet its symbolic vocabulary includes Falsehood as well as Truth, and Belligerence as well as Tranquillity. The hall’s figures therefore do not present justice as a simple or uncontested idea; they place it among competing qualities that the institution claims to contain.

Courtroom 500 and the trial’s opening

The court’s size is also measured by the daily activity passing through it. It has twelve courtyards and seventeen staircases, and about three hundred hearings take place there each day. Court officers make rounds of the courtrooms, posting each day’s programme on the doors. For Collini’s trial, one officer fixes a single sheet beside the tall wooden double doors numbered 500. The notice identifies the 12th Criminal Court and lists the murder trial for nine o’clock.

Courtroom 500 is the building’s largest courtroom. On the morning of the opening, around a hundred and thirty people crowd onto the spectators’ benches, while the press presence is so heavy that journalists’ seats are allocated by lot. The attention is disproportionate to what the first day is expected to contain: usually, little happens beyond the reading of the arraignment. That gap between public anticipation and procedural routine is part of the scene. The court becomes a media setting even before the trial has produced new developments.

Four camera teams move through the hall filming what they can, including files, law books, and Collini in a glass enclosure behind the defense bench. Their footage has no commentary. Senior Public Prosecutor Reimers waits beside a thin red folder containing only the arraignment, while Mattinger stands separated from him by glass as counsel for the accessory prosecution. Leinen enters by a lift in a side wing and takes his place in the courtroom. The public spectacle, the sealed defendant’s enclosure, and the sparse folder all belong to the same opening: a crowded event whose formal business is expected to be brief.

Institutional setting and narrative role

Moabit Criminal Court joins administration, professional exchange, and public performance in one place. Its registry connects the case to a vast flow of files; its common room gives defense lawyers a space for restricted conversation; its monumental hall presents law through architecture and allegory; and its courtrooms turn hearings into scheduled, observable events. The movement from Leinen’s file request to the notice outside Courtroom 500 traces how an appointment becomes a public trial within the institution.

The courthouse’s contrasting spaces also shape the reader’s view of legal authority. Its stone figures and high hall suggest permanence, while the crowded offices, worn furniture, routine notices, and camera crews show an institution made up of ordinary labor and repeated procedures. At the opening of Collini’s trial, the setting does not promise an immediate revelation: it emphasizes instead the machinery, expectations, and public attention surrounding a case whose first listed business is simply the arraignment.