His walk happened to take him along the Seine.
The day was gradually drawing to a close, and a fine mist was already battling against the last, hard-won warming rays of the winter sun.
The past few days for the lawyer Adolf Steinschneider, despite his precarious situation in Parisian exile, had been so calm on the surface that it seemed as if the world had, after all, managed to escape the abyss that had gaped open since 1933.
The cries of the newsboys, flooding across the quayside, bounced off him like an echo off an alpine face. In his thoughts, no doubt one of his sharpest pleas echoed as an expression of a more optimistic past:
„Whether public opinion is for or against the defendant, I… request acquittal… However, if you wish to follow the prosecution’s stance, then remember that with a fair distribution of guilt, 8 years of the requested 9 years of imprisonment would have to be distributed among the witnesses sitting in the witness box.“
Perhaps the sight of the Eiffel Tower's utopian architecture also stirred a memory of another, his lost utopia. That vision which had inspired him during the Weimar Republic. His law firm on Frankfurt's Untermainkai was meant to become a laboratory for new forms of cohabitation. In Paris, however, he was forced into a precarious strategy for survival. His attempts to earn a living as a legal expert, craftsman or sales representative bore fruit only for a short time at best.
Gazing at the spray crashing against the pillars of the eternal witness, the Pont Neuf, he could not yet suspect that he belonged neither to the fortunate exiles who would pass through the gates to Lisbon towards trans-Atlantic freedom, nor that his resistance to the NS regime would one day lead him to the violent death that its mindless henchmen held in store for him.
Yet for the uninvolved observer, Adolf Steinschneider was merely one part of the dull mass of Sunday idlers that day. A faint shadow, barely distinguishable from the leprous boundary walls of the Seine.