In Part I of this study, our focus was on the bases of crime in Imperial Germany during the 1880s—the “take-off” stage of German industrial development. In Part II, we will extend the time dimension of our analysis to include the period of growth between the 1880s and 1914, and we will also broaden the scope of the issues and explanatory variables to be considered.
In many ways, German society in the decades prior to the outbreak of World War I represents an excellent historical context for a study of the impact of urban-industrial development on crime. The German criminologist Aschaffenburg notes: “The last twenty years [1885-1905] of German criminality are especially suitable for such an analysis, because no transfiguring upheavals have taken place; the years having been marked by a great economic and cultural advance.” German society during this time enjoyed a period of international peace unknown since the years between 1815 and 1848. This period of relative tranquility allows the scholar a chance to analyze the problem of crime in its relations to socioeconomic conditions without having to control for the serious disturbing factors induced by war. La belle époque, as this period has been referred to by contemporary historians, also graced Germany with a respite from the bellicose domestic turmoil that it suffered in the past century. The movement for national unification had finally been completed, and the struggle for social reform had changed from the vitriolic confrontations of the watershed years of 1830 and 1848 to a peaceful and evolutionary, if no less manifest, nature.