New book by Christina Clemm: Thoughts from the co-plaintiff bench

What can a woman who survives domestic violence expect in court? What a Black man who narrowly escaped racist attacks? And the person who realizes that what they experienced meets all definitions of rape? Justice? Given the numbers, given how rarely rapes end in convictions, and how rarely domestic violence is even reported, that sounds presumptuous.

Criminal lawyer Christina Clemm has been representing people in court who are affected by such systemic violence for 25 years. Her clients include women and queer people who have experienced sexual and domestic violence, including Collien Fernandes and Claudia Wuttke. There are also relatives who lost sisters, daughters or mothers to femicide and those whose family members were murdered by the racist and right-wing extremist NSU trio.

Over the years, Clemm has seen how insufficient criminal proceedings take those affected into account, especially those who are not white, male and cis: “Time and time again I see how clients next to me are being destroyed,” she writes. "While we, the court professionals, think about the rules of evidence, participation rights, the right to be heard and the necessary burdens in proceedings and accept the need to impose a lot on people, we tolerate that those affected are damaged. I am part of this violence."

The lawyer deals with the violence that, after the violence she has already experienced, emanating from the German justice system in her new book “An Indignant Plea”. The readers accompany the author to the Berlin-Moabit criminal court, into the courtroom and to the bench of the co-plaintiff. On this day, Clemm is representing her client Lina C., a woman from Syria, married to a German doctor, she has a child with him, and she was abused, drugged and raped by him during her marriage. Client C. does not exist, nor does the main hearing, both of which Clemm designed for the purpose of this book. However, the violence that C. experienced does exist.

They know hundreds of Clemm's real mandates, as do hundreds of thousands of other women who experience or have experienced sexual, psychological, physical or digital violence every year, largely perpetrated by men. A femicide occurs every third day in Germany, which means a man kills his partner or ex-partner. There is an attempted killing almost every day. The BKA's LeSuBia dark field study shows that only 3 percent of psychological and physical violence in relationships is reported. Clemm has already devoted herself to this epidemic, gender-specific violence in her two previous books, “Akteneinsicht” (2020) and “Against Misogyny” (2023).

In the scenario she designed, Clemm gets up from the co-prosecution bench and begins to speak: “Dear those present,” she begins her plea. We don't know what usually follows in this situation, because then an inner monologue begins. As a reader, this causes brief confusion until you get used to the unusual format, which allows the criminal lawyer to expand on the thoughts and associations that probably come to mind in moments like this.

The courtroom, for example. There the co-plaintiff sits and stands opposite judges, lay judges, prosecutors, defendants and witnesses, everything follows a practiced choreography: "Nothing in these rooms is left to chance, no one can choose where they sit or stand. Anyone who has decided on a particular profession also chooses their place in the courtroom." The address, the seating arrangement, the hierarchy between the individual participants, everything is clearly defined.

Christina Clemm: “An indignant plea”. Hanser Verlag, Berlin 2026, 288 pages, 24 euros

Despite the strict order, there is a human atmosphere in the court. There are connections, shared experiences, affairs. Lawyers often know which judges are considered “choleric, defense-friendly, racist, misogynistic or particularly victim-friendly.” And then those involved in the proceedings also include those affected, as well as perpetrators. Clemm talks about judges, prosecutors and colleagues who have experienced domestic and sexual violence themselves. “As a rule, they don’t report the crime,” she writes. "There are also perpetrators among us. In these rooms, here, they are particularly common."

The structural shortage of personnel, the chronic overload in the police and courts, the lack of diversity in the offices of judges and prosecutors - Clemm makes this environment, which precedes the individual case, visible. This also includes personal protective mechanisms that lawyers have acquired over the course of a long career, but which in some cases turn into human coldness: Clemm writes that she knows prosecutors “who have developed a detachment over the years that could hardly be more inhumane.”

Only after this context has been dealt with does it turn to the individual case - to the injured or their relatives, to the accused, to what happened and what can be proven. "My clients often say that they don't care what the verdict is in the end, they just want justice. Whatever they mean by that. But that's not what the court is about, it's just about the verifiability of specific acts," writes Clemm. And this verifiability is being bitterly disputed in court.

“Some defense lawyers, in the fight for their clients’ rights, continue the humiliation of the witnesses that they were already exposed to during the crimes,” writes Clemm. She describes colleagues who shout at, laugh at and insult her clients in the courtroom. She talks about defenders who claim that it is actually easiest with those who have experienced really bad things: you just have to grab them by their trauma and then they will fall apart. If they then fall apart, this disrupts the process in the – as the NSU minutes are quoted – “freeze-dried” world of the court.

Her clients, in turn, Clemm writes, "usually try desperately to stick to the rules, to give their emotions no space or volume. The pain is often not quiet, the humiliation is not silent, the contempt they experience is not tender, not quiet." While they confront the violence and retraumatization they experienced in the courtroom, they must continue to live outside the courtroom. If they have to try to come to terms with what they have experienced or mourn those who have been killed, they have responsibility for caring for children, they do wage work and perhaps take extra vacation for court hearings, they worry about their residence permit or pay off debts.

Clemm's text makes visible what Foucault called practices of power in “Surveillance and Punishment”. Those instruments that are used in the search for a supposedly neutral truth, against the witnesses, the accused and also the injured. As an experienced lawyer, Clemm is not naive; she knows the tools of her profession, the value of criminal defense lawyers and the principles of German criminal law. The principle of doubt, she writes, must be adhered to. “This of course leads to injustices that are to be tolerated in a constitutional state.”

And yet she doesn't want to accept everything: Clemm writes in her "indignant plea" against the prevailing lack of empathy towards those affected and against their invisibility. “Annoyed” can be understood in both senses of the word. What cannot happen in court - namely that the individual case is abstracted from the big picture - is what the author does in this book. She draws connections between the role in a limited process and (continuing) existence in the world, between the individual case and the structure of a misogynistic, racist, queer and transphobic society.

Sometimes she wanders off in her associations and train of thought, becomes very large and general, and occasionally the tone becomes preachy. However, Clemm remains clear in her core message: Even in the courtroom, a system is supported that normalizes violence against some people, sometimes even hurting them more instead of protecting them; What happens in the courtroom also carries responsibility. And too often this is not complied with. The tireless criminal lawyer makes it clear time and time again that this cannot be good enough.