Avoidance and Retreating

Escape is presented as more than flight: it is also the act of arriving somewhere, and the refuge Michael Berg finds in legal history remains entangled with the past from which he seeks distance. His career offers intellectual shelter, but his reflections distinguish genuine historical engagement from using the past to avoid the present and future.

Refusal of the Legal Professions

After his state examination, Michael struggles to choose a legal profession. The roles he observed at Hanna Schmitz’s trial fail to offer him a position he can accept: prosecution and defense seem to him equally reductive, while judging appears to be the most extreme simplification of all. He also rejects administrative work. Having trained in a local government office, he remembers its rooms, corridors, smells, and employees as gray, sterile, and dreary.

The difficulty is not simply a lack of available jobs. Michael cannot imagine himself inside the courtroom roles through which responsibility had been argued and assigned at the trial. His response to those roles is part of his understanding of escape: rather than choose among them, he looks for a path that will remove him from their immediate demands.

Legal History as Refuge

A professor of legal history offers Michael a research position, giving him a way forward when few legal careers appeal to him. Gertrud calls this choice an evasion from life’s challenges and responsibilities. Michael concedes that she is right, and remembers feeling relieved. He tells himself, and Gertrud, that the position is temporary and that he is young enough to enter a conventional branch of law after several years.

That promised return never takes place. Michael’s first retreat is followed by another: he leaves the university for a research institution, seeking a niche where he can pursue legal history without needing anyone or disturbing anyone. The movement is both professional and personal. Rather than return to the roles he declined, he settles more deeply into work that gives him distance from other people and their claims on him.

The Past and the Present

Michael later revises what escape means. It entails not only running away, but also reaching a destination. The past he enters as a legal historian, he argues, is no less alive than the present. History is not a detached landscape that can simply be observed from a safe distance: doing it means building bridges between past and present and taking an active part on both banks.

This connection is especially clear in Michael’s research on law in the Third Reich. In that field, the past and present meet within a single reality. Escape, he insists, is not the decision to study history; it is the determined concentration on the present and future that refuses to see the legacy of the past as something that continues to mark those who must live with it. His distinction makes historical research ethically ambivalent: it can be a shelter from responsibility, but it can also expose the continuity that such shelter tries to conceal.

Historical Progress and Its Limits

Michael acknowledges that legal history also offered pleasures less urgently tied to the present. Studying the legal codes and drafts of the Enlightenment made him happy: they arose from a belief that the world possessed an inherent good order and could be brought into that order. He was drawn to the creation of legal provisions, paragraph by paragraph, and to laws that sought beauty as a means toward truth.

For a long time, he believed legal history showed progress toward greater beauty, truth, rationality, and humanity, despite terrible reversals. That confidence eventually proved to be an illusion. He then imagined a different course for legal history: after countless disruptions, confusions, and delusions, it reaches its own beginning, only to set out from that starting point again. The image denies a simple escape into a story of steady improvement. History returns to beginnings rather than leaving them behind, so the past cannot be made harmless merely by placing it at a distance.