Sace E. Elder

My current research focuses on the social and cultural history of violence and crime in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany. My current book project deals with the campaign against cruelty to children in Germany from the Wilhelmine to the Nazi periods. I am particularly interested in the ways in which child protectionists renegotiated the limits of acceptable violence (physische Gewalt) in German society, as well as challenged the legal and cultural terms of parental authority (elterliche Gewalt). This research has developed out of my first book project, Murder Scenes: Normality, Deviance, and Criminal Violence in Weimar Berlin(The University of Michigan Press, June 2010), which examines the role of murder in Weimar diagnoses of social crisis and urban modernity and demonstrates the interaction of the press, the police, and ordinary Berliners in creating a public culture of policing and surveillance.