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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Vol. 19 No. 14 · 17 July 1997 » David Blackbourn » Axeman as Ballroom Dancer (print version)
pages 16-17 | 2679 words