070303 SE BA-Seminar - "Wait, wait a minute"- Murder and manslaughter in the early 20th century (2021W)

What is understood as “crime” varies depending on historical contexts. In court files and material objects found in archives and museums, different views of “criminality” are reflected, which not only provide information about “the criminal”, but also about the political history and the everyday history of a historical epoch, the relationship of social actors to each other and the penal practice of the respective state. In the seminar, we address the questions of (i) which everyday actions were interpreted and prosecuted as criminality by the respective authorities, (ii) how this interpretation is reflected in court files and (iii) how this material can be interpreted using different methods, making court files thus historical sources.
The aim of the course is to read and discuss key texts and to reconstruct four historical court cases from four epochs of contemporary Austrian history. For the time of the First Republic, the “Philipp Halsmann” is put up for discussion; Marie Jahoda’s conviction in the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg dictatorship is subject of the second discussion. From the Nazi era, the case of Mathias Trimal, sentenced to death before the Sondergericht Wien, is being dealt with, while the conviction of Karl Horvath at the Linzer Volksgericht is dealt with for the immediate post-war period. In the first units, examples of historical, sociological and cultural studies debates with documents and material objects of state authorities in the pursuit of “crime” are presented and discussed.