I had a happy childhood. I was loved and had everything a child could want. Despite this, I grew up in a world of silence; things my brother and I were only vaguely aware of.
It was the silence of the past that characterized our family. Only later did I find out the details. Psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham captured the impact of silence in the words that open my book "The Road to Nuremberg":
What haunts us is not the dead, but the voids that others' secrets leave within us.
The others' secrets were cruel events that no one needs to be reminded of. Our silence was a German silence, born of the horrors that befell my grandparents and my mother. The consequence was that there was nothing German in the house. No dishwasher or music, no car, no books, nothing at all. Or, well, not completely nothing: somehow German – or rather Austrian – food crept over the threshold. I am still very fond of schnitzel and strudel.
Over the years things changed for me. At the university I met a German lecturer, who was actually Austrian. A wonderful man, not a monster, and we became friends. As a lecturer, I taught, among other things, fantastic young German students. Nor was there anything monstrous about them. We talked about the past in an open and honest way.
Several of my good German friends are in the audience today. An actor. A museum director. A lawyer who was born in the East. And the son of a lawyer who was convicted and hanged at Nuremberg for murdering four million people, including eighty of my family members. Niklas Frank has put silence behind him and dealt with his father's crimes, his family's history, his country's history. He is my friend. That he is here with us today says more than words ever could.
My academic work and my work as a lawyer are characterized by independence and integrity, as well as a fair assessment of the facts, wherever they lead. A lawyer cannot simply take someone's side: you have to represent both those you like and those you don't like, whose values you may share or loathe. And one is not accused of acting against the interests of one's own nation, or against any group one is considered to represent. But being a lawyer and an academic doesn't mean I don't lack opinions. I have opinions, and I will return to them.
One thing led to another. An open mind made German a part of my life. A dishwasher here, a car there, a footballer – Kai Havertz is a striker at my club Arsenal – then music, German expressionist art and books.
Some works have had a great influence on me, for example Sebastian Haffner's "The History of a German Man", for which I recently wrote the foreword for an English re-edition. As a judicial candidate for the Berlin Supreme Court in March 1933, he witnessed the collapse of Germany's bulwarks, an instant end to constitutionalism, legal certainty, and a large body of court lawyers destroyed by nationalistic and personal ambitions, corruption, and the cult of personality. As the Prussian legal system collapsed, so did the rights of individuals and groups. The traditional legal society "disappeared overnight".
Does that sound familiar? I want to express my full respect for the lawyers and judges in the United States and elsewhere who are standing firm and acting independently despite the attacks. Sebastian Haffner reminds us of what we are capable of, and how easy it can be. There is no better description. Chapter 30 of "The Story of a German Man" should be compulsory reading in school.
The years passed. I wrote academic papers and worked as a lawyer in international courts, in cases about the environment, borders, war and violations of international rights.
So I was invited to Lviv in Ukraine to give lectures on those of my cases that dealt with international law. During the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the city of Lviv was called Lemberg, and Leon Buchholz was born there in 1904. When the Russians invaded in 1914, he fled to Vienna. In 1938 he was stripped of his citizenship and deported. He ended up in Paris and became my French grandfather. I went to Lviv for the lecture, but above all to find his birthplace. It was about memory and identity: about finding out who he was, to find out who I am.
Before the trip, my mother gave me two bags filled with other people's painful secrets. I was fifty years old. I had never seen the birth certificates, the swastika stamped passports, the deportation orders and the other documents that filled in the gaps in our family history.
I found Leon's house. And I gave my talk, on the origins of the concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide - the fruits of National Socialism, you might say. Amazingly, it turned out that the origin of these concepts came from Lviv itself, from two men who once studied there.
Despite the horrors to come, Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphaël Lemkin did not cower in a corner and cry. They devised ideas and wrote books – Lauterpacht on crimes against humanity and individuals, Lemkin on genocide and groups. In Nuremberg, their ideas became international law, which I tell about in the book "The Road to Nuremberg". Last month I returned to Lviv, where the mayor unveiled a commemorative plaque on the building where the two had once studied criminal law. The people of Ukraine defend the Nuremberg principles. They need our support and our solidarity, and they should get that. Their fight is ours.
In Lviv, I got a writer's voice, a voice that is about both the individual and the group, that touches on questions of identity, memory and silence. There is nothing original about it. Laurent Naouri sang "Erbarme dich" from Bach's Matthew Passion. The Arian is a prayer for mercy and it follows Peter's denial of the truth - "Ich kenne des Menschen nicht" - and his moral breakdown when he realizes what he has done - "[Er] weinete bitterlich".
Passion binds two characters together in "The Road to Nuremberg". In Cambridge, Hersch Lauterpacht struggled to write the closing arguments for the Nuremberg trials. "I find comfort in the 'touching notes' of the Matthew Passion," he told his son Eli, who later became my teacher.
Meanwhile, in a cell in Nuremberg, Nazi Hans Frank tells a visitor that what helps him get through the trial is "imagining that I'm listening to the Matthew Passion."
So strange: a defendant and his prosecutor, on opposite sides of the courtroom, finding solace in a shared musical space. Lauterpacht understood Bach's works, Frank did not. It reflects a pietistic notion, which downplays the priest's role as officiant in the congregation and instead emphasizes the supremacy of the individual.
This idea characterized Lauterpacht's and Lemkin's respective views of the law – the individual or the group? The difference remains to this day. It characterizes today's conflicts and the endeavor to which this award is dedicated. The peace.
Peace requires justice. Justice requires rules. Rules require laws. And laws are universal, not selective. This is what we call the rule of law.
But the law does not operate in a vacuum. I have learned that. The authors and literature play a role in that they can take us to places where lawyers and judges dare not go. As Haffner pointed out: when the laws disappeared, so did "the world of books and discussion groups".
