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Murder Scenes
Normality, Deviance, and Criminal Violence in Weimar Berlin
By Sace Elder
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2010
University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-11724-6
Chapter One
"Life has recently become cheap"
Murder, Moral Panic, and the Uncertainty of Normality
Commenting on a 1931 Berlin murder trial involving three young people who had murdered a watchmaker for a small sum of money and a few watches, Siegfried Kracauer opined that the case was indicative of a much more pervasive and disturbing trend: "Murders in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany are on the increase.... Life has recently become cheap." Kracauer was not alone in raising the specter of rising rates of homicidal violence. His warning regarding the devaluation of human life was emblematic of the way in which murder assumed a place in the public culture and public discourse of Weimar society that far exceeded its statistical occurrence. Like Kracauer, many Germans were convinced that murder had become a pervasive feature of German social life. Not long before Kracauer published his article, the sensational daily newspaper Tempo ran a front-page article lamenting that "the unusual frequency of serious crimes is beginning to become a grave danger for the security of the Berlin population. Robberies and robbery-murders are occurring almost daily."
Why were Germans so concerned about homicidal violence when the statistical incidence of murder, although certainly higher than before the First World War, remained in international perspective relatively low? Why would Berlin especially have been noted as a particularly dangerous place when other regions of Germany had much higher rates of violent crime? One might quickly refer to the political violence that characterized the Weimar period. Yet Kracauer and the Tempo article were concerned not with political murder but with violence of a more venal and pecuniary nature.
Understanding the perception of Germany as a "violent society" tells us much about the culture of Weimar itself. This chapter examines public anxieties about homicidal violence to understand what they revealed about the perception of normality and crisis in urban society in the tumultuous years of the Weimar period. Karen Halttunen has suggested in the context of early American murder narratives that murder "demands that a community come to terms with the crime-confront what has happened and endeavor to explain it, in an effort to restore order to the world." By constructing narratives about the crime, by assigning guilt and innocence to the affected parties, by ascribing identities to the murderer and the victim, and by deciding on the appropriate punishment, a community seeks to find meaning in the crime and to correct the moral disruption caused by the murderer. Understanding what journalists, cultural critics, and criminologists had to say about murder provides important clues to the perception of crisis under Germany's first republic.
In the immediate postwar years, homicide, the most psychological and interpersonal of crimes, came to represent the pervasive lawlessness and political, social, and moral disorder that the war and its attendant effects had produced. As the postwar crises subsided and the republic, along with its currency, stabilized, the etiology of homicidal violence became more complex as crime professionals and newspapers alike connected murderous transgressions to the presumed pathological features of modernity-urban anonymity, mass culture, perceptual uncertainty, and moral relativity. The specific economic and social crises of the inflationary period also revealed the purported pathology of capitalism and the violent repercussions of a market economy run amok. Criminalists played a crucial role in shaping the discourse of murder in the latter part of the period by promoting the notion of ubiquitous criminality and by using murder to cultivate the idea of a society under siege from within, an idea that after 1929 was undergirded by the onset of economic crisis.
Murder was the source of such anxiety because, more so than any other crime, it cast in sharp relief the instability and uncertainty of the "normal" in Weimar society. From the perspective of many Germans, the society that emerged from the ashes of the First World War with a new republican constitution was a "topsy-turvy world" in which prewar certainties (which after all were never really ever certain) about morality, social identities, the structure of the family and gender relations, the relationship between state and society, and the proper functioning of the economy became a matter of open political contestation and experiment. The ambiguities of normality and deviance were dramatically articulated around the figure of the murderer. There was a tension between the citizen and the criminal throughout this period in literature and film. The difference between those who held allegiance to the state and those who transgressed its laws was a repeated theme of literary investigation. Murder in particular represented this "tension" because it constantly challenged seemingly stable categories of moral and social "normality" and "deviance." Conventional notions of criminality were never enough to explain most homicides, and because of the inflated importance of individual cases in the press and professional discourse, the process of narrating murder required a constant renegotiation of what constituted normality. When the public turned its attention to murder, it was turning its eye on itself.
Murder and Moral Panic after the First World War
The notion that crime was becoming a pervasive social problem had slowly emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, but only around the turn of the century did crime receive significant attention in public discourse. As Richard Evans has argued, the "criminal underground" was largely a bourgeois invention of the nineteenth century, and it served as the foil against which the German middle class defined its moral norms. In his survey of German newspapers from the 1870s to the First World War, Eric Johnson has found that crime received far less attention than did other topics of political and cultural interest, especially in the socialist and conservative press, each of which in its own way tended nonetheless to explain crime in terms of class. The liberal Vossische Zeitung and Berliner Tageblatt reported newsworthy crime stories more regularly than their competitors but avoided politically commenting on such reports. Reading the German dailies, Johnson argues, one would have had the impression "of an orderly society with its populace kept in check by a rigid class structure and repressive authorities," a society in which crime was a "foreign concept."
