Herman Bianchi

Abstract

Herman Bianchi, who passed away on the 30th of December 2015, has been a true ‘significant other’ for cultural criminologists. This article is a ‘criminological Verstehen’ of Bianchi’s work. His general attitude towards criminology is characterised by a mix of academic analysis, emotional outrage and incongruities. In order to understand this, his contributions to criminology are linked to biographical notes and to the mixed reactions he got on his work. Bianchi played an important role in the establishment of criminology as an autonomous academic discipline, yet he was very critical of this ‘discipline of shame’ because it has always served the exclusion of the most vulnerable members of society. He has been one of the frontmen of critical criminology, but he was not a Marxist. His concern for the despised other is related to his eternal fear, as a gay man in a ‘closet with a revolving door’, of new waves of discrimination against gays, and his rigorous abolitionism to his experience as a prisoner in a Nazi-concentration camp in 1944. Bianchi’s historical interest led him at the end of his career in the 1980s to support the emergence of strong historical criminol­ogy, but his utilitarian use of historical studies, also resulted in some clashes with professional historians.