What is one to do when one spouse wants to end the relationship while the other would gladly keep it going? A question that, on the face of it, has no answer. And all that can really be done for such couples is to give them time to think. The law of the Federal Republic of Germany takes account of the many different circumstances that lead people to decide on divorce, and allows a full year for that final decision to mature. Sometimes one spouse wants to speed the procedure up; another keeps hoping for reconciliation and would like the statutory period extended. And then a lawyer's help is often indispensable. A client of our law firm was hoping to save his marriage.
The broken mirror
Mark and Katerina married in 2012. He comes from a family of ethnic Germans from Russia; she is a Ukrainian national. Whether the couple burned with passionate love for one another is hard to say today. Even Mark and Katerina themselves would likely tell diametrically opposite versions of the day they decided to become husband and wife. Relations had soured so badly after three years together that an objective view of things was scarcely possible any longer. The young couple lived a thoroughly Berlin sort of life: he was on welfare, she had found some simple job. By Mark's account, Katerina was a very religious woman, which is why visits to places of entertainment were strictly forbidden. The most the couple ever allowed themselves was visiting friends. Life went on evenly and quietly until Katerina decided to file for divorce. In April 2015, Mark received the divorce petition. The law sets a one-year period running from the start of separation. The clock started ticking. In March of the year following the filing, Mark turned to our firm for help, hoping the broken mirror of their relationship could still be mended.
The particular features of the couple's separate living arrangement were these: they lived in a one-room flat that had space only for a sofa, a computer desk, a television, and a small wardrobe. Cramped living quarters and the physical impossibility of never brushing against one another are, however, no bar to being treated as living apart. But this separateness has to be proven somehow, where one side disputes the characterization. Mark disputed it flatly. On his account, the two of them had lived together the whole time in harmony, as husband and wife. As a couple, they had visited relatives and friends together — the last such visit having taken place in February 2016. And Mark named witnesses. It's true the disappointed husband did not deny that, in the last couple of months before the separation, problems had crept into their intimate relationship: Katerina, he said, had regularly cited tiredness after work. But before long, Mark learned that Katerina had a lover.
It happened on a day in March 2016. Spring was in the air. Hormones were at play in young bodies. Mark was making lunch. It was Sunday. Katerina had come back from church and, waiting for food more solid than the spiritual kind, was tapping out text messages, sitting at the kitchen table with her legs tucked under her. Mark wanted some attention. "Could you maybe stop staring at your phone?!" Mark remarked. "Let me introduce you to my new friend!" Katerina suddenly proposed. Mark had not been expecting a third person at the table and was not thrilled by the suggestion. But Katerina had already sent the invitation.
By the time Katerina's new flame was already standing at the door, Mark had shot the bolt. He saw no reason to open the door to a stranger — his wife's lover. A verbal exchange broke out through the closed door. The young man, standing on the landing, called the police. When the officers entered the flat, everything was calm. There were no signs of a struggle anywhere in the apartment. Katerina had no complaints of any kind. She simply got dressed and left the house with her suitor. Mark felt as though he had been plunged into ice water. Despair and hurt tore at him. "Later, on the phone, she told me she'd left me because I don't earn enough money. Her new friend is a businessman — he keeps bees, and Katya sells honey for him. But I can't work because of my illness, and I want her to come back," Mark explained, recounting to our lawyer what had happened.
Everyone gets sick
Taking up Mark's argument, our lawyer drafted a response to Katerina's claim, pointing out that the period of separation could not be calculated from the date given in her petition, since Mark and Katerina had continued to run a shared household and had continued going to visit people together. In her counter-response, Katerina's lawyer pointed out that the couple had already been sleeping apart for a long time. A witness who, a few days after the police incident, had helped move Katerina's belongings, had seen a folding bed in the flat, made up the way a bed is made up when someone is actually sleeping in it. The response further pointed out that Katerina had been undergoing treatment with a psychotherapist from October 2014 to December 2015, and that her side was prepared to waive medical confidentiality in order to call the doctor as a witness.
The psychotherapist confirmed that Katerina had indeed been her patient. At the time she first sought treatment, Katerina had been suffering from severe depression, accompanied by symptoms of anxiety and feelings of guilt. This pathological pattern, according to the psychotherapist — and as Katerina had described it to her — had developed because the marital relationship was no longer functioning. Katerina had complained of constant humiliation at the hands of her husband, and of his constantly belittling and mocking her. In her testimony, the doctor also stated that Mark had refused to engage and had rejected every attempt to propose joint therapy with Katerina. Our lawyer now had questions for Mark. If everything the psychotherapist had reported was true, the marriage could be dissolved by the court on that basis even before the one-year period had run — a period that, in any case, calculated from the date given in Katerina's petition, was already nearly over. In cases where domestic violence, whether physical or psychological, is present within a family, a marriage can be dissolved almost immediately.
Of bedbugs and the righteous
Having reviewed the other side's arguments regarding the folding bed and the visits to the psychotherapist, Mark responded that he had set up the folding bed only a few days before Katerina moved out of the flat. The move to a less comfortable bed, he explained, was because the old sofa had broken down, and the mechanism for folding it out into a bed no longer worked. "It couldn't take the strain," Mark hinted at something, and offered to produce evidence of the sofa's defect. As for Katerina's psychological problems, he explained that his wife was highly excitable psychologically, that she had been registered with a psychiatric clinic in Ukraine, and had received regular treatment there.
In Ilf and Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs" there is a minor character — a hermit-ascetic. This righteous man endured grueling fasts, tormented himself with prayer and penance, and slept in a coffin. But all his righteousness came to an end soon after bedbugs took up residence in that very coffin. The ascetic could not bear their bites and fled the desert. Sometimes a lawyer's work looks exactly like this: a great deal of painstaking, at times seemingly trivial, effort in order to achieve the desired result. In his written reply, our lawyer pointed out that the information set out in the psychotherapist's testimony was, one way or another, Katerina's own interpretation of the causes of her condition, and that the doctor may well have known nothing of her medical history from the period before the marriage. And, of course, the sofa really was broken, which explained the presence of the folding bed in the flat.
Katerina's counter-argument was a photograph showing Mark sitting at his computer, with a folding bed made up with bedding and a warm blanket visible in the foreground. A note accompanying the photograph showed it had been taken on 26 February 2016. This meant that Mark's claim — that the bed had been set up in the flat only three days before Katerina's move — was not true. But here a new "bedbug" turned up: on that particular day, Mark's mother had been staying with Mark and Katerina, and the folding bed had evidently been meant for her.
From our firm's practice
The broken mirror
With the arguments developed over the course of this correspondence, our lawyer applied to the court asking that the start of the separation period be fixed as the date of Katerina's actual move out of the flat. Having reviewed the arguments, the court sided with our client, adding further time to settle the question of pension rights. Where a couple has been married for more than three years, their pension entitlements accrued during the marriage are split equally — and that procedure takes a considerable amount of time. Our client thus gained an additional period during which he could still regard himself as a married man — nearly a year and a half more. Whether his beloved will come back to him, or whether the bees at her new friend's apiaries will stop producing honey, remains unknown. In this strange romance there is only one unambiguous hero — the lawyer at our firm, whose work enabled our client to achieve what he was after. That is what is called professionalism. And our professionalism is at our clients' service.
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