The Village in Court: Arson, Infanticide, and Poaching in the Court Records of Upper Bavaria 1848-1910

The Village in Court

The rural village in nineteenth-century Europe was caught in conflict between its traditional local culture and its new integration into the grasp of state institutions and modern social structures. Local practices were turned into crimes; the social meaning of crime within the village culture was redefined by the new standards of bourgeois penal laws and psychiatry. The language of the intruding agencies has structured, by a wealth of written documentation, the image of village life for the outside world. Criminal investigations, however, had to be based on interrogations of the villagers themselves. It is through this record of a traditional oral culture that the villagers' own views, language, and symbolic gestures have been preserved. This book uses an analytical approach informed by social history, folklore and gender studies, anthropology, criminology, and psychoanalysis to reconstruct the cultural implications of these documents, which originated from the very moment when traditional village culture was being called into question. Based on archival records of prosecutions of the three most important rural types of crime before the penal courts of Upper Bavaria in the late nineteenth century - arson, infanticide, and poaching - this study in historical anthropology reveals the fabric of the village society: its norms, conflicts, and hidden meanings. Concentrating on the individual in conflict within the household economy and the local community, it gives a new and original interpretation of power structures, gender relations, and generational rites of passage within the village.

The Village in Court Arson, infanticide, and poaching in the court records of Upper Bavaria, 1848-1910

REGINA SCHULTE Translated by Barrie Selman

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Originally published in German as Das Dorfim Verhor: Brandstifter, Kindsmo'rdcrinnen und Wilderer vor den Schranken des Biirgerlichen Gerichts by Rowohlt Verlag G m b H , Reinbek, 1989

First published in English by Cambridge University Press, 1994, as The Village in Court: Arson, Infanticide, and Poaching in the Court Records of Upper Bavaria, 1848—191 o

©English translation Cambridge University Press 1994 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schulte, Regina, 1949[Dorf im Verhor. English] The village in court : arson, infanticide, and poaching in the court records of Upper Bavaria, 1848—1910 / Regina Schulte : translated by Barrie Selman. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-521-43186-7 (he)

1. Rural crimes — Germany — Oberbayern — History - 19th century. 2. Oberbayern (Germany) - Rural conditions. 3. Village communities — Germany - Oberbayern - History — 19th century. 4. Criminal registers — Germany - Oberbayern. 5. Court records - Germany - Oberbayern. I. Title. HV6979.024S38 1994 364.i'o943'36 —dc2o 93-14229 CIP

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-521-43186-7 hardback

Contents

A cknowledgments

Introduction: The breakup of the village The peasant as seen by the middle class The literature on rural conditions Crime as a medium of historical anthropology Landscape with villages

i

I

6 io 17

PART I. PEASANT SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL

1. Fire in the village The arsonists Socioeconomic origins The quest for motives Work Master and servant Day labor The village Suspicion The relationship with work and property The outsiders The inn The families Belonging to a family The law of inheritance Cain and Abel The generations The marriages The hearth and the fire 2. The mad-doctor's gaze From social symptom to physical symptom Female arsonists and puberty Catharsis or disease?

25 26 26 26 27 27 3i 34

35 37 38 4i 42 43 45 46 49 51 54 58 61 68 73

Contents PART II. THE STATUS OF WOMEN AND THE PLACE OF CHILDREN

3. The Bridal Wagon 4. Silent births Women who committed infanticide The time spent as a maid Moving and belonging Work Wages The dowry Love affairs between unmarried farm servants Relationships Illegitimate children "With the angels" Work and childbirth "Something came out" - or the vagueness of the body's messages The search for motivation The love of children Talk

79 83 83 86 86 88 91 92 93 94 97 101 101 104 107 109 in

PART III. THE DISPUTED BOUNDARIES OF THE VILLAGE

5. Poaching: Economics, culture, and sexuality "Nothing but shoot game" A trade on the edge of the villages The village goes poaching The poor Farmers and farmhands A topsy-turvy world The families The young men Passion "Shooting a hind" — and the meaning of the words The reality of fantasy "The chamois in the mountains" Laments and curses Bavarian Hiasl 6. Domination in jeopardy The events The provincial judge attempts to mediate The "good-natured mountain folk" and the "stormy times" Manhood and execution A fantasy of reconciliation Conclusion: On the threshold between two worlds

121 124 127 130 132 134 139 140 142 144 147 150 153 166 172 178 178 181 184 187 189 191

Acknowledgments

The work for this study was carried out in several different places. The study of infanticide was written in Munich; the section on arson and psychiatry mainly in London; and the chapter on poaching in Berlin. I owe debts of gratitude to people in all these places. The staff of the Staatsarchiv, Munich, gave me friendly and interested assistance in my search for material and in deciphering illegible handwriting, for which I thank them. This work began in Karl Bosl's introductory course on Bavarian history and in many discussions with Helmut Sasse about psychoanalysis, which helped me make sense of my massive material. Wolfgang Mommsen made possible a period of reorientation in London, in the meeting of social anthropology and history. Through their encouragement and approval, Volker Hunecke, Reinhard Riirup, and Karin Hausen at the Institute for Historical Study at the Technical University of Berlin helped to ensure that this research led to a Habilitation. Dieter Langewiesche was the external reader. Karin Hausen deserves special mention because she belongs to that circle of friends, including Barbara Duden, Rainer Beck, Miranda Chaytor, Hans Medick, David Sabean, and Verena Stolcke, who have followed the development of this work over the years with their inspiring discussions and criticisms. Barrie Selman took on the far from simple task of translating sometimes convoluted German into readable English, and Pamela Selwyn helped with the final English text. Finally, I should like to thank Lutz Niethammer for his patience and for the joy of discovering in his company the stuff of history among the stories.

Vll

Introduction: The breakup of the village

T H E PEASANT AS S E E N BY T H E M I D D L E CLASS Even before the peasants had been set free, released from the shackles of feudalism, their requiem had already begun. The peasant had, after all, become a citizen, "a full citizen in the economic sense."1 In fact, the peasant's complete liberation had been conceived long before, with the enthusiasm for progress that accompanied the emancipation of the serfs. Thus, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a new figure saw the light of day - the "farmer," released from the traditionalism of the peasant and oriented toward the future. "Rational" in his approach to farming, he now ran a "business," just like a craftsman or mill owner. He kept pace with progress, which was now set to overtake the countryside, too. Agriculture is a business, the purpose of which is to yield a profit, or earn money, by producing (and occasionally processing) vegetable and animal substances. The larger the profit, on a regular basis, the more completely this purpose is achieved. The perfect kind of agriculture is thus that which extracts the highest and most sustained profit possible from the business in proportion to capital, manpower, and other circumstances.2 But those who announced the birth of the "farmer" were not the peasants themselves but enlightened civil servants, clergymen, and country noblemen, members of learned agricultural societies and academies, who were now applying the emerging civil society's ideas of economics and labor to the country. Civil society was reflected, as it were, in its "picture of the peasant." In this pitiable creature that for centuries had been despised, the city dweller now discovered the backwoodsman in a wilderness devoid of civilization. A prize-winning plan to civilize the peasants, put forward in 1786 by Nikolaus Beckmann, intervened in this wilderness, turning the countryside into a sort of park surrounding the city and anticipating the burghers' need for recreation. The dung heaps in front of the houses were to be 'Heide Wunder, Die bauerlkhe Gemeinde in Deutschland(Gottingen, 1986), p. 128. Cf., on Bavaria, Pankraz Fried, "Die Sozialentwicldung von Bauerntum und Landvolk," in Max Splinder (ed.), Handbucb der bayerischen Geschicbte, vol. 4, Das neue Bayern 1800—1970 (Munich, 1975), p. 772. 2 Albrecht Thaer, Grundsatze der rationellen Landwirtscbaft (1809) (Stuttgart, 1833), vol. 1, p. 3.

Introduction removed and the peasants' living quarters cleared of livestock; the peasants were to be taught hygiene under the solicitous supervision of the teacher and the vicar, and there was to be an end to the indecent practice of everyone sleeping together in the same room; beds and sexes were to be separated. Civilization's plan was for the peasant to do "clean"work, becoming a sort of landscape gardener.3 The men of enlightenment also sought to bring a new culture to the rural population. A "refined popular life, freed from the influence of the church, secularized, cleansed of all superstition and common vulgarity,"4 was to be created for Catholic Bavarians, as a substitute for their baroque customs. "Innocent musical entertainments" that "aided the country's economy" and "promoted morality" were composed, and new song texts were spread among the people. "Field and village songs of this kind are of use for moral instruction: If committed to memory and sung by country folk, they cheer the ploughman and banish impure songs that poison the heart and pollute the soul."5 Lastly, the old Bavarian peasant was rooted in history, the origin of the Bavarians traced back to the ancient Bojer, and the "noble savage" was invented: simple, modest, contented, physically powerful, and highminded.6 What had become of the peasant? His passing was now mourned. For was not this peasant, too, a surviving specimen of a form of life that had been closer to the origins of mankind? The image of the peasant was now made to express a longing for nature, simplicity, and primeval power. The bourgeois needed him to reenact their idea of their own long-lost past. The period 1850 to 1880 saw the "rapidly growing misunderstanding of the world outside the gates of the big cities by the bourgeoisie as it achieved emancipation. This was when 'peasantry' became a generalized concept, and rural life came to be seen as a 'summer retreat.'"7 And this bourgeoisie now began to equip its world with farmhouses "tended" by architects to reflect their aesthetic views, with painted Upper Bavarian peasant cupboards, with yodeling, thigh-slapping peasants, and with popular plays on "genuine" peasant 3 Ludolf Kuchenbuch, "Sauisches Wirtschaften auf dem Land als Problem der Volksaufklarung," in Jahrbuch fur Volkskunde 1987, pp. 27—42. Nikolaus Beckmann, Oberdeichgrafin Harburg, wrote the article analyzed by Kuchenbuch, which was awarded a prize in 1786. In 1786 it also appeared in the Hannoverscbes Magazin. On enlightenment in the country, see also Ernst Hinrichs and Giinther Wiegelmann (eds.), Sozialer and kultureller Wandel in der landlichen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts (Wolfenbuttel, 1982). 4 Hans Moser, "Der Folklorismus als Forschungsproblem der Volkskunde," in Volkskunde im gescbichtlichen Wandel. Ergebnisse aus funfzig Jahren volkskundlicher Quellenforschungen (Munich, 1985), pp. 359-92. 'Ibid., cf. Werner K. Blessing, "Fest und Vergniigen der 'kleinen' Leute. Wandlungen vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert," in R. Van Dulmen and N . Schindler (eds.), Volkskultur. Zur Wiederentdeckung des Alltags (16.-20. Jahrhundert) (Frankfurt a. M. 1984), pp. 2 8 2 - 9 8 , 361-2. 'Moser, Folklorismus, p. 369; on the "noble savage," see K.-H. Kohl, Entzauberter Blick. Das Bild vom Guten Wilden und die Erfahrung der Zivilisalion (Berlin, 1981); Fritz Kramer, Verkehrtt Welten, Zur imaginaren Ethnographic des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a.M., 1977). Cf. Martin Segalen, Mari et Femme dans la Smite" Paysanne (Paris, 1980), p. 10. 'Leopold Schmidt, "Das Volkslied in der Wissenschafts- und Sammlertatigkeit der Volkskunde," in R. W . Brednich, L. Rohrich, and W . Suppan (eds.), Handbucb des Volisliedes, vol. 2 (Munich, 1975), p. 15.

Introduction stages. Associations for the preservation and "revival" of customs were formed.8 But where were the peasants now? Early nineteenth-century scholars had preached the rise of the "farmer" (Landwirt); he would be one of them, a bourgeois with a trade and a rational way of thinking. In the wake of the 1848 revolution, a "scholar" spoke, and the "peasant" experienced a revival. Another facet of the bourgeois soul began to speak, articulating the deficiencies of bourgeois life in the "picture of the peasant." In 1851, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl9 gave this projection of the imagination a face and a name. He summoned up a world that rooted contemporary society in history, giving it an apparently natural, primeval soil. "Studying peasant conditions" meant "studying history," the customs of the peasant as "a living archive, a source book of incalculable value." And this was the scholar's task, since "the peasant has learned no history, but he is historical . . . in his gnarled peculiarity, like a defiantly independent construct."10 In the image of the peasant, the bourgeois might learn to discern himself, because "in the so-called educated world, man exists much more as an individual, whereas the peasant exists and acts as a group, as an entire class." Reflecting his "individual" physiognomy in the peasant's, the scholar saw himself as the "type of the individual personality," who would now recall his origins from the midst of his individual isolation. For even "to the eye of the natural scientist, the true German peasant represents the historical type of the German race. In town dwellers, the body's original stamp - as well as intellect and morality - has developed into a type of individual personality, or family, at the most — or disappeared entirely. The peasants' physical peculiarity is still collectively divided by class and tribal district [Gau]. In one district we still find a more long-legged, lanky type of man, in the next a more broad-shouldered, thickset type." It was still possible to find in "unadulterated peasants" medieval figures that had "not yet fully developed individual facial features."1' Yet Riehl's picture of the peasant remains equivocal. He sees not only the decay of the "true peasantry," which had made "immense progress in the last 50 years"; he also sees the "degenerate peasant," whose livelihood was being eroded by the modern state and who was losing his unique nature under the "sole dominion of the money economy." But worse than that: The peasantry itself was acquiring ugly traits because of its "irrationality."12 Through this ugliness, it insulted the scholar's aesthetic sense, destroyed his illusions about the intactness of the "peasantry," when 8 Cf. Hans Pornbacher and Karl Pornbacher, "Die Literatur bis 1885," in Spindler, Handbucb der bayerischen Geschichte, pp. ui2ff. On "museale Kultur," see Norbert Schlinder, "Spuren in die Geschichte der Zivilisation. Probleme und Perspektiven einer historischen Volkskulturforschung," in Van Diilmen and Schindler, Volkskultur, p. 30. 'On Riehl's life, see Peter Steinbach, introduction to W. H. Riehl, Die biirgerliche Geselhchaft (1851; Frankfurt a.M., 1976), pp. 7-44. 10 Riehl, BUrgerlicbe Geselhchaft, p. 58 "Ibid., pp. 58-9. 12 Ibid., pp. 75ff.

Introduction its everyday misery, its economic inefficiency, or the disintegration of its customs marred this Weltbild. Riehl may have felt this threat personally. At this time he went out to meet the peasants, conducting detailed research into their "customs." They were his major concern, the living kernel of his outlook. He became one of the fathers of folklore,13 not only as a founder of the nationalist, conservative tradition but as a field ethnologist. His work was the research journey of the "encyclopedic pedestrian," 14 seeking the traces of his history and of his future in Germany as a peasant country. Riehl's idealized peasant, the Hofbauer, became a ritually evoked "social figure whose social position was comparatively uninteresting . . . , since it was believed that in any case he had existed only in the past." 15 As such, he was also eminently suited to satisfy the projections of a class seeking a bulwark against the insecurities of rapidly expanding capitalism and a rebellious and increasingly socialist working class. The "peasant" was needed, but not his cows, pigs, or turnips, the humdrum squalor of his existence. What was needed was a peasant with a whole, rounded life and a history, capable of providing capitalism and the bourgeoisie with a worthy prehistory - of holding up a mirror to their idylls and self-assurance and reflecting the bourgeoisie's lost, idealized childhood. True, there were individual scholars who studied the actual living conditions of the peasants in the second half of the nineteenth century, and they were to influence agrarian history through their new approaches to research, based on statistics, 16 just as much as the backward-looking Utopia of the idealized peasant. But analyses of this kind could not depose "the peasant" and get people to see the reality of peasant living conditions, conflicts, class differences, and structures of domination. The myth of the peasant had become necessary; the peasant's real world would have been too banal. But the ethnologist's picture of the peasant has a Janus face. The famous French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep discovered the "other picture" of the peasant in this century. He, too, researched the everyday life, morals, and rites of peasant societies. Like Riehl, he was of central importance for conveying an idea of what peasant life might have meant and, as in Riehl's works, his picture of the peasant becomes ambiguous the moment he comes into direct contact with them during his fieldwork. This is the moment of danger, when the peasant - suddenly freed from the designs of the bourgeois, which until then would have afforded protection - might be revealed as totally different from his idea of the "other." After "Gottfried Korff, "Kultur," in Hermann Bausinger (ed.), Grundziige der Volkskunde (Darmstadt, 1978), pp. 47-80, p. 21. '^Hermann Bausinger, Volkskunde. Von der Altertumfonchung zur Kulturanalyse (Berlin, 1971), p. 60. "Christof Dipper, "Bauern als Gegenstand der Sozialgeschichte," in W . Schieder and V. Sellin, (eds.), Socialgeschichte in Deutschland(Gbttingen, 1987), vol. 4, p. 11. '*For example, among the publications of the Verein fiir Socialpolitik: Kuno Frankenstein, Die Verhaltnisse der Landarbeiter in Deutschland, 2 vols., Schriften des Vereins fur Socialpolitik, no. 54 (Leipzig, 1892); Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt, Fiinf Dorfgemeinden aufdem Hoben Taunus. Eine sozialstatistische Untersucbung liber Kleinbauerntum, Hausindustrie und Volksleben, ed. Gustav Schnoller, Staats- und socialwissenschaftliche Forschungen, vol. 4, no. 2 (Leipzig, 1892).

Introduction all, is he not the "savage" {Wilde), who had to be treated indulgently, and is he not - to put it mildly - slightly ridiculous too? As Riehl cautiously formulates it, the objects of the ethnologist's studies are "extremely childish and irrational customs and practices, concerning house and farm, skirts and camisoles, kitchens and cellars . . . in fact, nothing but worthless paraphernalia."17 In the view of Arnold van Gennep, who studied the customs of the French peasants with the same commitment, the problem lay in the encounter itself, for he considered that the peasant speaks the language of primitives or thinks along prelogical lines, whereas the ethnologist employs the language of civilization. The peasant's way of thinking is different; he envisages reality differently from the scholar - in analogies, symbols, beliefs, and rites. 18 Riehl discovers the object of his interest, the German peasant, in a place where "custom is still law," "where religion, national sentiment, social and family life are still matters of naive instinct, of custom." 19 But only in van Gennep does it become apparent that the "naive, instinctual" German peasant and the French peasant so rooted in prelogical structures are unwilling to divulge the secrets of their customs. The scholar must accomplish the feat, he says, of slipping into another's skin, "but here, too, there is great call for caution, because 'civilized men' experience great difficulty in thinking in participatory or associative terms, getting under the skin of another - as it is termed - casting off what they know, reverting to ignorance, at least in certain spheres." 20 Indeed, the idealized peasant, with his natural, genuine, original temperament, his "naive instinct," turns out to be so closely allied with the "primitive" that their images threaten to become identical at any moment. Civilized man, searching for his other self, suddenly finds the "other," primitive and wild, "an ignorant and childish people." 21 Riehl had still confronted the "scholar" with the "peasant"; for van Gennep, the problem is for the scholar to deprive the "ignorant man" of his treasures. And to this end it was necessary to deceive the peasants: "a certain measure of skill is required. . . . For if we do not manage to make ourselves liked by the people we approach, if we arouse in them the suspicion that we find their beliefs and legends ridiculous, we shall achieve nothing." 22 Whereas Riehl still allows an encounter to take place, after the turn of the century the peasant becomes the object of a collector's passion for relics of a culture that "Riehl, "Die Volkskunde als Wissenschaft," in G. Lutz (ed.), Volkskunde. Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte ihrer Problem (1858; Berlin, 1958), p. 29. 18 See Arnold van Gennep, Manuel de folklore franfais conttmporain, 9 vols. (Paris, 1938-58), vol. 1, p. 73. Van Gennep's international fame was established by ha rites depassages, which appeared in Paris in 1909. 20 "Riehl, Biirgerliche Geseltschaft, p. 74. Van Gennep, Manuel, vol 1, p. 100. 21 Cf. on this stereotype and for a critique of van Gennep, Segalen, Mari et femme, pp. n - 1 2 , and Jeanne Favret-Saada, Die Wbrter, Her Zauber, dtr Tod. Der Htxenglaube im Mainland von Westfrankreicb (Frankfurt a. M., 1979), p. 3O7ff. Originally published in French, Les mots, la mart, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le Bocage (Paris, 1977). 22 According to Favret-Saada, Wdrter, p. 308. Van Gennep is here following the tradition of Paul Sebillot, "Instructions et questionnaires: Sur l'art de recueillir," in Annuaire de la Societe des Traditions populaires, vol. 2 (1887).

Introduction must be considered alien and submerged. This image eventually makes its way into the heads of German scholars via Levy-Bruhl's theories on primitive peoples.23 Still prevalent, however, was "a way of thinking based more on a world view than on theory, oriented toward the backward-looking Utopia of peasant life," which long shaped historians' picture of the peasant.24 Above all it was Giinther Franz who continued this tradition in agrarian history. Harking back to peasantry's "political-revolutionary" role in the German Peasant War, he assigned it counterrevolutionary significance in the twentieth century as a bulwark against the "social upheaval of bolshevism."25 But there is also another perception of the peasants as a revolutionary force. In the tradition of Engels" work The German Peasant War,26 the peasant became the bearer of an early bourgeois revolution. In Marxist research into the Peasant War, the peasant was briefly "emancipated," to become the forefather of a revolutionary working class.27 But the alienation from the peasants that this implies is just as great as in Franz's political view of the peasant. Riehl and Franz derive the peasantry's value as historical subject matter from its "enduring," conservative "nature," whereas Marxism-Leninism fits the peasantry into history at the very moment when it deviates from its nature; it comes to the peasant's rescue by according him the "revolutionary" power of the popular masses. Ultimately, both positions reflect nineteenth-century ideas of society rather than an understanding of what peasant life and revolt in the early modern period may have meant to the peasants themselves. The peasants disappear beneath these sociopolitical projections and simply become functions of something else.

THE LITERATURE ON RURAL CONDITIONS What do we know about the peasants of recent centuries? Indeed, did they show their faces at all? Research into the Peasant War and discussions between Marxist and bourgeois scholars28 have increasingly attempted to view the peasants in their historical reality, replacing the "picture of the peasant" with the peasant as a historical subject. A shift of perspective occurred here. Nineteenth-century accounts of the peasant world bear witness to a literary culture and reflect their authors and compilers. Traditionally, the peasants themselves have written little. Nevertheless, 23 On Lucien Levy-Bruhl and Hans Naumann's theory of the "submerged" cultural heritage, see Schindler, "Spuren," pp. 32—3. M Schindler, "Spuren," p . 34; cf. Bausinger, Volkikunde, pp. 6iff. "Dipper, "Bauern," p. 14. 26 Friedrich Engels, Der deutscbe Bauernkrieg, ed. Karl Marx (1850, Berlin, 1979). "See Rainer Wohlfeil's anthology, Reformation oderfrtihburgerliche Revolution? (Munich, 1972), and B. F. Porschnew, "Formen und Wege des bauerlichen Kampfes gegen die feudale Ausbeutung," in Sowjetwissenschaft, Gesellschaftswissenschafiliche Beitrage (1952). 28 See the bibliography in Winfried Schulze, Bauerlicher Widerstand und feudale Herrschaft in der friiben Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1980); also Rainer Wohlfeil's anthology Der Bauernkrieg 1324—2;. Bauernkrieg und Reformation (Munich, 1975); Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke (eds.), The German Peasant War of 1323 New Viewpoint] (London, 1979).

