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Reviewed by:
  • Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895–1914
  • Peter Becker
Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895–1914, by Daniel Mark Vyleta. Austrian and Habsburg Studies, Vol. 8. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. 254 pp. $80.00.

Daniel Vyleta’s book is innovative as it looks at perceptions of crime and criminals through the lens of criminal trial reporting. He takes the historical debate about the construction of criminal types into a domain that has not been intensively studied so far. The press has certainly received its fair share of [End Page 156] attention from cultural history—even with regard to crime reporting. These studies have used trial and crime reports as a way to understand how the city population interacted with the police through the mediation of the press in pursuing highly profiled fugitives (Müller, 2005), as evidence to reconstruct performative and praxeological dimensions of Prussian criminal courts (Carter Hett, 2004), and, finally, as part of the consumers’ appropriation of their city (Fritzsche, 1996).

Vyleta does not follow the conceptual lead of these authors. His interest is mainly in the newspaper stories about crime and criminals, as they were tried at criminal courts. He looks closely at the introduction of the main persona in a trial and for the reconstruction of the crime itself. By scrutinizing the language used and the resources deployed within the reports, he aims at a popular understanding of criminal otherness in fin-de-siècle Vienna. As the final part of his title clearly indicates, he is not just interested in news and crime, but also in the presence of antisemitic stereotypes in the construction of criminals.

It is obvious that newspapers cannot be taken as proxies for the thinking and reasoning of their contemporaries. Vyleta readily acknowledges this in a well-reasoned methodological reflection. He claims, nevertheless, that “it seems hardly credible that the language of crime hawked by newspaper vendors bore no resemblance to and did not at all impact upon private languages about crime” (p. 10). Despite this claim, the book does not really venture into the field of popular perceptions of crime and antisemitism. The reader has to wait until the concluding remarks for a further discussion of the relation between press coverage and popular opinion, and even at that point Vyleta does not pursue this issue systematically.

The book can be best characterized as a well-written cultural study of the representation of criminals in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, with particular attention given to the use of antisemitic stereotypes. The main focus is on mass circulation newspapers, but the argument is not at all restricted to trial reports. Vyleta dedicates two of his five substantial chapters to an analysis of the scholarly discourse on crime, investigation, and criminals, where he looks for the role of race in the construction of criminals, for the role of expert knowledge in the unmasking of offenders hiding behind an apparent respectability, and for the threats posed by rational, volitional, and competent criminals, that is, the type of criminal with which Jews were mostly associated.

Vyleta finds the notion of a Jewish criminal persona framed above all as modern and competent. His claim that Jewish criminals have been presented “in much the same manner throughout the nineteenth century” (p. 221) has to be questioned, however. There is no doubt that contemporary commentators also saw Jewish gangs of the Vormärz period as being composed of experts in [End Page 157] crime. But the ultimate threat of these gangs was not related to their capability in manipulation but rather to their practice of expropriation. This makes a big difference with regard to Jewish crime as a wider political issue. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, the antisemitic press hypothesized a threat to the entire legal and political system by a concerted manipulation by Jewish capital, Jewish press, Jewish advocates, and Jewish criminals. This can be learned from Vyleta’s account of the Hilsner trials (pp. 185–210). A similar plot could not have been thought up during the first half of the 19th century.

Manipulation as imminent danger resulted from the malleability of peoples’ minds, as turn-of...

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