My latest book, "Londres 38", is about this, among other things, about Augusto Pinochet and his era. The Chilean courts did not bother to deal with the crimes, so the authors had to break their silence. Pablo Neruda made the prediction, then Bruce Chatwin, Pedro Lemebel and Roberto Bolaño narrated.
It is the same today, when nationalism and populism feed racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other things. Borders are violated, civilians are attacked, crimes are committed, violence and impunity run rampant.
Even nature is under threat. This summer's climate crisis has confirmed that. In April next year, I will publish my new book "The fifth crime", which is an appeal to add another international crime to the four formulated to protect us humans. Those who destroy nature should also be brought to international justice. In writers such as Rachel Carson and Christopher Stone's succession, the crime is called ecocide.
As if dependence on fossil fuels and the destruction of the nature that sustains us were not enough, we have also decided to acquire a new dependence: technology and artificial intelligence that threaten to destroy us.
The human condition would be impossible to imagine, where we are caught between decency and destruction. How would one even begin? Read the introduction to Eric Vuillard's novel "The Agenda" — in which a collection of industry tycoons in 1933 come to an agreement with Mr. Hitler — then watch the gathering of leading tech tycoons at the inauguration of America's 47th president, who struck a deal of his own.
Ambition, greed, narcissism, fragile male egos. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. We trudge along in the same old ruts.
What can we do about this?
Every community has rules and the international community is no exception. It is called international law, and has existed for centuries. Most of these rules work fine. They are not in danger of disappearing, even if some are roughly mined.
It's time to stand up for them, not stay silent. It is time to face the truth, to protect our principles and build on them. It is time to resist and not despair, because the rule of law is a long-term effort. We can learn the lesson from Lauterpacht and Lemkin. When the enemy grabs you by the throat - as Spencer Tracy put it in the movie "Judgment at Nuremberg" - it's time to defend your principles.
And these principles encompass the legal language.
A few years ago, I represented one of the partial cases brought by The Gambia at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where they accused Myanmar of genocide against the Rohingya people. There was not much I agreed with my opponent, a Nobel laureate, in court that day, but one sentence was memorable: "International law may well be our only global value system," Aung San Suu Kyi told the judges.
She was right. I am not naive: international law is neither perfect, fully effective, nor immune to brute force. But a world without rules is just unreasonable. And the rules don't just apply to the others, to our enemies. They are universal. They apply equally to us and our friends.
This brings me back to Germany, which more than any other country has dealt with the crimes of its past and shaped me into who I am. But there still hangs a heavy burden of responsibility, like the albatross that hung around the neck of the old sailor in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's memorable poem.
The Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 were horrific. They recalled the pogroms against Jews that prompted Rafael Lemkin to coin the term genocide. That day I was deeply shocked, but I also feared what would follow. Together with other British Jewish lawyers, I wrote a column for the Financial Times.
We presented three arguments.
First: Hamas' attacks on Israeli soil were a gross violation of fundamental values within international law.
Second: Israel had the right to act in self-defense, just like any other state.
And thirdly: the right to self-defense was not unlimited but had to be exercised within the framework of international law.
I stand by these points and regret that our fears were borne out. International crimes were committed on the territory of Israel on 7 October and subsequently on the territory of Palestine, in Gaza and in the West Bank.
How these crimes should be designated is disputed. Rafael Lemkin would probably have called both genocide, but his definition set a lower threshold than that later adopted in the 1948 Genocide Convention. The International Criminal Court has indicted leaders on both sides for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not—at least not so far—for genocide.
South Africa has brought the case to the International Court of Justice, which is another court in The Hague. It is claimed that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Next month, that court is due to hand down its judgment in the Gambia v. Myanmar case. The interpretation and application of the 1948 Convention will then determine whether South Africa wins or loses.
However the verdicts fall, I'm afraid the debate over names is a pointless distraction. There is no hierarchy that separates the different international crimes. Killing as a war crime or as a crime against humanity is no less serious than genocide. They are heinous crimes regardless.
The crimes require accountability and must be recognized as crimes. And those who denounce the crimes – no matter how they call them – should not be silenced, excluded or punished for exercising their freedom of expression. Writers and journalists, singers and poets, filmmakers and others, must be able to tell their stories. Hiding the crimes is indecent. Silencing those who try to report the crimes is indecent.
Germany has singled out and acted against many horrors, from the Yazidis to the Uighurs, from Syria to Iran, from Myanmar to Sudan. But when it comes to Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, the German silence has been deafening. The restrictions in the debate are worrying in this context. This is even more true after the International Court of Justice's clear, advisory opinion from 2024 on the Palestinian right to self-determination.
Britain, Canada, France and other countries have since recognized a Palestinian state. These days they have introduced sanctions. The British Foreign Minister has described the actions in the occupied territories as ethnic cleansing.
In Germany, people are well acquainted with ethnic cleansing and its meaning. So why this silence?
Literature helps us understand why it can be difficult to tell the truth. In the book "The Rat Line" I wrote about the son of a Nazi governor who admits his father's involvement in mass murder, but cannot bear to call him a criminal. In stark contrast to this, the governor's grandson has found the strength to tell it like it is and let the facts speak. It's courage.
I understand that a speaker's identity and background is relevant. I am also aware that some German leaders have begun to express themselves more sharply in their criticism of Israel's actions. That is right, if so tentative and limited. It is not anti-Semitic. It is not "anti-Israel". That is the truth.
The books are a kind of literary fight against silence. Family silence. My own and others'.
And a true, non-racist "state interest" for Germany, eighty years after Nuremberg, must still be to break the silence about international crimes, wherever they are committed and whoever commits them. Even if they are committed by friends, well especially when they are committed by friends. This includes crimes that can be committed by a state.
