Ferdinand von Schirach

Ferdinand von Schirach (born in Munich in 1964) is a German criminal lawyer and writer who became one of the most widely read authors in German over a short period. He comes from a family of old noble lineage, and his name carries the weight of recent history: his paternal grandfather, Baldur von Schirach, led the Hitler Youth.

He grew up in Munich and Trossingen and attended a Jesuit school in Bavaria. After studying in Bonn and completing his legal training in Aachen and Berlin, he qualified as a lawyer in 1994, specialising in criminal law. He defended several notable clients, including the BND spy Norbert Juretzko and the former East German official Günter Schabowski in the so-called Politburo trial. Much of his fiction grows out of this courtroom work, since his short stories draw on real cases that passed through his practice.

He turned to writing late, at around forty-five. His first collection, Crimen, appeared in 2009 and stayed on the Der Spiegel bestseller list for 54 weeks. Guilt followed in 2010, and in 2011 came his first novel, The Collini Case, which begins with the murder of a industrialist with a dark wartime past and questions how lightly postwar German justice treated former Nazis. His style is spare, with short sentences and little emotional display, and his recurring themes are guilt, individual responsibility and the limits of justice. His books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages, and his stage play Terror asks the audience to act as the jury. His legacy lies in bringing criminal law into fiction and into a wider public debate about morality.