Stammheim Terrorism Trials

The Stammheim Terrorism Trials, held in Stammheim Prison in the 1970s, are presented as a major test of the German legal system. In a period when many feared that democracy itself was under threat, defendants were treated first and foremost as enemies of the state. The trials made the defense of their rights a public and institutional struggle, and helped define Richard Mattinger’s professional commitment to legality and fair process.

Background and Courtroom Climate

At the beginning of the student riots, anxiety about the stability of democracy shaped public attitudes toward the accused. The defendants faced a purpose-built prison before a verdict had been delivered. Laws were changed in connection with the trials, defendants went on hunger strike, and the presiding judge had to withdraw from the main trial on grounds of bias. Court proceedings became a sustained contest over the conditions under which defendants could be represented and judged.

The intensity of that contest altered the role of defense counsel. Lawyers shouted at judges, and the courtroom was described as a place where a kind of war was being waged. The work taught defense lawyers to be more self-confident and made the principle of a fair trial newly urgent: justice, the account emphasizes, could be done only if the process itself was fair.

Mattinger’s Role

Mattinger acted for the defense in the trials, and his courtroom appearances became media events. A weekly magazine praised his intelligence, while public opinion often took his advocacy to mean that he had lent his voice to the terrorists. The narrative separates that public impression from his actual position. Although he had attended demonstrations and met student spokesmen, their rhetoric alarmed him when he saw them becoming intoxicated by their own words.

Mattinger’s work was therefore not an endorsement of the defendants’ politics. He represented legality and the constitutional state founded on law. That distinction gives his participation its particular significance: he defended the procedural rights of people treated as enemies without making their cause his own.

Excess, Restraint, and Legal Principle

The trials also exposed the risks of advocacy under extreme pressure. Some defense lawyers made common cause with their clients and crossed the boundary into offending themselves; the account presents these outcomes as tragedies born of rage. Mattinger is explicitly distinguished from those lawyers. The contrast shows how the struggle for defendants’ rights could both strengthen legal practice and tempt practitioners to abandon the limits that gave their work legitimacy.

His example links adversarial force to institutional restraint. The trials demanded that lawyers challenge the state and the court, but Mattinger’s defining position was that the contest must remain within legality. The defense of a fair trial was not a substitute for law; it was a condition of justice under law.

Legacy in the Novel

The history of the Stammheim Terrorism Trials helps explain Mattinger’s authority in the later Collini proceedings. There, he dominates the courtroom by turning expert evidence into language the judges and spectators can understand. His questioning makes the prosecution’s account vivid, and later he uses the legal record concerning Hans Meyer to argue that Meyer met the criteria for a lawful hostage shooting. The procedural skill associated with Mattinger thus has force in both directions: it can clarify evidence and expose a past official decision, but it can also produce a legal conclusion that does not resolve the moral question raised by that history.

The trials’ lasting importance in the novel lies in this tension. Mattinger’s commitment to legality begins in a context where defendants’ rights had to be defended against public fear and state power. In the later case, the same confidence in legal procedure confronts the consequences of an earlier investigation being discontinued under the statute of limitations. The trials stand as a precedent for defending fair process, while the novel asks whether procedural legality by itself can amount to a reckoning with historical responsibility.