Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century

Through the means of four narratives from the nineteenth-century German underworld, this book explores an intriguing array of questions about criminality, punishment and social exclusion in modern German history. Drawing on hitherto unexplored legal documents and police files, Richard J. Evans recounts the epic adventures of an art teacher imprisoned for forging bank notes, then transported to Siberia with a gang of violent Prussian felons in 1802; the tragic sufferings of a drunken female vagrant whipped repeatedly by the authorities in Bremen in the 1820s and 30s for the crime of persistently returning to the city after being expelled; the comical and fantastic personal and political deceptions of a con man arrested in the 1860s for not paying his hotel bill; and the ironic career of a young woman who drifts into prostitution after bearing an illegitimate child and discovers the underworld to be much less cruel and immoral than the 'respectable' society from which she was rejected.