Sace Elder's book is, as she explains, an “examination of how Berliners . . . experienced and made sense of homicidal violence within their urban communities” during the years of the Weimar Republic (p. 2). Murder cases in particular provided the occasions for narratives “through which citizens made sense of the ‘bad times’ . . . war, inflation, political upheaval, and later massive unemployment” (p. 2). The urban quality of narratives of and around murders makes Berlin an especially good focus for such a study (p. 3). Elder emphasizes that these narratives were embedded in assumptions about class and gender, and to an extent about the effects of World War I on individuals and the society as a whole (p. 5).

The book unfolds in six main chapters. The first introduces the paradox of the cultural salience of murder in a city and country where the murder rate was comparatively low, and sets out Elder's argument for the political stakes behind the discourse of murder. Chapter two deals with the encouragement of denunciations by the police, while chapter three moves on to the well-known Grossmann case, which Elder shows became (for the right) a story of postwar social degeneracy and (for the left) a cautionary tale about poor housing conditions. The fourth chapter, in many ways the most interesting, shows what could happen when a random homicide struck a solidly middle-class west Berlin neighborhood instead of the rougher precincts of the north and east. The fifth chapter returns to the theme of denunciations in the context of the murder of an old man in his Prenzlauer Berg apartment; the sixth deals with domestic violence, concluding that its absence from the concerns of reformers indicates the social acceptance of it, although there is no statistical evidence for what historians often assume was an uptick in violence against women in Weimar (pp. 162–163).

Elder's book, like most of the recent literature on criminal justice in German history, is mainly a study of public, professional, and medial perceptions of crime rather than of how the police and justice system actually worked, or of the sociology of criminals themselves (although there are some elements of the latter here). As she is mainly concerned with the construction of class and gender in Weimar Berlin, she mostly avoids (with the exception of Grossmann) the especially notorious cases, such as those cases of Paul Kranz or Charley Urban, to say nothing of the overtly political murders of Walter Rathenau and Horst Wessel. Instead, her subjects are generally domestic, rather common garden-variety killings.

Along the way Elder provides many sharp observations about her material. In the fourth chapter, for instance, she cleverly dissects the rhetoric of “strangers,” insiders and outsiders, to show the implicit class assumptions the New Westend case revealed, as well as including some interesting reflections on how Lombrosian ideas about the physical markings of criminals were becoming “unstable” by the 1920s, inducing a mild paranoia about how criminals could be identified (p. 119). In this case, arising out of the murder of eleven-year-old Hildegard Zäpernick in August 1929, strong circumstantial evidence pointed to a security guard at a construction site, but police and judicial authorities were not able to find enough evidence to prosecute. Elder suggests that this suspect, a war veteran with disabling injuries that were generally thought to reflect psychological trauma, fit a stereotype of what a murderer was likely to be (pp. 127–129). She leaves unexplored another implication: that even with all this against him, the authorities were restrained enough to drop the case—a very self-controlled thing for a justice system to do when confronted with a plausible suspect, and one that speaks for the much-maligned professionalism of Weimar legal authorities.

Elder's presentation naturally raises questions of continuities, which she does not neglect. She stresses, for instance, that the police of democratic Weimar encouraged denunciations, a baleful anticipation of the later practice of the Gestapo and the Stasi (chapters two and five). The continuities in police and judicial personnel across these regimes make the point even more interesting: a detective investigating the Freudenheim murder to whom she refers in chapter five, Criminal-Commissar Quoss, would a few years later be “investigating” crimes for the Nazis, including some committed by Nazi authorities themselves.

Inevitably there are a few points about which one could quibble. Elder identifies the tremendously influential Vossische Zeitung columnist Paul Schlesinger (“Sling”) as “leftist,” while the Weltbühne is “left-liberal”—something close to the reverse would be right (p. 37). She characterizes Fritz Lang's M as a film contrasting rational citizens interested in justice with idle voyeurs, which seems to me to miss the important satirical fun Lang has equating the parallel investigations of police and gangsters. There are some infelicities in translation: Dämmerzustand as “unconscious state” rather than semi-conscious (p. 177), and a mysterious entity called “the First Criminal Court of Berlin” which, given the date and offense in question, probably means the jury court of Landgericht I (p. 162).

All in all, however, Elder's book is a thoroughly researched and thoughtfully argued contribution to the growing historiographical literature on crime and policing in modern German history.