1. For examples of some of the best studies see Graham, Hugh Davis and Gurr, Ted Robert, eds., Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills, 1979).Google Scholar For a recent synthesis and bibliographical discussion of crime studies in history and in a variety of national contexts see Shelley, Louise I., Crime and Modernization: The Impact of Industrialization and Urbanization on Crime (Carbondale, 1981).Google Scholar Other recent works which discuss or exhibit much of the vast literature on crime are Sykes, Gresham M., Criminology (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; and Inciardi, James A. and Faupel, Charles E., eds., History and Crime: Implications for Criminal Justice Policy (Beverly Hills, 1980).Google Scholar For an excellent discussion of earlier studies of crime and its causation see Mannheim, Hermann, Comparative Criminology (Boston, 1965).Google Scholar

2. Between 1873 and 1906 there were only 713 homicides in Berlin. A recent Detroit Free Press article carried the photographs of over 750 people killed in Detroit in 1980. The two cities in these two time periods are roughly comparable in size.

3. Lane, Roger, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar; Lodhi, Abdul Qaiyum and Tilly, Charles, “Urbanization, Crime and Collective Violence in Nineteenth-century France,” American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973): 196–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chevalier, Louis, trans. Jellinek, Frank, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Szabo, Denis, Crimes et villes (Paris, 1960)Google Scholar; Zehr, Howard, Crime and the Development of Modern Society (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Monkkonen, Eric H., The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860–1885 (Cambridge, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gattrell, V. A. C. and Hadden, T. B., “Criminal Statistics and Their Interpretation,” in Wrigley, E. A., ed., Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (New York, 1972), 336–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gurr, Ted Robert, Grabosky, Peter N., and Hula, Richard C., The Politics of Crime and Conflict: A Comparative History of Four Cities (Beverly Hills, 1977).Google Scholar

4. Blasius, Dirk, Kriminalität und Alltag: Zur Konfliktgeschichte des Alltagslebens im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1978)Google Scholar; and Bürgerliche Gesellschaft und Kriminalität: Zur Sozialgeschichte Preussens im Vormärz (Göttingen, 1976).Google Scholar Certainly German historians and sociologists have not been deterred by a lack of historical criminal statistics, for various states, cities, and police departments kept excellent records dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. For a detailed discussion of the statistics available, see Graff, Helmut, Die deutsche Kriminalstatistik: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1975).Google Scholar For American studies dealing with crime in German history see McHale, Vincent E. and Johnson, Eric A., “Urbanization, Industrialization, and Crime in Imperial Germany: Parts 1 and 2,” Social Science History 1 (Fall 1976 and Winter 1977): 45–78, 210–47Google Scholar; and Johnson, Eric A. and McHale, Vincent E., “Socioeconomic Aspects of the Delinquency Rate in Imperial Germany, 1882–1914,” Journal of Social History 13, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 384–402.Google Scholar Although Howard Zehr's work concentrates more on crime in France, it also contains a considerable and important discussion of crime trends in nineteenth century Germany. See Zehr, Crime and the Development of Modern Society.

5. Louise I. Shelley, Crime and Modernization.

6. I think that the most prudent discussion of the little we know about patterns of crime in history is that of Gurr, Ted Robert, “On the History of Crime in Europe and America,” in Graham, and Gurr, , eds., Violence in America, pp. 353–74.Google Scholar For the impact of warfare on criminal violence see Archer, Dane and Gartner, Rosemary, “Violent Acts and Violent Times: A Comparative Approach to Postwar Homicide Rates,” American Sociological Review 41 (1976): 937–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

7. Lodhi and Tilly, Zehr, and Johnson and McHale's studies of crime in France and Germany test these theories and all agree that they should be rejected. Lodhi and Tilly, “Urbanization, Crime and Collective Violence”; Zehr, Crime and the Development of Modern Society; and McHale and Johnson, “Urbanization, Industrialization, and Crime.”

8. McHale and Johnson, ibid.

9. Lodhi and Tilly, “Urbanization, Crime and Collective Violence”; Stinchcombe, Arthur L., “Institutions of Privacy in the Determination of Police Administrative Practice,” American Journal of Sociology 69 (1963): 150–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. We conducted time-series correlations demonstrating a link between food prices and both adult and juvenile crime rates in “Urbanization, Industrialization and Crime: Part 2,” pp. 217–24, and in “Socioeconomic Aspects of the Delinquency Rate,” pp. 390–91. Whereas our concentration was on the latter part of the nineteenth century, Dirk Blasius has found similar trends in the first half of the nineteenth century as well. Blasius, Kriminalität und Alltag, pp. 46–51. German scholars, though they did not have the aid of computers, have long held that crime and economic conditions were closely related. See Fuld, L., Der Einfluss der Lebensmittelpreise auf die Bewegung der Sozialethik (Mainz, 1881)Google Scholar; Renger, Eswald, Kriminalität Preise und Lohn (Leipzig, 1933)Google Scholar; von Mayr, Georg, Moralstatistik mit Einschluss der Kriminalstatistik (Tübingen, 1917)Google Scholar; and Starcke, Wilhelm, Verbrechen und Verbrecher in Preussen 1854–1878 (Berlin, 1884)Google Scholar. The German authorities in Imperial Germany obviously recognized the importance of geo-cultural differences in crime trends as nearly every annual volume of official criminal statistics (Kriminalstatistik) contained elaborate maps showing how the eastern border districts of Prussia, which contained large Polish minorities, had exceptionally high rates of crime as compared to most other areas of Germany.

