| Book Review | Law and History Review, 24.1

Book Review

Benjamin Carter Hett, Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser's Berlin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. 291. $35 (ISBN 0-674-1317-4).

Benjamin Carter Hett has written what should become the classic account of criminal justice in the Wilhelmine era from 1890 to 1914. While a handful of others have written about crime and punishment in those years, Hett has explored for the first time what happened inside the courtrooms.

In studying the Wilhelmine era, Hett has drawn attention to a crucial time in the development of German criminal justice (not just searched for yet earlier origins of Nazi injustice). Germany's criminal justice system was nationalized in the 1870s—with the establishment of a unified Penal Code and Law of Criminal Procedure, and a reorganization of the courts—and by the 1890s these new laws and institutions had settled into place, and a new generation of lawyers appeared on the scene. At the same time, Bismarckian Germany ended and the Anti-Socialist Law lapsed. Perhaps most important, judicial reform and mass culture converged, for at the very time that secret proceedings had irrevocably given way to public trials the mass press appeared. This is where the rubber hit the road, with attention grabbing headlines about sensational trials.

In Hett's account, the legal culture of the Wilhelmine courtroom arose less from an authoritarian tradition than from the pressures of the popular press. At a time of growing specialization, judicial characteristics helped mold two legal institutions reaching maturation: the prosecution and defense bar. The prosecutors—who considered themselves, as one famously put it, "the most objective authority" (40, 132)—were determined to preserve the authority of the state. But closely watched by the press, they ultimately wound up resisting, accommodating, or succumbing to popular pressure. Defense lawyers were caught on the horns of a harder dilemma: was their first obligation to the truth or their client; were they a defendant's "first judge" (84, 96, 141) or a defendant's advocate? Opting for advocacy, lawyers on the cutting edge asserted client interests and their own independence with growing aggressiveness. In their clients' interests, many lawyers recruited the press to their cause; in their own economic self-interest, many became publicity hounds and self-promoters. They risked later ethical charges either when they broke new ground (as in arguing that the legal right of defendants to remain silent necessarily meant that lawyers were not improperly impeding the justice system's search for the truth if they advised clients to exercise that right), or when they grandstanded (as, in one notable example, when two lawyers requested a break in proceedings to sip champagne). With defense lawyers gaining prominence, judges became resentful. But no longer deciding cases by ministerial fiat as in bygone days of secret proceedings and now also worrying about their own public image, they did not always side with the prosecutors and were often pulled by competing arguments. Attentive to these nuances, Hett argues that the standard view of authoritarian justice in the Wilhelmine era needs refinement; although conservative, judges asserted their independence and did not mechanically reject new demands for procedural justice.

Because he focuses on criminal justice in Berlin, Hett does not set out to provide a comprehensive account of political justice in Wilhelmine Germany. Nonetheless, while he regularly discusses politics and criminal justice, he never provides a theoretical framework for understanding their relationship to each other; he does not explicitly define political justice (or ever use the term), let alone break political justice down into distinct types. This is the major weakness in Hett's book. In regard to politically motivated prosecutions, he reconfirms, as others have argued from other vantage points, that the lapsing of the Anti-Socialist Law prompted authorities in the 1890s to attempt political repression and control through prosecutions under other criminal provisions. With the decline in overtly political prosecutions after 1900, Hett turns to the rise of expert testimony, forensic science, and leniency in sentencing, and to the trend of understanding defendants in the context of social circumstances. These developments resulted from the German penal reform movement, but Hett leaves unclear in what way that movement and its repercussions were political. On the one hand, he sees a political dimension since the Social Democrats encouraged these developments while conservatives critiqued them. On the other hand, he shows that defense lawyers encouraged these developments while they were becoming more concerned with their own elite social status, more resistant to mass opinion, more scholarly—and less political. On a related issue, Hett focuses on sensational trials, which began outside the political arena but acquired political significance along the way. Is he suggesting that these represented the peculiar form of political justice in the Wilhelmine era? Or are they simply the form of criminal justice within his narrative that most often included a political dimension? Whatever interpretations future historians may pursue, Hett's lively, engaging, and thought-provoking book has set a firm a foundation.

Douglas G. Morris

New York, N.Y.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.