Tales from the German underworld: crime and punishment in the nineteenth century

Abstract

Evans, Richard J. Tales from German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.278 pp. 21 illustrations. $37.00. Tales from German Underworld by distinguished social historian Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, is result of research spanning over a decade and a half in archives and libraries in London, Berlin, Munich, Hanover, Bremen, Hamburg, Lubeck, Karlsruhe, Coburg, Frankfurt am Main, Braunschweig, and Schwerin. Evans's panorama of crime and punishment in nineteenth-century Germany takes form of four micro-studies (in line of Natalie Zemon Davis and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie)-intriguing and fragmentary underworld stories of a forger, a vagrant, a con man, and a prostitute--that disclose insights into contemporary discourses of criminality, incarceration, surveillance, and, not least of all, bourgeois identity. Rather than establishing facts via quantitative methods as was trend in 1960s and 1970s, Evans seeks the human dimension that had been buried beneath statistics and that, he implies, holds real key to our understanding. Chapter one, which makes up about a third of book, opens and ends with autobiography, published in 1804, of art teacher Wilhelm Aschenbrenner, a talented man who turns to forgery because of poverty. After escaping from a prison fortress in Konigsberg, Aschenbrenner pursues a series of epic adventures in which, to name a few highlights, he rescues a prostitute (who dons men's clothing in order to remain his loyal companion), engages in military espionage, suffers shipwreck, and finally finds himself serving a twenty-seven-year sentence in Spandau. What captures Evans's attention is Aschenbrenner's deportation in 1802 with fifty-seven Prussian felons to silver mines of Nerchinsk in Siberia. This focal study of Aschenbrenner's fate becomes occasion for a rich and detailed accounting of vagabondage, poverty, property crime, legal codes, carceral conditions, and prison reform, and of bizarrely amusing efforts on part of several German states to empty their overcrowded prisons by deporting criminals to Siberia, Brazil, and, especially, United States. The second chapter tells story of Gesche Rudolph, a poor prostitute who, at age of forty-eight, had spent eighteen years in prison and received nearly nine hundred strokes of cane for repeatedly returning to city of Bremen after she had been expelled. Evans's contextualization, indebted to work of Reinhart Koselleck, sets changing discourse surrounding corporal punishment (abolished as a result of liberal reform in last half of nineteenth century) within larger shift from a feudal or patriarchal status-bound world to a class society based on principles of legal equality and free enterprise. However, Evans argues, this picture also involves separation of a bourgeois public sphere from a private realm in which corporal punishment of women, children, and convicted criminals remained legitimate; corporal punishment was not abolished but simply banished from public view. This raises fascinating questions regarding fantasies of violence that inhabit private (sexual) imagination around turn of century. While Evans points to such works as Heinrich Mann's Professor Unrat and Wedekind's Pandora's Box as well as to Maria Tatar's book on sexual murder in Weimar Germany and Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, connections he makes are loose and quick-within space of a single page-between abolition of corporal punishment, release of violent impulses in fantasy, actual sexual violence, and fascism of Freikorps. …