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In year 1903 22-year-old maid Hedwig Otte is acquitted in a child murder case in Silesian Hirschberg. The judges and jurors – among m poet Gerhart Hauptmann – made this judgement out of pity. The process provides a rural drama as a material for a bourgeois mourning game: The main man Rose Bernd.
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More than a hundred years earlier, in year 1772, Frankfurt child murderer Anna Margaretha Brandt was sentenced to death and executed after harsh specifications of Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of 1532. The process observer Johann Wolfgang von Goe makes m tragic heroine in Gretchentragödie of Urfaust.
Between se two processes lies impact of debates of Enlightenment, which demanded end of death penalty and a humane treatment of child murderers. They were not only a change in jurisprudence, but also a change in image of child killer. If court sentenced 1772 to a “preserved and viciously” murder, it was assumed at 1900 that impending loss of sexual honour and fear of shame had induced unmarried mor to kill her child.
Regina Schulte
Is Emeritus professor of modern and recent history and gender history
Dishonourable out of society, living in bitter distress, mors in Wehenschmerz and madness killed ir child – so melodramatic also brought or poets of storm and penetrated calamity of innocently seduced child murderers on stage and in Bänkelliedern The market places. In new “Gretchenparadigma”, lamentable counterpicture to demurely-marital maternality, bourgeoisie reflected his sexual morality and his ideal of virtue, which in chastity before marriage saw highest value of woman. The acquittal for Hedwig Otte – and underlying clause 217 of Reich Penal Code of 1871, according to which child’s killing “is intentional, wher it is deliberate, wher or not murder of illegitimate child by mor in or immediately after birth” is, Paid homage to this idea in his mitigating reasons.
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But what stories tell child murderers in court, maids like Hedwig Otte, whose coarse dialect captain brings to horror of Bourgeois atre audience 1903 in Berlin? Crime statistics, which take into account only convicted cases but not high dark numbers, show that killing of children was mainly a rural offence, while in cities abortion figures were higher. The view of rural area shows at same time, on which social support child murderers were allowed to hope.
This text comes from magazine contemporary History No. 1/2018. You can purchase current booklet at kiosk or here.
According to Bavarian oath Gerichtsakten, who report on working and living conditions in peasant world, child murderers were single, but hardly threatened by shame, since in Upper Bavaria in middle of 19th century 25 percent of children of rural Substrata were born premarital. In service of servants, unmarried period was often a long transitional period up to 35 years, in which future household was only slowly built up. Many of upper Bavarian child murderers had even children at time of Act. The illegitimate parents lived in a village-style family order in which children grew up with grandparents or foster parents until parents were able to marry and start a house. Anor child, for many of m, meant an additional hardship, but y did not threaten to be offended by family or ir surroundings.
The fars of illegitimate children mostly came from same village layer as child murderers, were day laborers, young craftsmen or servants with whom y lived and worked under one roof. In testimonies, re is talk of love relations among beholders, but also of rigidity of peasants when it comes to impending disturbances caused by pregnancies. The maids could lose ir jobs if y did not adhere to strict rules of peasant working cycles or failed during harvest. Too many illegitimate children could become a burden and devour little saved.
