Schultzenstein's Wives

Bulgy and bald as a well-stuffed wurst is Herr Otto Schultzenstein, prosperous Berlin shoe factory official. Last week he successfully defied German efforts to punish him for possessing two wives.

Twenty-seven years ago Shoeman Schultzenstein married a girl with whom he lived until 1923, when she attacked him with a meat-hatchet. Husband and wife then lived apart until 1926, when he made a business connection in Leningrad, went there to live. Soon he took a Russian wife under Soviet law without previously divorcing his meat-hatchet spouse in Germany.

Back to Berlin moved Otto Schultzenstein with his young, Red wife and was promptly charged with bigamy by his old German wife, as sharp and relentless as her meat-hatchet.

Perplexed, the Court sought advice from German authorities on international law, learned that: 1) The German Republic recognizes as valid the law of the Soviet Union; 2) German courts cannot hold that an act committed in Russia is criminal if it is not criminal in Russia; 3) Under Soviet law the act of bigamy is not criminal, though if a man takes a second wife either she or the first may demand redress by bringing suit to have one of the marriages declared invalid.

Clearly, since neither of Otto Schultzenstein's wives had sought to invalidate either marriage, the German court could do only what it did, namely dismiss Otto Schultzenstein as a guiltless and triumphant bigamist.

By doing as he did any German may, it would appear, also become a guiltless bigamist. Vexed, Lutheran and Catholic clergymen thundered from their pulpits.

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