University
of Nebraska Press
Shofar
- Books Received
Shofar
- Advertising &
Mailing List Info
Shofar
- Book Reviews |
Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895–1914, by Daniel Mark Vyleta. Austrian and Habsburg Studies, Vol. 8. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. 254 pp. $80.00.
Daniel Vyleta’s book is innovative as it looks at perceptions of crime and criminals through the lens of criminal trial reporting. He takes the historical debate about the construction of criminal types into a domain that has not been intensively studied so far. The press has certainly received its fair share of attention from cultural history—even with regard to crime reporting. These studies have used trial and crime reports as a way to understand how the city population interacted with the police through the mediation of the press in pursuing highly profiled fugitives (Müller, 2005), as evidence to reconstruct performative and praxeological dimensions of Prussian criminal courts (Carter Hett, 2004), and, finally, as part of the consumers’ appropriation of their city (Fritzsche, 1996).
Vyleta does not follow the conceptual lead of these authors. His interest is mainly in the newspaper stories about crime and criminals, as they were tried at criminal courts. He looks closely at the introduction of the main persona in a trial and for the reconstruction of the crime itself. By scrutinizing the language used and the resources deployed within the reports, he aims at a popular understanding of criminal otherness in fin-de-siècle Vienna. As the final part of his title clearly indicates, he is not just interested in news and crime, but also in the presence of anti-semitic stereotypes in the construction of criminals.
It is obvious that newspapers cannot be taken as proxies for the thinking and reasoning of their contemporaries. Vyleta readily acknowledges this in a well-reasoned methodological reflection. He claims, nevertheless, that “it seems hardly credible that the language of crime hawked by newspaper vendors bore no resemblance to and did not at all impact upon private languages about crime” (p. 10). Despite this claim, the book does not really venture into the field of popular perceptions of crime and antisemitism. The reader has to wait until the concluding remarks for a further discussion of the relation between press coverage and popular opinion, and even at that point Vyleta does not pursue this issue systematically.
The book can be best characterized as a well-written cultural study of the representation of criminals in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, with particular attention given to the use of antisemitic stereotypes. The main focus is on mass circulation newspapers, but the argument is not at all restricted to trial reports. Vyleta dedicates two of his five substantial chapters to an analysis of the scholarly discourse on crime, investigation, and criminals, where he looks for the role of race in the construction of criminals, for the role of expert knowledge in the unmasking of offenders hiding behind an apparent respectability, and for the threats posed by rational, volitional and competent criminals, that is, the type of criminal with which Jews were mostly associated.
Vyleta finds the notion of a Jewish criminal persona framed above all as modern and competent. His claim that Jewish criminals have been presented “in much the same manner throughout the nineteenth century” (p. 221) has to be questioned, however. There is no doubt that contemporary commentators also saw Jewish gangs of the Vormärz period as being composed of experts in crime. But the ultimate threat of these gangs was not related to their capability in manipulation but rather to their practice of expropriation. This makes a big difference with regard to Jewish crime as a wider political issue. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, the antisemitic press hypothesized a threat to the entire legal and political system by a concerted manipulation by Jewish capital, Jewish press, Jewish advocates, and Jewish criminals. This can be learned from Vyleta’s account of the Hilsner trials (pp. 185–210). A similar plot could not have been thought up during the first half of the 19th century.
Manipulation as imminent danger resulted from the malleability of peoples’ minds, as turn-of-the-century criminologists emphasized. This lack of mental resoluteness was linked to a rapidly spreading degeneration within the general public—with the homeless, prostitutes, and sexual criminals being its most visible evidence. Vyleta pursues these contemporary anxieties from two different angles. He looks first at the victimization of people without pursuing further the links between this debate and the reflection on the psychology of the masses (pp. 23–30).
In a second step, he shifts emphasis from criminology to detection. Malleability of the mind was dangerous to judicial procedures, as experts like Hans Gross time and again reiterated. Vyleta draws on this early literature on criminal psychology to better understand the challenges for judges in assessing the reliability of statements made by witnesses, victims, and defendants. He argues convincingly that this anxiety with misrepresentation and false memory offered expert witnesses a privileged position not just within the trial but also within the press coverage of the trial.
Expert witnesses excelled in the scientific reading of traces left at the crime scene. Their contribution to the solution of criminal cases was given increasing importance towards the end of the nineteenth century, as Vyleta observes. In his analysis of the trial reports, he establishes an interesting analogy between the expert witnesses’ competence in reading clues and the reporters’ enthusiams for deciphering hidden realities on the stage of the criminal procedure: “The papers attempted to read the ‘phenomenological’ clues residing in the defendants’ appearance and mannerisms in much the same manner as Gross recommended in his Criminalpsychologie . . .” (p. 87).
Equipped with these conceptual tools—the indifference of Austrian criminological discourse towards race, the anxiety over manipulation, and the fragility of truth claims—Vyleta looks for the strategies of the Viennese press to implicate Jews in crime. Antisemitic claims were based on the manipulation charge, as he points out:
Precisely because crime was seen to be so tied up with the process of truth recovery, and because this process was seen to depend on the wider interaction of defendant, jury, public and papers, virtually any trial was open to the accusation of miscarriage of justice. Jewish forces could easily be identified as the primary instigators of such miscarriages, particularly when Jews were involved in this wider network. (p. 106)
Vyleta uses a close reading of several trial reports to highlight different aspects of this general strategy. This method offers the reader a fairly entertaining reading as the author provides visual and textual references to the trials and the crime treated. Vyleta could have buttressed his points with somewhat fewer case studies, however. From my perspective, this remains the only shortcoming of an intellectually stimulating book.
Vyleta concludes with a reassessment of the presence of the figure of the Jewish criminal in the wider public. Papers without an explicit antisemitic orientation were reluctant to engage in the paranoid search for Jewish implications in the crime itself, in the defense, or in the press coverage. For the vast majority of the population the implication of Jews and their mastery in crime and manipulation did not exist, as Vyleta states. From his perspective, this finding does not “whitewash” Vienna in 1900. It does raise important questions about narrative strategies of the mass circulation papers and the rationale of avoiding stereotyping regarding Jews at a time when antisemitism was certainly no negligible fact of Viennese life.
Peter Becker
Johann Kepler University, Linz |
