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A Right to Beat a Child? Corporal Punishment and the Law in Wilhelmine Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2014

Sace Elder
Sace Elder*
Affiliation:
Eastern Illinois University
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Extract

In 1903, Elisabeth von Oertzen, a widely read author and one of the founders of the Society for the Protection of Children from Mistreatment and Exploitation, exhorted her fellow protectionists in the pages of her organization's newsletter to push for greater legal protections for children from abusive adults. The occasion for her admonition was the infamous Bavarian child abuse case in which a young male tutor, Andreas Dippold, had beaten his young charges so badly that one had succumbed to his mistreatment. The case demonstrated, von Oertzen wrote, that while torture had been abolished for adults, it was still widely practiced on children. One of the chief causes of child abuse, according to von Oertzen, was the claim to the so-called Züchtigungsrecht, the right to use corporal punishment. “Because of [the] defenselessness of children it has become customary to exercise on them the right to use corporal punishment, even where it does not exist,” she wrote. A host of people, including tutors, governesses, and babysitters claim the right, but “how far the right to corporal punishment is transferrable is entirely an open question!” Curiously, von Oertzen asserted both that there was an objectively existing “right” to use corporal punishment and that there was no consensus on where that right lay.

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Articles
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Central European History , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 54 - 75
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Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2014 

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References

1 On the Dippold case, see Hagner, Michael, Der Hauslehrer, Geschichte eines Kriminalfalls: Erziehung, Sexualität, Medien um 1900 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010)Google Scholar.

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3 Ibid.

4 Lawrence Friedman, who pioneered the concept of “legal culture,” defines it simply as “ideas, attitudes, values, and opinions about law held by people in a society.” Lawrence Friedman, Total Justice (1985), 30–31; Friedman, “Legal Culture and Social Development” Law and Society Review 4, n. 1 (1969): 29–44Google Scholar. See also Robertson, Stephen, Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 4–5Google Scholar.

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24 ALR II 2 §86.

25 §1631 BGB. specifically gave fathers this right; §1634 extended this right to married mothers, as long as the marriage was intact; if opinions differed, however, the father's will overrode that of the mother.

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42 RGSt 5 (1882): 99.

43 Ibid., 100–101.

44 “This Züchtigungsrecht is no subjective right of the teacher in the sense of civil law, no authorization of the teacher specified through objective right in relation to a point of his private sphere of rights which can be transferred from him or taken from or limited only with compensation, rather it is an attribute of his office, his person as the bearer of an office, an official authorization.” RGSt 15 (1887): 381.

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85 Polligkeit, Das Recht des Kindes, 52; Duensing, Verletzung, 5.

86 Article 120 of the Weimar Constitution also indicated that the state supervised parents' exercise of this “natural right.” See Schumann, Dirk, “Asserting Their ‘Natural Right’: Parents and Public Schooling in Post-1945 Germany,” in Raising Citizens in the Century of the Child: The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective, ed. Schumann, Dirk (New York, NY: Berghahn, 2010), 209–211Google Scholar.

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