This volume edited by Richard F. Wetzell brings together articles by some of the leading historians of crime and criminal justice in modern Germany.They include the authors of a number of important monographs on topics such as deviance and criminality in Weimar Berlin, as well as criminal justice and criminology during the Imperial and Nazi periods. The collection's raison d’être is to introduce a broad audience to research conducted over the last decade in a field that had previously been a victim of historical neglect. As this volume illustrates, these recent efforts have not only begun to address the absence of scholarly work on crime and criminal justice in modern Germany, but have also acted to undermine a number of widespread assumptions about the nature of justice in and continuities across the Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi periods. Divided into four parts, the volume covers criminal justice in Imperial Germany, penal reform in the Weimar Republic, the construction of crime in the Weimar courts, media, literature, as well as criminal justice in Nazi and postwar Germany.

Beginning with articles by Benjamin Carter Hett, Andreas Fleiter, and Sandra Leukel, the book's first part challenges the idea that criminal justice in the Imperial period was authoritarian, illiberal, and distorted by the application of class justice. Hett's chapter, for instance, demonstrates that complaints by defense lawyers during the Kaiserreich did not tend to revolve around the absence of a Rechtsstaat (rule of law) per se, but instead focused on issues stemming from the implementation of liberal reforms, including the arbitrariness of justice, the influence of popular opinion, and the use of juries. Fleiter's chapter considers the reasons why Social Democrats largely accepted the tenets of bourgeois criminology, regarding the ordinary criminals with whom they were often imprisoned not as victims of a class-based justice system but rather as rougues and ruffians for whom the individualized punishments advocated by the modern penal reform movement were appropriate. The reform of women's prisons, inspired by the broader penal reform movement, as well as by growing concerns about women's emancipation, is the topic of Leukel's contribution, which interrogates the connections between the rising interest in female criminality, criminology, and the desire to use punishment to protect society from crime.

The second part of the volume, which consists of contributions by Nikolaus Wachsmann, Gabriel N. Finder, and Warren Rosenblum, examines the impact of modern penal reform on juvenile justice and on the relationship between welfare workers and the judiciary during the Weimar Republic. These authors complicate the narratives of post-World War I justice and punishment that point to straightforward connections between Weimar justice and the individualized and medicalized system later in operation under the Nazis. Wachsmann, for example, shows that Weimar prisons enabled experimentation with prisoner rehabilitation that drew on the liberal ambitions of many penal reformers. But, he also points out, these experiments were often curtailed by social and political events beyond the control of the reformers. Finder's chapter on the medicalization of juvenile justice contests the idea that psychiatrists came to dominate the juvenile courts during the Weimar years; he highlights instead the manner in which judges were able to check, in part, the momentum of forensic psychiatry and coopt it for themselves. Rosenblum examines the arguments between those on the Left and Right over the Gerichtshilfe (court assistance) system that enabled information about defendants' lives to be collected from welfare agencies in order to make decisions about appropriate punishment.

The volume's third part also deals with the Weimar Republic, but the focus here is on the representation of crime and criminality in the courts, in media, and in literature. Sace Elder considers the representation of serial killer Carl Grossmann's victims and the difference between their portrayal in the media and witness statements that located these women in far more complex and differentiated social settings. Eva Bischoff and Daniel Siemens offer an account of the trial of Karl Hussmann, a bourgeois youth accused of the sexual murder of his friend, that helps explain his acquittal along class lines. Todd Herzog analyzes Alfred Döblin's retelling of the Ella Klein and Margarete Nebbe murder case, arguing that the author's intention was to undermine the closure offered by the genre of the case study, which located guilt in the individual, by pointing a finger at the social order instead. The fourth part of the volume covers the Nazi and postwar periods, with chapters by Robert Waite on juvenile justice after 1933 that concentrates on the impact of the 1939 Decree for the Protection against Juvenile Serious Offenders; by Petra Gödecke on West German penal reform and the effects of denazification on law professors; and by Jennifer Evans on juvenile justice in the Soviet zone of occupation.

Edited collections often feel eclectic, but this book has a coherency fostered not only by Wetzell's excellent introduction, which provides an overview of both the chapters and the historiographical debates, but also by the selection of complimentary topics that benefit from juxtaposition. The strength of this volume is largely in the depth and breadth of the material on the Imperial and Weimar periods; by contrast, the Nazi and postwar eras receive far less attention. This is more than compensated for by the fine discussion of juvenile justice and changing attitudes of the judiciary toward individualized punishment across the three periods covered in the chapters by Finder, Waite and Evans. This is undoubtedly an important collection that will be essential reading for those with an interest in criminology, penal reform, the German courts after 1871, as well as the social, cultural, and political implications of crime. It is also a volume that will likely inspire further research because its contributors have proven that the study of crime and criminal justice is versatile enough to accommodate those with interests in areas as diverse as legal history and the histories of medicine, gender, sexuality, the media, and economic history.