Inasmuch as crime was perceived as a social problem in the nineteenth century, observers connected it to urbanization and class society. Critics of German cities in the latter part of the nineteenth century had posited a causal relationship between crime and urbanization. Some especially lamented the putative lack of social controls in the city and the associated anonymity, which gave license to the baser instincts of human nature. Unconstrained by the institutions of family and church or by the watchful eye of familiar neighbors, individuals could pursue their greedy and lustful desires as they wished, the evidence for which was, supposedly, the higher rates of venereal disease, prostitution, and theft in the cities. Urban dwellers preyed on one another in ways that country dwellers did not. Furthermore, the city, with its anonymity, its fast pace of life, and its constantly changing rhythm, allegedly produced a different kind of psychology, one that was distracted, selfish, and reserved, and thus not beholden to conventional notions of civility, lacking a respect for the persons and property of others, and given to uncontrolled emotional outbursts. In this view it was the working class that was susceptible to the deleterious effects of overcrowding, poverty, moral decay, and distraction. Further, cities were the home of demonized ethnic groups, such as Jews and Poles, to which conservatives also attributed a disregard for the "German" love of order and morality. In contrast, the Social Democratic press focused on middle- and upper-class crimes rather than lower-class crime stories in an effort to combat what they alleged to be the "class justice" of the conservatives' criminalization of the proletariat.
In the years shortly before the war, however, the perception of comfortable lawfulness began to erode. The liberal and conservative presses suddenly became more interested in criminal violence, in particular murder and manslaughter. While in the early years of the Reich, one would be hard pressed to find a report of a murder in the liberal press, between 1902 and 1908, there was a significant increase in the number of murder trials covered in the Vossische Zeitung. Further, the paper began carrying frequent police reports of ongoing investigations, rather than coverage of trials. 12 The increased interest in homicidal violence might have been a reaction to the overall increase in the crime rate before the war. It also might have been attributable to increased competition from the democratization of newspaper readership and the proliferation of popular dailies such as the Berliner Morgenpost and the BZ am Mittag that offered more in the way of entertainment and eye-catching headlines. The extended debates about the retention of the death penalty that accompanied the efforts to reform the criminal code beginning in 1906 gave homicides a more immediate political salience, especially in the left-wing liberal and Social Democratic press. In any case, the German press had begun to present criminal violence as a much more pervasive social phenomenon and was increasingly relying on sensational crime stories to sell print media.
Popular interest in crime corresponded with the emergence of criminological sciences in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. After 1884, the Reich government provided systematic criminal statistics that moral and social reformers could use to advance their arguments, already in circulation in the 1870s, that both crime and recidivism were on the rise. Another of the chief factors influencing the development of criminology in Germany was the introduction of Lombrosian theories of innate criminal characteristics, which were first systematically introduced to German audiences by Emil Kraepelin in 1885. Although German criminal scientists never wholly embraced Lombroso's theories (even Kraepelin specifically rejected his notion of atavism), criminal anthropology gained a small but significant place in the German study of crime and would become the dominant school of criminology only in the 1930s. More typical of late nineteenth-century German criminology were theories that emphasized environmental causes of crime and avoided the strict biological determinism inherent in Lombrosian ideas. Even many of those early criminologists who, like Gustav Aschaffenburg, were influenced by Lombroso and degeneration theory believed that social environment and milieu influenced criminal behavior. In the 1880s, Franz von Liszt initiated the penal reform movement, which rejected Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach's early nineteenth-century classical liberal model of the rational individual and the notion of penal punishment as deterrence and instead promoted the principle of penal practice as a tool for protecting society from criminals. In 1904, Liszt, along with Gustav Aschaffenburg, founded what would become the leading German criminological journal, the Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform. The Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik, edited by Austrian Hans Gross, reflected the biologistic-environmentalist hybridity of German criminal science. Gross was a founder of the "Graz Method" of criminalistics and authored an internationally successful textbook on criminalistics. He had intended his Archiv not only to include biological and environmental approaches to crime but also to bring them into dialogue with criminalistics. In this last endeavor Gross was less successful, and over the years the publication came to emphasize criminalistics rather than criminology, and articles by police experts in Germany frequently appeared in its pages.