Introduction they have constantly made their voices heard throughout history. In recent decades, the attention of historians has increasingly turned to peasant rebellions and revolts, periods in which their misery and oppression rose to the surface of historical events, reaching a climax in the Peasant War.29 Above all, they focused on the peasants in times of revolt and rebellion. Increasingly, researchers were struck by the peasants' capacity for latent recalcitrance and resistance. By showing that in addition to the one great event — the Peasant War — small regional, and especially local, rebellions of different kinds were constantly erupting and that confrontation with the authorities that exploited the peasantry as a means of production was very much on the historical agenda, they also undermined the assumption that these revolts were revolutionary in their force. Far from advancing in a straight line, the peasants proved more anxious to move backward. Research into peasant revolts has attempted to establish the peasants as a historical subject by describing their struggles. It has looked at those times in history when the peasants left their villages to voice their complaints before the very bodies that oppressed them; when everyday village life was turned inside out, and the rhythm of peasant work gave way to that of war and resistance. But the "peasant rabble"30 that their adversaries saw bearing down on them and which was finally forced tofleethe field in confusion following yet another rout, only became a "rabble" when misery, poverty, injustice, and despair drove them out of their homes onto the highway and when, at the same time, they had acquired the self-confidence to stand up to their masters. And ultimately they were forced to rely on the articulate, literate burghers to formulate their demands. Ranke provided nineteenthcentury civil society with his interpretation of the Peasant War as the greatest "natural event" in German history.31 But is that what it was for the peasants themselves, whose time elapsed in cycles and whose chief acquaintance with "natural events" was with recurrent yet unpredictable disasters? And is not the peasants' "subjectification" possibly a "bourgeois natural event," perceived from a dichotomous viewpoint of subject and object, individual and society? For the stage on which the perception of the peasant revolts is enacted is still largely the old familiar one, the political arena of rulers and "subjects,"32 outside the peasant world. Historians have tried to cross this traditional dividing line,33 but the process of getting at the real 29 Cf., among others, Peter Blickle et al., Aufruhr und EmpSrung. Studien zum bauerlkhen Widerstand im alten Reich (Munich, 1980); Winfried Schulze (ed.), Europaische Bauernrevolteti derfriihen Neuzeit (Frankfurt a.M., 1982); David Sabean, Landlxsitz und Gesellschaft am Vorabenddes Bauernkrieges (Stuttgart, 1972); Werner Trossbach, Bauernbewegungen im Wetterau-Vogelsberg-Gebiet 1648—1806. Fallstudien zum bauerlichen Widerstand im alten Reich (Darmstadt, 1985). 30 On the "peasant rabble," see Rudolf Endres, "Probleme des Bauernkrieges in Franken," in Wohlfeil, Bauernkrieg, pp. 90-115. "Referred to by Heide Wunder, "Der samlandische Bauernaufstand von 1525. Entwurf fur eine sozialgeschichtliche Forschungsstrategie," in Wohlfeil, Bauernkrieg, p. 149. 32 See Peter Blickle, Deutsche Untertanen. Ein Widerspruch (Munich, 1981). "See Rainer Wirtz, "Widersetzlichkeiten, Excesse, Crawalle, Tumulte und Skandale." Soziale Bewegung und gewalthafter sozialer Protest in Baden 1815—1848 (Frankfurt a.M., 1981). See also Karin Hausen, "Schwierigkeiten mit dem 'sozialen Protest.' Kritische Anmerkungen zu einem historischen Forschungsansatz," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 3 (1977), 2 5 7 - 6 3 .

Introduction peasants in historical times by way of the revolts of a collective "peasant" seems a laborious one. Moreover, they were not all simply "peasants" but were divided into rich and poor, dependents of various kinds, farm servants, the village lower classes, and craftsmen, whose inequalities, power struggles, and disputes remained hidden from view. And then there were the women. Did the peasant world in general consist of various different ways of life? What was it like, this world from which the peasants came, with their claim to justice and a life appropriate to them? Their anger and the knowledge with which they put their demands to their masters were rooted in an order whose most salient characteristic in times of revolt was humiliation. This "knowledge" was old, stored in a collective memory which appealed to peasant rights that may never have existed but seemed to them to be inherent in the very nature of the peasant economy. This memory was one of the sources of the self-assurance with which the peasants rebelled and belonged to a cultural and material tradition that gave birth to and sustained the peasant Utopias. These factors presuppose orders in the peasant world that did not exist above or outside the peasantry's actual way of life. They expressed the peasants' relationships with each other, with nature, the village, and the "outside world" - the market, the church, and the institutions of government and feudalism. Ultimately, they were reflected in the villagers' religious cosmology. As an expression of interwoven relationships, they assume the nature of a process and are historical.34 Since Georg-Friedrich Knapp's 1887 study of the emancipation of the peasants and the origin of the farm worker, another branch of agrarian history has devoted itself to the "agrarian system": the legal basis of relationships between landowner and peasant obligations.35 But these studies were chiefly concerned with written law, not everyday life under these legal conditions. In this century, though, these early research efforts were surpassed by Wilhelm Abel's studies in agrarian history. He wrote the history of agricultural production, viewing it as part of the economic history in general. 36 In Massenarmut and Hungerkrisen im vorindustriellen Europa (Mass poverty and famine in preindustrial Europe), he analyzed the economic cycles of agricultural production by means of his "quantitative economic history" 37 in a lengthy survey stretching from the sixteenth century to the mid-1800s. The ups 34 Theodor Shanin, "The Nature and Logic of Peasant Economy," pt. 1, Journal of Peasant Studies 1, (1973-4). 64-

"Friedrich Georg Knapp, Die Bauernbefreiung und der Ursprung der Landarbeiter in den alteren Theilen Preussens, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1887); Friedrich Liitge, Geschichte der deutschen Agrarverfassung vomfriihen Mittelalter bis zum 1$. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1963), and Die bayerische Grundherrschaft (Stuttgart, 1949); Friedrich Wilhelm Henning, Dienste und Abgabe der Bauern im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1969). "Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, Eine Geschichte der Land- und Ernahrungswirtschaft

Mitteleuopas seit dm hohen Mittelalter, 3rd ed. (Hamburg, 1969). For an appraisal of German agrarian history and Abel's studies, see also Ian Farr, "'Tradition' and the Peasantry: On the Modern Historiography of Rural Germany," in Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee, The German Peasantry (London, 1986), pp. 5-6. 37

Wilhelm Abel, Massenarmut und Hungerkrisen im vorindustriellen Europa. Versuch einer Synopsis (Ham-

burg, 1974). P- '5-

8

Introduction and downs of inflationary times, pauperization, and glutted markets paint a picture of the political and social conditions, and their consequences, that produced misery and need on a regional level. In Wilhelm Abel's studies we have estimates of peasant income levels for several centuries. At the same time, the cyclical movement of prices and yields, good times and famine years, almost seems to be naturally determined: farms, households, markets, state, and society are all woven into this "statistical garland." Abel's research enables us to understand the economic tensions to which the agrarian world of the early modern period was increasingly subject - between the cyclical confrontation with nature, on the one hand, and the movements of world trade, the confrontation with the modern world and the market, on the other. Breaches in peasant culture appear precisely at the interstices between the peasants' nature-bound rural economy and civil society. Abel's studies are macroanalyses. The tensions inside the peasant world itself remain a gray area. This gap was filled in a comparative regional history by Josef Mooser, Ldndlkhe Klassengesellscbaft 1770-1848 (Rural class society, 1770-1848), about the peasants and lower classes, farming and rural crafts, in two parts of Westphalia — a protoindustrial area and a farming area of small peasants.38 Mooser uncovers the class dividing lines, the stratification of these rural societies, and succeeds in bringing to light, at the same time, the fundamental structures of peasant society. Mooser's study demonstrates that only a nonromanticizing look at peasant society is capable of bringing to life its inner workings. His synthesis of Max Weber's model of the market classes and the socioanthropological concept of the peasant economy proved to be a fruitful one. Because it is the land that supports the peasant economy, the life of the peasants stands in an indissoluble relationship to nature. This is not however, a relationship of subordination. The peasant's relationship with nature is one of dialogue, consisting of work in and on nature, and it is reciprocal. "It is a peculiarity of agricultural production that it depends on a combination of man's work and the natural forces of growth. The form this combination takes is not haphazard, because farming, the way the peasant intervenes in nature and wrests from her what she will not surrender of her own free will, the way in which he 'tames' her, is itself dependent on nature."39 "Farming uses nature's resources without wholly subjecting them to human needs and without ever being able to predict the yield with full certainty."40 So the history of the peasants is also the history of their fields and animals. The appearance of the farmhouses reflects the character of their economy; the daily and yearly routine varies with the nature of the crops cultivated and the methods used. The division of labor is dependent on the number and nature of the livestock, the crops, 38 Josef Mooser, Landliche Klassengaellschaft 1770-1848. Bauern und Unterschkhten, Landwirtschaft und Gewerbe im Sstlichen Watfalen (Gbttingen, 1984); on the emancipation of the peasants, see also Wolfgang von Hippel, Die Bauernbefreiung im KSnigreich WUrttemberg, 2 vols. (Boppard, 1977). "Rainer Beck, Naturals Oekonmie. Unterfinning: Bauerliche Wirtschaft in einan oberbayerischen Dorf des friihen 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1986), p. 79. 40 Shanin, "Nature and Logic," p. 69.

Introduction fields, and meadows. The rules of this "natural economy"41 leave their imprint upon gender relations, with men and women each having their own place. When the care of the cows and calves on the larger farms of the Allgau was taken away from the farmers' wives and entrusted to professional dairymen, placing it within the farmers' ambit, the profits from market-oriented milk production went hand in hand with the farm women's loss of power. There was a shift in responsibility for the productivity of the peasant economy.42 The way things were done in the fields and the cow sheds also influenced the way things were done within the peasant family. This has been demonstrated by research into the laws of inheritance and family relationships.43 The point of departure was "the question of the way in which ownership structured the field of human relationships."44 This was not simply a question of internal family structure. Networks of relationships were, after all, also an essential component of peasant rootedness in the social environment and the village power structure. In the final analysis, struggles between brothers and sisters, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, old and young, were part of an incessant struggle for survival.45 However, the relationships among members of the same family not only reflected the divided fields; the land itself assumed the traits of the clans. The relationship is not a one-sided one: Not only do economics and its laws write the history of families; family relationships also determine the history of the land.

CRIME AS A MEDIUM OF HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Using material supplied in a tax record, Rainer Beck studied the rules of the "natural economy" of an Upper Bavarian village in the eighteenth century and the functional integration of each of its elements into the village subsistence apparatus as a whole.46 He demonstrated how this village society produced its material culture in the confrontation with nature. Josef Mooser's work47 tackles the question of rural stratification, inequalities, and their dynamic development at the time of the eman41

Beck, Naturale Oekonomie, develops the concept, using the concrete example of peasant conditions. Rosa Kempf, Arbeits- und Lebensverhaltnisse der Frauen in der Landwirtschaft Bayerns Qena, 1918), pp. 105-6, 115-16, and I28ff. 43 See Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and Edward P. Thompson (eds.), Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200-1800 (Cambridge, 1976); Peter Laslett (ed.), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1976). 44 David Sabean, '"Junge Immen im leeren Korb': Beziehungen zwischen Schwagern in einem Schwabischen Dorf," in Hans Medick and David Sabean (eds.), Emotionen und materielle Interessen, Sozialanthropologische und historische Beitrage zur Familienforschung (Gottingen, 1984), pp. 233-50, p. 232; see also Martin Segalen, "'Sein Teil haben': Geschwisterbeziehungen in einem egalitaren Vererbungssystem," in ibid., pp. 181-98. 4! Ibid.; Sabean, "Junge Immen." 42

46 47

Beck, Naturale Oekonomie. Mooser, Landliche Klassengesellschaft.

IO

Introduction cipation of the peasants. The work of Utz Jeggle and of Carola Lipp and Wolfgang Kaschuba,48 finally, unravels the socioeconomic conditions of survival in the village in the age of industrialization, demonstrating the role played by the struggle for survival and by marginalization in the villagers' social behavior and the village order. These works start with the scheme of things; they portray the foundations of survival and of the attendant power struggles, and from this vantage point uncover the schisms, the tendencies to disintegrate, the stratification, and the enduring structures of these ways of life. I have taken the opposite approach and, by looking at the conflicts and violations of village society, have tried to focus attention on its social culture. E. P. Thompson has described the study of an "atypical episode or situation" as a way of discovering the unspoken norms of a society, be it in the public, social or domestic sphere.49 If we take this shift in perspective one stage farther and, instead of merely noting that at the moment of conflict or revolt a norm is violated and becomes conspicuous by being broken, we accept that those who violated the norm were often injured parties, who sought through their actions to exact retribution for, or at least recognition of, the wrong inflicted on them, we gain an insight into a whole tangle of unwritten rules and underlying meanings in social relationships. And if we proceed on the assumption that people construct their culture through "networks of meaning" that they have established themselves,50 their conflicts take on a dialoguelike quality. They give voice to one part of a whole range of relationships. We hear the protagonists speak, but the peculiar nature of their language refers back to its context, its historical and cultural location, and gives this a voice, too.51 The assumption that conflicts are not merely schisms within a cultural system but also its language allows us to select a segment of history for study in such a way that it yields up the period's operative "cultural system" for investigation.52 The period chosen for my study of village society in Upper Bavaria is the second half of the nineteenth century. But because this peasant society was already tied to civil society, the documentation of these conflicts also acted as a mouthpiece for the latter. For in the period after 1848 the bourgeoisie, despite having failed to push through its claims to government, had managed to get its principles recog48 Utz Jeggle, Kiebingen - eine Heimatgeschichte. Zum Prozess der Zivilisation in einem schwabischen Dorf (Tubingen, 1979); Wolfgang Kaschuba and Carola Lipp, Dbrfliches Veberleben. Zur Gacbichte materieller und sozialer Reproduktion landlicher Gesellschaft im 19. und friihen 20. Jahrhundert (Tubingen, 1982). •"Edward P. Thompson, "Volkskunde, Anthropologie und Sozialgeschichte," in Thompson, Plebeiscbe Kultur und moralische Oekonomie. Aufsatze zur englischen Sozialgeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. D. Groh (Frankfurt a.M., 1980), pp. 289-318. '"Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), p. 5; Natalie Z. Davis, "Ein anderer Umgang mit der Vergangenheit, Ein Gesprach," Freibeuter 24 (1985), 7 1 . "See Pierre Bourdieu, Entwurf einer Theorie der Praxis auf der ethnologischen Grundlage der kabylischen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a.M., 1976), p. 148; originally published in French, Esquisse dune Tbtorie de la Practique, prlcedf de trois (tudes d'ethnologic Kabyle (Ghent, 1972). "Davis, "Umgang," p. 7 1 , considers the constitution of a period of historical study as a "complete cultural system" as one of the achievements of anthropology.

II

Introduction nized in law. Insofar as civil society had assumed the role of a moral guardian, on the lookout for breaches of the rules, it entered into a constant exchange with the village, which is at its most tangible when the villagers appear before the bourgeois institutions - to seek justice, or to hear the court's verdict on them. In the villagers' field of conflict, bourgeois culture, with its courts, becomes part of village culture's sphere of action, and at the same time the villagers acquire significance in the process of asserting the bourgeois rule system. This process of interaction produced the sources on which my study is based. They are the court records of Munich Regional Courts (Landgerichte) I and II, whose jurisdiction included Munich and western Upper Bavaria, and the regional court in Traunstein for eastern Upper Bavaria. In addition to these, I used the records of less serious offenses dealt with by the local court of the region in question.53 The historical study of crime, pioneered by Dirk Blasius as a branch of social history34 in his studies of nineteenth-century Prussia, has narrowed down and described the central conflicts of peasant society in the age of industrialization and the rise of the bourgeoisie. English and French historians, in particular, have investigated the evolution of social upheaval through the statistics and the character of specific crimes and their cyclical occurrence. Douglas Hay has also described the power of the English judicial system up to the eighteenth century.55 I did not personally study criminology from a historical perspective but used crime as a probe to acquire a deeper insight into village society — or such was my intention. For this reason I set out to investigate through this medium those groups of offenses that came closest to expressing the reality of everyday village life. Infanticide, arson, and poaching were not simply conspicuous by their frequency in the catalog of village crime in Upper Bavaria; a comparison of criminal statistics shows them to be typical of rural crime in general in the second half of the nineteenth century.5* The case categories opened up three central areas of village conflict. Arson was a predominantly male offense; infanticide that of the maids and unmarried women of the village; whereas poaching represented a cultural phenomenon through which the village expressed itself toward the outside world and on a political level. Wherever a bourgeois court dealt with typically rural crime, the confrontation between bourgeois justice and peasant society's rule system was at its most apparent. From the moment civil society occupied the control centers of legal definition, the peasants' sense of justice started to be superseded, and it ended by being subjugated to the demands of the ruling culture. The court records thus present more than just a contemporary extract from "Wilhelm Volkert, Handbucb der bayerischen Aemter, Gerichte undGemeinden (1799—1980) (Munich, 1983). 54 Dirk Blasius, Btirgerlicbe Gesellschaft und Kriminalita't. Zur Sozialgeschichte Pmissau im Vormarz (Gb'ttingen, 1976); Blasius, Kriminalita't und Alltag. Zur Konfliktgeichkhte da Alltagslebens im ly.Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1978). "See Eric J. Hobsbawn and George Rude1, Captain Swing (Harmondsworth, I973);J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 13^0—1800 (Princeton, 1977); Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority and Criminal Law," in Hay et al. (eds.), Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (London, 1975), pp. 17-63; Nicole Castan, Justice et repression en Languedocd Npoque des Lumiires (Paris, 1980). '^Further details are given in later chapters. 12

Introduction village daily life; they also depict "another" present, intervening in this everyday life: that of the bourgeois judge and, by the end of the century, more and more frequently, the psychiatrist. J. A. Sharpe described a similar transformation for eighteenth-century England and went on to ask how the mass of the English lower classes reacted. According to him, the law took over the role of religion as society's ideological foundation, though it could remain so only as long as the masses retained their faith in it - that is, in its equity and fairness.57 The Upper Bavarian example of the game laws will demonstrate that this process of "replacement" cannot be completed if, instead of making sense to the village in which it intervenes, it merely perpetuates injustice under a fresh name. The material for my research consisted of court records. They are multilayered texts with several levels of meaning intertwined confusingly. The most obvious one enabled me to locate the material in the first place, under specific reference numbers in a Bavarian state archive: that is, the cases bear the stamp, as "cases," of their encounter with the legal system, the courts, the official bodies of the law outside the village. They contain excesses, violations, deviations, and point to conflicts, and as such have already passed through the mills of the judicial and official channels of interpretation. The order of their utterances is predetermined, following superficially the canon of questions of the police officers, the investigating magistrates, and finally the judges. This order may also be imposed on the witnesses' statements and answers. Yet what I found was no question-and-answer game according to all the rules of the judicial art. The statute books helped me to grasp the relevant issues of law — but how am I to understand the answers, which may be contradictory, which, sticking to "banalities," appear to dodge the questions, unwilling or unable to understand them? These answers frequently fail to fit into the hierarchy of meanings that appears so obvious from the viewpoint of the law. A fictitious bringing together of the parties involved in a trial may elucidate, in a simplified form, the complexities of the text of a court record. The judge or judges and the lay magistrates see an offender before them. He or she has broken the law and is now to be found guilty or acquitted by due process of the law. He is an arsonist or poacher, and she has committed infanticide. The imperial penal code has a ready-written text prepared for' them. The village policeman, who was responsible for arresting the offender, stands at the threshold between the village and the law. His knowledge did not merely draw on familiarity with the police regulations and the penal code; his "ability" to apprehend the offender also had to follow the tortuous paths of village gossip. He finally handed over a person who had fallen within his ambit as village policeman. The witnesses - the farmer's wife, the farmer, the maid, the farmhand, the day laborer, or the midwife, for example - see standing before the court a person who may be husband, employer, fellow maid, neighbor, relative, child, or an important rival in the village power struggles. The witnesses embody a tangled web of village 57

J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modem England, i5}o-ij}o

13

(London, 1984), p. 12.

Introduction relationships: family ties, conflicts peculiar to certain strata, women's concerns, servant-master relationships. In many cases a psychiatric expert is also involved, who is supposed to summarize all these structural associations into a scientific, medical text. On the obvious level, the record of the trial formulates what it finds to be the truth by the rational standards of the penal code. It speaks the language of reason. Irrationality is its object, and - in addition to the offender's deed - part of this irrationality is the social context, which in court is represented by the witnesses. The conflict in which they are all implicated - participating, seeing, acting, knowing, hiding it - has a place in the records of bourgeois disorder. So says the penal code. A common yet "uncommon" encounter occurs in the courtroom of Munich Regional Court I. Several worlds collide; eventually the sole socially relevant summary of the incident will be inscribed in the record of the trial. Its language and interpretation will be unambiguous. I assume that this text will be written in a language I can understand: I should like to call it the manifest layer of the text. It follows the language of the judicial system, and the objects of this language are clearly defined and described. The penal code and the commentaries on criminal law give it a basis that conveys social consensus. And in accordance with these guidelines, the crimes central to this study — infanticide, arson, and poaching - are described in the abundant forms of their legal relevance. I can "understand" the verdict. I find its rationale rooted in the elementary legal agreements of civil society, which protects its newborn babies and their "legitimate" mothers, which appreciates the value of the houses that might be threatened by arson, and which changed the laws on hunting after 1848. But more than anything else, it is the judgment that follows these guidelines. Counterbalancing it - its "raw material" - are the statements of the accused and the witnesses, which also cover hundreds of pages. They, too, know the law and realize that all they can do is to make their offenses appear as insignificant as possible. Yet it is precisely the text of these peasant offenders and witnesses that muddies this clarity. "Infanticide," "arson," "poaching": The words trigger a string of associations, conceal a world, the perception of which is irrelevant to the law. Simple things such as a burned-down house, a poached chamois buck, suddenly become the vehicle of elemental, symbolic factors, taking on meanings that are an irritant to the sole legally relevant interpretation. But this text, that of the accused and the witnesses, is also prestructured; it follows an internal system that is not "conscious" like the judge's language. But the interplay of its words and images, the gestures and silences that accompany it, cast fragments of "another" reality to the surface that had vanished in the rationalized version of the verdict. I should like to term this reality the latent layer of the text. At the manifest layer, it was principally the arsonist, the poacher, the woman who committed infanticide replying; we now hear a farmhand, a peasant, a maid, men and women. In their statements and images the peasant world unfolds, and here the meanings start to become multilayered. The recounting of an 14

Introduction act, committed or not, dissolves into countless individual stories. On the surface they have to do with the offense; but at a deeper level they constitute the sphere in which the house was set on fire, a deer poached, a child killed. This sphere is not just the location of the village and its households but also a subjective inner space, where the objects of criminal acts may become the objects of demand, loss, prohibition, violation, and fear.58 In connection with her research in the Brittany of the 1960s, Jeanne Favret-Saada asked, "To what are the peasants attempting to give a form in an attack on witchcraft?"59 What had gone wrong? This question addresses a semantic field that is dismissed, in enlightened society, as superstitious and irrational. Favret-Saada, on the other hand, tries to decipher in it a deep structure of peasant relationships, operating beneath the peasants' "objectively" recordable and visible living conditions. The words of magic wield material power and utter the text of the unconscious. Just as Freud postulated the existence of a "commonsense other," "another speaker" and "another text"60 alongside the official text, on the basis of the mere occurrence of dreams, Favret-Saada views the words and gestures that make up the field of peasant magic as part of a shaping process. But as a researcher, she becomes aware of this process and its power within the social relationships of the village only in the moment when she finds herself involved in it, when her words have already become an act of magic. In the case of Upper Bavaria, I had no access to peasants' dreams, nor was I concerned with the world of witches - Truden and Hexen - or exorcists, which still operated in the second half of the nineteenth century. Rather, I tried to locate this "other text" in the layers of reality hidden in the trial records. In so doing, I was not so much concerned with the "other of bourgeois reason" but with the hidden, unconscious, latent rule systems of the village itself, which here become visible not 58 On the analysis of latent layers of meaning in oral statements recorded in writing, see also Lutz Niethammer, "Fragen - Antworten - Fragen. Methodische Erfahrungen and Erwagungen zur Oral History," in Niethammer and von Plato (eds.), "Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten," Aufder Suche nacb der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Undent (Berlin, 1985), pp. 3921!., especially pp. 4O9ff. Also Alfred Lorenzer, "Tiefhermeneutische Kulturanalyse," in Lorenzer, Kulturanalysen. Psychoanalytische Studien zur Kultur (Frankfurt a.M., 1986), pp. 57ff., and Carlo Ginzburg, "Beweise und Moglichkeiten. Randbemerkungen zur Wahrhaftigen Geschichte von der Wiederkehr des Martin Guerre," in Natalie Zemon Davis, Die Wahrhaftige Geschichte von der Wiederkehr des Martin Guerre (in French, 1982; Munich, 1984), pp. 187-8. "Favret-Saada, Wiirter, p. 10 '"Hans-Martin Lohmann, Freud zur Einfilhrung (Hamburg, 1986), pp. 25—6. On differing cultural perceptions of "rational" or "irrational" behavior by peasants, see George M. Foster, "Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good," American Anthropologist 67 (1965), 295: "Since all normative behavior of the members of a group is a function of its particular cognitive orientation, both in an abstract philosophical sense and in the view of an individual himself, all behavior is 'rational' and sense-making. 'Irrational' behavior can be spoken of only in the context of a cognitive view which did not give rise to that behavior. Thus, in a rapidly changing world, in which peasant and primitive peoples are pulled into the social and economic context of whole nations, some of their behavior may appear irrational to others because the condition of their life is other than that revealed to them - however subconsciously - by a traditional world view. That is, a peasant's cognitive view provides moral and other precepts that are guides to — in fact, may be said to produce — behavior that may not be appropriate to the changing conditions of life he has not yet grasped."

