Law, Politics, and Honor Codes in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918

FAIN: FT-53861-05

Ann Elisabeth Goldberg
Regents of the University of California, Riverside (Riverside, CA 92521-0001)

A book project on a pervasive legal culture of honor and rights that crossed class, gender, ethnic, and political divisions of German society and that, in the conditions of mass democracy under an authoritarian state, was appropriated and transformed by groups and individuals (workers, businessmen, professionals, civil servants, Jews, women, middle-class reformers) in ways that both reinforced and challenged the established order. Focusing, in particular, on defamation lawsuits, this topic provides a new view of German modernization and the cultural underpinnings of politics and civil society in the imperial era.