One of the most intriguing and enigmatic figures of early twentieth-century Germany was Hans Litten. The drama of his short life revolved around some of the sharpest conflicts of his day. Was he a Jew or Christian? A religious mystic or communist? He certainly was an imaginative thinker and daring lawyer. And an anti-Nazi. This fine biography solves some of the riddles of the man and captures the essence of his character like no other.

Litten's life essentially fell into a prologue, three acts, and an epilogue. The prologue set the stage with the convulsions of Jewish-Christian integration in pre-World War I Germany. Litten's father was a converted Jew, an ambitious law professor, and a conservative nationalist; his mother, hailing from a family of pastors, was a devoted wife and connoisseur of art history. His father—patriarchal, authoritarian, and distant—insisted that his son pursue a legal career.

Litten took the path his father demanded but defied his values for eight years (1920-1928), becoming one of the most influential participants in the Jewish youth movement in Königsberg. He devoted himself to Judaism and Jewish mysticism, rejected bourgeois values, and promoted leftist political activism. Upon finishing law school, he burst upon Berlin's legal scene, litigating against the Nazis with unprecedented aggressiveness. He used his legal battles to expose Nazi outrages, and he tested the boundaries of legal tradition and habit. For example, at his most theatrical, he purported to develop evidence by examining witnesses at public rallies. In court at the Eden Dance Palace trial in 1931, he caused a sensation when he cross-examined Hitler.

The dramatic confrontation between Hitler and Litten proved the young lawyer's undoing. The Nazis arrested Litten in their first round-up of political opponents after the Reichstag Fire on February 28, 1933; brutally tortured him, damaging his sight and hearing and leaving him crippled and hobbling on a cane; and for the next five years moved him from one concentration camp to another. For a time, he was able to study and teach fellow inmates about art history and literature. But broken both physically and emotionally, and despairing of ever being released, he committed suicide on February 4, 1938.

The epilogue is the story of the campaign for Litten's release. His friends and other activists facilitated underground reports in anti-Nazi emigree communities, inquiries from the International Red Cross, and a petition to Hitler from ninety-nine British jurists, not to mention one early hare-brained scheme for a prison break. But Litten's most tireless advocate was his mother, Irmgard. Drawing upon her connections in conservative nationalist circles, she pursued every possible contact, beseeching Gestapo officers and concentration camp commanders, obtaining audiences with Nazi officials as prominent as Werner von Blomberg and Roland Freisler, and writing Göring, Himmler, and even Hitler. After Litten's death, she made her way to England, where she used her son's fate to denounce the Nazis, most importantly in her 1940 book, A Mother Fights Hitler.

Litten's life deserves a Freud for exploring his psychology, a Marx for capturing his leftist fighting spirit, and a Gershom Scholem or Reinhold Niebuhr for understanding his religious sentiments. Maybe his mother has already interpreted Litten's significance much as Paul interpreted that of Jesus. But then Litten needs historians to get around her religious interpretation and uncover the historical figure.

The historical inquiry is necessary because in past portrayals the three parts of Litten's life seem at odds with one another. While in concentration camps, did Litten really harbor the Catholic religious fervor that his mother's account suggests? If so, how can we reconcile that religious fervor with Litten's unrelenting legal battles in the late Weimar Republic for communists against the Nazis? And how can we reconcile such late Catholic religious fervor and such mid-life secular political legal battles with Litten's early flirtation with Judaism?

The riddle, then, in understanding Litten is that each part of his life seems to make sense only when separated from the whole. The contribution of Denkmalsfigur is that it cracks the riddle and makes sense of the whole without ignoring any of its parts (even if at times the book reveals its insights implicitly rather than explicitly). The book reveals two keys, one in Litten's psychology, the other in his worldview.

Psychologically, a classic Oedipal conflict fired Litten's passions. Oppressed by his domineering father, Litten responded with rage. He openly practiced Judaism to embarrass his father and the hypocrisy of his conversion. Sublimating the rage, he defied authority in general, first by promoting the youth movement's anti-patriarchalism and later by exposing the hypocrisy of the courts that condemned the communists while indulging the Nazis. On the other hand, enamored of his nurturing mother, Litten never lost his dependence on her comfort. He adopted her love for art history, which sparked his intellectual excitement when he was in the youth movement as well as in concentration camps.

Regarding worldview, Litten left many contemporaries and later historians confused because of his idiosyncratic mingling of political radicalism with religious communal beliefs. The politics of his anti-authoritarian convictions, even as they oscillated between anarchism and communist sympathies, may be easy enough to grasp. But Litten also harbored a non-sectarian religious belief that creativity and culture arose from a community beyond the individual and that art was the medium for reaching a universal metaphysical reality. He developed these ideas while in the youth movement; he maintained them during his legal career, although at the time he expressed them only privately to friends and colleagues, not publicly in his political battles in court; and he returned to them while writing letters and teaching fellow inmates in concentration camps.

The most important historical event in Litten's short legal career was, of course, his cross-examination of Hitler. Indeed that event provides the titles for the two other full-length biographies of Litten, namely, those of the East German historian Carlheinz von Brück, Ein Mann, der Hitler in die Enge Trieb. Hans Littens Kampf gegen den Faschismus (Berlin [East]: Union-Verlag, 1975), and of the legal historian Benjamin Hett, Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Denkmalsfigur asks the question that previous historians have overlooked: was Litten's cross-examination effective? The answer is not yes or no; the answer is that the question itself forces us to look back at the event from the perspective of contemporaries rather than of later heroic constructs of the young saint who humiliated the devil. The point illustrates the contribution of this book. It succeeds in making sense of Litten by delving into an impressive array of sources, by analyzing them with a sober detachment, and by debunking myths, not with smug satisfaction but with balanced assessments. It reclaims to historical reality a significant lawyer in his oddity and his brilliance, with his vulnerabilities and his courage, and in his flawed humanity during his fight against unspeakable oppression.