Hett, Benjamin Carter

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Hett, Benjamin Carter

PERSONAL:

Education: Harvard University, Ph.D., 2001.

ADDRESSES:

Office—History Department, Hunter College, City University of New York, 695 Park Ave., New York, NY 10065. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Historian, educator, and writer. Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, NY, faculty member in the department of history. Previously instructor and lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fraenkel Prize for outstanding work of contemporary history, 2007, for Crossing Hitler.

WRITINGS:

Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser's Berlin, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.

Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2008.

Contributor to periodicals, including Central European History and Canadian Journal of History.

SIDELIGHTS:

Benjamin Carter Hett is a historian whose primary interests are criminal law in modern Germany, history of popular culture, and the history of Berlin. In his first book, Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser's Berlin, the author focuses on the culture of criminal justice in late imperial Germany. "This … book is a terrific read," wrote Julia Bruggemann for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. "It leads its readers into the lost world of Berlin's courts in the last two and a half decades before World War One." Bruggemann added that the author "has done a remarkable job bringing to life the social and cultural history of criminal law, courtroom culture, and its popular reception in Wilhelmine Berlin."

In the book, the author looks at the daily happenings of Berlin criminal courts and the people involved in the courts, from lawyers, judges, and jurors to the thieves, pimps, and murderers who show up on the various court dockets. As noted by Devin O. Pendas in the Canadian Journal of History, the author essentially "focuses his attention not, as is typical of German legal history, on the law as codified or on legal theory, but rather on law as practiced in the urban courtrooms of Berlin." Using a wide range of materials such as court records, pamphlets, and even pulp novels, Hett explores how the law of the time reflected the rapidly changing city's urban culture and politics. Writing in Death in the Tiergarten, the author comments: "What we miss in a broadly focused treatment is, for want of a better word, the culture."

The author writes of a transforming criminal justice system that fostered a culture war involving issues such as permissiveness versus discipline, the boundaries of public discussion of crime and sexuality, and the role of gender in the courts. The author writes: "The book focuses on a small number of Berlin trials spanning the years 1891-1913. I chose Berlin as a case study for several reasons. Looking only at cases from one municipality allows one to control for regional variations in the nature of justice. At the same time, Berlin—as contemporaries unanimously asserted—was the legal as well as the political capital of Germany, with a volume and sophistication of legal business far outstripping other centers. If any one city can stand for national patterns, it is Berlin."

Death in the Tiergarten received strong praise from critics. Writing in the Historian, Ronald J. Ross called the book "a thoroughly convincing account of the criminal court system that avoids the all too familiar image of a seamless authoritarian tradition connecting Imperial Germany's judicial arrangements with the Third Reich's legal abuses." Pendas wrote in the Canadian Journal of History that Hett's "portrait of the criminal justice system in Berlin is both lively and persuasive."

In his next book, Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand, Hett provides a biography of Hans Litten. In a 1931 trial of four Nazi stormtroopers, Litten conducted an intensive cross-examination of Adolf Hitler that sent Hitler into a humiliating rage. At the time, Hitler was trying to show his respect for the law while distancing himself from his stormtroopers. Litten later revealed that his intent was to discredit Hitler and his Nazi ambitions. In Crossing Hitler, Hett describes how Litten was imprisoned by the Nazis in concentration camps after the war started and his many courageous and compassionate acts, including sharing food with and teaching other prisoners.