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Hate Speech and Identity Politics in Germany, 1848–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2015

Ann Goldberg
Ann Goldberg*
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
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Abstract

A dramatic paradigm shift has occurred in European and German hate-speech laws, from their nineteenth-century origins in repressive campaigns against the Left to their present association with pluralism, tolerance, and minority rights. This article rethinks the timing and causes of that shift, arguing that, contrary to the prevailing scholarship, the decade of the 1890s—not 1945—constituted the first key turning point toward a human-rights model of hate-speech law. Departing from a more traditional legal historiography focused on formal legal institutions and laws, the article examines law “from below” as social and political practice. The results show how, in the 1890s, a new vision of hate speech began to take shape when a grassroots Jewish defense movement began to appropriate and reshape the law in order to oppose antisemites. In theoretical terms, the article's method of examining the interaction of law and politics shows that from the 1840s onward, the politics surrounding hate-speech law refutes simple binary constructions that cast German legal culture as “dignitarian” and distinct from U.S. “libertarianism.”

Die europäischen und deutschen Gesetze bezüglich Volksverhetzung haben von ihren Ursprüngen im 19. Jahrhundert von den repressiven Kampagnen gegen die politische Linke hin zu ihrer derzeitigen Assoziierung mit Pluralismus, Toleranz und Minderheitenrechte einen dramatischen Paradigmenwechsel unterlaufen. Dieser Aufsatz überdenkt den Zeitpunkt und die Ursachen dieses Wechsels und argumentiert, dass – entgegen der gängigen Forschung—das Jahrzehnt der 1890er Jahre und nicht 1945 den ersten, entscheidenden Wendepunkt hin zu einem auf den Menschenrechten basierenden Gesetz zur Volksverhetzung markiert. Anders als in der traditionellen Rechtshistoriographie, die auf formale rechtliche Einrichtungen und Gesetze fokussiert ist, wird im vorliegenden Aufsatz die Rechtsordnung vielmehr “von unten” her als soziale und politische Praxis betrachtet. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, wie sich in den 1890er Jahren eine neue Vorstellung von Volksverhetzung entwickelte, als eine jüdische Oppositionsbewegung begann, sich die Gesetze anzueignen und umzuformen, um damit Antisemiten entgegentreten zu können. Im theoretischen Bereich weist die hier angewandte Methode einer Untersuchung des Wechselspiels zwischen Rechtsordnung und Politik auf, dass man der Politik zum Thema der Volksverhetzung seit den 1840er Jahren mit simplen binären Einteilungen in eine deutsche “dignitarian” Rechtskultur und einen US-amerikanischen “libertarianism” nicht gerecht werden kann.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 480 - 497
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2015 

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References

1 The term Volksverhetzung first came into use in the early twentieth century; it was used during the Third Reich to signify threats against the German racial Volk, i.e., the opposite of its meaning after World War II. The term's post-1945 critics were not unaware of its association with Nazism. See, e.g., the comments of the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) Bundestag deputy Adolf Arndt in Stenographische Berichte des deutschen Bundestages (SBdB), Feb. 7, 1957, 10919.

2 For an overview of contemporary German hate-speech law, see Winfried Brugger, “The Treatment of Hate Speech in German Constitutional Law,” in Stocktaking in German Public Law, ed. Eibe Riedel (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2002), 117–50.

3 Though narrowly conceived, these legal dissertations provide the basic facts of the history of hate-speech law beginning in the nineteenth century. See Benedikt Rohrßen, Von der ‘Anreizung zum Klassenkampf’ zur ‘Volksverhetzung’ (Berlin: De Gruyter Rechtswissenschaften, 2009); Gunnar Krone, “Die Volksverhetzung als Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit” (Law diss., Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, 1979); Joachim Lömker, “Die gefährliche Abwertung von Bevölkerungsteilen (Art. 130 StGB)” (Law diss., Universität Hamburg, 1970); Markus Wehinger, Kollektivbeleidigung—Volksverhetzung (Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlag, 1994). For a historical monograph with a different but overlapping focus that offers additional important material, see Christoph Jahr, Antisemitismus vor Gericht (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2011).

4 See, e.g., Ivan Hare and James Weinstein, eds., Extreme Speech and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock, eds., The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jeremy Waldron, Dignity, Rank, and Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Eric Stein, “History against Free Speech: German Law in European and American Perspective,” in Verfassungsrecht und Völkerrecht, ed. Wilhelm Karl Geck, Wilfried Fiedler, and Georg Ress (Cologne: Carl Heymanns, 1989); Benjamin Weiler, Der Tatbestand “Volksverhetzung” im europäischen Vergleich (Hamburg: Kovac, 2012). There is currently much debate about the role played by the Holocaust in the rise of human rights after World War II. For a useful overview, see G. Daniel Cohen, “The Holocaust and the ‘Human Rights Revolution,’” in Iriye, Goedde, and Hitchcock, Human Rights Revolution, 53–71.