Criminologists and legal scholars were not the only ones in imperial Germany seeking to solve the problem of crime and criminality. As Warren Rosenblum has recently demonstrated, from the middle of the nineteenth century, Christian reformers-both Protestant and Catholic-had challenged the carceral institution of the workhouse as well as liberal models of criminality. They proposed instead workers' colonies and hostels, the intent of which was not a eugenic exclusion of the criminal from mainstream society but rather the "civilizing" of the criminal through protective supervision. For Rosenblum's reformers, welfare, not the penitentiary, was the key to rehabilitating those marginal social types who came to be known as "asocials."
The war only intensified these prewar concerns about law and order. Crime rates had declined considerably after the onset of armed conflict, although property crimes increased during the war with the rise of the black market economy and shortages of daily necessities. The increased participation of women and juveniles in property crimes was a major cause for concern, and a sign to some that the absence of strong male role models was eroding the moral character of everyday Germans. The social, political, and economic dislocations of the war exacerbated these conditions and heightened fears that German society was a wounded one. As Richard Bessel has demonstrated, a perceptible increase in the general crime rate prompted public concerns about a loss of legal, moral, and social order. While contemporaries could attribute property crimes to material deprivation and monetary inflation, the violence was less easily explained in terms of immediate and temporary crisis.
The escalation of murder in the early postwar years seemed to indicate something was more fundamentally morally wrong with society. In the nineteenth century, Germany had enjoyed low homicide rates compared to those of other European nations; compared to the United States, the German murder rate appeared positively negligible. While this relative position on the international scale of violence did not change dramatically in the Weimar period, reports of the German statistical office confirmed-with a delay of some years as the Reich Statistical Office compiled its data-that the number of convictions for premeditated murder and manslaughter increased dramatically in the postwar period. The rate for unpremeditated murders also rose above immediate prewar levels. In the early years of the republic, the average number of convictions for premeditated murder per year for the entire Reich jumped from 0.17 per 100,000 residents in 1914 to 0.35 in 1919 and .41 in 1920-24. Similarly, convictions for unpremeditated murders increased from 0.48 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1914 to 0.56 in 1919 and 0.76 in 1920-24. In the German judicial system at least, murder and manslaughter had definitely increased with demobilization, revolution, and inflation. When taken together, homicide convictions in the German Reich remained on average higher in the entire Weimar period than they had been in the two decades before the war.
Berlin, too, saw an increase in homicidal violence, although inconsistencies in reporting make difficult year-to-year comparisons. In 1915, the number of arrests for all homicidal offenses (including infanticide) was nineteen; 1916 brought thirty-seven arrests. In 1921, the number was forty-two. The numbers were not particularly impressive. But Berliners learned of the incidence of murder not through statistics but through the pages of newspapers that reported, almost daily it seemed, of political assassinations, robbery-murders, family "tragedies," and the occasional prostitute-murder. The overrepresentation of murder on the pages of the daily newspapers contributed to the impression that German society was in a state of moral, political, and social chaos. In December 1921 a Berliner Morgenpost article entitled "Increase in Capital Crimes" warned that more capital crimes were occurring in Berlin than ever before. "Almost not a single day passes that a murder, robbery-murder or attempted railway murder is reported, and although the police have announced special measures in the war against criminality, new serious crimes are perpetrated daily." The press frequently warned readers of predatory criminals inhabiting dark urban spaces and threatening the property and wealth of upstanding citizens. "Vampires. Shadow-pictures from Berlin Life" read one newspaper headline on the occasion of a 1921 murder trial involving the robbery-murder of a propertied gentleman in Tiergarten. The trial led into the "dangerous activities of the light-shunning scoundrel," who preyed on his victims at night in the streets of Berlin. At the corner of Friedrich- and Jägerstrase one could find "hundreds and hundreds" of such "vampires" who would fall upon "gentlemen" returning home from the "respectable pubs" and with trickery and violence rob them of possessions or, in this case, their lives. The image of the criminal-as-vampire presaged the vampire Nosferatu, who in F. W. Murnau's classic film brought pestilence and disease as he nocturnally fed on unsuspecting townspeople. Such reports had particular resonance in a city darkened by a lack of street lighting following the war. Until full peacetime nocturnal illumination was restored, newspapers periodically reported of the "nightly insecurity" and "dangerous streets" of Berlin, where robbers and murderers could lurk under the blanket of darkness.
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Excerpted from Murder Scenes by Sace Elder Copyright © 2010
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