Last July, I went to Berlin for archival research. My goal was to find primary sources that would tell me something about the everyday practice of criminal interrogations in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Berlin. Unfortunately, most case files of criminal trials – the most direct access to interrogation records, which I have often relied on in…

Almost two months into the project, I’ve mainly been exploring German-language publications on criminal interrogation and forensic psychology from around 1900. Here I’ll try to formulate some of my initial findings about the role of psychology in criminal interrogation and the relationship between jurists and psychologists. Most strikingly: Germans and Austrians wrote a lot about…