Death in the Tiergarten, and other stories: Murder and criminal justice in Berlin, 1891--1933.

摘要

This dissertation is a study of criminal trials in Berlin from 1891 to 1933. Based on police and court records, justice ministry documents, memoir and pamphlet literature, and contemporary newspaper accounts, most previously unexploited by historians, the dissertation examines the daily life of the courtroom and the way particular trials were received in various sections of the German public.;In the 1890s, the state attempted to use the criminal law to combat undesired political and social trends, especially the rise of Social Democracy. Prosecutions for high-profile offenses increased, and the authorities tried to scale back the civil liberties of defendants and restrict public access to trials. These efforts failed, partly because judges resisted arbitrary administrative measures and unfounded prosecutions, partly because of opposition from lawyers and the press, and partly because the frugality of the Prussian administration frustrated its more authoritarian goals.;After 1900, an increasingly liberal public opinion and the growing influence of psychology and criminology drove the courts to treat defendants with ever less severity. Political and cultural conservatives became increasingly alarmed at what they considered the permissiveness both of the legal system and of German society as a whole. At the same time, less benign public opinion, especially anti-Semitism, could sometimes push judicial authorities to unfounded prosecutions, and lawyers became increasingly alarmed by the chronic gridlock and seemingly arbitrary outcomes of the judicial system.;The liberalizing trends continued in the Weimar Republic, but the backlash grew stronger and the justice system eventually fell victim to the poisoned political atmosphere and the general crisis after 1930. The criminal law became a powerful tool of repression for the Third Reich, but occasional conflicts between judges and the state demonstrated that the ideology of the rule of law had taken a strong enough hold before 1933 that it could not easily be eradicated. In making this argument, the dissertation rebuts a line of historiography which has seen only malign continuities in German justice from the Bismarckian to Hitlerian periods.