Introduction in dream or in witchcraft but in crime and in the discourse it sets in train. Since the unconscious is also the seat of the prohibited, the dangerous, of suppressed feelings and images, concealing violations, fears, and fantasies - the traces which the official order inscribed in the individual - 1 assumed that the language of the unconscious could not be identical to the text of the statements of offenders and witnesses, that it was often contained, unstated, in the sum of the statements and documents. Hence it was not just significant "what" people said about their actions but "how" they spoke of them, what imagery they used. The deed itself was language and had a symbolic quality, and in the village a word exerted its power above all on the place it had occupied in the network of village relationships. But how was I to understand these symbolic, gestural, pictorial elements? For one thing, it was necessary to reconstruct the social context in which they had arisen, which had produced them. Extricated from the fabric of everyday reality, at the same time they pointed back there. For another, it was the issues raised by social anthropology, ethnology, and sometimes psychoanalytic hermeneutics that formed the background to my approach.61 They sent me in search of the meaning of the concrete, of the banal detail, the repetitions and black holes in the text, the language of the unstated.62 They not only gave me ideas and methodological hints that enabled me to uncover a network of meanings in the plethora of details and case histories; they also made me aware of the "ethnocentric" pitfalls of an "immediate," "intuitive" understanding, if the share of one's own unconscious in the reconstruction of a past, "alien" reality is not reflected.63 I too grew up on a farm, and though I have lived in towns for many years now and worked in the institutions of urban society, such self-projecting intuitions would have come quite naturally to me if my special knowledge - which in many ways made it easier for me to read the traces in the peasant statements - had not repeatedly called the texts in question. The nineteenth-century village frequently seemed remoter and stranger than the familiar conditions suggested and the notion of the immutable traditionalism of peasant life would have it. The village culture of Upper Bavaria, as it emerged in my encounter with offenders, witnesses, and the representatives of the bourgeois legal system who sat in judgment, was in a stage of transition that was almost imperceptible to the outside world. Internally, however, it was under growing pressure, caught between the older system of standards and motives, on the one hand, and contact with various forms of bourgeois intervention, on the other. It is precisely this transition that made it possible to grasp the latent levels of meaning that I sought to open up with my 61

Cf. Lorenzer, "Tiefenhermeneutische Kulturanalyse," pp. 57ff. The literary works of Lena Christ, Ludwig Thoma, and Oskar Maria Graf provided an important source of material and helped me to cope with the complexities of Upper Bavarian village life. 62

Cf. Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge. Eine Archaologie der Humanwissenscbaffen (Frankfurt a.M.,

1971, especially the section on psychoanalysis and ethnology, pp. 447ff.; Barbara Duden, Gacbkbte unter der Haul. Ein Eisenacber Arzt und seine Patientinnen urn 1730 (Stuttgart, 1987). "Bourdieu, Entwurf, p. 152. Cf. Maja Nadig, Die verborgene Kulturder Frau. Ethnopsychoanalytiscbe Gesprache

mil Bauerinnen in Mexiko (Frankfurt a.M., 1986).

16

Introduction hermeneutic methods of interpretation, but these levels of meaning cannot be further broken down in terms of time. For this reason I did not try to give my account a chronological structure but extended my often circling movements in search of the traces of deeper meanings to an entire group of cases.64 Consequently, the work is constructed according to the sociocultural relations and meanings that could be derived from the trials of certain crimes, and the structures of perception stemming from my reading of the text. They range from the profoundest isolation of individuals to political conflict at the highest level, the latter occurring in 1848. This is why the earliest events are not dealt with until the study nears its conclusion.

LANDSCAPE W I T H VILLAGES Old Bavaria was not a rich country. It contained the ruins of four mountain ranges. They had been the original cause of many disturbances; now the land had calmed down, and there were no more earthquakes. But its treasures of coal and marl had sunk into the depths and could no longer be exploited. The territory of old Bavaria was a hard, angular tract of the planet. It lay on the border between the two worlds, as if inserted, divorced from the more northern world, not quite cut off from the south. The country had height and breadth, mountains, lakes, rivers. Its skies were all hues, its air made all colors fresh. . . . For centuries, its inhabitants had been farmers, hostile to the towns. They loved their land. They were tough and powerful, keen of eye and poor of judgment. They did not need much: What they had, they clung onto tooth and nail. Slow, sluggish in their thinking, unwilling to toil for the future, they were given to pleasantly coarse amusements. They loved yesterday, were content with today, hated the morrow. They gave their settlements good, graphic names, they built houses that were a joy to the eye and adorned them with down-to-earth artwork. They loved utilitarian art of all kinds and were fond of colorful costumes, festivals, comic plays, the splendor of churches, processions, lavish food and drink, lengthy brawls, mountain climbing and hunting. For the rest, they wished to be left in peace; their life suited them as it was; they were suspicious of everything new.65

Upper Bavaria forms half of this old Bavaria, described by Lion Feuchtwanger with affectionate irony. The western border is marked by the river Lech, and to the south by the Upper Bavarian Alps, between the Lech and the Inn. The limestone of the Salzburg Alps between the Inn and the Salzach rivers forms the eastern wing. Mountain regions and the foothills of the Alps gradually give way to a flat plain, M I examined the main groups of offenses one by one and submitted the preliminary versions of my findings for discussion: See Regina Schulte, "Kindsmorderinnen auf dem Lande," in Medick and Sabean (eds.), Emotionen undMaterielle Intenuen, pp. 113-42; Schulte, "Feuer im Dorf," in Heinz Reif(ed.), Rauber,

Volk und Obrigkeit. Studien zur Geschichte der Kriminalitat in Deutschland seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt

a.M., 1984), pp. 100—52. I presented other key aspects at interdisciplinary colloquia and am grateful to all those who contributed to discussions of my work for their ideas and opinions. "Lion Feuchtwanger, Erfolg (1930; Frankfurt a.M., 1975), vol. 1, p. 1. 17

Introduction until the Upper Bavarian border finally crosses the Danube at Ingolstadt, its northernmost point.66 As the landscape changes, from the wooded mountains and foothills of the south, with its lakes, to the fertile plains and the moorlands of the north, so, too, does the character of the settlements. Whereas the lowlands are more heavily populated, with larger, more compact, and more built-up market towns and villages, the sparser population of the mountain regions is found in smaller communities that are much farther apart. There the farms generally stand alone or in small hamlets, separated from the village. One example of this method of settlement is the parish of Schoffau, in the district court circuit of Weilheim. At the end of the century the village consisted of only 10 houses, as it had 100 years earlier, and the other 35 farms were spread out singly (10 of them) or in groups of 2 or 3, forming another twenty settlements, each with its own name, such as Spindler, Lukatsried, Holdern, Hohenrain, Filzbauer, and so on.67 The placenames in court records may thus designate anything from solitary farms to hamlets, villages, small market towns, and actual towns. The map frequently shows them as belonging to one parish or another. The nature of the soil and the climate also determined the type of farming practiced in the various parts of the region — from the mountain pastures of the southern Alps, mainly devoted to livestock, to the grain-growing plains by the lower reaches of the Inn. Bavarian agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century was typical peasant farming. Ninety-five percent of farmland was owned by the farmers who tilled it. Small and medium-sized holdings dominated. Medium-sized farms of 5 to 25 hectares (12—60 acres) accounted for 52.1 percent of all agricultural land.68 Bavaria had more medium-sized holdings than any other part of Germany. A third of the land formed part of large farms, but large-scale land ownership was of little importance yet. These structures were relatively stable. Moreover, between the 1895 farm census and that of 1907, the number of large farms actually declined — as did the very small farms — with a simultaneous increase in the number of medium-sized holdings. Medium-sized farms were particularly important in Upper Bavaria. Between 1882 and 1907, they increased from 37.1 to 41.4 percent as a proportion of all farms, accounting for 44.2 percent of all farmland. Upper Bavaria had the lowest number of very small farms in the kingdom: 23.7 percent in 1907, down by 4.9 percent since 1882. The proportion of small farmers with holdings of 2 to 5 hectares (5-12 66 On the Bavarian countryside, see Hans Fehn, "Das Land Bayern und seine Bevolkerung seit 1800," in Spindler, Handbucb, vol. 4, pp. 6481!.

"Franz Schweyer, SchSffau, Elm oberbayerische Landgeminde. Eine wirtscbaftliche und soziak Studie (Stuttgart,

1986), pp. 16-17. 68 Axel Schnorbus, "Die landlichen Unterschichten in der Bayerischen Gesellschaft am Ausgang des 19. Jahrhunderts," ZBLG 30 (1967), 830; Kempf, Arbeits- und Lebensverhaltnisse, pp. 8ff.; see also Pankraz Fried, "Historisch-statistische Beitrage zur Geschichte des Kleinbauerntums (Soldnertums) im westlichen Oberbayern," in Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft in Miinchen, no. 51 (Munich, 1966), pp. 3off. 18

Introduction acres) had remained more or less constant, rising by 0.5 percent to 21.5 percent of the total, accounting for 7.5 percent of all farmland-as they had 25 years earlier. But Upper Bavaria also had the most large farms, with 13 percent boasting 20 to 100 hectares (50-250 acres) in 1882 and 13.2 percent in 1907. Although their number had risen, their share of land under cultivation fell, from 45.7 percent to 43.0 percent. There was also more large-scale landownership than in the rest of Bavaria: in 1902, 0.2 percent of holdings were larger than 100 hectares (250 acres), accounting for 3.6 percent of agricultural land.69 The distribution of land and the size of the holdings determined the social structure of the peasant villages and farms. With farms averaging 9.29 hectares (23 acres) in Upper Bavaria in 1890,70 a farm could provide sufficient income to support a houshold. The smallest farmers - those with less than 2 hectares (5 acres) - always had to rely on odd jobs to see them through. Often it was left to the women to manage the smallest holdings, while the men practiced one of the rural trades, working as coopers, plumbers, masons, or carpenters. Many also worked as day laborers when they could, with opportunities varying according to region and season. They might include harvesting in the grain-growing country around the river Inn, digging peat in the lowland bogs, or felling timber in the foothills of the Alps and up in the mountains in winter. Within the ownership structure of the Upper Bavarian villages, day laborers and craftsmen generally belonged to the group comprising the smallest landowners of all, the cottagers. It was, in fact, only during the course of the nineteenth century that they had come to occupy this position; prior to that, most of them had been landless. During the nineteenth century, the lower strata of village society became drawn into agriculture, a process that gathered momentum after the liberation of the peasants and was given a fresh boost by the removal of all feudal dues in 1848.71 The less well-off would come forward whenever larger estates were broken up and came under the hammer. In this way it was possible for day laborers' and cottagers' families to rise to the station of medium-sized farmers in a few generations.72 One aspect of the social history of the rural lower classes is thus their attempt to gain a foothold as peasant proprietors. The ownership of some land (at least a tiny plot), a house and garden, and a few cattle, was a requirement for starting a family and gaining recognition as a full member of the village. After a period in service, even the biggest group of landless in the village, the single farmhands and maids, aspired "Throughout Germany as a whole, however, 22.2% of the farmland under cultivation belonged to large forms that made up only 0.4% of the total. Statistics from Statistik des deutschen Reicbei: vol. 112, Die Berufs- and Betribeszaahlung vom 12,6.1895 (Berlin, 1898), pp. 4 2 - 3 1 , and vol. 2x1, Die Berufi- and Betriebeszahlung vom 12.6.1907, suppls. 3-23, Berlin, 1909); cf. Kempf, Arbeits- und' Lebensverhaltnisse, pp. 9ff.; Schnorbus, "Landliche Unterschichten," pp. 828-9. 70 D« Landwirtschaft in Bayern. Denkschrift nach amtlichen Quellen bearbeitet (Munich, 1980), p. 127. "Fried, "Historisch-Statistische Bertrage," p. 756. 72 Ibid.; see Untersuchung der Wirtscia/tlichen Verhaltnisse in 24 Gemeinden del Kb'nigreicbes Bayern (Munich, 1895), p. 28, on purchases of ruined peasant properties by cottagers in the 1860s and 1870s in Eberfing/ AG Weilheim. This survey, conducted in the Bavarian villages by government officials, also showed that the indebtedness of small farmers was often due to land purchases. 19

Introduction to purchase or take over a smallholding, which was only possible when they married. Under the prevailing conditions for survival and earning a living, the ownership of land was one of the basic essentials of Upper Bavarian village life in the nineteenth century. But land was not available in unlimited quantities. There was rivalry among the less well-off for land and tenancy rights. 73 The farms of Upper Bavaria were run by the peasant families and by farm servants and day laborers. In 1907, family members comprised 70 percent of those working on Bavarian farms, with women in the majority. In Upper Bavaria, servants made up 72.3 percent of nonfamily labor employed and day laborers 27.7 percent. Farmhands and maids were chiefly found on medium-sized farms, day laborers on large ones.74 Admittedly, these figures mark the end of a period - the second half of the nineteenth century - that witnessed an exodus of servants and day laborers from the land to the cities and the new industrial areas.75 The immense growth in population in these years also led to shifts in occupational structure in favor of industrial and commercial occupations. In 1848, some 65 percent of the people of Bavaria were employed on the land; in 1907, 40.1 percent were.76 But the trend was for people to move to the cities - which, for Upper Bavaria, meant Munich in particular. So, although the situation must be kept in perspective, the shortage of farmhands and servants in rural areas had undoubtedly worsened. Since the number and size of the farms had stayed fairly constant, family members had increasingly been forced to help out on the farms, especially as work became more demanding, with new methods of cultivation and stock raising. Admittedly, since the middle of the century the introduction of machinery had gone some way toward easing the burden of work (particularly ploughing, hay making, and harvesting), though only on a modest scale.77 These steps toward rationalization were first introduced on the large farms, so that it was the day laborers who were most affected. Studies of Upper Bavarian agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century reveal a peasantry more egalitarian and self-assured than anywhere else in Germany or in Europe. What is more, villages often closed their ranks against attacks by state or church on their slowly crumbling autonomy. 78 Yet the unity of the peasant villages and the relatively "favorable distribution of property" cannot disguise the fact that within the village and the peasantry there were strict, almost insurmountable class differences, which could be gauged with accuracy from the size and quality of the farm's ploughland, meadows, and woodland, the number of horses, oxen, cows, "Ibid.; in 1895 ^ people of Eberfing competedforthe lease on the vicarage lands. Cf. also Schweyer, SchSffau, pp. 124-5. 74 Kempf, Arbeits- undLebensverhaltnisse, p. 19; Schnorbus, "Landliche Unterschichten," p. 834; Beitrage zur Statistik da KSnigreichs Bayern: vol. 8 1 , Die Landwirtschaft in Bayern nach der Betriebszablung vom 12.6.1907

(Munich, 1910), pp. 79-80. "Schnorbus, "Landliche Unterschichten," pp. 835-6. 7S

Wolfgang Zorn, Kleine Wirtscbafts- und Sozialgescbicbte Bayerns 1806—1933, Bayerische Heimatfors-

chung, no. 14 (Munich, 1962), p. 76. "Fried, "Sozialentwicklung," p. 755; Kempf, Arbeits- und Lebensverhaltnisse, p. 17. 78 See Helga Ettenhuber, "Charivari in Bayern. Das Miesbacher Haberfeldtreiben von 1893," in Richard van Diilmen (ed.), Kultur der einfachen Leute (Munich, 1983), pp. 280-308. 20

Introduction beef cattle, and pigs that filled its outhouses - and the size of the dowry that its daughters were able to take with them to another farm. To take an example, the village of Wollomoos in Upper Bavaria lay between the extremes. There were not very many of the poorest smallholders and cottagers and few large farms. In 1895, an inspector of estates and a tax commissioner from Munich decided that the distribution of property could be characterized as "generally not unfavorable, since only a few (8) farmers are in possession of less than 3 hectares [7.5 acres], the land is by no means poor, and those with small holdings are often in receipt of some extra income as a result of practicing a trade, etc."79 Eighteen farmers owned up to 10 hectares (25 acres); 22 had up to 30 hectares (75 acres), while the lands of 7 larger farmers ranged from 30 to 55 hectares (75-137 acres). The dominant forms of ownership were thus small and medium-sized holdings, and in the estimation of the government survey of the parish of Wollomoos the land under cultivation was sufficient to guarantee farmers an adequate income, except for the 8 smallholders with less than 3 hectares. The main source of revenue in this parish was raising cattle and farming. Toward the end of the century, dairy farming started to assume greater importance. The peasants of Wollomoos sold their grain at the weekly crop markets (Schranneti) in the nearby market town of Aichach, which was one of the most important of the Upper Bavarian Scbrannen in the nineteenth century. As the town hall and the courthouse were also in Aichach, legal matters could be dealt with, in addition to ordinary business. Besides the market, the chief buyers of grain were the millers and grain merchants; the farmers sold their grain throughout the year, according to their need for money. Livestock was bought and sold at twenty different markets (an annual market was held in Aichach, too), or the cattle dealers came to the farm, where they conducted the preliminaries through a middleman called a Schmuser. A person's place in Bavarian village-peasant society was always defined through his or her membership of a household. Living in the village meant belonging to one of the households as a member of the family, working as a farmhand or maidservant, eating at the common table, sleeping in the house, and being tied to the household day and night. Belonging to a household meant sharing in its evident and well-ordered resources and helping to preserve and augment them. Anyone lingering in the village without a roof over his head or a job was expelled. This was particularly liable to happen to unemployed farmhands and maids on the tramp.80 But the material foundation of the village households was ownership. Of Wollomoos's 30 households, for instance, 27 belonged to land-owning farmers. The other 3 all had at least a garden and a house. For anyone who fell through the network of relationships which these households comprised, there was not much alternative. Although land in the village was in constant movement, being bought, sold, broken ^Untersuchung in 24 Geminden, p. 11. '"Manuscripts, Staatsarchiv Munchen, StAM, LRA 78101, 78105. Hereafter cited by number only. See also Klaus-Jiirgen Matz, Pauperisms undBewlkerung. Die gesttzlidxn Ehebeschrankungen in dm sUddeutxhen Staaten wahrenddes 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 22iff. 21

Introduction up, and auctioned off, it was not a commodity that was offered for sale on the open market. It had a name; it was a social asset, tied to the history of the families and generations that had cultivated it, rooted in traditions, and ultimately charged with prestige and emotions. The peasant and the land belonged together and were part of a complex of established relationships.81 Not everyone was able to grab a share. Land was primarily available to those who already belonged: to the village families, but not to outsiders. In 1861, at Hohenburg near Lenggries, a 200-strong charivari "drove out" a Jewish baron who had bought up meadows and forests there and introduced mechanical sawmills, thus jeopardizing the area's traditional socioeconomic structure.82 The villagers saw to it that the overall structure of the village remained stable, socially and economically. Changes of ownership were kept within the village or the parish as far as possible. Thus it was that in 1895 the village of Schalldorf, where the distribution of ownership (12 large, 62 mediumsized, and 28 small farms) was considered "favorable," acted to prevent the division of parcels of land into ever-smaller plots caused by the breaking-up of farms and the ensuing auctions, as "it is even harder for the small farmer to make a living than for the farmer."83 Instead, the land went to cottagers who already lived there, as in Eberfing in the 1860s and 1870s. The oft-evoked autonomy of self-sufficient farms was an autonomy within village ties. The account of a farm being auctioned in Lena Christ's story "Mathias Bichler" demonstrates how the economic and social nexus of relationships between the farms and the villagers became visible all at once, the moment that land and property reverted to the village, immediately eliciting the knowledge that everyone had of his neighbor's business.84 The character of peasant ownership was expressed symbolically by the fact that the name of the family did not need to be the same as the farm's. The latter outlived the individual names of the families that had run the farm. Thus, farmer Dollel dwelt at the "Fiirst," while Andreas Hauser was the "Schroll farmer." Even where family and household were identical and no servants were employed on the farm, it was the "household" that underpinned social identity. The household mediated between the individual, the family, and the village.85 Belonging to one of the village families meant being a member of a peasant household: that is, of a complex economic, social, and emotional microcosm. 81

Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago, 1960), p. 19. Ettenhuber, "Charivari," p. 184. 83 Untersuchung in 24 Gemeinden, p. 75. 84 Lena Christ, "Mathias Bichler," in Christ, Gesammlte Werke (Munich, 1970), pp. 368ft.; cf. Olivia Harris's critique in "Households as Natural Units," in Kate Young, Judith Walkowitz, and Roslyn 82

McCullough, eds., 0/Marriage and the Market: Women's subordination in International Perspective (London, 1981),

p. 53, on the ideal of self-sufficiency in the peasant household. 85 Cf. Segalen, Mari et Femme, pp. 436° and I37ff.

