This project evolves around a statue in front of the Administrative Court in Berlin: a lion defending its cubs against a snake, commonly read as justice (lion) fighting the lie (snake). By questioning this interpretation and linking two trials a century apart, the research reflects on the contradictions of the liberal legal order.
In November 2025, I attended the last trial day of a lawsuit against the German federal government at the Administrative Court regarding weapons export licenses to Israel and, by extension, German complicity and involvement in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Both lawsuits were dismissed on procedural grounds, leaving the substantive questions of responsibility and complicity legally untouched.
The same statue stood just around the corner in front of the Old Criminal Court in Berlin, where in 1921 the trial against Soghomon Tehlirian took place. Tehlirian had assassinated Talaat Pascha, the former grand vizier of the Ottoman empire and one of the key architects of the genocide against Armenians. He was acquitted after just two days of trial, having been declared not of sound mind at the time of the murder. The acquittal was widely interpreted as “indirect” justice, as the defence had successfully shifted the attention away from the murder on the streets of Berlin to the atrocities the victim was responsible for. Due to political pressure from the German government and possibly also because of the acquittal, the trial did not manage to tackle Germany’s well-documented involvement in and support of the Armenian Genocide during WW I.
A young Raphael Lemkin who would later coin the term Genocide, followed the trial in the press and changed his studies to law. The trial against Soghomon Tehlirian and the Armenian Genocide was formative for his thinking. If the destruction of entire peoples could not be prosecuted within existing legal frameworks, then the law itself had to change. In that sense the trial can be read as one of the moments that eventually led to the concept of genocide and to the post-war formation of international criminal law. Though Lemkin’s ideas were significantly narrowed and liberalised especially regarding the structural responsibility of states.
The sculpture of the lion and the snake becomes a narrative device for thinking through these distant but connected histories. The trials and their historical and legal relations expose ruptures between the claims of the liberal legal order and the political realities in which it operates, revealing its own contradictions, double standards, and power structures. What if the snake represents a form of knowledge the legal order of the liberal nation-state cannot contain, and therefore must fight?
