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Attending Judge Drenkmann's state funeral in West Berlin last week, West German President Walter Scheel cited disturbing parallels with the "carrousel of terror and murder, hatred and violence" between extremists of right and left that finally helped bring down the Weimar Republic in 1933. He appealed to Berliners to put aside "thoughts of revenge." Nonetheless, anxiety over the violence was apparently prompting West Germans to sacrifice at least one traditional civil liberty: the right of lawyers and clients to discuss their case in private. Last week, amid charges that lawyers for the Baader-Meinhof prisoners had spirited messages out of prison, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt sent a draft bill to the Bundestag that could monitor lawyer-client meetings whenever the accused was charged with a "grave crime." The bill also provides for trial even if a defendant is too weak, presumably from hunger strikes, to attend.
It is expected to pass easily.