Pitaval

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A pitaval is a collection of historical criminal cases . The name is derived from the French lawyer and author François Gayot de Pitaval (1673-1743), who compiled a twenty-volume collection of causes célèbres et intéressantes between 1734 and 1743 . Such case collections initially served both as legal specialist reading and as general public reading. Later, they were primarily aimed at public taste.

The heyday of this form of literature was the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, so-called Pitaval stories belonged in every library. In the post-war period such collections were still published, but the previous importance could no longer be achieved. Instead, the function of these collections was taken over by television documentaries of more or less authentic criminal cases.

Examples

Well-known collections of criminal cases of this type are, in addition to the work of François Gayot de Pitaval, for example Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach's Strange Legal Cases (1808–1811), Der neue Pitaval by Julius Eduard Hitzig and Willibald Alexis (1842–1890), Egon Erwin Kisch's Prager Pitaval ( 1931), Herrmann Mostars and Robert Adolf Stemmles Der neue Pitaval (1963 ff.), Maximilian Jacta's multi-volume work Famous criminal trials published in the late 1960s / early 1970s and the volume Processes that moved our world, published by Curt Riess . The four-volume selection of the cases compiled by Pitaval, edited by Friedrich Schiller , is also well known . The GDR television leaned with by Friedrich Karl Kaul developed Fernsehpitavalen the tradition of the genre. The works of Ferdinand von Schirach can also be assigned to this literary genre.

See also

literature

  • Willibald Alexis : The new Pitaval. A collection of the most interesting crime stories from all countries, both old and new. Leipzig 1869.
  • Udo Fleck: "Thieves - Robbers - Murderers". Study on the collective delinquency of Rhenish robber gangs at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. Dissertation , Trier 2003, p. 50. ( hbz-nrw.de PDF)

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