22

PART I

Peasant society and the individual

Fire in the village

Farms and small holdings had gone up in flames: straw stacks and hay barns, some peat huts and piles of brushwood, and particularly the barns packed with hay, straw, and the entire harvest, from where the fire would spread in an instant to the rest of the farm, so that in more than half the cases all the farm buildings and their contents had been reduced to ashes. The barn, with its store of dry fodder and grain, was the easiest part of the farm to set fire to. With stables, sheds, barn, wagon shed, and living quarters all under one roof, setting fire to the barn frequently resulted in the destruction of the farmhouse as well as the outbuildings, which, as often as not, was probably the intention. For everyone knew from experience the danger of fire in the hay, especially when the wind blew the sparks up onto the roof, which in the nineteenth century was often thatched with straw. By then it was too late for the fire brigade and for the neighbors rushing to help. Fires were often due to arson. The cases described in Part I are not studied mainly for their legal or criminal content but regarded as a probe, illuminating conflicts central to peasant society. The "collecting of evidence" is not intended to apprehend a culprit, as the village policemen did, or to demonstrate the pathology of individual criminals within an otherwise small, comprehensible, and orderly world, as the psychiatry of the day attempted to do. Nor can it be our business to describe the "barbaric village" from an almost ethnocentric viewpoint, a "backwoods world" which apparently still had not developed an enlightened "conflict management strategy" of the type on which modern civilization prides itself. These cases of arson not only suggest the conflicts and fears that characterize the world of the peasant village; they also reveal the full extent of the social knowledge with which the villagers sought to decipher and secure their lives and their survival. The following study looks at three key aspects of this world - work, village life, and family life - and examines their structures against the background of the conditions arising in a society based on landownership and peasant labor. Fires and arson were intrusions into everyday life, disasters before which working people, the village and its families, exposed for a moment the vulnerability, fears, knowledge, and standards that normally determined the daily lives and feelings of people in the village on an unspoken and perhaps even partly unconscious level. 25

Peasant society and the individual THE ARSONISTS The arsonists operated within the framework of everyday peasant life - the experiences, knowledge, and rules that regulated and enclosed it. This analysis is based on the records of 114 cases of arson brought before the Munich court of assizes between 1879 and 1900, involving 121 persons. A casual glance at the statistics shows that arson was principally a rural crime of peasant and village life.1 Only 1 of the 114 fires was started in Munich.2 Socioeconomic Origins The arsonists sentenced by the Munich court of assizes mostly came from the rural lower classes and were chiefly men: 47 farmhands, including 2 dairymen (milkers) 29 cottagers and day laborers, including 1 carpenter, 1 umbrella maker, and 1 miller 10 artisans: 3 blacksmiths, 1 butcher, 1 weaver, 2 bricklayers, 1 sawyer, and 2 shoemakers 8 journeymen and assistants: 1 weaver, 1 binder, 1 bricklayer, 1 carpenter, 1 joiner, 1 tailor, and 1 cooper (all journeymen), and 1 barber's assistant 2 cottagers' sons 2 miners 2 innkeepers 3 farmers 1 farmer's son, 1 poorhouse inmate, and 1 secretary Of the 14 women, 5 were farm maids, 8 married women, and 1 a seamstress. The records show that 22 of them were illegitimate; 85 of them were single including all the servants - 29 married and 6 widowed. The Quest for Motives These arson cases can only be understood in the context of everyday peasant life. The fact that arson was a crime that chiefly threatened country people has to do with their special relationship with their property. There was a fundamental difference between a house in the city and a farm. Anyone setting fire to a farm was striking at the very heart of peasant life — not just property but the farmer's very identity. In the village, the fire marked the victim out, openly and visibly for all. Arson for fraud plays a relatively small part in the cases studied. Both the records and 1

Die Kriminalstatistik ftir dasjahr 189^—1900. Hg. im Reichsjustizamt und Im kaiserlichen statistischen Amt,

Statislik des Deutschen Reicbs, n.s., vols. 89-139 (Berlin, 1897-1902). 2 The Bavarian statistics also show that Upper Bavaria had the highest arson rate of all the Bavarian government districts. In 1905, for example, it accounted for 16 out of 55 convictions. The second-highest rate was in Lower Bavaria, with 9 cases. The number of cases between 1896 and 1905 tended to fluctuate, with a peak of 77 in 1899. See Zeitschrift des KSniglicb Bayerischen Statistiscbes Bureaus, 40. Jg. (Munich,

1908), pp. 325, 327 and 331.

26

Fire in the village other studies of farming in Upper Bavaria show that the great majority of farms were not insured and that fire usually meant ruin for the farmer.3 The dominant motive in most of the cases studied was revenge: In no less than 54 cases, the arsonist had deliberately started the fire in order to exact vengeance. Presumably the true figure is higher, but in many of these incomplete records, consisting merely of formal judgments, the motive is not apparent. After all, "revenge" is no more than a word for a sort of vague retribution fraught with emotion, an archaic form of seeking justice according to the principle "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."4 The court regarded "base revenge" or "sheer vengeance" as an aggravating circumstance, a barbaric relic whose devastating consequences were quite out of all proportion to the "insignificance" of the causes that sparked them. By the end of the nineteenth century, the records show that psychiatry and the expert report had already become an integral part of the administration of justice5 and guided the scientific discourse about arsonists. It now felt able to discern a specific disease behind the desire for revenge, the symptoms of which pointed to "moral inferiority" and "moral deficiency," unless it was simply diagnosed as "idiocy."6 What was the nature of the village social relationships that not infrequently caused conflicts to result in a farm being burned to the ground? If one is unwilling to seek the cause in the sick body or sick mind of the individual arsonist, one must examine events on the farm, in the house, in the mill, in the village, and in the families before thefireoccurred. An individual's motives do not explain, either, why an entire farm - or one rather than another — had to go up inflames.Initially, individual cases merely reveal their surface. In order to render visible the underlying structures capable of stripping away the apparent "triviality" of the causes of arson and relating them to the substance and form of the crime, a sensible approach is to liberate the individual from his pathological fortuity by studying a fairly large number of cases. In addition, it is necessary to relate the arsonists' activities to their living and working conditions, both in the village and within the family. WORK Master and Servant Almost half the fires - 52 out of 114 - were started by farm servants. Twenty-one times it was the farm of a master or former master that went up in flames. As far 'See Schweyer, Schtiffau, pp. 124-5; Untersuchung in 24 Gemeidnen, pp. 2 9 , 3 1 . See also Beitrage zur Statistik Bayerns, kg. vom Bayer. Statislischen Landesamt, vol. 138: Verbrechtn undVerbrechertum in Bayern 1882 bis 1937

(Munich, 1944), pp. 6)(l. 4 Cf. Staatsarchiv Miinchen, Staatsanwaltschaftsakten (records of the public prosecutor), e.g., StAM, St Anw 46, 224, 367, 458, 545, 659, 709, 1190, 1382, 1479, 1483; on revenge as a medieval way of satisfying the injured sense of justice, see also Johan Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters. Studien iiber Lebensund Geistesformen des 14. und i^.Jahrbunderts in Frankreich undin den Niederlanden (Stuttgart, 1969), p. 24. 'On psychiatric reports, see StAM, St Anw 1135, 1142, 1231, 1440, 1483, 1613, 1625. The number of psychiatric reports increases from 1894 on. 6 See the chapter "The mad-doctor's gaze," pp. 58ft".

27

Peasant society and the individual as we can tell from the records, farmhands and maids (especially farmhands) often felt unfairly treated; in cases such as these, arson was directly linked to work and farm servants' working conditions. A key motive for arson by farmhands was premature dismissal. Thus 37-year-old Michael Fischer of Kirchberg set fire to the Maierhof farm in Miesham, belonging to Count Arco-Zinneberg, on the night of 8-9 October 1895, because he had been fired, after 6 years' service, "for his repeated drinking bouts," even though he had until then been considered a "reliable" and loyal worker. He told the judge: This, in my opinion, unjustified dismissal angered me all the more as the previous owner had promised me that I would be able to stay on the farm forever when my hand was crippled in a machine on 29 November 1889. . . . In my defense I can only say that I was extremely upset, as it is hard to find a job in autumn, especially if you have a crippled hand.7 Eighteen-year-old farmhand Ludwig Auer had been dismissed at Michaelmas 1883 because the farmer "had doubts about his honesty."8 Before he finally set fire to the farm in Pollomoos on 1 December 1884, he had been arrested for vagrancy and been reduced to tramping, begging, and stealing food. Normally farmhands were hired only twice a year: before sowing started in the spring, and after the harvest had been gathered in. 9 If he left his employment or was fired in the meantime, it was difficult for him to find new work, just as farmers found a new farmhand hard to come across. Thus a farmer from Hallen complains about his farmhand, Johann, who walked out on his job in September 1888, "just when I had the threshing machine there and needed all the manpower, out of spite." 10 The farmhand had handed in his notice after the farmer accused him of breaking a rake. When 10 marks for the rake were deducted from his wages, he set fire to the farm the following night "to get my revenge." He did not protest against his arrest and felt that he was in the right; in any event, he had not known "what to do with himself."11 No one would take on a farmhand who had left his job in the middle of the harvest; he was as little to be relied upon as one who drank. Some could still go and stay with their parents - though this was naturally not popular with the latter, as their children then became a burden on them. Others tried to muddle through by begging and vagrancy, as the lists of servants' previous convictions show.12 Farm servants were

7 StAM, St Anw 1190, and cf. StAM, St Anw 1011. 8StAM, St Anw 499. 'Josef Schlicht, Bayerisch Land und bayerisch Volt (1875), P- 5^; Walter Hartinger, "Bayerisches Dienstbotenleben auf dem Land vom 16.-18. Jahrhundert," ZBLG 38 (1975), 598-638, esp. p. 606. Farm servants' employment commenced at Candlemas (2 February) and ended at Michaelmas (29 September). 10 StAM, St Anw 686. "At the end of the nineteenth century, employers rarely paid the full amount of old age or disability insurance for their workers. See Untmuchung in 24 Gemeinden, p. 17. 12 StAM, St Anw 686, 449, 709, 909, 1192, 1440. Johann P., StAM, StAnw 909, for example, had 62 previous convictions; more than half the arsonists already had convictions for similar offenses, such as begging, vagrancy, theft, assault, disturbing the peace, and breaches of the law on the employment of servants. "Resisting the power of the state, damage to property, using offensive language, causing a grave nuisance."

28

Fire in the village still a group of potential vagrants at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them changed jobs annually, trudging from one farm to another. Michael Fischer's 6-year period of service mentioned earlier was something of an exception, which made dismissal an even more drastic intervention in his life, particularly as he was comparatively old. The life of the arsonist Lorenz Hammerl from Kiihberg is typical of the nomadic way of life of farm servants and lower-class youth, which might begin at birth, as the illegitimate child of a maid: I was illegitimate, my father was a cottager, Wolfgang Gasteiger. . . . About 17 years ago my mother married Mathias Reichl, a cottager from Kiihberg, and took me into the house. [When the boy was 12 years of age!] I soon had to go into service, but always stayed in the area, in Pfaffing, Gefelbach, W—hoft?], Holbing, Neufahrn near Walgartskirchen, and Griming. In 1872 I was sentenced to 4 months' imprisonment for grievous bodily harm and then went into the army, joined the reserves in 1876, and then worked as a farmhand in Kronberg . . . , first with the farmer Winkler and then at Unterauer's. I quarreled with him at the end of November last year, left the job, and went to stay with my stepfather.13 Now 29 years old, he had worked for nine farmers and, according to his mother, had been repeatedly put up at home in between times. But farm servants who lost their jobs at an unfavorable time of year were often more or less homeless. They were expelled from a village in which they had no employment and no right of domicile: It was feared that they would become a charge on parish poor relief; they were on the fringes of society. Furthermore, they themselves experienced a period in the poorhouse as humiliating. The 35-year-old farmhand Johann Wolferstatter, who suffered from tuberculosis, finally set fire to two barns, on 7 April 1892, in order to get himself transferred from the poorhouse to prison, to "secure for himself a carefree life in jail," in the judge's words.14 He died in prison in August 1892. Michael Jager, an unmarried, unemployed, and penniless day laborer from Giesing sought to "escape destitution through arrest" 15 and in 1884 set fire to a barn on the road between Weilheim and Diessen - a search for housing combined with antipathy toward village society, which was no longer willing to employ him. The possibility of returning to the parental home, at least for a while, was also of emotional importance to farm servants. Farmhands who were dismissed or ran away before their time was up also lost, to a certain extent, their "place at the hearth." Servant status defined their membership in a household; farmhands and maids were members of the household in which they served. To them the farm was not just their workplace; they ate and slept in the household community and also spent a large part of their leisure and recreational time in the farmer's livingroom, which the farmhands forsook for the local inn at weekends. The "belonging" of farmhands and maids was also defined within the village through the farm and the farmer who employed them. A festival in a farmer's family, which was also a sort of self-display to the village, normally included farm servants, who had a clearly defined place in "StAM, St Anw 321. 14StAM, St Anw 909, 62 previous convictions. "StAM, St Anw 376. Died on 23 February 1885 in Munich prison. 29

Peasant society and the individual the procedures and rituals of weddings, for instance. The 18-year-old farmhand Ferdinand Baumann from Bachenhausen felt excluded from his master's wedding; on the afternoon of 3 April 1884 he set fire to the hay barn containing the harvest and to the cow shed, out of "revenge and hatred."16 In fact, he had been excluded not just from a family festival by the farmer but also from an occasion at which the village youth got together, danced, and flirted, and not only the peasants but the farm servants, too, confirmed their positions within the village community. A common reason for committing arson on the property of a master were disputes over pay and pay docked at the end of a period of service.17 Sometimes farm servants did not receive the "perquisites" due to them: clothing and, for maids, additions to their dowries. Failure to receive the correct wage coincided with the feeling of having one's work undervalued. "Revenge" through arson was supposed to set matters right: the subjective sense of injustice could only be satisfied by damaging the "guilty party's" reproductive basis. The idea of getting even through arson was rooted in feelings of impotence and growing hatred: In many individuals it took a long time to develop. This was the case with 22-year-old Mathias Dax. I could not rid myself of my anger toward Holl. On 26 October [1897] the poison took hold of me again; about nine o'clock in the evening I put on my best clothes - I was then working in Anning — so that, if arrested, I would be smartly dressed, and went to Friihling. Before leaving I said to my fellow worker Haberthaler, "There'll be a red sky tonight, all right."18

Mathias Dax put on his best clothes, just as the farmer did before going to the district court to settle his property affairs with the notary. Farm servants seldom went to a royal or civil judge for justice. They knew from Gesindeordnung, the law governing the conditions of service, that they were at a disadvantage in terms of the written law. The rules existed to clarify the legal aspects of service and ensure the supply of an adequate number of servants at an affordable wage. Through the servants' regulations, the state championed the interests of the class "that was felt to be an important source of support to the state by virtue of its [tax] contributions, in favor of the rural masters."19 Two farmhands who were taken to court by their farmers and charged and sentenced for running away from their positions demonstrated their own way of obtaining "justice": They set fire to their masters' farms.20 Clearly, arson as an act of vengeance by farmhands was generally feared by the farmers. In many cases of fire and arson, suspicion initially fell on a farmhand or 16 StAM, St Anw 1079. On the participation of farmhands and maids in wedding celebrations and the revenge of a farmhand who was excluded from the household and set fire to the (arm of the bride's parents on the wedding day, see also Christ, "Mathias Bichler,' esp. pp. 338ff. "For example, StAM, St Anw 47, 367, 661, 686, 1647. 18 StAM, St Anw 1435; see also StAM, St Anw 1050, 299. "Walter Hartinger, Bayerisdxs Dienstbotenlekn, pp. 602, 636; cf. Schnorbus, "Landliche Unterschichten," p. 839. 20 StAM, St Anw 709, 321.

30

Fire in the village maid: The possibility that a farm servant was the culprit first had to be ruled out before the search for someone else could go ahead: "The victim Dax had no enemies, no farmhand, and the maid in question is respectable."21 In another case from 1881 it was said: "By general consensus, suspicion initially alighted on Fink, who had worked for Gobel earlier and had been punished for running away . . . , which also explains the particular interest Fink showed in efforts to catch the offender." - He knew that suspicion would fall on him first.22 But suspicion of arson not only harmed the servant; it also harmed the farmer. If a farmer acquired the reputation of not getting along with his servants or of being a "servant flayer," it could be difficult for him to find a "good" farmhand. The monitoring was mutual. Farm servants often discussed working conditions at the various farms, and even the character of individual masters, over a beer in the inn and at the time of year when they changed jobs.23 Arson not only put the offender in the wrong but could do the same for the victim. Arson by farm servants took place within the status quo. Farmhands who set fire to their masters' farms were not questioning working conditions on farms in general but only the individual case; they were not rebelling against the conditions of service as such. Rather, they were demanding what was traditionally theirs. In the opinion of these farmhands, the farmer had violated customary justice by not paying out the correct wages, not respecting periods of notice, and so on. The fire was intended not just to satisfy a sense of injustice and need for vengeance but to brand the lawbreaker in a literal sense. Witnesses' statements by fellow farm servants show, however, that although arson for revenge was constantly threatened among the servants in conversation, in the final analysis it was not an accepted means of asserting their claims. Many of the arsonists from the ranks of farm servants acted alone and were often isolated from their peers. The fact that, according to the records, little solidarity with the arsonists was shown by the other farm servants does not, of course, rule out the possibility that everyone knew the cause and to a certain extent "understood" why the farmhand started the fire; yet it was his affair. The farm servants had other opportunities - for example, the change of jobs at Candlemas - and other venues - for example, the inn - to express as a group their opinion of the farmers. Furthermore, by the end of the century increasing numbers were seeking work in the expanding industries and in the towns.

Day Labor Acts of arson by day laborers and cottagers directed against their employers were also individual actions. The day laborers of Upper Bavaria were almost without exception rooted in a particular place through marriage and property and were thus 21

StAM, St Anw 1557. "StAM, St Anw 321. See Ludwig Thoma, "Der Wittiber," in Werke, Jubildumausgabe (1906; Munich, 1978), vol. 4, p. 1 i8ff., for the conversations of the farmhands about the farmers in their presence in the village inn. For France, see Segalen, "Mari et Femme," pp. I3off. 23

Peasant society and the individual constrained to find work there. They depended on the development of farming, their work was farming work and tied to the farmer's property. Running small farms themselves, they partially identified with the demands the farmers made on their capacity for work and their attitude to it. Judging by the arson records, conflicts between farmers and day laborers were most frequent when working conditions in agriculture changed as a result of mechanization and changes in farming methods. The number and range of jobs available to cottagers and day laborers decreased particularly because they were reluctant to be mobile and migrate to distant industries. 24 As happened in England in the first half of the nineteenth century with the introduction of threshing machines, the transition in Bavaria at the end of the nineteenth century from manual and whim-driven threshing machines to steampowered ones on the larger farms, which had employed large numbers of hands during the threshing period, led to discontent among the day laborers. In the area around the Inn River, Upper Bavaria's most important grain-growing region, harvest work and threshing were the small cottager's main opportunity to eke out his living with day wages, as well as the most traditional. This is shown by the distinctions among different categories of day laborers in the eighteenth century: They hired themselves out at different rates (for a certain area or by the day) as sower, raker, haymaker, reaper, thresher, straw cutter, and so on. 25 The mechanization of farming with labor-saving steam machines for sowing and threshing did not really get under way in Bavaria until the start of the present century, 26 but the big farmers of the Inn region were a step ahead of the rest of the country. Early in the summer of 1895, arson threats were uttered in Peterskirchen, south of Miihldorf: A lot of steam for threshing and a lot of flames will rise up. Every year a scoundrel of a farmer will be burned out because they act so proud. When harvest time was over, the people can go back into hiding, and then they say that none of them does any work. The arsonist won't be found, there will be commotion everywhere, and anyone who wants to rebuild his house will have to step lively.27 Farmer Unterauer of Peterskirchen found this arson threat on the morning of 28 May 1895 o n t n e window ledge of his stable. According to the report by the village policeman of Kraiburg to the investigating magistrate at the district court of Muhldorf, the letter not only caused Unterauer and his family the utmost dismay but during my investigations into the matter on 28 and 29 May I could not help noticing widespread fear in the entire neighborhood of Peterskirchen and was met everywhere by the same message: "What are things coming to when you can no longer be sure from one minute to the next that you won't see your farm burned down, it's plain enough the threat's a serious one," etc. But the M

See Untersuchung in 24 Gemeinden, p. 33.

25

Hans Platzer, Ceschichn der Idndlichen Arbeitsverhaltnisse in Bayern (Munich, 1904), p. 221, table 1.

26

Fried, "Sozialentwicklung," p. 775.

27

StAM, St Anw 15468. 32

Fire in the village breach of public order reached its climax when the place known as the old blacksmith's farm in Peterskirchen burned down.28 Johann Weger, a day laborer from Mang near Wasserburg, who was later sentenced to 3 months' imprisonment for a public-order offense, though he did not start the fire, said that he had been angry with the farmer because Unterauer, like many other large farmers, was using steam engines to do farm work, depriving day laborers looking for work of their livelihood. He had been earning i mark a day plus food, was destitute, had two children, and his wife was pregnant. He had therefore sought to put fear into Unterauer and the other large farmers by leaving the arson note, so that they would be frightened of the workers deprived of their livelihoods by the use of machines. I am not hostile to Unterauer in any way and never had any intention of carrying out the threat in the note. On 4 September of the same year, 1895, before threshing was due to start, a farmhand turned away while looking for work in Tittmoning, also in the district of Laufen, uttered a similar threat: "Farmers who have machines should all be burned out, because we can't get any work."29 The farmers in this area had been living in fear of arson by day laborers for years. Before Johann Weger wrote the letter* other farms in Peterskirchen had already gone up in flames, without the cause being identified. In 1890, a day laborer's remark to a number of farmers in the inn in Grafengars, also in the district of Laufen, had sown panic, following a series of fires: "If you start threshing with steam engines in Grafengars, we'll set fire to you like the very devil himself." It was the "we" that worried the farmers more than anything, "because it sounded as if Heimeder was speaking of a plot."'0 Despite the day laborers' revolt against the machines, the situation did not reach the point of machine wrecking and widespread incendiarism by rural laborers, as it did in England in the early nineteenth century. Hobsbawm and Rude" have described this in the Captain Swing protests.31 The assize court records do not contain any instance of group arson; the day laborers' hostility toward the large farmers did not lead to any politicization or antipathy toward them, despite the job cuts precipitated by the threshing machines. Arson threats remained individual acts, though in areas like Laufen they did cause the latent tensions within the village's social strata to flare up at times. The hostility of the small cottagers, who were dependent on paid employment with the larger farmers, stirred up fear among the latter. The farmers' reactions to arson threats and the unexplained fires - and particularly to the "we" — do show, however, that group arson might have become a weapon in 28

Ibid. 2'StAM, LRA 139990. 30StAM, St Anw 15468. "Hobsbawm and Rude\ Captain Swing. Cf. Andrl Abbiateci, "Incendiaires," p. 23: "c'est en hiver, quand le niveau de 1'emploi est bas, et a I'e'poque de la soudure quand le prix des grains sont sieve's, que la mendecite' avec violences et menaces de feu constitue une ressource d'appoint pour les couches sociales inKrieures les plus pauvres." See also David Jones, "Thomas Campbell and the rural Labourer: Incendiarism in East Anglia in the 1840s," Social History 1 (1976), 5-43.

