05 september 2022
Thoughts on Wolff's Postcards from the End of the World
tw: discussion of child abuse
Reading this not as part of AHA Reads, but because it's been on my book list for awhile. I'm about halfway or so done with the Hummel case and I find a lot of Wolff's analysis to be a bit odd.
He makes much of the how the lack of confession to murderous intent is a problem to the prosecution, because the law does not really have a concept of child abuse and lack of intent to kill would imply this is not murder.
But like isn't that a concern in the modern US legal code. Perhaps less of a problem because many parts of the US have felony murder laws, but still issues of intent can be important in the US. For that matter, he catches on to a particular phrase that the child was not murdered but slaughter, but while this might highlight the brutality of the act, it is not clear to me that it undermines the prosecutions case. I guess I'd read it as 'not (just) murderd, but (also) slaughtered'.
My German is terrible and reading Fraktur just gives me a headache, but I half remember that it is improper to use 'aber' for 'but also' -- in that case you should use 'sondern' -- so I wondered if the newspaper had used 'aber'. The article seems to use neither. It seems to just connect the thought with a 'nein', but I haven't read it fully and my German is bad, so perhaps I misunderstand.
Similarly, the describing of the trial comes off as just really strange to me. He'll note that people are laughing at certain points as if that's odd, but honestly when he quotes from it, it comes off as quite farcical. Like, I'm a true crime junkie, so the idea of someone laughing at the bad attempts of a criminal to shift away guilt seems pretty standard to me.
Even the comments about how the Viennese audience cannot handle psychological ambivalence -- a mother both loving and hating her child -- seems weird. Can they not handle that ambivalence, or do they have good reason to question it. Like, if someone tells me the love someone, but they've beaten, burned, and starved them to death, then I'm going to be very sceptical they in fact love them. Maybe they do, but I'd need to see much stronger evidence than just saying 'I love them' and failing that I might well laugh because such a statement will seem like a bold-faced lie.
I'm also a bit confused about his account of the discovery of the concept of child abuse, particularly the comment that child abuse was in part unrecognised because the child was viewed as the property of the parents. Conceptual history, like all history, isn't my forte. But in Wolff's account,
- The parents received an official warning from the police about mistreating their daughter.
- Other parents seem to react negatively to the behaviour and attempt to assist.
- The judge seems to distinguish between punishing and mistreating a child.
This all seems to suggest that there were limits to what people thought appropriate to do to children and that these limits were themselves encoded into law.
Let me be clear, I certainly accept that in the past particular actions which we now conceive of as abusive were considered part of parental rights.
And I also accept that there may have been a shift in social norms relating to dealing with child abuse, legal norms delineating and investigating child abuse, and public attention / awareness of the frequency of child abuse, but I am somewhat sceptical of the framing of this trial as representing (or being part of) the discovery of the concept of child abuse in Vienna, since, so far, it doesn't seem like there was either a belief in the parents having limitless power over children nor a legal system unable to punish parents who abuse children. (Even if it might not have done it well!)
On the other hand, I'm not through with the case yet. Perhaps my mind will change as it develops.