Displacing Justice? Looking for the Law in Gustav Freytag’s Die Journalisten

This article assesses the treatment of the theme of justice in Gus- tav Freytag’s comedy Die Journalisten (1852), one of the most frequently performed Lustspiele on the German-language stage in the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that Freytag’s play foregrounds questions of justice, but in terms of wider “structural couplings” (Thomas Beebee) between law and literature which move our attention beyond the direct representation of legal processes on the stage. After considering the place of Die Journalisten within the wider dramatic production of the nineteenth century, the article first considers the function of justice in the work’s critique of electoral injustice. Here it argues that Freytag responds to the specifics of German electoral law in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, whilst also seeking to situate that German debate within a wider European one, through intertextual links to Charles Dickens. The article then turns to the play’s titular representation of journalism, revealing the extent to which Freytag viewed the freedom of the press from judicial control as a cornerstone for a specifically bourgeois model of German social progress. It closes by considering the play’s more concrete representation of the law through the figure of the Justizrath and its central thematic presentation of justice as a specifically bourgeois value. In so doing, the article maps the ways in which questions and concepts of justice continued to find ex- pression in nineteenth-century drama–and met with great success in the process.