The Trial of Gustav Graef: Art, Sex, and Scandal in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany by Barnet Hartston (review)

Looking at the cover illustration and title of Barnet Hartston's book, one might think the publication was extraordinarily well timed to offer historical insights on current discussions of sexual exploitation and harassment. The core of the book turns on the relationship between a middle-aged artist and his teenage model, the latter portrayed nude in the artist's painting Das Märchen, reproduced on the book's dustcover. The author, of course, could not have foreseen this potential resonance in his material. Ultimately, the book focuses much more attention on conflicts in German politics and criminal justice than on questions of gender and sexuality. The artist, Gustav Graef, had first been the complainant and witness in a case against a thirteen-year-old model who had tried to blackmail him with claims of sexual abuse. That 1884 trial set up Graef to be charged with perjury and sexual impropriety in the 1885 trial that is the book's central event. Hartston discovered that references to the case appeared frequently in a number of debates carried on in pamphlets and newspapers in subsequent years. The book follows these debates among artists, morality campaigners, political commentators, and judges and lawyers through the remainder of the Kaiserreich. Hartston's microhistorical approach uses the circumstances, characters, and controversies of the Graef case to illuminate the era's "social, cultural, and political tensions" (7). In addition, Hartston makes it clear that he favors narrative history, counting on the telling of a good story to pull together the disparate subjects of debate.

Hartston has chosen to organize the book thematically so that the trial narrative is related mainly in the prologue and the first two chapters. Unfortunately for Hartston, the courtroom records for the two cases have not been preserved; instead, he relies on journalistic accounts of the trial. The author is careful to put the evidence in context, explaining the editorial and political orientations of the sources and contrasts of the differing accounts. Another sourcing problem for the author's microhistorical and narrative style is that there are few documents created by his main characters that might allow deeper insight into their beliefs, feelings, and subjectivities. Besides Graef, the character of most consequence for Hartston's purposes is the model for the fairy tale painting, Bertha Rother. Hartston does his best to fill in Rother's life as the girl from an insalubrious urban milieu whose beauty makes her a celebrity, but whose questionable morality dogs her attempts at social upward mobility until she winds up literally dead in the gutter. Hartston has wisely chosen not to make claims about whether Graef or Rother had a sexual relationship or who was the more exploited in this tale.

Subsequent chapters follow the role that the Graef trial played as a convenient example in the various debates. Already in the third chapter, which deals with changing styles of art and the politics of the art establishment, the reader starts to wonder how much it all really has to do with the Graef trial. This pattern continues in the subsequent chapters. While Hartston ably discusses these issues within the broad frame of the Kaiserreich, he is not particularly motivated by the questions of social, gender, or cultural history. The chapters relate the unfolding progress of the debates, but they give little analysis or argumentation to supplement the quotes, summaries, and background information. Beyond a broad sense of social change and conflict between and among modern-minded reformers and defenders of existing authority, it is hard for the reader to discern what thread to follow, what is at stake in these conflicts, and how they relate to each other and back to the story of the Graef trial. In addition, too many extraneous details slow down the main thrust of the debates. Perhaps part of the problem is that...