Courtroom reports during the interwar years in comparative perspective. The experience of crises and the construction of social norms in Germany, France, and the US

The way a society deals with criminality, which for the purpose of this study is understood as a "behaviour against social rules", provides not only information about existing deviance, but allows even more to draw conclusions about the acceptance of norms and laws, their symbolic realisation, collective anxiety and strategies of coping with it. In the centre of my PhD-Thesis, I am going to analyse courtroom reports, which are situated at the interface of different fields of "discours" (as politics, justice and mass media publicity).
This empirical study concerns a highly relevant problem, the public perception and production of crime and justice through mass media. By comparing courtroom reports from Germany, France and the United States, I am going to point out this central topic for a cultural history of the interwar years.