In March 1885, Berlin police arrested artist Gustav Graef on charges of “perjury, subornation of perjury, and two counts of lewd behavior with minors under fourteen” (39). The perjury charge related to a statement he had made the prior year while under oath, denying a sexual relationship with a twenty-one-year-old woman named Bertha Rother. For years, Rother had worked as his muse and model. Graef's trial, which began in late September 1885, quickly captured public attention. After eight days of proceedings and ninety minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted Graef on all counts.

The Graef trial, which Barnet Hartston describes as “one of the most sensational cause célèbres of this era” (3), is the starting point for his book, The Trial of Gustav Graef: Art, Sex, and Scandal in Late Nineteenth-Century. Hartston's goal is to use the methods of microhistory to transform the Graef case into a window onto German society in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, he seeks to uncover social tensions and highlight the key political, social, and legal changes at work. Over the course of seven chapters, he uses the trial to explore several topics, including debates among German artists about naturalism, the growth of the commercial press, women's limited but expanding access to the public sphere, ongoing disputes about the origins of poverty, the “othering” of the urban poor and Jews, as well as debates about the strengths and weaknesses of the German legal system. Hartston explains that three majors themes transverse these chapters: first, that German society was passing through a period of profound transformation, namely, industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth century, and that these changes produced a “growing anxiety” (10) among German elites; second, that the bourgeois elite operated according to “a complex code of honor” (12) that was overwhelmingly masculine; and third, that German society was increasingly obsessed in the 1880s with the “ready accessibility of erotic books and pornographic photographs” (17).

The final product is an interesting study of German male elites and their many anxieties. This focus is likely a consequence of Hartston's source base. In addition to using available archival materials, and because the original trial transcripts no longer exist, he relies on contemporaneous newspaper coverage, as well as on pamphlets published after the trial. The journalists and authors who wrote these descriptions and offered their reactions were bourgeois men. The few women's publications that existed at the time remained silent about the case. Although Hartston tries to recover women's voices as they appeared during and after the trial, he concedes that, in every case, male attorneys, court reporters, and journalists mediated their words.

One of the book's major themes is the honor code that regulated bourgeois male elites in the late nineteenth century. This was an honor code focused on “an ethic of work, thrift, honesty, moderation, and sexual chastity” (12). Hartston argues that this group's “obsession with honor” was a “product of the deep anxieties formed within a society in the midst of a dramatic transformation” (14). Given that Graef stood accused of perjury, this focus on honor makes sense. Hartston's analysis highlights throughout this honor code at work, locating it, for example, in the defense strategy adopted by Graef's attorney, in criticisms of journalists who reported on sensational trials, and in the decision by the Association of Berlin Artists to support publicly the prosecutor in the Graef trial. He explains that this was a masculine honor culture that excluded individuals and groups “considered uncultured, irrational, and essentially ‘feminine’ in nature”; this included “women, Jews, and members of the lower classes” (14). Hartston's assessment of this honor code as both bourgeois and masculine is compelling. Yet, his retelling of the Graef trial suggests that, in this era of transformation, some groups may have been challenging the bourgeoisie's exclusive claim to this concept.

Another interesting theme that Hartston raises is that of democratization. He identifies German elites as increasingly anxious about the economic and social changes taking place around them, but, returning to the Sonderweg debate in his conclusion, argues persuasively that this was a society experiencing democratization. The book's last two chapters analyze closely debates about perjury and oath-taking, the ability of police to regulate lewd images, the extent to which journalists possessed a constitutionally protected right to courtroom proceedings, and the efficacy of trials by jury. Hartston's research suggests a society committed to erecting a Rechtsstaat, and demonstrates that many of these constitutional and legal debates first started in newspapers and then made their way into the legislative process. The author explains how conservative lawmakers were unwilling to reduce or endanger civil liberties, even when encouraged to do so by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. And, in spite of complaints about the jury trial system in the 1880s, it was not legislators during the German Empire but rather a justice minister in Weimar who ended the jury system.

One potential topic that both the Graef trial and Hartston's focus on bourgeois honor culture raise is age-of-consent laws. Bertha Rother, he reveals, had been working for Graef as a model since she was thirteen. When police searched Graef's home in March 1885, looking for evidence of perjury, they found financial receipts and erotic poems suggesting, at least circumstantially, a sexual relationship. Hartston notes that §182 of the German criminal code prohibited the seduction of girls under the age of sixteen, but this was only applied in cases of girls who had an “unblemished [unbescholten] character” (103). Because police had identified Bertha as a prostitute when she was fourteen, and because she conceded that she had lost her virginity at age twelve, prosecutors could not have pursued a charge of lewd conduct even if they had proved a relationship. The prosecutor therefore focused on the perjury charge. But the book raises an interesting question that Hartston does not fully address: could bourgeois men, directed by this honor code to demonstrate sexual chastity and act as “guardians” (15) of female sexual honor, maintain their own honor if they had sex with an underage girl who, because of prior sexual experience, lacked the protections of age-of-consent laws?

Hartston's book is a well written and engaging study. The author successfully uses the Graef trial to shine a light on the reactions of German male bourgeois elites to social and economic transformations taking place in the 1880s, an era, he argues, that historians too frequently ignore in favor of the 1890s. The book speaks to several historiographic discussions within German history, and will be of value to students of the legal, cultural, and social history of late nineteenth-century Germany.