4 - Moral Discourse and Reform in Urban Germany, 1880s-1914

Summary

The intellectual and ideological contexts within which criminological analysis took place were multiform and polyvalent. Men and women who constructed the discursive environment that impinged on the thinking of professional specialists in the area of felonious behavior approached the broader terrain of immorality and wrongdoing from widely varying standpoints. They also had distinctly differing purposes in mind. Reflecting a widespread belief that the rise of the Grossstädte (big cities) greatly exacerbated an ongoing moral crisis in their country, many Germans commented critically on contemporary conduct in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. In so doing they evinced a wide spectrum of thought and feeling. Even if we limit our attention - as I do in this chapter - to members of and spokesmen for the Bürgertum (middle class), we discover a great multiplicity of preferences, prejudices, and prescriptions. After first surveying moral criticism of the Grossstadt per se, I compare two contrasting strands in the writing of representative individuals who articulated quite different views of the causes that lay behind immorality and the best ways to combat it. I hope thereby to help situate thought about crime within a broader framework in which debates among criminologists can be seen as having echoed and paralleled disputes among other commentators on putative misconduct in an urban and urbanizing Germany and the best ways of responding to it.