Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin (2004)

A nightwatchman is murdered on the steps of a church . . . a beautiful young woman shoots her boyfriend in the Tiergarten park . . . a con-man dons a captain’s uniform and hijacks a squad of soldiers . . . the police fight back with new tools, like fingerprints and blood chemistry, while defense attorneys ostentatiously drink champagne in the courtroom. It’s Berlin in the years before World War I, a society obsessed with crime and scandal as it rushes headlong into the brutal twentieth century.