Join us at the German Historical Institute London or online for this year’s Gerda Henkel Foundation Visiting Professorship Lecture given by Professor Korinna Schönhärl (Trier) on ‘Paying Taxes Honestly? Scandals as an Arena for Negotiating (Tax) Morality’.
In times of tight public finances, the question of (dis)honest payment of taxes often comes to the fore: who has contributed to the financing of public goods for the community, who has tried to evade this obligation, and what are the consequences? Throughout history, tax scandals have become an arena for the study such negotiation processes. This lecture thus examines tax scandals from Spain, West Germany, and the USA from the 1950s through to the 1980s, in which the practices of companies, VIPs, or tax authority staff were scrutinized and found to be morally questionable. The lecture explores how societies used these scandals to renegotiate their norms regarding payment of taxes—and demonstrates how closely tax payment was linked to other major moral issues such as the relationship between the state and its citizens, or between citizens of unequal status.
Sign up via the GHIL’s website: https://www.ghil.ac.uk/events/lectures#c6501
The Visiting Professorship is a joint project of the German Historical Institute London (GHIL) and the International History Department of The London School of Economics and Political Science and is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
Korinna Schönhärl has been the Professor of Modern History at Trier University since October 2025. Her expertise lies in the field of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, with a focus on social, economic, and financial history. She is particularly interested in historiographical methods and postcolonial perspectives. Alongside Germany and Central Europe, she is also a specialist in the history of modern Greece, Spain, and the USA.