Research project
Lethal intimate partner violence is currently the subject of increasing political debate. However, it has a long history that has until now been largely unexplored by historians. The research project uses in-depth case studies and selected time periods to examine the transformation of lethal intimate partner violence in Germany during the long 20th century. The project analyzes the development of gender-based violence in intimate relationships across political system changes as part of modern gender orders, practices of violence, patterns of medialization and emotional norms.
The central question is how lethal intimate partner violence was perpetrated, perceived, regulated and sanctioned in the 20th century. The project also investigates the gender and emotional frameworks that structured this violence. The research focuses on the killing of women by their intimate partners as the most common form of lethal gender-based violence, contrasting it with other intimate configurations. The project examines regimes of knowledge, emotional regimes and practices of lethal intimate partner violence across political watersheds in three time periods: the long turn of the century around 1900 (1890–1932), National Socialism and the divided German post-war period (1933–1967), and the phase of pluralization of relationship concepts in recent decades (1967–2002). These time periods reveal upheavals, continuities and changes in understandings of violence in different political systems.
Social negotiations of lethal violence in intimate relationships do not align seamlessly with theories of liberalization and the rejection of violence after 1945. A central hypothesis is that the responses to lethal violence in relationships were shaped by normalization for much of the 20th century. Gender-based violence was then, as now, a media phenomenon. Many violent relationships remained in the shadow of sensationalist media discourse such as ‘Lustmord’ or ‘poisoning’. The question to be discussed is how gender-based violence was constructed as an affective exception through emotional attributions and externalization to “the other” and to what extent this affected normalization processes. The politicization of the debate on lethal violence in intimate relationships has only begun in recent decades.
Methodologically, the project combines approaches from gender, knowledge and emotional history as well as feminist concepts of violence and masculinity with praxeological case studies. The research draws on a broad range of archival sources, including court records, women’s shelter and youth welfare documents, marriage guidebooks, criminological literature and (tabloid) newspapers. Oral history interviews complement these sources. With its multi-layered approach to the transformation of violent practices and the grammar of modern intimacy practices, the project provides new historiographical perspectives on the social history of modern gender and violence relations.
