For three days a neighbourhood dispute between a middle-aged German pensioner and a young Turkish-German family was the object of my work. The escalation was classic. At some point everyone had been called something. At some point the police were at the door. At some point two sides, each with a lawyer, were glaring at each other across a table, ready to go to court over a garden fence.
Cases like this — and every lawyer in a small town has such cases on the file — show something important. Once the slogan-level of the conflict is reached, everything becomes a caricature. The pensioner is the "nazi" who insults the family; the family is the "damn foreigners" who play music at two in the morning. What nobody sees any more — and what even the lawyers have to remind themselves of — is that both sides, ordinarily, are people who do their shopping, drive to the same hairdresser, have lived in the same street for twenty years and, before this escalated, exchanged a "good morning" at the gate.
The task of a lawyer in such a dispute — and this is why I like civil law even in these moments — is to de-escalate. There is no applause for that; it is, frankly, a thankless kind of work. The client wants their attorney to fight. The opposing side wants their attorney to fight. Everyone is convinced that the other side is, finally, getting the blunt message they deserve. And into this storm one is supposed to place the calm sentence: "Let us try to find an agreement the two of you can live with next year, too."
What surprises me, still, after so many years in this field, is how often such an attempt succeeds. The pensioner, when he takes the Turkish-German father aside in the lawyer's corridor for five minutes, discovers that the man is an electrician who has worked for the same firm for eighteen years, that his son is in the same football club as the pensioner's grandson, and that the music at two a.m. came from a wedding that lasted two hours longer than the family had expected. The father, in turn, discovers that the pensioner's wife died two years ago, that the dog that barks incessantly is the only thing that keeps him in the garden, and that the word he shouted in German was, in fact, the strongest thing he had said in thirty years.
Out of this small mutual understanding — and out of a legal framework that allows for a settlement rather than a full-blown verdict — emerges what the two of them had lost for weeks: the possibility of living next door to each other again. The lawyer has helped. But the achievement is the clients'. They have been brave enough to change their own image of the other.
None of this applies to the rare case in which one side actually is what the other side accused them of being. Then the law takes its harder course. But in ninety percent of neighbourhood disputes, what we are dealing with is two ordinary people who have lost their ordinary voice and need, for a little while, a substitute. That is what lawyers are for.
Two people who do their shopping at the same supermarket cannot afford to hate each other for ten years. The law helps them to remember that.