20 - Criminals and Their Analysts: Psychoanalytic Criminology in Weimar Germany and the First Austrian Republic

Summary

a modern form of social defense

The time in the Weimar Republic (1918-33) and the First Austrian Republic (1918-34) was ripe for rethinking the tenets of criminal justice. Many Germans and Austrians, feeling increasingly vulnerable and insecure, blamed the apparent unraveling of the social fabric in the aftermath of World War I in large measure on an irrepressible rise in criminality of all kinds, from the petty to the psychopathic. This perception naturally intensified calls for law and order. However, the authoritative prescriptions of criminal justice in the imperial era appeared not only moribund but also sterile. Many contemporary observers questioned the efficacy and legitimacy of traditional straightforward punishment, in part because they no longer felt angry enough to need to stigmatize all offenders. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) had already articulated this sentiment in 1887 in Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morality). There he traced the origins of punishment to the debtor-creditor relationship. The lawbreaker was simply someone who owed a debt to society, and punishment was tantamount to repayment of this unpaid obligation. Thus, justice originated not in ressentiment - that is, reactive sentiments of revenge - but rather in the containment of fratricidal hatred. Only much later did society transform an objective “feeling of guilt” or “feeling of indebtedness” (Gefühl der Schuld; the German word Schuld yields this twofold meaning) into a “bad conscience” (schlechtes Gewissen or Gewissensbiss) in the offender. In this climate the legitimacy of capital punishment and the desirability of prison reform became topics of intense debate.