Siemens's prize-winning dissertation, like the newspapers on which it focuses, tells many stories. It is, of course, much more selective than they were, focusing as it does on a particular theme that reverberated in parts of the press rather than on the history of journalism more generally—let alone on anything like the full range of topics on which newspaper reporters wrote. Siemens depicts, however, a very wide array of events and developments. While concentrating on narrations of and commentaries on criminal trials in nine newspapers in three “world cities”—two in Europe and one in the United States—during the decade and a half after World War I, he situates Gerichtsreportage with reference to the histories of crime, criminal justice, criminology, and criminal medicine. By far the best known of the trials with which Siemens deals occurred in Chicago. It entailed the prosecution of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb for the murder of Bobby Franks and the successful effort by their attorney, Clarence Darrow, to enable them to escape the death penalty. But Siemens's book considers many other trials as well, with proceedings that led or could have led to capital punishments standing out. It thus offers the reader a multi-faceted delineation of ways in which (supposedly) criminal acts and institutional responses to them permeated the consciousness of urban readers, resulting in what the author refers to as “interdiscourses” that transcended more limited discourses of either a professional or popular sort. The history of the media is thus pursued here with a view to leaving us with a broad comprehension of legal culture, the culture of crime, and the history of metropolitan mentalities, as well as of contested views about the relationships between the rights of individuals and the need for protection from public “enemies.”

Despite the inclusion of helpful summaries and explicit reflections on methodology along the way and of an effective summary in the conclusion, the heterogeneity of viewpoints in the vast assortment of sources the author has investigated makes it difficult for the reader to extract from his book an overarching thesis or argument. What one takes away from it instead is a sense of the growing intensity of interest in and concern about criminal justice (particularly in Berlin and Chicago, albeit somewhat less so in France) and of the liveliness of the debate that arose from the manner in which judicial proceedings were described and evaluated. Beyond that, we glimpse a multitude of ways in which anxieties about varying aspects of life in a modern metropolis other than crime itself, ranging from sexuality and ethnicity to relations between generations, were refracted through court reporting. (In this connection, it must be emphasized that concern over misdeeds perpetrated by youths and views of so-called “crimes of passion”—both sexual and political—receive particular attention.) Men and women who wrote about criminal trials sought mainly to satisfy their readers' curiosity, and in so doing, they largely refrained from commenting explicitly on the specialist discourses produced by scholars (from which in some cases the discourse of the journalists strikingly diverged), but their writings helped nonetheless to construct “local moral order[s]” for those who consumed them.

Although he pays attention at various points to differences that apparently separated views along national lines, Siemens prioritizes international parallels, repeatedly emphasizing similarities rather than national singularities. He takes particular pains to reject the notion of a German Sonderweg that supposedly led via hereditarian views of crime's causes both toward eugenic approaches to crime prevention and toward National Socialism. Siemens thus helps to confirm the validity of the views on this subject expressed by Richard Wetzell in his Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2000). Debates between advocates of criminal biology (the most famous of whom was the Italian Cesare Lombroso) and those who stressed the impact of the social and familial milieus in which law breakers grew up permeated discourse about crime in all three countries. To the limited extent that controversies among specialists were echoed in the press, the (mostly hard-line) views of the hereditarians found no more favor in Berlin than they did in Paris or Chicago. Indeed, one is struck by the fact that writers in Berlin tended to regard those on trial neither as wicked monsters nor as victims of their genetic Anlagen but instead as victims of circumstance, who deserved sympathy rather than retribution or exclusion from the society at whose hands they had themselves suffered before committing offenses against others. This view was accompanied, in Berlin, by opposition to capital punishment. In fact, support for eugenic approaches and for the death penalty was strongest in Chicago, where there was a reaction against the environmentalism propagated earlier by “progressives,” and it also appears to have been stronger in the French capital than in the German capital. Moreover, in Berlin, (mostly liberal) journalists were much more inclined than journalists elsewhere to challenge the validity of proceedings that occurred in courtrooms, which they frequently regarded as bastions of conservatism. In various respects, the views of Siemens's Germans thus pointed away from rather than in the direction of support for the much greater harshness that prevailed during the years of the Third Reich, both in courts and in the area of public opinion.