33

Peasant society and the individual the day laborers' and farm workers' struggle against the farmers. But ultimately the cottagers and day laborers did not question conditions of ownership any more than the farm servants did.

THE VILLAGE Motives for arson cannot be solely and directly ascribed to conflicts among the strata of the village population. The records show that most of the day laborers among the arsonists satisfied the criteria and values of peasant village society, that is, not only of the independent formers but also their neighbors who were day laborers and cottagers. Hobsbawm has pointed out that the differences among the peasantry, to which land-owning day laborers did after all belong, might be of secondary importance compared with their common characteristics and their common interest in averting threats that attacked the very foundation of their common livelihood.32 The conflicts among the village strata are reflected vertically in the arson records; horizontally, the records display the values and standards, central to peasant life and survival, of property, land, and farms, indivisible from the families to whom the property belonged and who received it and passed it on; of work, which sustained it and also had to feed those who had nothing and were dependent on their hands; and finally of the village community, which enclosed and excluded. A farm fire unleashed a wave of solidarity within the confines of the peasant world in which everyone knew everyone else, and at the same time revealed the extent of the supervision that everyone exerted over everyone else. The village was a witness: A fire was one of those situations in which, even at night, the helping community of neighbors would rally around in a few minutes to save what could be saved, get the livestock out of the cow sheds, and carry water.33 But they also came out of curiosity, for the insight that a fire could give into their neighbors' material conditions - and some, no doubt, out of malicious glee. Help in extinguishing the fire was part of essential neighborly assistance, the village division of labor, which was taken for granted at harvest time or on festive occasions. The ringing of the bell on the roof, the "fire alarm" or the "fire call," alerted the people and the fire brigade with the shortest delay, even in the middle of the night. These joint fire-fighting operations, which were the only response to the rapid and total destruction of property, saw village solidarity interlinking with village supervision, which would already be finding out who the culprit might have been. A "legend" arose among the helping neighbors, as the village policemen's reports show, as to how the fire started, not infrequently even naming the possible arsonist, which might even lead to an arrest at the scene of the crime. Anyone who failed to express an opinion and actively 32 Eric Hobsbawm, "Peasants and Politics," Journal of Peasant Studies i (1973), 3—22; see also Hugues Lamarche, "Pouvoir et Rapports des Production," in Hugues Lamarche, Susan Carol Rogers, and Claude Karnoouh, Paysans, Femmes et Citoyens. hates pour le Pouvoir dans un Village Lorrain, Editions Actes Sud (1980), 17-57. 33 StAM, LRA 139982; StAM, St Anw 1557.

34

Fire in the village side with the victim risked coming under suspicion: In an Upper Bavarian village, solidarity meant setting out and safeguarding one's position in the ensuing discourse about the arson attack.34 Naming the culprit was ultimately not just "scandalmongering" but often drew on knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the fire, and also on the fear that anyone - though not anyone, exactly - was a potential victim. I shall try to show, in the following sections of this chapter, how this knowledge arose in the village and point to the cornerstones on which it was based. Suspicion The individual's reputation directly affected his position in the discourse on the conflagration. Anyone who violated the principles that protected property and served to preserve and increase it was attacking peasant society's reproductive capacity and risked losing his own reproductive ability within the village community. Thieves and "work-shy," "lazy" individuals forfeited their moral credit and their chances of good jobs.35 They were believed capable of more, too - even arson. Anyone who did not work and threatened others' property through theft was also capable of setting fire to a farm for a "trivial" reason. Witnesses' statements about a suspect often contain no specific grounds for suspicion but assessments of his attitude to work and what "they" (people) said about him, with terms such as "wicked," "lazy," "vindictive," and "work-shy" featuring prominently. As constabulary records show, even statements like this were accepted as evidence. In 1895, for example, a 65-year-old cottager merely said of a farmhand suspected of arson that he "was a danger to others' property."36 His being in the vicinity meant danger. In the course of the investigation, this isolated statement proved prophetic — which was often the case with the brief, sometimes coded utterances that were nonetheless intelligible to the initiated. An aura of danger surrounded the accused even before the fire. On the evening of 24 October 1898, a Sunday, the barn containing all the harvest and half the hay burned down on the 250-acre farm of Anna Bronner, a farmer's widow of Zorneding. The presence close to the fire of Martin Haberer, a 48-year-old married day laborer resident in the village, unleashed terror.37 His case provides us with a textbook example of how someone's guilt was "established." After 14 or 15 unexplained fires in Zorneding in the space of 20 years, which had destroyed several farms, suspicion had increasingly focused on him. Though nobody had ever been able to prove anything against him, he was thought to be the culprit: 34 See Yves Castan, "Mentalitfe rurale et urbaine a la fin de l'Ancien Regime dans leressortdu Parlement de Toulouse d'apres les sacs a proces criminels 1730—1790," in Andr£ Abbiateci et al., Crimes et criminalitf en France sous l'Ancien Rigime i-je—i8e siicles, Cahiersdes Annales, no. 33 (Paris, 1971), pp. 109-86, p. 172. "See also the village study by Miranda Chaytor, "Household and Kinship," History Workshop 10 (1980), 25-60, 26. 36 StAM, St Anw 1192. "StAM, St Anw 1467. See also LRA 139990: A similar reaction was caused by the presence in Tittmoning in 1895 of Georg Winkler, a shepherd, who, according to a police report, was "feared throughout the district, because fires had been breaking out of late wherever his presence had been noted."

35

Peasant society and the individual I saw Martin Haberer standing between the barn and the house, looking at the fire. I was most alarmed at this, as Haberer is not well thought of by public opinion and is suspected of having something to do with all the fires we've been having recently, but nobody can say anything because nobody has seen anything. One of Anna Bronner's maids gave a similar statement, repeating the legend that had been spun around Martin Haberer for some time: The courtyard was lit up by the fire, Martin Haberer, who I know well, was standing in the door, which frightened me, because people think it possible he might have started the earlier fires in Zorneding. The mayor, the official authority in the village, assumed the role of "fire announcer" in his statement to the examining magistrate, showing that he was familiar with the "logic" according to which the fire "arose": I have been suspicious of Martin Haberer for quite a while now; though up to now there has not been much to hold against him. But he has never been considered a good type, he'd rather avoid work if he could, and if he took a job it was always with the thought of "good money, little work." So I did not have him working for me, although I do need help now and then. On Sunday, 24 October, I was in the Neuwirtshaus inn here until half past six, then I moved on to the Postwirtshaus. I got there a little before half past six and saw Haberer sitting near the stove, and I kept a careful eye on him, thinking right away, "You won't get away from me today." At once I thought, "There'll be another fire today." In his reasons for arresting Martin Haberer on suspicion of arson, the village policeman endorsed public opinion: Since 1885 there have been 15 fires in the district of Zorneding, including two cases of attempted arson, and Haberer has always been under suspicion, though adequate grounds for suspicion could not be found, and Haberer was able to come up with an alibi on each occasion. But this time he cannot furnish any evidence to avert suspicion from himself in the slightest, and all the inhabitants of Zorneding are firmly convinced that Martin Haberer and no other is the culprit. People's opinion, constantly repeated in the witnesses' statements, was that Martin Haberer was "a work-shy, lethargic fellow," that he was "indolent and lazy," which is why "people would only employ him if in the utmost extremity"; "he never enjoyed working, was fond of fooling around . . . , though not hot-tempered or pugnacious." The widow on whose farm the fire started brings up yet another argument against Haberer, an accusation of theft: "and as he was already under suspicion of stealing, nobody liked him, and I never allowed him into my rooms, though he would have liked to come in." She assumes that he felt offended and might have wanted to get his own back for the accusation of stealing: It is also possible that an incident shortly before the fire might have prompted the accused to commit arson: In the week before Kirchweih [17 October) the farmer Ferdinand G. had some geese stolen; Haberer was suspected, and his house was searched. . . . The accused's

36

Fire in the village own wife told witness Hopf that she at once thought that the theft of the geese would not be the end of the matter. Finally, the indictment against Haberer simply summarized what people had been saying about him: But Martin Haberer is commonly held to be capable of the offenses imputed to him, although his record shows no previous convictions of any note and although it might really only be said of him that he avoided work as far as possible. . . . Nor can anyone claim that Haberer has benefited from any of the fires by seeking gainful employment rebuilding the burned out buildings.

The Relationship with Work and Property The statements contain elements that eventually yield a suspect as fire follows fire. The first and crucial description of the putative arsonist has to do with his attitude toward work and, closely linked with it, his attitude toward property, which cannot be divorced from work. Martin Haberer was considered work-shy; after a while he was deemed capable of being a thief, too. And the charges leveled at him simultaneously gave rise to fear. This fear had, in turn, two aspects: fear of him as an arsonist, and fear that he would avenge himself for the charges - arson and theft and for his increasing exclusion from the village community. In the witnesses' statements this second fear is tinged with guilty conscience: the evil, the accusations that may have been unfounded, might recoil on the accuser. In the end, the trial at the court of assizes did not prove whether or not Martin Haberer actually started the fires. Before the state prosecutor had even started investigating, the "arsonist" Martin Haberer and his existence as such had been established by an ever-tightening net of accusations. Discourse about him in the village was rigged in such a way that after the first suspicion of arson the next could follow. The fact that nothing could be proved was mostly of concern to the judiciary. In the village itself the spoken word, a hint of a supposition, amounted to a reality. "He is not considered a good type" - the very vagueness of the comment implies an element of judgment that escaped the individual's control the moment it was uttered.38 But how is it that Martin Haberer could become the object of these fears and accusations? Why was he the one who attracted the fears aroused by the uncontrollable fires? It has already been pointed out that the key statement about him made by all the witnesses was that he avoided work: a character trait that was a threat to the survival of a peasant community based on landed property and its cultivation. 38

Cf. Abbiateci, "Incendiaires," p. 15: "dans une socie'te' rurale, chaque parole est pes&, car elle porte a consequence, elle est une maftre-mot magiquement ope'ratoire. Trait de mentality paysanne qui s'oppose a la plus grande volubility et le'gerete' du language urbain." On the power of the spoken word, see also Favret-Saada, WSrter.

37

Peasant society and the individual Other cases, too, reveal the same key element in the witnesses' statements. In 1895 a farmhand, Johann Neumayer of Erding, was suspected of being an arsonist "because he had already been hanging around the area unemployed for a week."39 Anyone who did not work was considered liable to commit offenses against other people's property. A charge of theft carried a great deal of weight in the village. A thief would find no more work; he forfeited the villagers' solidarity.40 In fact in some cases the act of arson is a final, desperate attempt by the culprit to appear in the right light by getting his revenge on his accusers, to restore his sullied name. It is in this light that one must view the actions of the arsonist Josef Riessl,41 who was accused of theft - for he was a "good worker," and what is more he was no thief. His motive for committing arson is rooted in the peasant system of values: respect for work and property. It was not only farmhands and day laborers who were subjected to the judgments of the village but also the larger farmers. In the case of Tertullian Bauer of Zell, who set fire to his farm in October 1896, the mayor said that Bauer knew very well "how to plough different types of soil."42 Even his four farmhands testified that the farmer's work was "properly done," that he understood the job, he knew "how to do it, but he set about his work clumsily and did not enjoy working, he liked drinking." In the farmhands' view his "business methods . . . were the right ones, he didn't know how to carry them out . . . you could see that the work did not come easily to him." When it came down to it, farmhands wanted a master who understood something about his business and his work. Like his property, his work was judged, because being a farmhand meant learning how to farm, acquiring the skills and the know-how that would one day be required when getting started on one's own. The Outsiders In Martin Haberer's case we cannot rule out the possibility that he finally assumed the role that was increasingly assigned to him; the psychiatric report on him hints at this: "Leaving aside the question of whether Haberer's growing resentment against Mrs. Bronner may have been the motive for his crime, her conduct had angered him, all the more so when he found that the villagers of Zorneding would not have anything to do with him."43 To those with whom the villagers would have nothing more to do, to whom they would give no work, and whom they ended up by fearing, the social barriers of exclusion appear to have been insuperable. In many cases arson was revenge for exclusion from the village community. In August 1893, Peter Raitmair, a 30-year-old unmarried cobbler and farmhand from Ampfing near Miihldorf, after he was beaten up by some youths, set fire to two "StAM, St Anw 1174. StAM, St Anw 1474: In 1898 a day laborer from Dorfen set fire to a pile of straw because the farmer "had, as I saw it, accused me of stealing, and for this reason I could not obtain any more work." 4l StAM, St Anw 1635. 42StAM, St Anw 1231. «StAM, St Anw 1467. 40

38

Fire in the village inns from which he had once been ejected.44 Johann Oberauer, a 26-year-old married cobbler from Untergarching, took his revenge in the same manner in April 1895, when he was thrown out of an inn where a wedding was being celebrated and he was feared as a troublemaker. 45 Max Kring, 44, an unmarried farmhand, started three fires, including one in the mayor's barn, on 11 July 1898, after saying in the inn, according to witnesses, that he would be better off in prison than outside.46 Andreas Gradl, a 41-year-old unmarried day laborer, told the provincial court doctor, who examined him in prison, " 'When I get out . . . I will start a new life. It would be best for me to get away from Murnau. No man is a prophet in his own country.' He said he had repeatedly looked for work but could not find any employment in his home district, because everyone shrank away from him." 47 People who had lost their good name and their livelihood in the village and had thus been forced to the periphery of the village community, inspired fear. They became "outsiders." Homeless and destitute farmhands and maids were always in danger of being assigned to this category. In the public mind they came immediately after strangers as potential arsonists, especially if they were unemployed, came from another village, and had no right of domicile. Who knew anything about their families? The village sought to avert the risk of granting them poor relief at its expense and tried to get rid of them as soon as possible. 48 A stranger was not only a guest but also — especially if he was a pauper — an enemy, with his eye on the villagers' goods. 49 There is no contradiction between the fear of strangers and the sense of obligation to them. When Josef Dax's farm in Vollkrating near Palling was almost burned to the ground on Palm Sunday 1899, Well-founded suspicion fell almost at once on a young vagrant who had sought admittance to Dax's farmhouse about 11 minutes before for the purpose of begging but had been turned away by the maid, who told him that she would not open the house during the church service, which was in progress.50 The maid had been forbidden by the farmer to open the door to strangers during this period - around two o'clock in the afternoon during Lent. Witnesses' statements show that other farmhouses were locked, too, and the women and children stayed indoors while the men were away. It soon emerged that the youth in question belonged to a circus company staying here at the time, and about 15 or 30 minutes before the fire broke out . . . he encountered the •"StAM, St Anw 1003. 45StAM, St Anw 1171. 46StAM, St Anw 1497. •"StAM, St Anw 1483. 48StAM, LRA 78 101, describes such a case. •"See (for France) Castan, "Mentalites," pp. 168, 172; Jean Delumeau, La Pair en Occident {XlVe-XVIIIe siicles). Une citl assHgte (Paris, 1978), p. 17; on the ambivalent attitude toward strangers, see also Judith Ennew, The Western Isles Today (Cambridge, 1980), p. 90. 30 StAM, St Anw 1557. Damage caused by the fire was put at 17,000 marks by the farmer, Josef Dax. He received 4,500 marks from his fire insurance policy and 1,572 marks from a private friendly society in Palling to which he belonged. The peasants told the examining magistrate, "In addition to the usual household goods, the fire destroyed all the farm equipment, all stocks of grain, hay, and straw, all the farm implements, a threshing machine which was alone worth 2,000 marks, and all the livestock except for one ox."

39

Peasant society and the individual Piechetsrieder of whom we have spoken, and the farmhands Ludwig Pinzinger, Josef Jager, and Johann Haberl, all in Hohenstetten, who were on their way to church in Palling, and at this encounter he came straight out of the woods, about 5 minutes from the Dax farm, from the direction of Palling. From the look of the youth the men suspected chat all was not well, and for this reason Piechertsrieder, the oldest of them, turned around and went home, since at his house there was only one woman in, keeping watch for fear of the youth. The young man's appearance and strangeness were sufficient reason to suspect that "all was not well." As a member of a circus troupe - all of whom were initially arrested as suspects - he aroused feelings akin to the fear with which the village regarded gypsies and foreigners, "as the superstition prevailed of old among the peasants that such fellows were capable, with their curses, of inflicting damage and disaster by virtue of a demonic power they possessed."51 The circus folk's fascinating, exotic, and colorful side attracted the villagers but they were believed to have magical powers, too. Furthermore, this troupe lived largely from begging, like the gypsies. Literary, autobiographical, and ethnological sources reveal that the villagers were afraid of refusing the gypsies anything, fearing their revenge, which might alight on a house or farm as a curse.52 In addition to this, gypsies also had power over fire. People believed they were able to tame fire, so why would they not be capable of allowing it to flare up, if they were not given what they wanted? 53 In the present case, too, people considered the likeliest motive for arson to be the turning away of the beggar: It could not have been anyone else but Huber who started the fire, because apart from him there were no strangers within half an hour's distance of Vollkrating. . . . He is a quite degenerate, insolent individual, and he undoubtedly started the fire out of revenge when the maid refused to open the door or give him anything and he was sent on his way.54 The notions of magic surrounding fire in the old peasant societies show how deeprooted was the fear of arson as revenge for being refused a gift or not being asked in. The superstition indicates that the person denied these things actually had a right to them. Even when, in the villagers' view, fires had started in some magical fashion, ill-treatment, insults, and rejection of the "arsonists" equipped with magical powers were believed to be the motives that provoked the vengeance.55 Fire, moreover, was a punishment. It brought bad luck to turn a beggar away, whereas giving him bread, which the actor Huber had received from another farmer, was part of the justice in the form of gifts that the poor were entitled to demand. "StAM, St Anw 1557. 52 See Oskar Maria Graf, DM Lebtn miner Mutter (Munich, 1975), pp. 99-100; Schlicht, Bayerisch Land, pp. 63-8. "Hanns Bachtold-Staubli (ed.), HandwSrterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens (Berlin, 1929-1930), vol. 2, col. 1430. 54 StAM, St Anw 1557. "Bachtold-Staubli, HandwSrterbuch, cols. 1416-17. On ritual acts to do with the fire in the hearth, see Segalen, "Mari et Femme," pp. 133—4.

40

Fire in the village Even the villagers themselves could become "interlopets." Outsidets in the village inspired the same fear as strangers did, a fear that permeated all peasant societies, as many studies have shown. 56 Individuals whose means of livelihood were not clearly defined and apparent to all gave rise to uncertainty. Martin Haberer became a symbol of this fear, insecurity, and unpredictability. His real-life, "funny" self—he was actually quite a well-known character — aroused ambivalent feelings: The dark side of his personality, the unpredictability of his "work-shy" life made the villagers uneasy, and he became the projection of their general fear of insecurity. The collective search for the arsonist was rooted in the fear of the unpredictability of the fires, which were liable to strike anyone suddenly in the night. 57 It was not just concern for their property; the fear went deeper than that: It was an atavistic fear related to life itself. Not just because the people and their lives were indissolubly linked to the property and their fear was an appendage of their assets. Rather, property had become part of a more general anxiety about living: Anxiety for their lives included concern about property, the material basis of life. The arsonist's attack was aimed at life itself.

The I n n Many arsonists started a fire immediately after leaving the inn in a state of intoxication, after being insulted, abused, or thrown out of this center of the maledominated village community. 58 The inn had confronted them head-on with their rejection by the village. This mainly applied to men whose position within the rigid hierarchies that structured their presence at the inn, especially on Sundays and feast days, had been shaken, who had forfeited their regular, clearly assigned seat at the inn, were always at the wrong table wherever they sat, pushed aside and treated as a nuisance, disturbing the peace with their drunken "chatter." There were strict rules governing the ritual of drinking; on Sunday, in particular, it was common for the farmhands to get drunk at the inn, but with masters and servants, farmers and day laborers, sitting in close proximity, their drunkenness had to be kept on a tight rein. Intermixing would have meant anarchy: The first table, placed in the center of all the windows and exposed to the gaze of all those who enter, is undoubtedly the place of honor. This is where the Grossbauern [large farmers] sit, those with 200 to 300 Tagwerke. The second table is occupied by the Mittelbauem with 130 to 180 Tagwerke. At the third table sit the Kleinbauern with 90 to 120 Tagwerke, alongside the Grossoldner with 80 Tagwerke. The fourth table is occupied by the Mittels'oldner with 30 to 60 Tagwerke and the Kleinsoldner with 15 to 20 Tagwerke. At the fifth table sit the Gutter [cottagers] with 8 to 14, the Hausler [small cottagers] with 5 to 8, and the Leerbamler with 2 to 4 Taberl [Tagwerke]. . . . At the sixth table, lastly, sit the drinkers, gypsies, pedlars 56

See Theodor Shanin, Awkward Class (Oxford, 1972), pp. 3 2 - 3 . Compare reactions to the above-mentioned threats in the rural district of Laufen. 38 See, for example, arson cases StAM, St Anw 1467, 1192, 1231, 1440, 1647, 1519, 1171, 1003, and 1143. 37

41

Peasant society and the individual . . . gooseherds, mousetrap vendors, picture vendors, bootwax vendors, and so on. The farmhands, who these days vie with the farmers when it comes to beer drinking, weekdays as well as Sundays, sit at the fifth, fourth, and even third tables - not willy-nilly, but strictly according to age, rank, position, office, cash, and reputation.59

As this account from 1875 shows, peasant society ensured that at the inn matters of work and life took their old, traditional course. The discourse was laid down; in cases of arson it proved to be a way of confirming the speechlessness within the village, too. Acts of arson were also reactions to "not being heard." The dark threats uttered under the influence of drink that preceded the fires penetrated the villagers' consciousness only when the fire had already broken out. "Revenge, revenge shall seek him out"60: The sky was red, and now all could see what no one wanted to know. At the inn they all "chattered"; that was not enough to be taken seriously against the incessant noise of the propertyless with no land to boast of.

THE FAMILIES Arson is like a signpost pointing the way from the village to the families. In 18 cases, the motive for the act unfolds on the level of the social reality of the village, the families, and the wider circle of relatives. While the peasant families and their property were the key component of the peasant economy and society, the household was the center and basis of ownership, production, and consumption. It was where the socialization of individuals and their integration into the network of social obligations and mutual aid took place.61 The background to acts of arson that had their roots in family circumstances shows that the lives of the families were marked, even in their emotional ties, by the conditions of daily work, the obligation to keep the farm going, and the demands made upon them by "belonging to the village." The individual's membership in a specific peasant class - whether that of the independent farmers or the cottagers dependent on wages - was also a family experience. In lower-class families it manifested itself in an early breakup into individual paid laborers who left the parental home, and for peasant children in the provisions made by the laws of inheritance for their life on the farm. Being a member of the village meant belonging to one of the village families. A firm foothold in the village could be achieved only by acquiring a share in the land and joining the family that owned and tilled the land. Inscribed in every villager's biography was the history of the land that supported him and of the generations that had cultivated it "Schlicht, Bayerisch Land, p. 105. On the dialectics of geographical proximity and social distance, see Bourdieu, Sozialer Sinn (in French, 1980; Frankfurt a.M., 1987) p. 251. Translator's note: Tagwerk (southern German) or Tagewerk (Austrian): this measure (lit. "day's work") is essentially untranslatable, since the amount of land that could be plowed by a man and the usual team of two oxen in a day (or just a morning) would obviously vary so greatly from region to region. A very rough estimate would be 1 acre. w StAM, St Anw 1647; on the language of arson threats, see also Abbiateci, "Incendiaires," p. 15. *'Cf. also Shanin, Awkward Class, pp. 28-9.

