Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin

by Benjamin Carter Hett

From Alexanderplatz, the bustling Berlin square ringed by bleak slums, to Moabit, site of the city's most feared prison, Death in the Tiergarten illuminates the culture of criminal justice in late imperial Germany. In vivid prose, Benjamin Hett examines daily movement through the Berlin criminal courts and the lawyers, judges, jurors, thieves, pimps, and murderers who inhabited this world.

Drawing on previously untapped sources, including court records, pamphlet literature, and pulp novels, Hett examines how the law reflected the broader urban culture and politics of a rapidly changing city. In this book, German criminal law looks very different from conventional narratives of a rigid, static system with authoritarian continuities traceable from Bismarck to Hitler. From the murder trial of Anna and Hermann Heinze in 1891 to the surprising treatment of the notorious Captain of Koepenick in 1906, Hett illuminates a transformation in the criminal justice system that unleashed a culture war fought over issues of permissiveness versus discipline, the boundaries of public discussion of crime and sexuality, and the role of gender in the courts.

Trained in both the law and history, Hett offers a uniquely valuable perspective on the dynamic intersections of law and society, and presents an impressive new view of early twentieth-century German history.

Genres: Germany, Crime

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2004

About the author

Benjamin Carter Hett, a former trial lawyer and professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, is the author of Death in the Tiergarten and Crossing Hitler, winner of the Fraenkel Prize.

Reviews

[Tyler Wolanin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exactly what I was looking for and expected from Benjamin Carter Hett's first book. Understandable overview and analysis of judicial and policing trends in Wilhelmine Germany from 1890 (when Bismarck's Socialist Laws lapsed) to World War One. There was also, if you are worried, enough on-the-ground crime coverage (and notes on the resulting media and pop culture) to keep things moving along. This book will give you precisely what you came for, a very readable academic treatment of the subject.

Full blog post here: https://tylerwolanin.com/2021/6/20/pk...

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

German criminal and civil law is for most Americans a totally unknown quantity. I certainly included myself in that number before reading this book. Herr Carter Hett's book sheds quite a bit of light on the theory and practice of German law, especially in and around Berlin's Moabit district. Even more importantly, his book breathes life into a cast of characters including judges, lawyers, and criminals of all stripes and classes, that gives the work its narrative drive. It's rare that something is equally illuminating and entertaining, but the author does a solid job of condensing the piles of codes and statutes that no doubt strained the eyes of poor clerks doing scut work for their robed superiors roughly a century ago.

A book that could have been boring, and by all rights should have been a chore, ended up being a pretty fascinating account of how the law changed in Germany during the Wilhelmine period, and how society itself both reflected and perhaps initiated these sea changes.

Although "Death in the Tiergarten" focuses primarily on "Second Empire" Germany, Carter Hett does a good job of not considering his subject in vacuo, and there is a seamless continuity in how he integrates facts about everything from the ancien regime to the Nazi terror in his tale. The tales he relates about how various newspapers waged ideological warfare against the courts are also a compelling aspect of the "Kulturkampf" that, even when traditionally addressed in other studies, doesn't get such keen or in-depth consideration.The book also does a good job remaining (mostly) unclouded by bias, presenting a lot of concepts for the jurist to mull over, without drawing any heavy-handed conclusions of its own or belaboring a point. Recommended, for scholars and laypersons alike.