Faculty Research & Creative Activity

Murder Scenes: Normality, Deviance, and Criminal Violence in Weimar Berlin

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

January 2010

Abstract

Using police reports, witness statements, newspaper accounts, and professional publications, Murder Scenes examines public and private responses to homicidal violence in Berlin during the tumultuous years of the Weimar era. Criminology and police science, both of which became increasingly professionalized over the period, sought to control and contain the blurring of these boundaries but could only do so by relying on a public that was willing to participate in the project. These Weimar developments in police practice in Berlin had important implications for what Elder identifies as an emerging culture of mutual surveillance that was successful both because and in spite of the incompleteness of the system police sought to construct, a culture that in many ways anticipated the culture of denunciation in the Nazi period. In addition to historians of Weimar, modern Germany, and modern Europe, German studies and criminal justice scholars will find this book of interest. - See more at: http://www.press.umich.edu/script/press/1177008#sthash.EzagL9ar.dpuf

https://works.bepress.com/sace_elder/3/

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