Richard Mattinger

Richard Mattinger is a prominent defense lawyer whose history gives the legal conflict in the Hans Meyer murder trial a second dimension: he once fought for fair process when defendants were treated as enemies of the state, but now moves among wealthy clients whose cases often end without a full trial. His courtroom challenge to Caspar Leinen turns that history into a question of what the law can establish—and whose interests its procedures protect.

Identity and Background

Mattinger is in his mid-sixties, fit and active, with dark-blue eyes described as unusually intense. A hand grenade tore off his left forearm when he was eight, in the last days of the war. That injury is part of his physical presence, but the portrait does not reduce him to it: the defining tension is between his public identity as an advocate of legality and the increasingly elevated social world in which he works.

His private life is marked by an absence he has chosen to preserve. Nearly twenty years earlier, his wife found their house on Wannsee, when properties by the lake were cheap. She furnished it and died soon afterwards; Mattinger has changed nothing in the house since. He recognizes that her judgment about the property was vindicated by rising real-estate values, but the domestic setting is also a record he has left untouched. The scene of him thinking about her, even while his attention is occupied by a much younger Ukrainian girlfriend, places memory and present-day transactional intimacy side by side.

Mattinger regards the relationship with his girlfriend as a reciprocal arrangement that may be agreeable to both parties for a time. Her repeated declarations of love do not persuade him otherwise. The account makes his own response notably unsentimental: he accepts the arrangement without confusing it with lasting attachment. This private pragmatism sits uneasily beside his public commitment to a constitutional state founded on law, without cancelling it.

Career and Legal Principles

Mattinger’s reputation was made in the terrorist trials at Stammheim Prison in the 1970s. Those proceedings were a struggle over the conditions of trial itself: the defendants were treated first as enemies of the state, a prison had been built for them before the verdict, laws changed during the trials, defense lawyers confronted judges, defendants went on hunger strike, and the presiding judge had to withdraw from the main trial over bias. In that climate, defending procedural rights could mean resisting the assumption that the accused had already forfeited them.

Public opinion sometimes treated Mattinger as the terrorists’ spokesman, believing that he had lent them a clearer and more effective voice. The account distinguishes that perception from his own position. He had attended demonstrations and met student spokesmen, but was alarmed by the way their rhetoric intoxicated them. His stated commitment was not to their cause: he represented legality. The distinction helps explain why he could defend the rights of defendants without, in the book’s characterization, joining their political project.

He went on to act as defense counsel in almost two thousand trials. He had never lost a murder trial, and none of his clients had received a life sentence. Yet his clientele changed over time: speculators and building contractors gave way to bankers, company chairmen, and established families. He seldom appeared in court in the later phase of his career. Many proceedings against his clients were dropped by the state prosecutor’s office in return for large payments, before a full-scale trial could take place. His faith in the constitutional state remained, even as the courtroom battles that had formed his reputation seemed to have been won.

The Meyer Trial and Leinen

Mattinger enters the Hans Meyer case from a position of seniority and established prestige. In the common room at Moabit Criminal Court, Caspar Leinen approaches him while carrying the file and introduces himself as counsel appearing in the same trial. Their brief first encounter places them within the court’s everyday professional world, where lawyers read papers and prepare among colleagues; the later confrontation reveals how far their accounts of the case diverge.

On the next day of the trial, Mattinger rises with visible concentration and addresses the judges. He restates Leinen’s account of the motive: Hans Meyer ordered the shooting of Fabrizio Collini’s father, and Collini avenged him fifty-seven years later. Mattinger does not deny that a motive can appear honorable. Instead, he argues that if the shooting was legally permissible under the law in force at the time, that motive takes on a different meaning: Collini killed a man who, in that legal framework, had done what the law considered correct.

He then turns to the role of the accessory prosecution, which he says has a duty to protect the victim. His insistence that Hans Meyer—not the defendant—is still the victim of the case is a deliberate counterweight to Leinen’s presentation of Collini’s history. Mattinger thus contests not only the legal interpretation of the wartime shooting but also the trial’s moral framing: the past can explain Collini’s act without, in Mattinger’s argument, displacing Meyer from the position of victim in the present proceedings.

The Earlier Investigation

Mattinger’s questioning of Dr Schwan brings an institutional history into the open. After learning that Meyer had not even been questioned, he turns toward the spectators’ and press benches and points out the gap between the accusations, the Stuttgart investigation, and the absence of any charge or conviction. He notes that the court has just heard that Meyer met the criteria for a legitimate shooting of hostages, then asks what became of the proceedings against him.

The answer is that they were discontinued. Mattinger confirms that the Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office dropped its investigation into Meyer on 7 July 1969. The date and the procedural outcome make the earlier inquiry more than a vague piece of background: Meyer was investigated, a file was prepared, and the case was ended without his being questioned. Mattinger’s intervention forces those facts into the trial record, even as his argument elsewhere supports the legal permissibility of Meyer’s wartime conduct.

Character and Narrative Significance

Mattinger is neither simply the defender of a fair trial nor merely an agent of privilege. His history establishes that procedural fairness mattered when the defendants were widely regarded as state enemies; his later career shows him representing clients whose wealth can end proceedings through payment rather than a public trial. The contrast is not resolved into a claim that his earlier convictions were false. Instead, it exposes the distance between a principle he still professes and a legal world in which access to that principle is uneven.

In the Meyer trial, this complexity becomes active. Mattinger insists on legality as the measure of the past and on Meyer’s status as the victim in the present, while his questioning also draws attention to the prosecution that stopped without questioning Meyer. He therefore sharpens the trial’s central tension rather than settling it: what the law once permitted, what the state later investigated, and what justice now demands do not automatically coincide.