5 Ronald Krotoszynski, The First Amendment in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Rosenfeld, Michel, “Hate Speech in Constitutional Jurisprudence: A Comparative Analysis,” Cardozo Law Review 24, no. 4 (2003): 1523–68Google Scholar; Edward J. Eberle, Dignity and Liberty: Constitutional Visions in Germany and the United States (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). For an explanation of the importance of dignity in European law that emphasizes the strength of communitarian values, see Rao, Neomi, “On the Use and Abuse of Dignity in Constitutional Law,” Columbia Journal of European Law 14, no. 2 (2008): 201–56Google Scholar.

6 James Q. Whitman, “On Nazi ‘Honour’ and the New European ‘Dignity,’” in Darker Legacies of Law in Europe, ed. Christian Joerges and Navraj Singh Galeigh (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2003), 243–66; idem, “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,” Yale Law Journal 113, no. 6 (2004): 1151–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There are serious empirical and methodological problems with this argument, some of which are indicated in the present article. For a fuller critique and an altogether different historical account of honor and the law, see Ann Goldberg, Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

7 Both Rohrrßen and Jahr, for example, note the paradigmatic differences between pre- and post-1945 German hate-speech law, but without analyzing the questions, at the heart of this article, about when and how the shift occurred. See Rohrrßen, Von der ‘Anreizung zum Klassenkampf’ zur ‘Volksverhetzung,’ 4; Jahr, Antisemitismus vor Gericht, 383–84.

8 See the literature cited in note 5.

9 Das Allgemeine Landrecht für die preußischen Staaten (hereafter ALR), Theil 2, Titel 20, Arts. 151, 214. Other relevant sections of the ALR can be found in Arts. 151–156, 214–228.

10 ALR, Theil 2, Titel 20, Art. 538.

11 On the history of the term Klasse, which gradually began to displace Stand beginning in the eighteenth century, see “Stand, Klasse,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990), 155–284.

12 Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1963), 36 ff.

13 Stenographische Berichte der zweiten Kammer (SBzK), 1849–50, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1850), 120 ff.

14 Huber, Verfassungsgeschichte, 92 ff.

15 The only change in wording between the 1849 and the 1851 laws was the removal of the concept of intentionality (i.e., “seeking” to incite). For more on this, see SBzK, 1850–51, vol. 2: Drucksachen (Berlin, 1851), 65.

16 SBzK, March 8, 1849, 92–93.

17 Ibid., 124.

18 Ibid., 498.

19 Ibid., 503.

20 Ibid., 568. Conspiratorial theories about secret revolutionary societies had been rampant in Germany and Europe during the decades since the French Revolution. See Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789–1848 (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

21 Ibid., 498, 640–41

22 Ibid., 500.

23 Ibid., 501, 640.

24 Ibid., 568.

25 Ibid., 569.

26 Goldberg, Honor, esp. chap. 1. On honor and the German bourgeoisie, with an emphasis on the appropriation of aristocratic culture, see Ute Frevert, Ehrenmänner. Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991).

27 Goldberg, Honor, 19, 27–32, 123–28.

28 Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Norddeutschen Bundes, vol. 25, March 21, 1870 (Berlin, 1870), 439–40.

29 The official justification (“Motive”) of the Reich legislation referred to Arts. 100 and 101 as “perhaps the most contested” section of the entire criminal law bill. See R. Hippel, “Verbrechen und Vergehen wider die öffentliche Ordnung,” in Vergleichende Darstellung des deutschen und ausländischen Strafrechts, ed. Karl Birkmeyer et al., vol. 2 (Berlin: O. Liebmann, 1906), 48. More generally on criminal justice in the Kaiserreich, see Uwe Wilhelm, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich und seine Justiz (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2010).

30 The 1895 draft added to that list of offenses speech against the monarchy. The wording of the various bills can be found in Rohrßen, Anreizung, 291–300.

31 Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des deutschen Reichtags (SBR), vol. 19, Dec. 3, 1875 (Berlin, 1876), 385. A second bill aimed directly against the Catholic Church was submitted simultaneously to the Reichstag. This bill, which was voted down, would have removed the adjective “public” from the qualification of prohibited speech in Art. 130a, thus potentially expanding the ability of the courts to prosecute Church officials beyond just their speeches before public audiences. See Hippel, “Verbrechen,” 90.