11. In partial defense of our study, we used these broad categories primarily because we wished to make our work comparable to Lodhi and Tilly's study which used the same broad categories even though German and French criminal law and definitions are not exactly the same. Certainly our work was not more ambiguous than the works of many American sociologists who often use FBI “index crimes” as their dependent variables.

12. In Prussia the Kreis was the basic unit of administration. In all cases I have used units that were comparable in size and function to the Prussian Kreise, Bezirksämter in Bavaria, Amtshauptmannschaften in Saxony, Oberamtsbezirke in Wurttemberg, Amtsbezirke in Baden, Verwaltungsbezirke in Sachsen-Weimar and Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Ämter in Oldenburg, etc.

13. The most important sources I have used for criminal statistics are the yearly volumes, beginning in 1882, of Kriminalstatistik contained in the huge series of governmental statistics, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs. For murder and death rates I have used the volumes, entitled Die Sterblichkeit nach Todesursachen und Altersklassen der Gestorbenen, contained in the also very large series of Prussian governmental statistics, Preussische Statistik. Most of my socioeconomic data comes from the published census reports contained in various volumes of Statistik des Deutschen Reichs (in particular vol. 150, which contains a linguistic breakdown of the smaller administrative districts for the years 1900). I have also made use of many other smaller statistical series including various statistical yearbooks like the Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin, Statistisches Jahrbuch für den Preussischen Staat, and Statistisches Handbuch für den Preussischen Staat.

14. Most criminologists believe that conviction statistics are worse then arrest statistics or, of course, than crimes reported to the police. Unfortunately, it is only possible to use conviction statistics for this study as no nationwide arrest figures or reported-crime figures were kept by the German authorities which pertain to the different administrative districts. The conviction statistics, however, are not as bad as some might think; for example, they really are very similar to the arrest statistics many scholars use in studying French criminality; approximately 90% of those arrested for a crime were eventually convicted in these years. Also one might argue that the German conviction statistics are in some ways better than French arrest figures, as many French people who were arrested were not guilty. In a recent paper I wrote with David Cohen I demonstrated how the French authorities often acted in a biased way toward ethnic minorities by arresting them without enough evidence to convict them. Cohen, David and Johnson, Eric A., “French Criminality: Urban-Rural Differences in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12, no. 3 (Winter 1982): 477–501, esp. 487–90.Google Scholar

15. Any solid economic history text would provide ample documentation. Recommended are Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 193–359Google Scholar; and Stolper, Gustav, German Economy, 1870–1940 (New York, 1940).Google Scholar

16. I have taken these figures from Hohorst, Gerd, Kocka, Jürgen, and Ritter, Gerhard A., Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch: Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs 1870–1914 (Munich, 1978), pp. 43–44.Google Scholar

17. These figures do not contain Übertretungen, or minor offenses, which differed from state to state and town to town. Definitions of Verbrechen and Vergehen did not differ from place to place as they are all specified in the German criminal code, Reichstrafgesetzbuch, which applied uniformly to all localities after 1881.

18. The best numerical summary of yearly crime rates made by the German government is contained in Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, vol. 370 (Berlin, 1930).Google Scholar For all property offenses the conviction rate was 534 per 100,000 strafmündige population in 1882 and 522 in 1913. Simple theft reduced in this period from 249 to 167. McHale and Johnson in “Urbanization, Industrialization and Crime, Part 2,” pp. 214–27, found, furthermore, that the rise in the overall crime rate resulted largely from increases in the convictions of repeat offenders and not from first-time offenders. Dirk Blasius found that the theft rate actually started dropping by 1852 in Prussia. At the same time, however, the rate of criminal violence (Körperverletzung) began increasing rapidly. See Blasius, Kriminalität und Alltag, p. 50.

19. Zehr, Crime and the Development of Modern Society, p. 115.

20. Ibid. For his entire discussion see pp. 114–20.

21. For detailed discussion of this see Rabl, Rupert, Strafzumessungspraxis und Kriminalitätsbewegung (Leipzig, 1936)Google Scholar; and Exner, Franz, Studien über die Strafzumessungspraxis der deutschen Gerichte (Leipzig, 1931).Google Scholar

22. For example, in the five-year period between 1887 and 1891, in Berlin 59 out of 95 homicides were of infants less than one year old. In the entire state of Prussia only 514 out of 1,788 homicides were of infants in the same period.