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Fire in the village before him. Through them, the individual identified himself as a "native," one who belonged. 62

Belonging to a Family The status and reproductive capacity of the individual in the village could not be separated from the reputation the family "possessed." The family's economic position and its good name were the basis of people's village identity. An attack on the honor of one member of the family was an attack on the family's honor. If we are to believe the records, the poor families in the village as well as the formers had a well-developed sense of honor. Children avenged the wrongs inflicted on their parents by starting fires - like Josef Riessl, who avenged not only himself but his grandfather, too, after they were both accused of stealing; like the journeyman cooper Sebastian Reichwimer, who reduced a farm to ashes in the night of 16-17 May 1897, "because old Unterauer was not kind to my mother," 63 ; and like Lorenz Hammerl, an unmarried farmhand from Kiihberg, who at seven o'clock in the evening on Christmas Day 1880 set fire to the farm of Grad von Oberndorf, because he had insulted his stepfather: About a week before Christmas, Mathias Reichl [his stepfather] told my mother, his sister, who lived with us, and me how he had been looking for sawdust in the woods known as Kirchenwald around about the time of the church festival, when the farmer, Grad von Oberndorf, came across him in the forest and started calling him a scoundrel again and again, saying that he would shoot away his other fetlock. [Comment by the stepfather: "That made me so furious I began to weep."] You see, Mathias Reichl has a clubfoot. This story turned me against Grad and gave me the idea of harming him in some way. The thought kept occurring to me over the next week, but I just kept dismissing it from my mind. I knew Farmer Grad well and had never had any quarrel with him, nor is my family enemies of his, and I didn't know anything bad about him except what my stepfather had said about Grad abusing him in the forest. On Christmas Day I stayed at home; by seven in the evening my relatives were already in bed, when it occurred to me to avenge my stepfather by setting fire to the barn.64 In these attempts to salvage the honor of insulted relatives through an act of revenge, we can discern the impotent rage that might seize a poor cottager - who may also have been wrongly accused of begging and stealing - when faced with a well-respected farmer. Inequality of property ultimately entailed inequality of opportunity when it came to defending and restoring one's own honor. The smaller and poorer an individual's land, the slimmer his chances of obtaining justice in the event of a dispute; only the rich could afford to go to court. Anyone who had nothing 62 To a certain extent, these ties may still be valid in village life today. See, for example, Marilyn Strathern, Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology ofElmdon, a Village in North-Welt Essex in the 1960s (Cambridge, 1981), pp. xxiv—xxv: "As we shall see, there is a close connection between being a member of a certain family and counting oneself a native." w M StAM, St Anw 1595, Gericht Haag. StAM, St Anw 3 2 1 , AG Erding.

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Peasant society and the individual and was nothing was treated accordingly. Like many others, the present case shows the speechlessness and hatred that had built up to the point of arson. The unassimilated, pent-up feeling of having been unfairly treated and humiliated developed into an inner compulsion to achieve by means of revenge some kind of compensation not provided for in law. As the owner or tenant of the woods in question, the farmer was anxious about his property, apprehensive about poaching and was, moreover, in the right. He was demonstrating the power of the stronger party and threatened to use violence. This threat evidently freed the violence that recoiled on him through arson. Property was the generally recognized overarching principle of life and the law, but in the family context it attained the quality of densely wrought experience. The insult to his stepfather, a cottager of slender means, brought Lorenz Hammerl into direct contact with the hierarchy among the farmers and with the power that ownership bestowed. This case also shows that children from the lowest rural classes who had left home to find work on other farms, like Lorenz Hammerl, did not relinquish their identification with their parents' family - certainly not until they had started a family of their own and were running their own farm. In their sense of honor they remained tied to their parental household. Like Sebastian Reichwimer,65 Lorenz Hammerl66 assumed the task of obtaining satisfaction for the family as a proxy for his stepfather. His conduct after the act showed that his leading motive could not have been any special love for his stepfather but that his identification with the latter stemmed from their membership in the same household. In addition to this, he had just been turned out of his job as a farmhand. It is possible that the farmer's insulting behavior toward his stepfather unleashed his aggressive feelings toward farmers who were rich enough to employ and dismiss servants and to abuse poor day laborers. The fact that he started the fire on Christmas Day, selecting a feast day for his act of vengeance, may have endowed the deed with special symbolic significance. Another important point in this connection is that Lorenz Hammerl did not threaten the farmer physically - as the farmer had threatened Hammerl's stepfather - but set fire to his farm, which was the foundation of Grad's status as a farmer, and hence of his power. In this way Hammerl was expressing his detailed understanding of the foundations of peasant life: Far from calling the system into question, his act of arson was confirmation of its established structures. The strong emotional element in the motives for arson is seen at its clearest, however, in those cases in which the deed was directed against relatives of the culprit or his entire family. The 24-year-old farmhand Johann Neumaier of Erding stated that he had set fire to his parents' house "because his stepfather had never liked him, even as a child."67 On the Sunday in question he had returned home at midday, and his stepfather had called him a lazy ass because he was out of work. Worst of all, however, his parents had refused to take him in and had sent him back to the farmer. "At this, he had made the decision to set fire to the house out "StAM, St Anw 1595.

"StAM, St Anw 321.

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67

StAM, St Anw 1174.

Fire in the village of revenge." This case raises the question of to what extent revenge on the stepfather was a problem peculiar to the illegitimate children of the rural lower classes, whose mothers had not married their natural fathers and who therefore did not feel fully accepted by their families. Racked by guilt, Johann Neumaier eventually gave himself up to the police, "saying that he couldn't stand it any more." This was also the case with the farm maid Maria Neumaier, who set fire to her foster parents' farm in 1876, when she was 16, and confessed to the police eight years later, by which time they were both dead.68 On the evening of 26 August 1894, Kajetan Rappolder, a 32-year-old journeyman cooper, set fire to his parents' farm, which consisted of a farmhouse, cooper's workshop, barn, stables, and storage area for animal bedding, all under one roof: "As the motive he gave his family's behavior toward him. He could never do anything right in their eyes, and he thought that no one liked him any more."69 Feelings of being neglected and not being loved, being turned out of the house by one's parents, being disadvantaged compared with siblings (often half-siblings) - these are articulated after the event with an immediacy that is astonishing, given the speechlessness surrounding or preceding the arson attack. The fires seem to signal the impossibility of voicing these powerful feelings and being heard, which often gives these acts the character of attempted social suicide. From the point of view of the families, the farm servants' widely divergent reactions and ways of behaving become clearer after the event. The strong feelings of guilt that followed an arson attack on the family property, and which often led arsonists to give themselves up to the police, appear to be linked with attempts by many farmhands to make up for the damage they had done by trying to put the fire out and getting the livestock out of the cow sheds, after setting fire to their master's property. Perhaps arson following dismissal or the refusal of new clothing by the farmer or his wife may have been prompted by the same fundamental reason as in the cases just discussed: a sense of neglect. This was particularly likely where farm servants had lived with and worked for the same farmer for several years. After the act, the culprit often expressed remorse or a feeling of having justiy obtained revenge for nonpayment of wages. Is it possible that farm servants assumed children's roles if they had entered into service as young as 12 or 14 and that they remained to a certain extent under the farming couple's paternal-cum-maternal authority, unless they changed households every year? "They couldn't stand me" is also cited by farm servants as a motive for acts of revenge on masters. The Law of Inheritance The formal expression of the peasant system was the law of inheritance, the legal version of the individual's responsibility toward the land that outlives everyone. "Property was the basis, it belonged to the kinship group as a whole and not to the individual. . . . Kinship is the specific manifestation of the conditions of owner"StAM, St Anw 395.

"StAM, St Anw 1135.

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Peasant society and the individual ship and production, the order principle of kinship suspends control over land both in the longitudinal, generational axis and in the local, lateral axis manifested in marriage. Land held the kinship group together, just as the group did the land. . . . As long as tradition, the preservation of inherited property and know-how, lasted, these conflicts were always resolved in the best interest of the kinship group, the status quo, and the inheritance. The individual element had no place in all this and usually meant danger, decline, and fall."70 According to the Bavarian law in force at this time, in Upper Bavaria at the end of the nineteenth century the eldest son inherited the farm. The estate was not divided. The eldest son made payments to his brothers and provided his sisters with dowries commensurate with the size of the parental farm, dowries capable of attracting farmers of equal standing. To offset these demands for payment, which often meant incurring substantial debts,71 money was needed, which a young woman's dowry could provide. The politics of marriage implied the circulation and preservation of goods at each level of the property hierarchy. The laws of inheritance also determined the manner in which personal relations within family and kinship group were structured.72 The arson records reflect the emotional tensions created by the laws of inheritance and the need to keep the property together, initially between the generations: between the old farmer and his son, treading in his father's footsteps and taking over his authority, and between the farmer's wife and her daughter-in-law, who would be running the household from now on. The second source of tension affected relations between the firstborn and his siblings, between the heir and those who would inherit nothing, who either had to work on other farms under the authority of other farmers or had to go away and seek a new livelihood elsewhere. In the final analysis, it was the relationship between the farmer and his wife, who had entered the household as a "stranger," an outsider, that determined the emotional environment of the families and the farms.73 Cain and Abel The arson records show that families did not merely "function" in accordance with the law of inheritance but that their cohesion often required a high degree of cooperation and emotional sensitivity. In the individual's everyday experience, a child's place second in line under the law of inheritance might lead to a deep-rooted feel70

Albert Ilien and Utz Jeggle, Leben aufdem Dorf. Zur Sozialgeschichte dts Dotfes und Sozialpsychologie seiner

Bewohner (Opladen, 1978), p. 70. ll Untersuchungin 24 Gemeinden, p. 11; this inquiry shows that in the second half of the nineteenth century one of the main reasons for the indebtedness of medium-sized farms was the large sums that heirs had pay to their brothers and sisters. Many tried to solve this problem by selling timber, which, in a generation, led to excessive deforestation. "Jack Goody, "Inheritance, Property and Women: Some comparative considerations," in Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson, Family and Inheritance, pp. 10-36, p. 31. Cf. Bourdieu, Sozialer Sinn, pp. 264ff. 73 See Eric Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), p. 68.

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Fire in the village ing of being passed over that was experienced as a withdrawal of parental love or as alienation between siblings. The result was conflicts that were as rigid and unbending as the conditions that gave rise to them. The case of Johann Hopf, a 32-year-old unmarried sawyer from Starnberg who set fire to his parents' mill on I January 1895, reveals several different levels of such family dramas. 74 His brother Josef had inherited the mill, his mother continued to live on part of the property, and Johann Hopf had been paid compensation. His statement to the assize court of Munich is reproduced here in detail: My brother and I were employed in my parents' house. My brother took over the mill, while I was elbowed out by my brother and had to go off to foreign parts. I bought myself a mill in Haarkirchen, but the property was deep in debt, and after about four years it was sold at auction to the farmer Georg Feit; in this way the fortune of my mother and myself was lost. I ventured abroad as a miller and returned to Starnberg after a few years. My brother took me on as a sawyer, and at first I was employed alone there. Then I went away again and came back to Starnberg about a year ago. Just recently my brother has employed an apprentice to help out now and again. A few days ago my brother took on Andreas Maser, who also slept there. I started the fire for the following reason: 1) Because I was angry with my brother, because he had treated me and my mother badly. Matters came to a head when my mother was not satisfied with the meals stipulated in the agreement; she said she would rather have the food delivered as it was and cook for herself. 2) It was my brother's fault that I lost my place in Haarkirchen; he wanted me out of the house and therefore encouraged me to buy the property. 3) My brother told Eckhardt the sawyer to abuse mother, and he did so at the inn. 4) I was angry because I heard that my brother was going to throw me out again and take on the previous sawyer again. I started the fire on New Year's Eve. I was not envious - indeed, I was happy that he had something. I'd never thought about starting a fire and didn't come to a decision until evening. I flatly deny saying that I was going to start a fire; what I said was - once only "I'll get even with the fellow," just meaning that I'd smash his face in. On Christmas Day I didn't turn up for dinner, but on New Year's Eve I did. I said nothing at all, out of anger, and then left at once. At the inn I drank to drown my anger; I drank 8 or 9 liters of beer - I can take quite a bit. Unluckily for me, I went to Riedl's inn in the evening, and there I met my brother; that sobered me up. I fell into conversation with Jochner; there was talk of a fireball from the sky that would fall to earth and destroy everything. I didn't undetstand the allusion. I drank another 8 or 9 halves in Riedel's inn, and then got into an argument with my brother: I said that this heavenly ball might as well fall on my brother, because he'd behaved so barbarically toward me and he'd been beating the apprentice. My brother told me that I shouldn't imagine that I'd be working for him any more. These gibes continued until my brother left, while I went on drinking until twelve. I decided to start the fire when I left the inn. . . . My attempts to douse the flames failed. 74 StAM, St Anw 1143; see also StAM, St Anw 1226, the case of a 47-year-old unmarried farmhand, Thomas Lader, who set fire to the farm of his widowed sister in 1896 because she had withheld his parental inheritance from him.

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Peasant society and the individual . . . I went to my mother and told her that there was a fire and then I left again at once, getting as far as the Tutzinger Hof, where I was arrested and confessed what I'd done to the constable. This statement reveals Johann Hopf s relationship with his older brother and his mother, and also his mother's relationship with her two sons. It shows how he had emotionally assimilated his objective position as the second child. He felt cheated by his brother, badly treated and thrown out of the parental home. 75 He "had to" go away to "foreign parts"; his repeated attempts to return to the parental home foundered, in his own view, on the conflict with his brother. His brother is also to blame for the fact that he was never able to settle down for any period of time "in foreign parts," that he never managed to stand on his own two feet and become independent. In his eyes, his brother became the reason for his failure. He himself remained the destitute, dependent, rejected younger brother. To crown it all, his elder brother no longer wanted his labor, preferring to employ an outsider as a sawyer. Did jealousy play a part in this, too? The two brothers had worked together at the mill until it was taken over by the older one; now Johann Hopf was a problem as a worker and, furthermore, he was expendable - possibly precisely because he was a brother. The records only hint that in this kind of situation the role of firstborn also entailed problems. It is not clear whether or not the elder brother advised the younger one to buy the mill in order to get rid of him or whether it might have been intended as help. What is more, after the elder brother took over the mill, the two brothers were no longer working side by side on a more or less equal footing: the division of labor was now that between master and servant. Because the economy of the farms - or, in this case, a mill - required work to be organized in this way, the new master of the mill had to demand the brother's subordination or exchange him for another worker. By buying the mill, Johann Hopf showed that he, the younger brother, also aspired to be a master and, this being so, the way in which the business was managed was bound to lead to a power struggle between the two brothers. The elder brother was now indicating to the younger the nature of his position at the mill by exchanging him for a new sawyer, from whom he was entitled to expect, to a certain extent, a return to the usual employer-servant relationship. It was not at all uncommon in the peasant society of Upper Bavaria for brothers and sisters to stay on the farms and work them, sometimes for their entire lives. The conflict between the brothers shows how relentless this socialization had to be, 76 rearing brothers and sisters in a state of inequality that was felt to be almost "natural" and simultaneously preventing the one not entitled to inherit from rebelling and entering into competiton with the legatee - even, perhaps, obliging him to serve the latter and his wife until the end of his days. Within the peasant family, the individual's identification with the household, the farm, and the land may have played a crucial part in this. After all, the heir was not primarily the owner but the steward of the property, which he had to pass on to the younger generation in his "See the section "Erbfeinde" in Men and Jeggle, Leben aufdem Dorf, pp. 73—8. 76 Cf. Wolf, Peasants, p. 64; Bourdieu, Sozialer Sinn, p. 272. 48

Fire in the village old age. The members of the family who worked on the farm were thus serving not the brother but the farm. Like them, he was part of a higher principle: Identifying with the principle meant identifying with the farmer, not as an individual but as a social person.77 The Generations The protective role he assumed toward his mother seems to be a factor of key importance in the case of Johann Hopf. He sees her - as he does himself - as the weaker party, living out her days on sufferance at the expense of the elder brother. As a lawyer in Dachau at the turn of the century, Ludwig Thoma became familiar with the inheritance struggles that split families and the care peasants about to pass on their property took to ensure that the rights and goods due to them in their old age were formally laid down by a notary. In one of his tales on this subject, he depicted the solidarity and identification that could develop between a farmer's wife and her younger son, who would not inherit.78 It does not appear to have been all that unusual for the aging parents to side with the younger son. The younger son was the disadvantaged one; the elderly parents were dependent on the goodwill of the heir, from whom they frequently withheld the farm, preventing him from marrying, as long as possible. In Thoma's story the heir is very much aware of his mother's rejection, stemming from fear, and her love for the younger son. The relationship between mother and elder son turns sour. The scene at the notary's office, in which the transfer of the farm is described in meticulous detail, underlines the parents' fear of impoverishment in their old age and the heirs' fear that the parents will not let go of the farm. The official study of 24 Bavarian parishes at the end of the nineteenth century shows, like Thoma's account, that the conditions of transfer customarily specified the number of pounds of meat, the number of eggs, beehives, chickens, geese, loads of firewood, and so forth, to be provided per year, month, and week.79 The son would protest at this evidence of parental mistrust, but who knew what might happen? After all, with a daughter-in-law involved, how far could filial love be relied upon? "The old people adhered to the maxim 'Act in haste, repent at leisure,' believing that it was no use regretting things after the event. They wanted certainty, chapter and verse, and reasoned that the more you demand, the easier it is to give ground."80 On 16 April 1898, Jacob Polsterl of Miesbach, a retired day laborer, set fire to the farm of his daughter and son-in-law: An old man, he had not managed to negotiate favorable conditions for his retirement, nor had he been able to enforce his contractual rights. He had also been missing his dead wife, and he himself was 69 years old. Before setting fire to the farm, he bemoaned his plight to another daughter: "See also Alan MacFarlane, Origins of English Individualism; Family, Property and Social Transition (Ox-

ford, 1979), p. 232. 78 Ludwig Thoma, "Margret," in Werke, vol. 2, pp. 277ft., and "Hochzeit," in ibid. pp. 202-77. 8o ^Vntersuchung, pp. 12, 42. Thoma, "Hochzeit," p. 242.

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Peasant society and the individual I don't know how it happened. . . . I have often quarreled with my son-in-law and his wife because I have received nothing to eat from them but bread and potatoes. I told my daughter that one day they would pay - 1 have even wept at their ill treatment. . . . My son-inlaw has often struck me; once I reported him for it, and he was punished; it cost him a 40mark fine.81 The conflicts between heirs and parents, sons and fathers, mothers and sons, farmers' wives and daughters-in-law, farmers and sons-in-law who married to acquire the farm in the absence of sons, characterized the peasants' life and especially their emotional world. The younger generation ousted the elderly and took over their power; if things went badly, they used it against the old people, who had treated them like children for too long. The despair of sons and daughters of marriageable age in the face of their parents' obstinate refusal to retire sometimes led them to set fire to the farm, even though it had been apparent for many years that it would one day be theirs. They could not become independent - come of age, in the real sense, and get married. They were denied the status enjoyed by a married farmer in the village. This was the case with 25-year-old Peter Paul, a day laborer, who set fire to his father's farm in January 1898.82 The girl with whom he lived was pregnant for the second time and was pressing him to marry her; she wanted the place at the hearth now due to her. The young man's father had "brusquely" turned down his request for an advance. In another case, people assumed that a son must have set fire to his father's farm, because he was "not on good terms" with his parents.83 Responsibility toward property that outlived the living required that parents should surrender power to those over whom they had earlier wielded parental authority, and this caused profound psychological problems in the love between parents and children. Parents not only had to exercise control over their children; they also had to instruct them in farm management. In the long term, they were accountable to them for the maintenance of the farm and had to defend their own contribution. If at the end of the day the transfer did not take place at the agreed time and was not free of friction, the older generation - who were responsible for choosing the right moment - might feel ousted, shoved aside, by their children. The relationship was one of mistrust and mutual recrimination. At the same time, the transfer of the farm, the responsibility, and the power to a younger generation was an initiation rite ushering in the peasant's old age, a life living on his "retirement portion." Whether or not he considered this a disenfranchisement or a well-earned rest depended, to a certain extent, on how far he felt subordinate to the interests of the farm and the family as a whole. The point of departure for this study, crime, was not intended to obscure the methods and rules peasant society had - and still has - for dealing with these conflicts, including the emotional ones.84 For one thing, it was essential for the peasants - who did not always 81

StAM, St Anw 1479. StAM, St Anw 1451. "P.P." only meant to set fire to the barn, but the whole place burned down. 83 StAM, LRA 139990. 84Cf. Wolf, Peasants, p. 64. 82

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Fire in the village live in the lap of luxury or even as befitted gentry but often felt the pinch of poverty - to observe the rules of inheritance. For another, the fact that their marriages were not always marriages of love in the bourgeois sense did not prevent people living together — old and young, man and wife — from developing an intimacy and sense of responsibility toward one another, a love that can be traced back to the type of life they led. Jacob Polsterl's tears85 show that he must have had some Utopian conception of what life with his daughter and son-in-law should have been like; this is also evident in the trust of parents who did not seek legal guarantees. But it possibly showed the wisdom of those who did go to the notary. They were perfectly familiar with the constraints that might come to threaten the provision made for them in their old age. The bargaining about the parents' retirement benefits at the notary's was not entirely hostile; after the parents had haggled, it was the turn of Andra, their son, who haggled "about every little thing and defended his position with such skill that it aroused the secret admiration of his parents. Emerenz [his bride] was also reassured to see that her future husband would be able to stand up for himself."86 The Marriages In some cases, an arson attack signified the end for a peasant household. With the loss of the property, the family fell apart. Marriages based on shared labor and responsibility, on the expectation that the peasant would "make a go of things," fell apart when they lost their material basis. The love of the farmer's wife for her husband could not be divorced from his management of the farm and respect for his work. Tertullian Bauer, a 52-year-old farmer from Zell, in the district of Kleinweil near Weilheim, set fire to his farm himself after he had reduced it to ruin and his wife and children had left him.87 He had had a property of more than 80 Tagwerk, a cow shed containing 20 head of cattle and 3 horses; by the time he had finished, all he had left was 3 head of cattle and 1 horse; 4 Tagwerk had been sold; he had mortgage arrears and other bank debts; and the forest had been cut down. Even before the disaster, the household economy had suffered from shortage of money. In spite of this, the farmer had intended to take out a new bank loan of 1,000 marks. All the witnesses agreed that he engaged in foolhardy business deals and had lost a lot of money that way and that in order to alleviate temporary financial difficulties he would make rash sales, buy inferior livestock, and so on. The financial position, his intention of taking out a loan and fear of being placed in the hands of an administrator, led to reproaches from his wife. He quarreled with her and beat her, at which point she finally left the farm. Bauer later said, in the district lunatic asylum: For about a year he had had domestic problems because his wife wanted to deprive him of the right to manage his own affairs, with the intention of making their prospective son-in85

StAM, St Anw 1479.

8fr

Thoma, "Hochzeit," p. 242.

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87

StAM, St Anw 1231.