32 Ibid., 89–90.

33 SBR 39 (Jan. 27, 1876), 940.

34 Ibid., 941–45.

35 SBR 19 (Dec. 3, 1875), 391–95.

36 Günter Grützner, Die Pariser Kommune. Macht und Karriere einer politischen Legende (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1963).

37 SBR 39 (Jan. 27, 1876), 960.

38 Ibid., 965–66.

39 In 1882, for example, a total of fifteen hate-speech cases were heard in the courts, as opposed to 56,088 defamation cases. See Kriminalstatistik für das Jahr 1882. Statistik des deutschen Reichs. Neue Folge, vol. 8 (Berlin: Verlag des Königlich Preußischen Statistischen Bureaus, 1884), 134, 136. See also Hippel, “Verbrechen,” 50; Rohrßen, Anreizung, 83.

40 Ibid., 85.

41 Ibid., 82–88.

42 SBR 65 (March 14, 1906), 2004–9. The precise wording of the legislative proposal can be found in SBR, 1905–06, Drucksache, no. 107 (Berlin, 1906), 1825. There had been many other recent attempts on the part of the Polish Party to reform Art. 130.

43 SBR 65 (March 14, 1906), 2004.

44 Ibid., 2015.

45 Ibid., 2009.

46 For the most comprehensive coverage of the CV, see Avraham Barkai, “Wehr Dich!” Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (C.V.) 1893–1938 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002). For a more general discussion of Jewish responses to antisemitism, see Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); Marjorie Lamberti, Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978).

47 At same time, Jewish activist use of defamation law in the courts was upending notions of honor, helping to transform the corporative, hierarchical honor of the early-modern world into a value associated with civil rights and the modern Rechtsstaat. See Goldberg, Honor, 157–92.

48 The CV was the first such mass organization, but there were, of course, earlier Jewish emancipationist activists. The most important figure before the Kaiserreich was the jurist and leading political activist for Jewish emancipation, Gabriel Riesser (1806–63). The “liberal-legalistic” framework he brought to his activism was the basis for pathbreaking interventions on behalf of Jewish rights in the Vormärz period and during the 1848 revolutions. For an analysis of Riesser's approach to emancipation within the broader context of contemporary Jewish thought, see David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) (the term liberal-legalistic is on p. 146).

49 Eugen Fuchs, “Der Antisemitismus vor Gericht,” in Um Deutschtum und Judentum. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Leo Hirschfeld (Frankfurt/Main: J. Kauffmann, 1919), 176. Fuchs's confrontational style was controversial even within the CV, and he was forced repeatedly to overcome opposition from within the organization.

50 On Jewish uses of the courts to combat antisemitism, see the literature cited in note 46, as well as Inbal Steinitz, Der kampf jüdischer Anwälte gegen den Antisemitismus (Berlin: Metropol, 2008); Lehmann, Emil, “Der Antisemitismus vor Gericht,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 14 (April 5, 1895)Google Scholar; Peter Paepke, Antisemitismus und Strafrecht (Law diss., University of Freiburg, 1962).

51 Friedrich Harkort, Harkort vor dem Criminalgericht in Berlin (Elberfeld: Bädeker, 1851); SBR 65 (March 14, 1906), 2011.

52 Ferdinand Lassalle, Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter. Eine Vertheidigungsrede vor dem Berliner Criminalgericht (Zurich: Meyer & Zeller, 1863).

53 “Der Massenstreik vor Gericht,” Vorwärts, no. 290, supp. (Dec. 13, 1906): 2.

54 “Der Deutsche is gutmütthig und geduldig… aber wenn sein Zorn einmal erwacht,… dann erhebt er die gewaltige Rechte zum Schlage und drischt und drischt und drischt so lange, bis es nichts mehr zum Zerhauen giebt.” Quoted in Jahr, Antisemitismus, 190.

55 Ibid., 191–92.

56 The CV's newspaper, Im deutschen Reich, regularly reported on these cases. For in-depth coverage of several of them, see Steinitz, Der Kampf jüdischer Anwälte.

57 Entscheidungen des Reichsgerichts in Strafsachen (hereafter ERS), vol. 26 (Berlin, 1895), 63; Hippel, “Verbrechen,” 50.

58 See the Jan. 4, 1892 ruling in ERS, vol. 22 (Berlin, 1892), 294.

59 For background on laws regarding religious insults, see Hugo Hälschner, Das gemeine deutsche Strafrecht (Bonn: A. Marcus, 1887), chap. 5.