23. Baker, Ray Stannard, Seen in Germany (New York, 1901), p. 8.Google Scholar

24. Louise I. Shelley, Crime and Modernization.

25. Dirk Blasius also argues that German crime trends for the first half of the 19th century do not support the modernization theory of crime put forward by Zehr and others which Shelley accepts at face value. See Kriminalität und Alltag, pp. 44–50. For a thought-provoking, though unsuccessful, attempt to link 19th-century crime trends in several countries to the growth of professional police forces see Tilly, Charles, Levett, Allan, Lodhi, A. Q., and Munger, Frank, “How Policing Affected the Visibility of Crime in Nineteenth-Century Europe and America,” forthcoming in Ferdinand, Theodore, ed., The Criminal Justice System.Google Scholar They argue that the rise of recorded crime may be due simply to the rise in the size of police forces as “the intensification of policing undoubtedly tended to raise the proportion of all violations of the law which came to the attention of crime control specialists and thereby became visible.” But they also argue that more police leads to less “real crime,” as the “net effect of policing is to diminish the frequency of illegal acts by increasing their probable costs.”

26. Between 1870 and 1910 circa 500,000 people from just the province of Posen left for other Prussian provinces and over 200,000 emigrated overseas. Hagen, William W., Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772–1914 (Chicago, 1980), p. 326.Google Scholar

27. For a fuller discussion of urban-rural differences see Hans Hermann Burchardt, Kriminalität in Stadt und Land. But this structural argument for theft may still be somewhat dubious because of changes in the German criminal code. The relationship between urbanity and theft might dissolve if largely rural offenses like wood theft (by far the largest property offense in the first half of the nineteenth century) had not been decriminalized in the last part of the nineteenth century. In Imperial Germany wood theft was considered only a minor offense (Übertretung), thus it does not show up in our figures. Earlier, however, it was considered a misdemeanor (Vergehen). On the great importance of wood theft and on the severity with which it was punished in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Blasius, Kriminalität und Alltag.

28. Some may still wonder if the death rate really is a good measure of relative poverty or wellbeing especially since other measures such as taxation or infant mortality rates are so often used in sociological studies. Even though such measures are available in German government statistical series for the period I am studying, I believe that it is more prudent to use mortality rates in this case. Income tax measures would be misleading as they overestimate the economic wellbeing of urban inhabitants vis-à-vis rural inhabitants: urban inhabitants earned more taxable income but were not necessarily better off economically than rural inhabitants; fewer rural inhabitants received their renumeration in taxable salary, rents, and wages than urban inhabitants and they were often paid lower wages, since living expenses were lower. Infant mortality rates, on the other hand, might be useful, but I still think that mortality figures are better. Having looked many times at German infant mortality figures, it appears that they were tremendously influenced by cultural and ethnic considerations often independent of economic conditions. All of this said, I still recognize that the death rate is an imperfect measure of poverty or wealth. My confidence in it is bolstered, however, because in our study of German juvenile delinquency trends, McHale and I found that the death rate of a district was highly correlated with various measures of material and economic standards such as taxable income, school spending, and doctors per capita. See “Socioeconomic Aspects of the Delinquency Rate,” pp. 395–96. My confidence is further strengthened because other respected scholars have used such mortality measures for the same purpose. In Louis Chevalier's graphic portrait of Parisian crime and economic conditions in the first half of the nineteenth century, he argues that the precipitous rise in Parisian crime rates was largely caused by declining material standards as measured by rising mortality rates. See his Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes, pp. 320–43. In his monumental study of the English working class, E. P. Thompson argues at length that health and mortality measures are far better indicators of economic wellbeing than are income or consumption measures. See his The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966), esp. pp. 314–50.Google Scholar Another usage of mortality measures for similar purposes, though somewhat provocative, is provided in a recent review of a report on the declining living standards in the Soviet Union to the United States Statistical Bureau, In his review article, Nick Eberstadt explains that life expectancy in the Soviet Union may have declined by about four years since the late 1950s, and this is a far more reliable indicator in his view of declining Soviet living standards than any figures about Soviet wages or consumer activities. See Eberstadt, Nick, “The Health Crisis in the U.S.S.R.,” New York Review of Books 23 (02. 19, 1981): 23–31.Google Scholar

29. The fact that in 1900, after decades of Germanization policies, millions of Poles still considered their mother tongue to be Polish must demonstrate their unwillingness to become Germanized. In a forthcoming book The Rechtsstaat: Crime and Criminal Justice in Imperial Germany, I discuss at some length the ways in which the courts discriminated against the Poles. For example, if they were taken to court and charged with a crime, the proceedings would usually be in German even though many Polish defendants could not understand a word of what was going on.