Peasant society and the individual law - Wirth Breuer of Zell - master of his form. . . . The thought of losing the farm troubled him and embittered him toward his wife, who was a tool in the hands of strangers. . . . He had given vent to his resentment once or twice by beating her, whereupon his wife had run away with the children. . . . His relatives shunned him. It was in the nature of peasant property that was family property, as it was in Upper Bavaria, that the head of the family could be replaced.88 Bauer's wife had the backing of the local mayor in her plans. Bauer not only had to defend himself against his wife; the village also called him to account for his handling of his finances and of his marriage. 89 After his impending incapacitation had been brought up at the inn one evening and he had been criticized for the beatings he had given his wife - "inn talk that was understandably not lacking in scorn and mockery" - his hatred of his wife increased. He had already said that he would hang himself, but now his anger was directed at his wife: "If he was not to have anything, his wife wouldn't get anything either." On the way home he felt that only an extraordinary deed could put an end to his desperate mood. He could not believe that his wife and children, with whom he had lived for so many years, would really leave him; he felt like a man who enters a field to see three tame birds sitting there who fly off at his approach after showing trust in the past.90 On finding the house empty, he had "gone crazy," lit a match, and thrown it into the hay. Uninsured as he was, his entire livelihood had gone up in flames. The act of arson was tantamount to social suicide. 91 The case of Maria Westermaier, a 41-year-old miller's wife from Lappach, casts some light on a similar story from the woman's viewpoint. 92 After losing large sums of money through litigation, her husband had brought the mill to the brink of ruin and finally lost it to one of his creditors, a tradesman in the village, for 7,900 marks at an auction. The buyer also took a horse and cart that belonged to the miller's wife's father. All they had, when they left the mill, was a little grain. "In anger at the way we were forced to leave," the miller's wife threatened to set fire to the mill. With their six children they went to stay with the miller's father-in-law, but there, too, they got into difficulties. Maria Westermaier prepared for the arson attack deliberately, buying a bottle of paraffin and a box of matches, having first attended church and called on her former neighbors on her way to the mill. Then, on the afternoon of 8 October 1898, she set fire to the mill, which she knew very well, including the cow shed and the barn, and then gave herself up to a constable at the inn in the next village. 88 Shanin, Awkward Class, pp. 30-1, shows that this was widespread throughout the agrarian societies of Europe. 89 Cf. the case of the peasant Riempp in David Sabean's analysis, "Junge Immen." '"StAM, St Anw 1231. "See also StAM, St Anw 51, 91, 261, and 209 on marital conflicts as the background to arson against the spouses' own property. »2StAM, St Anw 1590, AG Haag.

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Fire in the village The miller's wife clung to possession of the mill; sooner than hand it over to another, she would rather destroy it93 - thus symbolically retaining control of it. A mill, a farm, a house, land: For the peasants these were not simply factors of production and reproduction, they were things with symbolic value94 - like the horse and cart belonging to the father of the miller's wife - and fraught with emotion. A great deal depended on them: the history of the families - for generations - and their status and the strength of their position in the village and in the wider circle of their kin. For this reason, land with a farm attached or a mill were not simply commodities that could be bought and sold in the marketplace, because they were linked with knowledge - of such things as the nature of the soil, how it had to be cultivated, what sort of crops it would produce - knowledge acquired through a process of learning going back generations, passed on from father to son, from mother to daughter, the mastery of which was part of the peasant socialization process. When a farm went to rack and ruin, part of the family identity also perished. The cases of Tertullian Bauer and Maria Westermaier95 also tell us something about peasant marriages. When the farm became more and more run down, Bauer's wife had already sought a divorce - some time before the fire. "Although he and his wife were reconciled in court, her rejection of him, accompanied by fear, persisted." The miller's wife told the examining magistrate: I carried out the act after a good deal of thought. At first because I was furious at the way Ziegler took our horse and cart, and then because I was unhappy after I left the farm and angry with my husband for causing all our misery through his poor management, and I didn't want to live under the same roof with him any more. Maria Westermaier knew that prison awaited her after the arson attack and that she would have to leave the family for awhile. She gave herself up to the police. She did not want to continue living with her husband; the marriage had lost its basis. He had not only let the mill go to the dogs but was no longer able to provide for the children. They would now stay with his wife's father, who had once again assumed the economically dominant role of the male head of the family when his daughter returned home. The affection the women may have felt for their husbands was not independent of the home, and the economic security and status this guaranteed them, also as part of the village community.96 Before the miller's wife started the fire, she not only went to church but also visited her former neighbor - as if confirming once again her role among rhe village women. For not only her identity as a married woman but also her identity as a neighbor and friend had been based on her role as the miller's wife; following the loss of her social prestige and

"Abbiateci, "Incendiaires," p. 29, shows the solidarity of French villages with tenants who set fire to the (arm from which they had been evicted. M Wolf, Peasants, p. 15. 95 StAM, St Anw 1231, 1590. 96 Chaytor, "Household and Kinship," p. 42, shows that this was also true of rural Northumberland in the sixteenth century.

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Peasant society and the individual her economic footing among her neighbors and in the village, she would gradually lose her friends and her position among the village women, too. Many women ended up leaving their husbands when these ceased to be able to offer them the social and economic basis on which they led lives that were - to a certain extent - independent and self-assured, as they showed by their demanding attitude toward their husbands. They even defended this life against their husbands; if he proved unable to manage, she would take the accounts book away from him. Bauer's wife sought to have him declared incapable of managing his affairs, and the miller's wife assumed control of the mill for an instant by the symbolic act of burning it down. She showed that she had not accepted the sale. The almost ritualistic framework - attending church, visiting her neighbor, handing herself over to the police - may indicate that she had also undertaken to restore the honor of the miller's family.

THE HEARTH AND THE FIRE Arson in Upper Bavaria between 1879 anc l 1900 was mainly a rural crime, a crime of the peasantry. It points straight to the heart of the arsonists' existence — their work and their property, their life in the family and in the village and their feelings — and also to the peasant world of the village, in which they became offenders. It designates in quite a specific way the interpersonal relations of those who lived in this world and the object of the arson attack - usually a farm or small holding, at once a piece of real estate and an expression of the peasant way of life that structured the family and determined the pattern of labor. It was nearly always a house - the employer's house, the neighbor's house, the house of the "other," and in some cases the arsonist's own, welcoming or rejecting, the receptacle of feelings that had grown and been nurtured by it or had been shut out. A house that was a farmhouse housed the family and the servants, the animals, tools, and stores that were the fruits of labor and the basis of survival through the annual cycle - for livestock as well as for human beings. The acts of arson are the sign of a world in which the house could still largely be identified with the people who occupied it, whose existence was both physically and symbolically protected inside the house, yet remaining vulnerable. The house represented to all the villagers the wealth or poverty of the families living in it, their history and the status accorded to them within the village hierarchy. The solidity or wretchedness of a farm's appearance were an indication of its occupants' work, the ability of the master and mistress of the house to make a go of it, and characterized the attachment to and the concern of the children and successive generations with the inherited property. The heart of the house was the hearth, the fireplace. The fire in the hearth was not destructive as long as it was kindled and contained in the fireplace. Harnessed to a stove, it was even productive, being used for cooking. The preparation of food in the peasant household was tied to the controlled use of the energy in fire. Fire, 54

Fire in the village domesticated, ensured not only food but warmth. Just as the men of the village — and on feast days the women, too - met at the inn, the families and households would gather round the fireplace: for meals, on cold days and winter evenings, to work, to tell stories, to sing and to play. The hearth thus became the center of the assembled family. Feelings focused on it; it gave food, light, and heat. Protecting and using fire was the women's duty, especially the farmer's wife, the mother and mistress of the house. Being excluded from the circle around the fire may thus have meant not only the loss of family and household but, at a deeper psychological level, the loss of the mother and wife, the original provider of food and warmth. Perhaps most arsonists were men because, unlike the women, they had no independent access to the hearth, to food and warmth, and because they had never learned, as the women had, to protect the fire. The peasant division of labor had reserved this area for women alone. It was still directly associated with their motherliness. In most cases of arson it was this material security that was threatened. It is indicative that 85 - two-thirds - of the arsonists were single, had no family ties or household of their own in which their feelings were embedded. When farmhands lost their jobs, they also lost their seat at the peasant's hearth and table, and hence their social identity in the village. The miller's wife and Bauer's wife had both lost their own hearths. On a farm and in a mill that had been allowed to go to rack and ruin, the food- and warmth-dispensing hearth was extinguished; resources were no longer enough to feed its flames. The women lost their place and their love for the man who could not keep the farm going and was no longer able to take care of them. Exclusion from the hearth or loss of the fire released the formerly well-guarded feelings of the subjects, who were now vagrants. The arson attacks and the offenders' statements show that these pent-up, unguarded feelings of hatred and revenge could become all-consuming. Accompanied by a sense of being misunderstood and forsaken, envy of those who were warm and secure - and had also witnessed their shame and humiliation - these feelings were no longer communicable and were mute. The fire finally symbolized the eruption of these feelings that were no longer "domesticated," and hence all-consuming. A fire in the hearth became a destructive force only when it got out of control because it had not been tended carefully enough. The records of the district offices are forever mentioning house fires caused by the overzealous stoking of hearths and defective chimneys.97 Flying sparks often set fire to thatched roofs, starting a conflagration. It was the peasants' belief that such fires, breaking in on a farm like the blows of fate, were the work of magical forces seeking revenge for a refusal.98 I set out to show the emotional core of revenge in these cases of arson. According to David Jones, the acts of the East Anglian arsonists of the first half of the nineteenth century were not motivated by political conviction and long-term strategy but by "despair, hatred and the magnificent announcement of immediate 97 Cf., for example, LRA 139982, nos. 147, 181, 442, 1077, 1463, 1820, and 1977. ' 8 Bachtold-Staubli, HandwSrterbuch, cols. 1416—17.

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Peasant society and the individual revenge."99 The attempt to satisfy an injured sense of justice by destroying the "evil" and inflicting social murder on the assailant was immanent in an emotional structure that was linked with the peasant society. The deed appeared necessary in order to reconstruct the ego; afterward, the world was all right again, restored to order, as it were. The whole village was witness to the righting of the injustice, which was as splendid as the blazing light of the fire. The fire blotted out the hatred and the vindictiveness, and the arsonist regained his inner balance. The attempt at conflict solving through arson appears to have worked, for many offenders, on an emotional, psychological level: The fire and its dramatic enactment fulfilled a cathartic function. But the village did not take the arsonist back; instead, it sent him to face the judge. To this extent, arson did not upset the power relations within the village but consolidated them. The injustices that had caused the cup to overflow and had to be redressed were immanent in the peasant economy and social structure and could only be redressed subjectively within its limits. The village order was also accepted by the arsonist; it was the victim who had not adhered to it. The conflict and its settlement thus had no political dimension. A comparison between arsonists and poachers in Bavaria and in East Anglia100 reveals the differing political power of rural crime. The arsonists of Upper Bavaria acted emotionally, as isolated outsiders tied to a specific situation. They were not supported by the village population but demonized, because of the deep-seated dread of the vengeful fire they aroused. The fire touched on the latent existential fear that possessed the peasants. Poaching, on the other hand, was not destructive in the villagers' eyes, but productive. It did not destroy the substance of rural survival but defended it. The poachers brought home food which they considered theirs by right. Poaching was an attack directed against the outside world, against authority, which had curtailed and now controlled the village's resources. Injustice could be experienced collectively. Poachers were supported by the village population and hidden from the arm of the law. Many of them became folk heroes, like Bavarian Hiasl. With the arsonist it was otherwise - though naturally we must assume that the villagers made a distinction between the peasant who set fire to his own farm to collect the insurance money and the man who set fire to another's farm for revenge. Perhaps this is why there were comparatively few arsonists among the accused whose purposes were fraudulent; after all, a large number of fires were never cleared up. But who could have any interest in betraying a peasant who cheated on his fire insurance? He posed no threat to the village, and in any case insurance companies were generally regarded with suspicion. But the arsonist who acted out of revenge was on the "outside," and his attack was aimed inward with the purpose of severing all links (burning his bridges), or in the hope of regaining acceptance, once the flames had consumed what had rejected him. Arsonists were no folk heroes, but "David Jones, Crime, Protest, Community andPolice in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1982), p. 6 1 .

Similarly, for Prussia in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Blasius, Ceselhchaft und Kriminalitat, p. 66. 100 Jones, Crime, p. 62.

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Fire in the village their language was familiar and understood; for ultimately everyone was a potential arsonist, and everyone could become a victim. This social knowledge and a subtle network of social surveillance made it possible to identify an arsonist and exclude him once again. This exclusion was performed with increasing efficiency by the prisons and by bourgeois psychiatry. The individual was now answerable to an official body that did not know his language.

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The mad-doctor's gaze

The arsonist Josef Riessl, the 20-year-old son of a cottager, a farmhand in Emmerich, was finally referred, by the assize court of the Munich II District Court, for observation to the district lunatic asylum, where he was examined from 4 July until 14 August 1900. If he was shown to be mentally defective, it might, after all, be possible to take mitigating circumstances into account. The report stated that he was small in stature, and his physical development . . . clearly retarded in relation to his age. His legs are very short, and his upper body is comparatively long; his hands and feet are also disproportionately large. His head is conspicuously round in shape, his face is asymmetric and, in addition to the snub, upturned nose, is disfigured by the protrusion of his upper jaw and lower lip. The accused's facial expression, normally dull and rather childlike, becomes downright stupid when he distorts his fece into a broad smile, which he does at every opportunity. Furthermore, he displays other so-called signs of degeneration: grossly malformed ears, very high, raised palate, protruding os incisivum, lack of body hair. . . . Both physically and intellectually Riessl presents the classic picture of the idiot.1 This text is an extract from an attempt to explain an arson attack. It claims to have discovered the truth. The psychiatrist, or Irrenarzt, (mad-doctor) describes in his report for the state prosecutor the body of the farmhand and arsonist Josef Riessl in order to show that what was a human disaster to the "layman," - to the villagers surrounding Riessl - actually concealed the act of an idiot. From the viewpoint of the village, Riessl set fire to a neighbor's house in April 1900 to restore his own and his grandfather's honor. He had destroyed his social existence in the village, the rules of which were well known to him, with this act of revenge, through which he had sought to salvage it. But the psychiatrist's text deprives the village farmhand, step by step, of his social environment and the "story" that he is able to offer for his act, in order to decipher the truth about him and the significance of his deed in the biological substratum, in his physical being. His history is reduced to a function of a medical finding. •StAM, St Anw 1635. 58

The mad-doctor's gaze In order to record the story of the arsonist Josef Riessl, it seems necessary to write about the context in which it was lost. How did the picture of the 20-year-old as an idiot develop? How does his neurological physiognomy differ from the description of him given by his parents, his neighbors, and the villagers with whom he lived and worked? Is there a human picture to counterbalance this neurological one? The examining doctor sees Riessl's large hands and feet as signs of feeblemindedness. But the people of the village mainly speak of him in court as a good, reliable worker, as someone able to look after himself. There is no statement from anyone concerning his hands. Is it possible to separate the perception of their shape from the knowledge that he was a good worker? Do they not symbolize, with their size, a history of peasant work and the physical effort to which they bear witness? Or is it the story of a mental disease that had crept into the family over the generations without being recognized until the psychiatrist diagnosed it? After all, it is also important for the villagers to know what an aspiring member's parents and grandparents were: farmers, day laborers or drinkers and ne'er-do-wells. Indeed, their reputation was an asset for their grandchildren to manage. The experts examining arsonists were chiefly interested in what illnesses the parents had transmitted to their sons, and grandparents to their grandchildren.2 Family history becomes medical history, lodged in the convolutions of the brain and the genetic makeup, of which the grandson's oversized hands and feet are the evidence. The appearance cited as a symptom of idiocy is the prelude to a revision of the family's history within the village. The villagers, too, begin to ask, "Is it true? Didn't we always know it?" The court records show that the doctors' questions to the villagers on the mental health of one of their number invited them to take the same view of their neighbors as the doctors.3 In the case of the 21-year-old arsonist Xaver Sponer from Feldmoching, for example, people respond to the doctor's questions about his state of health in their own language. Of course there is something odd about him: He "looks funny," "was teased and made fun of," "is a dull-witted fellow," "he's not all there, he's got no talent," "a decent fellow, people used to make fun of him a lot, and most holidays he was drunk," he "showed off and tried to impress people."4 The doctor makes an offer that the villagers accept if they never got along with the person in question. "Not one of the witnesses heard, mostly farmers, considered Sponer intellectually sound." But what do the villagers mean when they call somebody a "dimwit"? Is their perception of him the same as the doctor's? Or is it only his question that makes possible the transformation from a 2 StAM, St Anw 1438, report of 6 November 1898 by the provincial court doctor on the mental state of Andreas Gradl, a 41-year-old day laborer from Murnau. 3

See also Dirk Blasius, Der verwaltete Wahnsinn. Eine Sozialgeschichte des lmnhauses (Frankfurt a.M., 1980),

p. 103, which refers to inquiries being made of relatives and neighbors if the authorities wished to confirm suspected madness. 4 StAM, St Anw 1625. He was declared mentally ill in 1900 in a report by the Munich district mental hospital.

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Peasant society and the individual "funny, dull-witted fellow, a decent guy who people used to make fun of, a clumsy person," into somebody who is mentally ill, who poses a "danger to the public," as it says in the report of the district lunatic asylum? Similarly, in the case of the 24year-old farmhand and arsonist Joseph Weinhart from Glonn, the district doctor refers to the villagers' perception before certifying mental deficiency in the form of "moral imbecility," which is especially apparent in the offender's irritability and vengefulness. But the village had a different opinion of Weinhart: "According to Constable Weser, no one in his home village considered him mentally ill or a 'dimwit,' and it was only because of his tendency to flare up and lose his temper that some people called him 'a foolish fellow.' " Furthermore, he was deemed quite a useful worker.5 The villagers' statements furnish no evidence of Josef Riessl's alleged idiocy, either; it is the doctor who supplies the "proof."6 And what becomes of this good worker? He had always had big hands. But now that he is in trouble they assume an ungainly, grotesque aspect, detaching themselves from the good farmhand, taking on a life of their own, having been isolated from the daily work of peasant society that gave them a meaning. If one attempts a portrait of Josef Riessl on the basis of the doctor's description of him, his picture dissolves into a variety of slanted and distorted components wrenched out of all proportion. The interrelations, the links between the parts, are lost. I have before me the description of an arsonist who used to be a hard-working laborer. And he looks like a monster. It is the criteria and the language of psychiatry itself that have created this cretin. The reader encounters this figure only on coming to the end of his or her researches, the doctor's report. And it is not the shape of his nose, the size of his hands and feet, or the shape of his upper jaw that conveys this version; rather, it is the way in which the body is detached from all these social circumstances of its origin, the fragmentary and sketchy perception and the impossibility of reconstituting this segmented body, that make the figure of the arsonist ridiculous in the eyes of anyone reading the report. How can a smile be anything but idiotic on a face described as grotesque? The perception that furnishes certain knowledge for one person arouses uncertainty in others. For knowledge postulates a hierarchy of meanings. Reconstructing an act of arson, the motives behind it, and its social and historical context, the historian is confronted, in the text of the psychiatric report, with an interpretation of the crime that lays claim to objectivity and seeks acceptance as a scientific analysis. My frame of reference was originally the study of a historical source, the offender's story and the social context of his life as represented in witnesses' statements; finally, the act itself and the motives behind it, as described by the arsonist himself and as perceived and interpreted by the villagers. Over the individual and his village loom the superstructure of justice and the civil code, the dis5 StAM, St Anw 1613. The district mental hospital finally diagnosed "congenital idiocy," "mental weakness," and "mental illness liable to endanger the public" in a second report in 1900. 6 StAM, St Anw 1635; cf. StAM, St Anw 1613.

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The mad-doctor's gaze course of legal procedure, the interpretation of right and wrong in a crime directed against property. The psychiatric report offers us a new level of interpretation, in opposition to that of the village peasantry and that of criminal justice. This different interpretation of the crime, which claims to present a reasoned scientific summary of the truth about the accused, is in contrast to the understanding of the community - that is, the offender's village - of the significance of the crime. The criminal record thus contains, as we shall see, two mutually exclusive views of reality. The villagers' version says, "It was revenge," and thus describes a social relationship and its history. The experts' version is "idiocy" and describes the diagnosis of a disease. If "madness is not something unequivocal and fixed, once and for all, but always the outcome of a process of definition that points back at the person doing the defining,"7 it would seem necessary to visit the place where Josef Riessl was adjudged an idiot, the place of the bourgeois psychiatrist. If we wish to form a clear idea of how his diagnosis intervenes in the village, we must find out where psychiatry derives the logic of its discipline and what Josef Riessl's story would have looked like if it had been based on the conclusions drawn in the preceding chapter.

FROM SOCIAL SYMPTOM TO PHYSICAL SYMPTOM Josef Riessl is an arsonist. At the time he was sentenced, arson was considered a typically rural crime. Most arson cases occurred in the country. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, criminologists, psychiatrists, and criminal psychiatrists had been looking into the motives for arson, seeking "a common thread, with its origins in the field of psychopathology."8 In 1817, psychiatrist Adolph Henke invented the theory of the arson urge and of "pyromania": "The fascination with fire and inclination toward arson that often manifest themselves in youthful individuals are not infrequently the result of a physical irregularity, particularly of irregular organic development at the approach or onset of manhood."9 This theory became so prevalent that the Prussian Ministry of Justice commissioned an expert report on the subject from the Scientific Deputation for Medicine. In 1824, this statement was forwarded to the courts, endorsing Henke's theory and saying that in future 'Blasius, Wahminn, p. 80. 8 Otto Kant, Beitrag zur Psychologie der Brandstiftung, in Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistilc, no. 79 (Leipzig, 1918); Otto Monkemoller, "Zur Psychopathologie des Brandstifters," in Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik, no. 48 (Leipzig, 1912), pp. 193—310; Cesare Lombroso, Der Verbrecher (Hamburg, 1890), p. m ; Reiss, "Zur Psychopathologie der Brandstifter," in Jahresversammlung del Vereim bayerischer Psychiater (Munich, 1909); Dr. Jessen, Die Brandstiftungen in Affekten und Geistesstbrungen (Kiel, i860); Heinrich Toben, Beitrage zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Brandstifter (Berlin, 1917), pp. 6—34, contains a list and a discussion of the psychiatric literature on arson of the nineteenth century and the early part of this century. For France, see Abbiateci, "Incendiaires," pp. i6ff., who shows how early arson was included among the interpretive patterns of the new science of psychiatry. See also Michel Foucault (ed.),'Mm, Pierre Rivilre, ayant (gorge"ma mire, ma soeur et mafrhre. . . (Paris, 1973). 'Adolph Henke, Kopps Jahrbuch der Staatsarzneikunde, vol. 10 (1817), p. 78; J. E. D. Esquirol, Die Geisteskrankheiten in Beziehung zur Medizin und Staatsarzneikunde, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1838), with his theory of monomania, exerted a decisive influence on the doctrine of pyromania.

