Crime and German Decadence: Discussing Todd Herzog’s Crime Stories

In Crime Stories: Criminalistic Fantasy and the Culture of Crisis in Weimar Germany, Todd Herzog – explicitly or implicitly – deals with different established myths about crime fiction, criminality and its cultural presumptions. It is generally quite seldom – as Herzog does – that the three subjects are dealt with collectively and in doing so he establishes new grounds for reflection on crime and culture – both factual and fictional representation as such. Approaches to crime fiction often build on an acknowledged history of the genre which, then, reproduces an established concord of assumptions. In recent years, new and refreshing approaches to crime fiction have emerged where – among others – particularly Maurizio Ascari’s A Counter-History of Crime Fiction (2007), Leonard Cassuto’s Hard-Boiled Sentimentality (2008) and Andrew Nestingen’s Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia (2008) probe the boundaries of understanding the cultural and historical roots of genre and crime fiction. Nevertheless, the missing link in dealing with crime fiction – even though Nestingen takes certain steps in that direction – is often its connection to criminological and cultural studies. If we approach crime stories in general – both fact and fiction – and the cultural, philosophical and sociological components in the established presumptions of these stories, there seems to be a foundation of a general revision of the understanding and representation of crime and violence. Todd Herzog’s recent book Crime Stories is indeed part of this needed and remarkable wave of theoretical and historical revisions of our understanding of crime through factual and fictional representations.