An European Dilemma: Punishment or Welfare Society
Brussels, 26th October 2001
Crime and imagination.
The transformation of normality in the discourse on criminality in
Germany
Dr Felix KELLER (Inst. Sociologie Zurich; ZEG Konstanz)
Durkheim showed us a way of understanding criminality that is still valid: society without criminality is
impossible. Crime is necessary, wrote Durkheim; it is a constituent part of social life. That is why crime is
useful. In other words: Criminality as a means of perceiving deviance defines normality. Crime represents an
important force of social cohesion.
In contemporary societies, the social awareness of deviance is without doubt more closely connected to
statistical constructions and medial presentation than to individual acts of deviation, which are relatively
seldom in daily life. Perception has to be produced. For this reason, the research project on the construction
of normality through criminality concentrated on the collective und public representations of crime.
An analysis of the collective representation of criminality in Germany since 1989 provides an exceptional
chance of observing the role of the discourse on criminality in a changing society. A relatively complex
textual argumentation about the roots of (mostly growing) deviance is accompanied by an iconological
discourse of graphics, tables and numbers that is relatively independent of the content of textual
argumentation. This iconological discourse reflects a system of political emblems, which follows its own
logic: the graphics, images and tables often strictly contradict the textual argumentation. Why this “double
rhetoric”?