ABSTRACT
To recall the vulnerable status of criminology’s claim to science is rather like taking owls to Athens. But that is what Jacek Kurczewski did in a presentation to the International Association of Criminology in 1988, commenting on the inadequacy of the concept of crime for dealing with the fundamental changes then occurring in Poland (Kurczewski 1988). I want to follow his example, some years later, in looking at the relationship between ‘talk of crime’ and the political transformations that have been occurring in my own country, Germany, in the period since 1990.
