Review

Sace ELDER: Murder Scenes. Normality, Deviance, and Criminal Violence in Weimar Berlin, in: German History, vol 29 (2011), No 3, pp. 666-667.

In the Weimar Republic, the explosive rise of homicides and murders after the Great War was a staple statistic used by cultural critics of all political colours to illustrate Germany’s moral and social degeneration. The perceived devaluation of human life was presented as a symptom of a deep-seated crisis, a narrative that in turn neatly underpinned the validity of the political agendas of the commentators making these claims.