Dem Beruf auf der Spur. Beruf und Devianz im Fall Peter Kürten, 1929/30

In the case of the serial killer Peter Kürten (1929/1930) the police was not only tracing a murderer, but at the same time concepts and techniques to strengthen its epistemic authority. The result was that the investigators brought the social factor vocation (“Beruf”) into play. First, they declared vocation to be a distinctive feature of the unknown murderer. Second, they characterized Kürten as a “Berufsverbrecher”. The paper analyzes how criminalists and criminologists transferred “Berufswissen” of the early 20th century into the realm of deviance, e. g. the notion of a lifelong connection between a person and his vocation and the concept of Taylorism

Humanities · Political science · Realm · Sociology · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Decadence, Literature, and Society · European history and politics · Law · Philosophy · Psychology