ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the central aim of the book and lays the foundations for the empirical analyses. It highlights that crime is not a ‘thing’ that could simply be talked about without a particular perspective. Instead, it results from a special way of devising stories about it, thus creating crime as a noteworthy event and ‘real’ experience. Associated with this narrative approach is a certain kind of ambivalence. On the one hand, there are multiple ways to tell stories; narrative constructions of crime are historically, culturally and situationally contingent. On the other hand, when crime is talked about, contingency is often obscured. For instance, when a judge imposes sanctions on an offender, s/he implies that a ‘real’ kind of offence was at hand, that it could not be interpreted differently but deserves, by its very ‘nature’, an unequivocal response. In this regard, crime seems to be what it is, beyond any ‘storylike’ qualities. And yet it is a dynamic and context-specific narrative. The book analyses this ambivalence using crime narratives in Germany as an example.
