The Usual Suspects: Begging and Law Enforcement in Interwar Austria

Abstract

In Austria in the early twentieth century, as in Germany legal offences against the Vagrancy Act were not at all clearly codified.² As the jurist August Finger stated, there was no definition of ‘begging’: ‘in applying the legal regulations’, he wrote, ‘one is forced to use the word as it is understood in common parlance’.³ A broad variety of different practices could thus be described as begging, ranging from the strictly forbidden to habits that were more or less accepted or even explicitly allowed. Hence, begging was legal and illegal at the same time. Since neither asking for alms nor ‘tramping’ were criminal activities per se, how was it that they became offences? How did the authorities distinguish what was criminal from what was not? If their decisions were not purely arbitrary, what circumstances and criteria affected the judgements they made?