After thirty years of unrelenting revision, the Sonderweg interpretation of nineteenth-century Germany has been systematically dismantled. No longer viewed as the incubator to twentieth-century fascism, the Kaiserreich is now seen as a quintessential case study in modernity, similar in most respects to Third Republican France or Edwardian Britain. Ann Goldberg situates her fascinating new account of honor, politics, and the law in Imperial Germany squarely within this post-Sonderweg paradigm––but not without suggesting elements of German singularity that call into question a revisionist point of view.
In contrast to postrevolutionary France, where honor disputes were relegated to the private sphere, or Great Britain, where defamation lawsuits were infrequent and generally decided on the basis of material harm, Goldberg notes the “continuity [in Germany]––the tenacity over centuries and within vastly different settings—of an honor culture litigated in the courts (p. 2).” Far from dissipating in the wake of modernization, as Max Weber had predicted, the number of defamation-based lawsuits exploded in the Kaiserreich, yielding nearly 85,000 criminal indictments for libel and tens of thousands of settlements in 1910 alone. Instead of confirming the persistence of traditional values and preindustrial elites, however, libel lawsuits, according to Goldberg, were the “product of the liberalization of Germany's criminal justice system” (p. 9) and reflected “a hybrid legal culture that harnessed a traditional idiom of honor to a democratic politics of rights” (p. 11). Hence nineteenth-century “honor culture”––and the remarkable litigiousness that went along with it––evolved in concert with Germany's inexorable political and legal modernization.
After an illuminating introduction, the first chapter proceeds with a survey of German defamation law since the medieval era. While honor legislation favored feudal elites throughout the Early Modern Period, the revolutions of 1848–1849 paved the way for a much more liberal legal code. By the 1860s, most German jurists had seized on the German tradition of Privatklage (“private prosecution”) in which a plaintiff could bring her own civil lawsuit to counter the “prosecutorial monopoly” (p. 26) of the Prussian state's attorney's office. The government summarily rejected center-left demands to permit parties or corporations to bring “class action” suits, but the 1877 German legal code still incorporated a number of liberal reforms, which gave private citizens remarkable access to the courts.
Chapter two turns to honor litigation in “everyday life,” demonstrating how social and political tensions that could not be resolved in the parliamentary arena––between capital and labor, left and right, men and women, private citizens and an authoritarian administration––were displaced onto the courts. To be sure, the judiciary's elitist bias persisted into the late-Wilhelmine period, as reflected, for example, in the disastrous libel suit brought against Max Weber by the untenured Heidelberg journalism professor, Adolf Koch. Koch not only lost the suit, but his teaching post for good measure. Thus, even while German honor culture “undermin[ed] fixed social roles,” it also incorporated “hierarchical, corporate values into modern institutions” (p. 50). The state's double standard in deciding defamation cases becomes particularly apparent in chapter three. Central in this regard is the 1910 Moabit trial, in which the state successfully prosecuted five dozen working-class protesters for insulting the police.
Although the workers were declared guilty, however, their spirited defense and the damage done to the image of the police in public opinion suggests the state's victory was “Pyrrhic” at best (p. 92). Indeed, if the politicization of libel law normally favored the right, chapters four and five are very good at illustrating the important exceptions. The famous Eulenberg Affair, during which the radical Jewish liberal Maximillian Harden accused the ranking diplomat Phillip Prince zu Eulenberg and General Count Kuno von Moltke of maintaining a homosexual relationship, proved that libel law could be exploited to the advantage of the left. Despite the salacious nature of Harden's accusations and his clearly inferior social standing, he was eventually vindicated. Subsequent attempts by conservatives to restrict the ability of private citizens to bring libel lawsuits also failed. Through case studies of Jews and lunatics, Goldberg likewise shows in chapter five how “outsiders” used defamation law to pursue their claims to full citizenship and equal rights. In fact Jewish emancipation depended to a remarkable extent on the political instrumentalization of honor, while Germans accused of mental disorders made wrongful incarcerations and psychiatric incompetence into matters of public political debate. The book's conclusion, which follows libel legislation into Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Federal Republic, contends that Germany's enduring honor culture continued to push politics and society to evolve in dynamic if often contradictory ways.
Goldberg's well-researched and elegantly written monograph is generally convincing and adds an important dimension to our understanding of politics and society in Imperial Germany. Undoubtedly honor was a malleable concept that could be used to question traditional values, undermine inequality, and promote democratization. Yet defamation law, as Goldberg makes clear, was also frequently (and successfully) employed by the state to reinforce a conservative status quo. One is therefore left with the impression that Germany's unique history of “honor culture,” though fungible and open to contestation, did as much to restrict as to encourage the Kaiserreich's political and legal modernization.
