Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany ed. by Richard F. Wetzell (review)

As Richard Wetzell points out in his introduction to this well-conceptualized volume, “historians of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Germany have been relative latecomers to the history of crime and criminal justice” (1). Only over the course of the last decade has research in this area begun to flourish. Perhaps one reason why historians traditionally did not deem the German criminal justice system a particularly auspicious subject was their tendency to associate it with more or less predictable continuities in bureaucratic conservatism and authoritarian state power. It is among the most stimulating achievements of Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany that it opens up numerous fresh perspectives on the cultural and political complexities of German discourses over crime and criminal law in the period between 1871 and the 1950s.

The book covers five different political regimes, Imperial Germany (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), Nazism, and the East and West German states after World War II. Six of the twelve chapters focus on the Weimar years, a period particularly rich in experimentation and reform. Wetzell’s informative introduction lays out effectively the historical background and major issues of scholarly debate. Most of the individual authors draw on their own careful research in German archives and employ an engaging style free of unnecessary jargon. Many use ambitious analytical approaches influenced, for example, by legal theory, gender and performance studies, literary discourse analysis, and Michel Foucault’s concept of power. The volume concludes with an extensive bibliography of secondary literature.

Part I highlights the politically ambivalent potentials of judicial and penal reform during the Second Empire. Benjamin Hett examines how judges and lawyers responded to the growing influence of public opinion on criminal trials. He suggests that the success of certain liberal demands (e.g., for the introduction of juries and public trials) contributed to powerful antiformalist trends that heightened the risk of arbitrariness in judicial decisions and helped move the administration of justice increasingly “out of the control of the state” (50). As Andreas Fleiter shows, many Social Democrats concurred with criminal law professor Franz von Liszt, who advocated calibrating punishment to the specific social circumstances and psychological makeup of the individual perpetrator. While in the capitalist present, socialist leaders tended to support classical liberal demands for the protection of individual rights, in the context of a future socialist state in which crime’s social causes had been eliminated, some of them endorsed exceptional punishments (e.g., forced sterilization) of allegedly incorrigible “habitual criminals” (Gewohnheitsverbrecher). In her discussion of debates over reforming women’s prisons, Sandra Leukel stresses similar tensions. Criminological definitions of the special characteristics of “the female criminal” could influence progressive reforms such as, for instance, the introduction of female prison staff. Simultaneously, however, these discourses often reinforced restrictive gender roles by linking female “deviance” to women’s loss of their purported “natural” sphere of the home and family.

Part II, on “Penal Reform in the Weimar Republic,” addresses larger debates over the nature of Weimar-era social policy. In his essay on 1920s prison reform, Nikolaus Wachsmann “tests” Detlev Peukert’s claim that Weimar offers unique insights into the “Janus-faced” nature of modern social policy. Peukert had argued that Weimar-era social welfare officials, optimistic about the potentials of the human sciences, clung to dreams of their own “pedagogical omnipotence” and largely refrained from implementing radical policies against “incorrigibles” later adopted by the Nazis. In contrast, Wachsmann finds that many prison officials “continued to put their trust largely into the traditional and authoritarian prison regime based on military discipline and retribution” (131), and stresses important continuities in this area across 1919 and 1933. Gabriel Finder and Warren Rosenblum examine how different groups of judges responded to 1920s penal reforms increasing the role of psychological and social-welfare experts in sentencing decisions. Both authors stress judges’ resistance to such reforms, yet offer strikingly different interpretations of their motivations. According to Finder, in the...