Richard J. Evans - The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History

The essays collected in this book with two exceptions previously unpublished deal with the neglected history of the lowest layer of German society, of marginal, outcast and deviant groups such as arsonists, witches, bandits, infanticides, poachers, murderers, prostitutes, vagrants and thieves, from the end of the thirteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Until very recently this has been terra incognita for the historian of Germany. Studies of the pre-industrial guilds, of peasants and rural labourers, of the urban working class, have grown rapidly in number over the past ten to fifteen years, as social history has begun to establish itself in the German field after decades of neglect. Beneath these poverty-stricken masses, however, there existed an even more miserable and impoverished stratum with a long history of its own, which research is only now beginning to uncover: the German underworld. To use the term underworld is no mere romantic ploy: in pre-industrial times, outcast and marginal groups did to a large extent constitute a world on their own, separate in many ways from the rigid social hierarchies of Early Modern Germany. Their customs, institutions, and even language (known as Rotwelsch) differed sharply from those of the settled and respectable society around them. If relatively little has been written in German about these groups, then there is as yet virtually nothing available in print about them in English. To help in the process of recovering the lost history of the German underworld, and to present it to an English-speaking readership, are the two major purposes of this book.

Historical scholarship has all too often given the impression that the Germans have been an obedient and conformist people. The studies of deviance and law-breaking collected in this volume show how throughout German history substantial groups of people have deviated sharply from the norms laid down by respectable society. However, they also illustrate how these groups have been stigmatised and treated as outcasts, and how these structures of stigmatisation and deviance changed over the centuries above all, perhaps, from the late nineteenth century, when Germany became an industrial society. The pre-industrial underworld was constantly under suspicion and subject to persecution by the authorities, but its boundaries were never entirely sealed off , mainly where networks of social support for the unmarried mother were relatively weak. These female criminals were thus only part of a much wider deviant group. At times of particular hardship, like the Depression years in the early 1930s, deviant groups such as vagrants were massively swollen by thousands of people who had previously spent their lives in respectable society. A study of the German underworld must inevitably, therefore, go beyond the confines of professional crime and encompass wider attitudes to conformity and deviance, authority and obedience in the German past.

At its most general level, this book can be seen as a contribution to the history of state and society in Germany from the Early Modern territorial state to the Third Reich and its aftermath. The nature and effectiveness of judicial and police procedures in Germany and the attitude of the state to deviants and law-breakers are themes running right through the book, and can be followed in every chapter. The inquisitorial justice of the Early Modern period is seen in operation in we see how a crisis of the state could coincide with a breakdown of the social order in generating a crime-wave of major proportions.