A history of the case study by Birgit Lang Joy Damousi Alison Lewis

Author:Birgit Lang, Joy Damousi, Alison Lewis [Birgit Lang, Joy Damousi, Alison Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526124098
Google: eiYxtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T22:14:27+00:00

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Erich Wulffen and the case of the criminal

Birgit Lang

In 1927, the leading illustrated weekly Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ) introduced its readers to the twenty-one most influential German criminologists of the day. Each was represented by a portrait photograph and a caption. The result was an iconography of experts in the burgeoning fields of studying, solving and writing about crime and criminals. Among the select group was Dr Erich Wulffen (1862–1936), Head of Department in the Saxon Ministry of Justice.1 The photo essay describes Wulffen as the author of several criminological works on sex crime. Actually, the former state prosecutor can be considered Wilhelmine Germany’s first legal expert; with reference to Reiner Grundmann and Nico Stehr’s definition of such an expert, Wulffen was undoubtedly a broker of knowledge between specialist discourse and the wider public in modern society.2 In addition, Wulffen wrote creative fiction on criminal psychology and legal reform.

During Wulffen’s lifetime his published oeuvre included an unprecedentedly wide range of interdisciplinary cases: his case study compilations integrated sexological, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and anthropological insights to broaden the legal understanding of criminality. Through these compilations, Wulffen targeted the milieus of the court, the university and professionals within the penal system, but also the educated public. As a broker of knowledge between the law and the German people in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Wulffen deserves special credit for shaping two new case modalities: the expert case and the case story. Wulffen’s expert case studies relied on his privileged position and expertise to communicate new academic insights to the reading public. Wulffen’s case stories were conceived as creative works of fiction with the purpose of illustrating certain criminal psychological insights gained in his academic work.

This chapter represents the most in-depth scholarly engagement with the breadth and nuance of Wulffen’s case writings, and explores the intellectual contexts and case writing traditions that influenced Wulffen’s use of case modalities: his humanist education, the cases and case writing traditions of the legal profession and forensics, and, most importantly, the role of the legal reform movement. Further, this chapter contextualises Wulffen’s case writings in relation to his wider emancipatory project of educating a range of publics about the psychology of criminals – part of his attempt to further society’s understanding of the criminal mind. Wulffen cleaved to his pedagogical project across the divide of the First World War, his sustained use of the case study genre defined by an ability to adapt case writings to particular audiences in Wilhelmine Germany. The period of the Weimar Republic proved more challenging to his larger project and to preserving the authority of what turned out to be a genre in crisis.

Like the fellow experts featured in the news magazine, Wulffen was a modern German mandarin. Fritz Ringer originally used the term ‘mandarin’ to reference the conservative nature of Germany’s academic and legal elite, yet Wulffen was part of an overlooked group of legal reformers who sought to change the legal system from within.3 This progressive German intellectual elite aimed to

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