Gender and the Policing of Honor in Imperial Germany

Imperial Germany (1871-1918) was a society that heavily policed a person’s sense of dignity (honor) through the court system. In hundreds of thousands of defamation lawsuits, German citizens, from peasants and workers to doctors, businessmen, officials, politicians, and housewives, took the conflicts of daily life and politics to the courts. The onslaught of honor court cases, a phenomenon recently examined for the first time in my book Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany (2010) was made possible by Germany’s unusual defamation statutes that allowed for private, criminal prosecutions of a large range of “insulting” statements and actions. The state massively used the laws to censor opposition. At the same time, ordinary citizens, even the disempowered (e.g., workers, Jews, women), used the courts and the trope of honor, not only to resolve personal disputes, but to assert the rights of citizenship.

The pervasive way that speech in Germany was policed through honor lawsuits has enormous implications for our understanding of how power worked in the Kaiserreich. Not only does it shift attention to the courts, it suggests the multidirectionality (from “above” and “below”) of power relations. In so doing, it challenges  top-down notions of power that are so common in the historiography. Most importantly, it puts culture at center stage, since it was a distinct culture of honor that mediated the diverse conflicts prosecuted under defamation law.

Building and expanding upon my book, the talk will explore these issues through an examination of defamation litigation involving women. Women comprised a striking number of plaintiffs. Their lawsuits suggest a complex relationship beween women (second class citizens) and the state, as women, in daily conflicts (with neighbors, family members, employers, and sexual harassers), invoked defamation law and the sanctity of honor to make old and new claims about rights and dignity.