Axeman as Ballroom Dancer

David Blackbourn

  • Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987 by Richard J. Evans
    Oxford, 1014 pp, £55.00, March 1996, ISBN 0 19 821968 7

In future times people will look back on the death penalty as a piece of barbarity just as we now look back on torture.’ These confident words were spoken by a member of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament, which voted amid cheers to abolish capital punishment, except in military law. By the spring of 1849 it had been ended in a score of German states, including Prussia. Like the liberty trees and torchlit processions that greeted the outbreak of revolution, ending capital punishment was a symbolic act. It was intended to mark the end of princely arbitrariness, show the state’s respect for human life and provide the cornerstone to a new, higher morality.

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