Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany, 1871–1914 (review)

The concept of honor carries more than a whiff of the archaic. At least until modern times, honor connoted a form of respect and prestige that determined one’s place within an exclusive and hierarchical social order. Its importance was thus inextricably bound up with the power of estates. Honor codes often referred to unwritten rules, rituals, and mythologies that were self-consciously distinct and even opposed to the national codes of law emerging in the nineteenth century. More than one scholar has concluded that honor was essentially a premodern phenomenon, destined to fade in importance as communities become larger, more complex, and governed by the rule of law.

Why, then, did an honor culture not only persist but actually thrive during Germany’s periods of rapid modernization? Ann Goldberg’s pathbreaking work explores this question through an analysis of defamation law from the unification era to World War I. The sheer growth in the number of lawsuits for insult during this period was staggering. In 1910 alone, there were 84,000 such honor cases, representing an almost 60 percent increase over twenty years. The state, Goldberg notes, vigorously used defamation law to protect the authority of its agents and representatives: honor suits frequently suppressed speech and harassed the political opposition. At the same time, many cases were private affairs pitting neighbors, coworkers, and colleagues against each other. Subaltern classes used defamation law to challenge “their betters.” Workers sued employers, Jews sued gentiles, women sued men. However banal and petty many of the suits were, they demonstrated collectively a new spirit of democratic self-assertion and demand for social equality. Honor codes, Goldberg shows, proved to be “flexible, multipurpose, and far from anachronistic” (9). Indeed, the flood of honor prosecutions in the Imperial era, she argues, was traceable to a distinctly modern set of forces, including legal reform, professionalization, and the expansion of democracy.

It was the liberalization of German law, Goldberg argues, that first opened the floodgates. Insult in Germany was (and is) handled mainly as a criminal matter. In the 1860s and 1870s, liberals were frustrated with the “discriminatory and highly selective” (24) manner in which state prosecutors intervened in honor disputes. The authorities readily prosecuted alleged insults against aristocrats and state officials, but often ignored injuries to middle-class men and opponents of the regime. The remedy for this bias, reformers argued, was to give private citizens the right to initiate prosecutions in cases where the public prosecutor refused or neglected to do so. Private prosecutions, they claimed, could guarantee legal equality and procedural fairness throughout the system. As a consequence of liberal efforts, the first Reich Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure gave wide latitude for ordinary citizens to prosecute cases of defamation. Suits that had once been unthinkable soon became commonplace. A maid sued her mistress for calling her a “dumb broad” (61). A Jewish soldier sued his captain for an antisemitic remark. Women of all classes used honor suits as a response to sexual harassment.

Goldberg demonstrates that law not only reflected cultural norms, but also shaped popular attitudes and practices. Private prosecution made justice more accessible to ordinary Germans, which in turn heightened the expectation that injuries to honor would be answered in court. A derogatory statement that was never legally challenged was more likely to be perceived as valid and true. Those who ignored an insult or turned the other cheek risked accusations that they lacked a “sense of honor.” In short, the success of liberal legal reforms helped elevate the significance of ordinary insults and invigorated the honor culture. The punitive nature of German defamation law, moreover, reinforced the meaning of “honor” as a social and moral issue—and not just as a personal injury. In contrast to England, where plaintiffs in defamation suits pursued monetary compensation, German cases focused on retribution and deterrence. Courts rarely awarded damages to the victims of insults, but nevertheless...