German reputations live on beyond the grave, even Nazis’

Since the 1960s screenwriters have vied to produce the silliest film about the return of the Nazis, from Zombie Lake, in which undead SS goons rise from a puddle in France, to Iron Sky, where descendants of the “master race” invade our planet from the far side of the Moon.

But no B-movie plot is quite as strange as the truth — under a quirk of modern German law accessories of the Third Reich can exact vengeance from beyond the grave.

Two years ago a criminal complaint was filed against Takis Wurger, a reporter at Der Spiegel, over his novel Stella. The book is based on the true story of Stella Goldschlag, a middle-class Jewish woman in Berlin who denounced hundreds of other Jews to the Gestapo in an attempt to save her parents from being deported.

Goldschlag died in 1994. Her executors tried unsuccessfully to have the novel censored or pulped, saying that it had “denigrated her memory” for “marketing purposes”. This was not the first posthumous lawsuit from the Nazi era. In 1936 Klaus Mann published Mephisto, a satirical portrait of his former friend and brother-in-law Gustaf Grundgens, who had embraced Hitler’s regime and become one of its most successful actors and directors. Thirty-five years later Germany’s highest court upheld a ban on the book, ruling that it had violated Grundgens’s rights to dignity and personality, even though he had died in 1963.

Read the article by Oliver Moody in The Australian (from The Times).