30. It is possible, of course, that the German urbanization and modernization processes were largely different from other societies. Economic historians are agreed that German urban and industrial development certainly came later but proceeded more rapidly than in England or France. Moreover, one might argue that German cities and their inhabitants were not as hard pressed as their counterparts in many other societies for the following reasons: 1) the more paternalistic and less laissez-faire treatment of the German people by their government; 2) the early social welfare advances under Bismarck; and 3) the historic fragmentation of Germany may have led to more local pride in provincial cities which led Germans to undertake stronger attempts to keep all or most of their cities attractive and livable instead of devoting their resources to the building and preservation of one or a few national showplace cities. Nevertheless, I expect that the German case is really not uncharacteristic in most ways, at least regarding my doubts about the impact of urbanization and modernization on crime and about the importance of poverty, ethnicity, and cultural factors. To prove or even to discuss this argument in sufficient detail, however, would take at least a sizable article. But in that serious crime rates have been shown to have declined in the United States and England over the nineteenth century and to have declined in postwar Japan, despite its rapid urbanization and industrialization, it is hard to believe that the processes of urbanization and modernization are necessarily crimeinducing. For statistical evidence and discussion of time-series crime trends in these countries see Lane, Roger, “Urban Homicide in the Nineteenth Century: Some Lessons for the Twentieth,” in Inciardi, and Faupel, , eds., History and Crime, pp. 91–109Google Scholar; Gattrell, and Hadden, , “Criminal Statistics and Their Interpretation”; and Bayley, David, Forces of Order: Police Behavior in Japan and the United States (Berkeley, 1976).Google Scholar What seems most important to me is how a society adapts to urbanization, industrialization, and modernization. If these processes bring poverty, ethnic strife, and social disaffection in their wake, then I expect crime will increase. But if they bring material improvements and afford reasonable social harmony, then crime might even decrease.

31. I have not tried to prove that Germans experienced improvements in material conditions in Imperial Germany as I consider this already well established by others. Good discussions of wages and conditions in this period are contained in Bry, Gerhard, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945 (Princeton, 1960)Google Scholar, and Tipton, Frank B., Regional Variations in the Economic Development of Germany During the Nineteenth Century (Middletown, Connecticut, 1976).Google Scholar

32. There are many indications from German diplomacy, political life, and arts and letters that Germany was becoming an increasingly militaristic and violent culture and society in the years after the turn of the century. Many other countries were certainly wary of Germany's diplomatic saber rattling and naval and colonial expansionist policies in these years. One of the major arguments made by Fritz Fischer in his monumental study of German war aims, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York, 1967)Google Scholar, was that these fears were well founded as a broad spectrum of Germany's leaders and public were pushing and preparing for war well before 1914. The rise of the strike movement and the tremendous growth of the socialist movement led to frequent violent encounters between the authorities and the people at least in urban and industrial areas. Anyone who has read Mann's, HeinrichProfessor Unrat oder das Ende eines Tyrannen (Munich, 1906)Google Scholar or has seen its Weimar movie version, “The Blue Angel,” is immediately struck by Mann's criticism of the brutal nature of prewar German society. Satirical magazines such as Simplicissimus (published first in 1896) regularly featured cartoons and art reflecting and lampooning the violent and brutal activities of the authorities and the society they represented. Although crime was not a major theme in German literature as compared with many other countries, depictions of death, brutality, and violence became increasingly common especially with the advent of literary expressionism after the turn of the century.

33. Greater contemplation and more knowledge of Germany's police and legal practices, attitudes toward crime and criminals, and mentality may eventually provide this Verstehen. But after devoting three lengthy chapters in my forthcoming book, The Rechtsstaat, to these issues, I must confess that Verstehen is difficult to come by. Part of the problem is that Germans themselves seemed to have had little of it. Crime and criminal justice were important topics for both scholarly and journalistic writers in Imperial Germany, but their works were either too narrowly empirical, as in the case of the scholars, or too ideological or soupy, as in the case of most journalists and publicists, to provide anything tantamount to Verstehen. One might expect to find Verstehen in the works of the literary elite, but, alas, little is to be found there either. Very few serious novelists, short story writers, or playwrights wrote about crime or criminal justice; the only notable exceptions were a few naturalist authors like Hauptmann, Kretzer, or Conrad, whom most Germans found too dreary or too leftist-minded to take seriously. Several others have noted before that Imperial Germany failed to develop a socially conscious and critical school of letters. Without this, few Germans gained much compassion or understanding either for other Germans or for foreigners. Perhaps class conflict, ethnic strife, virulent nationalism, and ultimately a milieu conducive to interpersonal violence were, in a sense, byproducts of Germany's own lack of Verstehen.