Wartime Romance
December 17, 2007
A 65-year-old romance was fresh fodder for a lawsuit in Germany, when nonagenarian author Lisl Urban went to court to defend her right to evoke an old love affair.
On Monday, a Leipzig court rejected a complaint by Urban's then-lover, now aged 92, that Urban's depiction showed him in an unfavorable light.
Court rejects claim for changes
In her autobiography, Urban briefly described her 1942 love affair in the Czech capital Prague with a German army captain she calls Captain Eike (a pseudonym,) and how she became pregnant and prepared to move to Poland to join him.
But Eike jilted her and married a Polish woman instead.
The court agreed the story was clearly about the complainant. But the judges ruled that rather than being defamatory, the book in fact treated him kindly. They rejected his demand for changes in the memoir.
Dark past in Warsaw Ghetto
The publishers told the court there was another, yet darker side to Eike, which had not been mentioned in the story.
He had not been in the German army at all, but had been an officer in the SS, the Nazi Party's brutal security force. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem said his unit had killed people in the Warsaw Ghetto, where Jews were detained in the Polish capital.