Barnet Hartston. The Trial of Gustav Graef

Germany in the 1880s was a nation on the cusp of modernity. In its second decade as a nation and in its final decade under the rule of Otto von Bismarck, Germany was already a formidable industrial and military power on the European continent and hence on the world stage. As a newly unified nation, however, Germany had a civilian population that still bore the marks of regional, religious, and class differences that could not easily be erased by political unification under Prussian rule. Particularly in the rapidly growing German capital of Berlin, the regional differences of its newest residents existed alongside social tensions related to class, gender, ethnicity, and professional and political power. Berlin in 1885, and its myriad social tensions, is the setting for Barnet Hartston’s detailed exposition of The Trial of Gustav Graef: Art, Sex, and Scandal in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany. By looking carefully at both the individuals on trial for perjury and sexual misconduct—the bourgeois artist Gustav Graef and his model Bertha Rother—and the network of journalists, legal professionals, artists, and working-class Berliners that were either involved with the trial or connected to its defendants, Hartston gives his readers a compelling story that serves as a window into the larger debates of the time: debates concerning the freedom of artistic expression, the role of the press as intermediary between the court system and the broader populace, and the supposed decline in sexual morality, just to name a few. While such debates often served as platforms for the articulation of bourgeois fears of urban “others” including women, Jews, and members of the working class, Hartston argues that they also stand as evidence of an increasingly modern, emerging democratic society concerned with issues of artistic freedom and the freedom of the press. It is Hartston’s deft balancing of a particular focus on the Graef trial and a broader view of its historiographical implications that makes this book a successful example of microhistory, one that convincingly argues against a German Sonderweg (“special path”), a particularly authoritarian path leading inevitably toward twentieth-century Nazism, and for an understanding of 1880s Germany as a society that experienced “the growing pains of an often wrenching and disorienting transformation, but one that was inexorably and unavoidably moving forward” (228).

Bourgeoisie · German · Modernity · Nazi Germany · Political science · Politics · Population · Power (physics) · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Demography · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies