In Court: Trials in Contemporary Literature

A legal trial produces not only a verdict but also a narrative. During the proceedings, competing representations of reality collide, as facts are interpreted and publicly scrutinized for their truthfulness. Literature takes up this motif and gives voice to those absent from the proceedings, offers multiple perspectives, and calls the official verdict’s authority into question.

Against this backdrop, the project examines the depiction of legal proceedings in contemporary German and French literature from a comparative perspective. Many works critically engage with high-profile trials. For example, Emmanuel Carrère’s V13 addresses the proceedings following the November 2015 Paris attacks, and Kathrin Röggla’s Laufendes Verfahren deals with the NSU trial in Germany. Other texts turn to the workings of everyday justice, such as Joy Sorman’s Le Témoin. In these works, the trial emerges as a paradigmatic scene through which practices of truth-making and social norms can be explored. Literary representations of real or fictional trials, whether historically significant or mundane, enable us to critique the dramaturgy of judgment and consider alternative perspectives on crime, responsibility, and justice. In this context, the courtroom becomes a site where social conflicts are negotiated. Not least because of its language and inherent forms of violence, it is also a place where the justice system itself may be put on trial.

But literature, too, is put to the test. Authors who recount or accompany legal proceedings bring their own preconceptions, blind spots, and narrative habits to the task, thereby shaping their portrayals. Adopting a critical stance toward the judiciary has indeed become a convention of socially engaged writing—one that calls for reflection. Engaging with the (literary) trial raises a host of ethical and aesthetic questions: Who is allowed to speak? Whose perspective is privileged? What positions are readers invited to adopt?