Hamburg Regional Court rejects application to ban novel “Inner City Death”

The three judges of Civil Chamber 24 of the Hamburg Regional Court took three weeks to read a novel. It was worth it. Not even primarily because Christoph Peters' "Innerstädtischer Tod" unfolds a highly attractive literary game by transferring the plot structure and character constellation of Wolfgang Koeppen's 1953 novel "Death in Rome" to Berlin in 2022, but because the judges' reading produced the pleasing result that anyone else interested can continue reading the novel.

Because today the civil chamber announced its decision on the application for an interim injunction against the distribution of the novel: it is rejected. The application was submitted by the lawyers of the Berlin gallery owners Johann and Lena König, who claimed to have recognized themselves in two characters from Peters' book. Their application was linked to the notorious "Esra" decision of the Federal Constitutional Court in 2007, which had confirmed a ban on the novel "Esra" issued by the same Hamburgregional court (which is considered to be particularly plaintiff-friendly in such matters) because it violated the personal rights of the author's former partner. The Luchterhand Literaturverlag, which published "Innerstädtischer Tod", had filed a protective brief against this application.

She opposed the protection of personal rights with the freedom of art guaranteed by the constitution. And the Hamburg court followed this argument. The crucial passage in its rejection notice reads: "The chamber assumes that both applicants are recognizable to at least some of the readership due to the similarities between the applicants and the characters in the novel Konrad and Eva-Kristin Raspe described in the application. However, this alone is not sufficient to assume a violation of personal rights. The balancing of the applicants' personal rights and the freedom of art under Article 5, Paragraph 3, Sentence 1 of the Basic Law is in favor of the respondent as the publisher of the work in dispute." The applicants will bear the costs of the proceedings.

Nevertheless, it is expected that the Königs will file an appeal against the decision with the relevant higher regional court. In doing so, they did themselves a disservice with their original application. The case received widespread media attention and “Innerstadtischer Tod” has had more buyers in the past three weeks than in the entire five months since its publication. If an appeal were to be filed, the case would then be heard in public and the arguments in weighing up artistic freedom and personal rights could be generally appreciated.

Luchterhand had already announced before the court's decision that if the novel was banned, they would take the case to the Federal Constitutional Court if necessary. The publisher won the first round; we will probably only find out in a few weeks whether and when there will be a second round. If that were to happen, more judges would read "Inner City Death". And certainly an even larger audience. This is another way to get good literature out to people.