60 Sorkin (see n. 53) puts these two factors—attachment to the state and to the ideal of Bildung—at the center of what he argues was a particular German-Jewish “subculture” taking shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Important and influential, Sorkin's notion of a discrete, unitary, German-Jewish subculture has been challenged by scholars emphasizing cultural hybridity and “multiple modernities,” approaches influenced by postmodernist theory and cultural, gender, and postcolonial studies. See, e.g., Moyn, Samuel, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity: Historiography and Theory,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 41, no. 1 (1996): 291–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner, eds., Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). On conceptualizing “the relationship between the particular and the universal” in Jewish identity, see also Till van Rahden, “Germans of the Jewish Stamm: Visions of Community between Nationalism and Particularism, 1850 to 1933,” in German History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils H. Roemer, and Mark Roseman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 27–48 (quote on p. 38). The hugely influential Schutzjuden oder Staatsbürger? (Berlin: Schweitzer & Mohr, 1893), an anonymous pamphlet written by Raphael Löwenfeld, was considered the CV's “founding manifesto” (Barkai, “Wehr Dich!,” 19). It articulates very clearly the merging of older notions of Bildung and Jewish self-improvement with a newly aggressive stance on equal rights.

61 Jahr, Antisemitismus, 192.

62 There is no hard data available for these court cases, only anecdotal statements by activists and lawyers. Statements on this matter are scattered throughout the CV's journal, Im deutschen Reich. See also Eugen Fuchs, “Antisemitismus vor Gericht,” 173. For a critical discussion of the legal ramifications of the “race” concept, see Erich Eyck, “Die Stellung der Rechtspflege zu Juden und Judentum,” in Deutsches Judentum und Rechtskrisis, ed. Jacques Stern, Erich Eych, and Bruno Weil (Berlin: Philo-Verlag, 1927), 36–42.

63 Barkai, “Wehr Dich!,” 180–82.

64 See, e.g., Rosemarie Zeuschen-Seppel, Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus im Kaiserreich (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1978), 73.

65 On German Social Democracy, Jews, and antisemitism, see August Bebel, Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1906); Lars Fischer, The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Leutschen-Seppel, Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus; Donald Niewyk, Socialist, Anti-Semite, and Jew: German Social Democracy Confronts the Problem of Anti-Semitism, 1918–1933 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971).

66 Arnold Paucker, Der jüdische Abwehrkampf gegen Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik (Hamburg: Leibniz-Verlag, 1969), 79–80.

67 See Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 116–80.

68 See Para. 9 of the “Law against the Enemies of Democracy,” SBdB, Feb. 15, 1950, Drucksache, no. 563 (Bonn, 1950); and the debate in SBdB 47, March 16, 1950. In addition, Para. 10 would have outlawed behavior and words injurious to the dignity of any person killed by the Nazis because of “resistance, race, belief, or worldview.” This controversial bill was modeled on the Weimar Republic's emergency decree of 1922 (though the latter was focused solely on protecting the democratic government and had no racial or religious provisions).

69 Rohrßen, Anreizung; Krone, Volksverhetzung. Rejecting the SPD's special legislation approach, the governing conservative parties pushed to contain right-wing hate speech through the revision of the penal code; it was the government's bill that eventually passed with modifications on May 20, 1950, and became law in the 6. Strafrechtsänderungsgesetz of June 30, 1960, under Art. I, No. 2.

70 Goldberg, Honor, 157–92.

71 Eugen Fuchs, “Antisemitismus vor Gericht,” 172.

72 Ibid., 176.

73 Eugen Fuchs, Bericht der Rechtsschutz-Commission über ihre bisherige Thätigkeit (Berlin: Schmitz & Bukofzer, 1894).

74 “Entwurf eines allgemeinen deutschen Strafgesetzbuchs,” May 14, 1927, SBR Anlage, no. 3390, 88–89; Rohrßen, Anreizung, 110–23. Reinhard von Frank, a Tübingen law professor and member of the state commission charged with revising the penal code, had begun advocating this as early as 1913. See Rohrßen, Anreizung, 100.

75 See, e.g., SBdB 92 (Dec. 3, 1959), 5081 ff. Memories of Art. 130's authoritarian, anti-socialist origins and uses also help explain the SPD's postwar resistance to building modern hate-speech law on the basis of the existing Art. 130 statute. See, e.g., SBdB 191 (Feb. 7, 1957), 10919. The party's 1950 hate-speech proposal notably went the route of an exceptional emergency law rather than that of a revision of the existing Art. 130 statute. See SBdB (Feb. 7, 1957), 10919.

76 See the literature cited in note 4.

77 SBdB 47 (March 16, 1950), 1602.

78 The actual terms nation, race, and religion were not incorporated into the law until 2010. See Gesetz zur Umsetzung des Rahmenbeschlusses 2008/913/J1 des Rates vom 28. November 2008 zur strafrechtlichen Bekämpfung bestimmter Formen und Ausdrucksweisen von Rassismus und Fremdenfeindlichkeit, Art. I, March 16, 2011.