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Peasant society and the individual an expert's report would have to be sought whenever arson cases of this type were tried. The Ministry of Justice ordered the courts to take this fact into account when applying paragraph 280.10 The theory of the arson urge was abandoned in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Yet there was no letup in discussion about arson's psychopathological causes and attempts to establish a scientific theory of pyromania. What was abandoned was the doctrine of a specific compulsion to commit arson, not the attempt to distinguish arsonists according to the clinical picture. Increasingly they were assigned to the most diverse categories of mental illness. This was quite in accordance with psychiatry's general state of development.11 The diagnosis was no longer simply "pyromania" and no longer focused on youthful arsonists. Congenital imbecility and mental disabilities occupied first place; the list of defects was now a long one.12 As the clinical pictures employed by psychiatry became more differentiated, in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a growing tendency to attribute all sorts of mental disorders, diseases, and "biological inferiority" to "asocial" individuals, vagrants, criminals, and others living on the fringes of society. In the meantime, criminal psychiatry had come to enjoy a higher status and took up the cause of these groups of the population. Psychiatrist Carl Wilmanns, for example, achieved fame with a book in which he sought to prove, on the basis of a scientific theory about the origin of madness, that the way of life of tramps and vagrants should be regarded as the symptom of an initially hidden, then creeping, and finally advanced form of schizophrenia - madness at its most typical.13 Someone had "finally" managed to classify and categorize these itinerant, unsettled, uncooperative, "work-shy," and yet so elusive individuals, to render the subsequent course of their lives predictable and appraise their value to society.14 At the same time, psychiatrist Karl Jaspers came to the conclusion, in his dissertation, that "morbid" homesickness was primarily a mark of degeneration in young girls, particularly servant girls from the countryside.15 In their attempts to find the pathological origins of the crime of arson, experts believed that they had traced the phenomenon back a hundred years - but contemporary psychiatry had neither the more varied and precise categories nor the acuteness and clarity that the criminal psychiatry of the second half of the nineteenth century was to develop. It was now assumed to be no longer sufficient to operate with a body of knowledge that was merely capable of identifying mental deficiency, which was obvious to all and sundry. After all, any untrained layman could do as much. They now sought to locate the foci of diseases that did not appear in the 10

See TSbben, Psychopathologie der Brandstifter, pp. 7, 10. "See the classifications of the desire to commit arson in Emil Kraepelin, Lehrbuch der Psychiatric (Leipzig, 1909). 12 Cf. Monkemoller, "Psychopathologie," p. 285. "Carl Wilmanns, Zur Psychopathologie da Lahdstreichers (Leipzig, 1905). 14 Cf. Blasius, Wahnsinn, pp. iO2ff. "Karl Jaspers, "Heimweh und Verbrechen," Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik, no. 35 (Leipzig, 1909).

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The mad-doctor's gaze open and were, for that very reason, even more of a danger to society. The courts were good enough for the "normal," "healthy" criminal. But where was the line between a normal criminal and a sick one? It was not the spectacular criminals that were the problem for criminal psychiatry. It was the small, unobtrusive, and yet numerous beggars, vagrants, the "work-shy," the "parasites," and "recalcitrants," who might not even know themselves what illness their bodies concealed. They had to be identified. The humanitarian concepts of psychiatry in the first half of the nineteenth century decreed that the insane, the beggars, and the vagrants should be cured through moral education and work. It was a reschooling through "dignity, labor, and interpersonal relations" that was not free of rigidity and a claim to absolute authority. Mental disorder had been regarded primarily as "an aberration of the morals and the will" that had to be suppressed and corrected. In the second half of the nineteenth century scientific determinism in psychiatry relinquished this possibility.16 Henceforth, mental diseases were diseases of the brain, the development of which was governed by certain natural laws. It was the intention of the new scientific approach, as summarized by Freud in 1895, " t 0 furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science, that is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making these processes perspicuous and free from contradiction."17 The dualism of body and mind had been eliminated; they were one again. The mind functioned in a similar way to the body - as did its disorders. The mind was "the 'sum total of all brain functions,' the specific energy that is the function of the brain."18 "The mentally ill person was no longer a person who behaved abnormally but an organism that functioned poorly, producing uncoordinated movements, stiff postures, fragmentary sentences, hallucinations, and deliriums devoid of meaning."19 Once it was detached from the context of guilt and morality, it was no longer a question of understanding the sick person's behavior but of decoding it and assigning it to one of the many clinical pictures. Legal case histories were taken as proof of the histories of illness. Bodies and biographies appear fragmented into incoherent entities, a procedure allied to that of the physical anthropologists, described by Edmund Leach as the method of the modern laboratory sciences and technologies, in which the first analytical step consists in breaking up a continuum into countless isolated discontinuities.20 Since "mental alienation" is then only conceived as mere "quantitative changes in the mental state," as "objective suffering that is impenetrable for the subject,"21 the suffering subject '^Giovanni Jervis, Kritisches Handbuch der Psychiatrie (Frankfurt, 1978), p. 5 1 . "Sigmund Freud, "Project for a Scientific Psychology," in The Standard Edition of the Completge Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), vol. 1, pp. 2 9 5 - 6 . Freud drew up this project before discovering psychoanalysis and never finished it. ls Klaus Dbrner, Burger und Irre. Zur Sozialgeschichte und Wissenschaftssoziologie der Psychiatrie (Frankfurt a.M., 1969), p. 369. See also Roger Smith, Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 9tT. 20 "Jervis, Handbuch, p. 5 1 . Edmund Leach, Social Anthropology (Oxford, 1982), p. 87. 21 Dorner, Biirger, p. 366.

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Peasant society and the individual is no longer capable of morality and responsibility. The classification of beggars, vagrants, "asocial" individuals, and criminals as sick and their branding as schizophrenics and degenerates by criminal psychiatry took away their responsibility both as individuals and as a group. Poverty and "degeneration" could still be blamed on the environment and the family - as hotbeds of infection and carriers of damaged genetic material. The sick man was thus no longer regarded as a historical and social personality, responsible for his own actions, which had been a key feature of psychiatry's view of man in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, with its "education of the will" and "moral treatment." Since the 1860s and W. Griesinger's theory of mental illness as a disease of the brain and his combination of psychiatric and neurological clinical practice, the right conditions had developed for an "almost 'imperialist' expansion of the area covered by psychiatry: first, in the direction of [nonpsychopathological] somatic disorders of the brain and nerves; and secondly, with even more fateful consequences, toward society in general, that is, those countless individuals whose "irrationality" has not been revealed because they never enter the institutions, concealing from society the suffering it causes them, turning in on themselves, but who now increasingly come to the attention of that ruthless diagnostic watchdog of economic liberalism, Leistungszwang [the pressure to work hard], as "weaklings" and thus begin to express their views, at least to neurologists in private practice and the clinical psychiatrist, that is, the host of "excitable weaklings," "abnormal" individuals, the "sexual perverts," the psychopaths, obsessives, neurotics, in other words the area where the demarcation between "abnormal" and "normal" is on the verge of vanishing. The first to attract Griesinger's attention were those who hide their "irrationality" behind a "facade."22 Failure to recognize mental disease in vagrants and criminals by judges, doctors, and prison staff was one of the main problems for criminal psychiatrist Carl Wilmanns, who himself worked as a prison doctor. In his view, a large proportion of workhouse inmates had to be considered mentally ill (this was published in 1905). Experience [shows] that a relatively high proportion of workhouse inmates must be considered mentally ill. One of the main reasons for this fact is the difficulty of recognizing the mental changes that, despite their crucial impact on the patient's way of life, manifest themselves quite unobtrusively, whether the disease is in its early stages or the defects are slight and acquired, as described. If the patient's outward behavior is orderly and natural, free of eccentricity and affectation, if his use of language is clear and apposite and betrays nothing unusual, there is no sign of delusions or illusions and in conversation the patient displays a certain outward alertness and vivacity, even an expert may fail to recognize the acquired weakness of mind. . . . Cases in which the acquired mental deficiency is only suggested and is solely apparent in a slight decline in willpower, initiative, and intellectual and emotional impulses are not unusual in penal institutions. The sudden and apparently unmotivated economic decline of the sick, the contradiction between their present listless, itinerant life and their previous "Ibid., p. 358. 64

The mad-doctor's gaze settled, well-ordered way of life, the contrast between the extent of all they learned at school and the poor scraps of knowledge they have picked up since, will sometimes provide the clue to the existence of dementia praecox [schizophrenia].23 The layman's inability to identify idiocy or schizophrenia was supposed to justify psychiatry's assertion that it was precisely the unobtrusive cases that required that medical experts be consulted. The director of the Royal District Lunatic Aslyum in Munich demonstrated this by means of the case of the arsonist Josef Riessl, the "apparently" normal, industrious farmhand who was well respected in the village. "Revenge" was a motive for arson that was well known to the villagers; fires started out of a desire for vengeance were an everyday occurrence, but it took the eye and ear of a psychiatrist to discover what was evidently a totally new stratum in the criminal's personality, a stratum situated below the offender's consciousness threshold and beyond the cognitive capabilities of the layman. The knowledge of the villagers, which came of experience, could not get at it; only the "specialist" could perceive the "true" nature behind the facade of the everyday. To the eye of the district "mad-doctor," Josef Riessl's outward appearance was so clearly that of an idiot: that one is positively astonished to find that it is possible to converse quite fluently with him about everyday matters, to the extent that a superficial or untrained observer would not note any mental deficiency. Given the fact that Riessl has proved quite capable until now of coping with the requirements of life in the narrow circle in which he lived and that those who know him unanimously describe him as an industrious and able worker, it is understandable that many laymen will find nothing abnormal about him. The records contain comments by Riessl relating to his crime such as, "The right wind is blowing that will do you no harm, nor Gratz either. . . ." Within the limits of his conceptual powers, Riessl undoubtedly operates with some degree of skill, and he can call on them readily when he needs to. But as soon as one starts to ask questions about things that lie beyond them but to which any sensible, normal farmer's boy would be able to give a sensible answer, albeit not the correct one, the full extent of Riessl's intellectual inadequacy becomes apparent. The formation of abstract concepts is quite rudimentary; all his ideas relate directly to the sensuous view of life and rise little above that level. . . . Similarly, the first things that strike one on examining Riessl's emotional life are exceptional phenomena, defects: extreme indifference, extreme insensitivity to all impressions. The unfamiliar life in a lunatic asylum certainly provided him with many of these, without causing him to lose his unshakable composure or even to show any real interest. He is totally deficient in what are termed the "nobler feelings"; there is no trace of repentance: "It was all Westermaier's fault, she shouldn't have run me down like that"; or "I'm just annoyed with myself for saying something that gave the game away." . . . As for his religious feelings, they are evident from his remark that "I never pray now, because the Lord made me start the fire and is leaving me locked up in here so long." . . . It sometimes happens that an individual of this type behaves well for years without evincing any bad qualities other than those also found in healthy people, until all of a sudden he commits a crime that no one who knows him would have expected and that is intelligible only to someone 23

Wilmanns, Psychopatbologie, pp. 4 0 1 - 2 .

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Peasant society and the individual who is familiar with the mentality of idiots. . . . And this is the case with the arson committed by Riessl.24 Directly opposed to the discourse of the village, of life "in the narrow circle," of property, peasant labor, and the villagers' "conceptual powers," with which Riessl was familiar and in which he was able to move freely, his "unshakable composure" and his resolute attitude toward the Lord, is another truth. It rejects the look of the "superficial and untrained observer," that of the villagers, as lies. Riessl's everyday village identity appears in the doctor's text as a spurious one, a facade, his actions and intentions as "unreality . . . routine, mechanical, imitated"; the "mentality of the idiot" had been waiting beneath this surface to erupt and wreak havoc. Riessl's relationship with his surroundings, with his act, and with the Lord is thoroughly down to earth. But the doctor sees this down-to-earth quality chiefly as a symptom of deficiency: "the formation of abstract concepts is quite rudimentary," as "all his ideas relate directly to the sensuous view of life." The nineteenth-century mad-doctor had no use for the down to earth: It is "equated with the trivial"25 and does not merit further consideration. "Everyday things" - the ideas, feelings, and images in all their complexity - are eradicated by the "exceptional phenomena" and "defects" that the doctor finds in Josef Riessl, entirely on the "higher levels": in his inability to form "abstract concepts," the development of "what are termed the nobler feelings," religiosity. From this angle, "unshakable composure" is bound to appear as no more than a deficit and be interpreted as emptiness, indifference, and insensitivity. There is no space left, no space for ambiguity and fantasy, to guard an ambiguous inner world initially inaccessible to the "stranger."26 Is it not possible that the composure of this "idiot" was the silence that was Riessl's way of rejecting the logic of the mad-doctor's questions? Indeed, was the latter capable of recognizing rationality that did not follow the laws of his own? Did Riessl perhaps give "sensible" answers that followed a different scheme of things from the doctor's and were bound per se to disqualify his "higher capabilities" in the doctor's eyes? The psychiatrist tests Riessl's capacity for abstract thought, but did he also pose the question of "how" Riessl's thinking might operate and whether his actions followed causal patterns that were different from those that the "civilized" citizen would consider relevant to himself?27 What remains is simply the "truth" of the scientist. "I never pray any more," Josef Riessl told the psychiatrist, "because the Lord made me start the fire and is leaving me locked up in here so long." This prompts the psychiatrist to observe that his religious feelings were underdeveloped. Riessl appears to have lost his religious feelings, but what are his feelings now? He seems godforsaken, but at the level of a tremendously close, concrete relationship with God. God was already involved in Riessl's arson ("The Lord made me start the fire"): the originator, as it were, the vehicle of a fateful power that challenged Riessl. God is 24

StAM, St Anw 1635. "Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York, 1985). See also the diagnosis of imbecility in StAM, St Anw 1613. For a critique of the ethnocentric position expressed here, see also Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 8-9, and Favret-Saada, WSrter, 1 if. 26 27

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The mad-doctor'5 gaze an integral part of the scheme of things under which his arson was inevitable. Riessl had not lost his religious feelings, but the orderly relationship between him and God seems to have become disrupted. By leaving him to languish in the asylum for so long, he has overdrawn his credit with the farmhand. Josef Riessl had ended up in the district lunatic asylum in Munich when he.started to blaspheme against God, refusing to pray to him any more because "he is leaving me locked up in here so long." In order to diagnose "disease," an observation unit had been set up, as called for by W. Griesinger in his efforts to combine the lunatic asylum and the nerve clinic. 28 Only there - under the eye of the specialist, stripped of the concealing, deceptive, and deceived surroundings - would the substratum be revealed as something different from what the layman might see or the patient himself feel. "It is as easy for someone with psychiatric training to recognize the defects of an idiot like him {Riessl] as it is difficult to convince the judge and jury of their existence." The process of looking for clues turned out to be a series of contradictions of the perceptions of laymen, from the villagers to the judge. Attention was now focused on the description of bodies, physiognomies, and behavior and its codes. The "true" figure takes shape in these notes; the language of gestures reveals its meanings. After his unmasking in the lunatic asylum, the face of Riessl the farmhand is shown to be the face of an idiot. 29 His grimaces and physical ungainliness are evidence of the biological-historical substratum: hereditary disease, degeneration. For Wilmanns, the clowning around of a vagrant simpleton is evidence of the schizophrenia affecting vagrants: Finally it should be mentioned that the often highly characteristic peculiarities of many mentally ill people in terms of behavior, posture, and movements generally go unnoticed or are misinterpreted. The mannerisms mentioned above - the grimaces and face-making, the fixed stare, the rolling and winking of the eyes, the curious signs of embarrassment, the rubbing and tugging of clothes, fingers, and beard, the stroking of the hair, the restlessness of the limbs, the nervous and aimless movements, the eccentric and ridiculous gait and posture - are all phenomena, the diagnostic significance of which can be properly appreciated only by the expert, while the layman will generally disregard them or see them as inconsequential peculiarities.30 "Familiar instinctual acts" and "morbid impulses" such as "laughing at prayers," "whistling in the workshop," and "singing in the cell" were types of behavior that were often mistaken for indiscipline in workhouses and prisons. Even what doctors and supervisors interpreted as defiance and recalcitrance were finally recognized by the experts as physical symptoms. Resistance was merely the "sign" of something that lay deeper and had to be deciphered: the imprint of character changes that stemmed from malfunctions and changes in the brain. This "otherwise tractable and peaceable character," whose conduct before the onset of the psychosis had been "very 28

Cf. Blasius, Wahnsinn, pp. 43-4. 'Cf. Chap. 1, note 77, and the quotation at the opening of this chapter. For a counterpart of the bourgeois perception of "peasant physiognomies" in the educated, see Riehl, "Volkskunde," pp. 58-9. 30 Wilmanns, Psychopathologie, pp. 401-2. 2

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Peasant society and the individual good," was suddenly transformed into an "intractable lunatic": impertinence, insolence, disobedience, contradiction, refusal to work, unbearable behavior, abuse, disputes, fighting, and so on, were considered symptoms of the patient's alienation from his healthy personality. 31 Wilmanns describes this process of "alienation" through one case which he regards as typical of a vagrant. He sees the transition from the "normal," healthy state to the pathological state as a fluid one. He wishes to describe the development of dementia praecox, or schizophrenia. In his hands, this text turns into a sort of broadsheet about a young "citizen" full of hope who became a "noncitizen" and eventually "had to" end up tramping the roads. Before the crisis the individual had still been at one with his environment and with the expectations it had of him. An almost imperceptible process of change then sets in, chiefly evident in the social behavior and intellectual interests of the henceforth sick man. According to Wilmanns, the people close to him are helpless in the face of these changes; it is for the doctor to interpret them. "Only gradually does the idea take shape that we are in the presence of a serious pathological disorder." Wilmanns describes schizophrenia, the divided self, as a splitting away from the patient/lunatic-to-be's parental home and circle of acquaintances. He translates the process of alienation into the process of going mad in the scientific sense.32 It has been said that especially after Griesinger's theories in the second half of the nineteenth century, psychiatry was also concerned to extend the area of pathology to cover the "inconspicuous," hard-to-spot - and hence all the more dangerous - groups of the population. But why was it arsonists (along with other groups) that attracted the attention of criminal psychiatry? There is a vast amount of nineteenth-century literature on the subject. What are the contents of the discourse on arson? Monkemoller assumes that "the whole nature of arson, even where it stems from normal motives, differs not inconsiderably from other crimes and is characterized by a number of peculiarities that are quite consistent with many abnormal patterns of thought." 33 Finally he questions one of the key motives for arson, revenge, as an explanation. The act of revenge, earlier the visible evidence of a social relationship, is now attributed to the individual personally as vengefulness or an addiction. It has become a pathological character trait, blotting out the real substance of social conflicts in peasant societies.

FEMALE ARSONISTS AND P U B E R T Y The peasant world figures in psychiatry's attempted explanations in another way. The authors of the texts point out that the majority of the arsonists are of peasant origin, especially from the lower peasant strata and the servant class. To a certain extent, then, we may regard these texts as descriptions of pathologies within these "Ibid., pp. 407-8; cf. StAM, St Anw 1613. "Monkemoller, Psychopathologie, p. 296.

32

Wilmanns, Psychopathohgie, p. 346.

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The mad-doctor's gaze strata. The fact that the generalizations in the individual articles nevertheless make a mockery of all statistics clearly demonstrates the contrived nature of theories of the compulsion to commit arson. Although women and girls comprise only a relatively small proportion of all arsonists, a sizable part of the literature concentrates on this group. Generally speaking, they were "immature country girls of low intelligence," particularly maidservants suffering from homesickness.34 Arson was considered a typical homesickness crime. In his dissertation "Homesickness and Crime," Karl Jaspers studied this aspect of arson at the beginning of this century. For him, pathological homesickness is not a specific psychosis but one reaction among many "in constitutionally weak, degenerate individuals." He saw homesickness as a degenerate phenomenon. The precondition for it was a comparatively childlike stage of development. Confined social conditions, rural life far from the life of the cultural centers, probably allow the childlike state of mind to survive longer. As far as our figures show, our homesick criminals are country girls, the children of poor parents. . . . It is not so much a narrow horizon or immorality that one encounters in homesick criminals but the restriction of feelings to childish areas of life.35 In the literature, the homesick are repeatedly compared with the "savage": Love of one's home is evinced most emphatically by all the uncivilized peoples. The savage's way of life is well suited to strengthening his first ties, which sweet familiarity make dearer to him than life itself. The instinct that constantly summons him back to nature allows him to see nothing in the world but the districts where he has caught his prey, the brook in which he has slaked his thirst, the moss on which he rested, the hut in which he has slept. The repeated impression of these things - the stronger, the less they vary - identifies him with the same, imperceptibly forming the indestructible and touching bonds that shackle the simple peoples to the land of their birth.36 This nostalgic sketch of the "noble savage," a metaphor for the homesick maidservant from the country, accords with the comparison of melancholy, in which the brain constitutes the seat of "conscious" emotional activity, with homesickness and nostalgia, in which the medulla oblongata and the spinal marrow serve as the bearers of the "instinctual" inner life.37 Implicit in this comparison is the culturenature dichotomy: on the one hand, civilized man as the ideal type of the bourgeois West; on the other, the backward individual untouched by civilization and cleaving to nature with a "predominantly unconscious inner life."38 But it was this 34 T6bben, Beitrage, p. 23; Harms Gross, Kriminalpsychologie (Leipzig, 1905), p . 92; Martin, Brandstiftung undHeimweh, Archiv fiir Kriminalanthropologie, no. 20 (Leipzig, 1905); Carl Wilmanns, "Heimweh oder impulsives Irresein," Monatsschrifi fur Kriminalpsychologie 3 (1905), 150. "Jaspers, "Heimweh," p. 69. '^Quoted from ibid., p. 17. " O n the psychiatric discourse on melancholia, see also Wolf Lepenies, Melancholic und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a.M., 1969), pp. 2ioff. 38 See Karl Figlio, "Chlorosis and Chronic Disease in 19th Century Britain: The Social Constitution of Somatic Illness in a Capitalist Society," International Journal of Health Services, 8 (1978), 593.

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Peasant society and the individual very "unconsciousness" that was behind the uncontrollability and unpredictability of sudden "outbreaks" of nostalgia. In 1855, psychiatrist L. Meyer finally repudiated the romantic components that had characterized the interpretation of homesickness until then and noted the "absurdity" of describing it as the yearning of a tender mind. His account of the backward savage in his own country is not without contempt. Through the example of five maidservants who had left their parental homes for the first time and gone into service in the city, he attempts to demonstrate that homesickness is a "passive asthenic mental disorder." 39 Its symptoms are said to be the symptoms of an individual deficiency, the debility of an intelligence deprived of one of its customary supports, due to a constricted way of life and occupation. The isolated life and the dull-witted tedium predestine a person. He then sketches the picture of these apathetic creatures, living in the country in "isolated farmhouses behind trees and hedges with a very restricted horizon," finally felling into a sort of trance when they are suddenly brought into contact with an entirely new world. "Just as their palates are unable to overcome their aversion to a new dish, their brains are unable to cope with a large number of alien objects."40 Disagreements at work he saw as manifestations of this backwardness and weakness. Meyer proceeds from a state of urban complexity and rapidity, which, though of comparatively recent date, he elevates to a "natural state." In the light of this, it is hardly surprising that "peasant superstition" and witchcraft enter the psychiatric register of mental disorders in connection with arson and fires.41 J. L. Casper42 gives a more far-reaching account of arson by maidservants, though in his version domestic service is once again regarded as actual, concrete work. He calls a spade a spade, from the point of view of the master and mistress. He moralizes, where the previous interpreter naturalized. Indolence and laziness, dislike of hard service, and the desire for freedom and independence — in his view it was factors such as these that constituted the motives for arson. Casper finally approaches the gloomy, treacherous, work-shy, and asocial figure of the "arson type," as described by Reiss at the beginning of this century. 43 This type has the characteristics usually attributed to the vagrant. Crucially, however, it was precisely these vagrants that at the end of the last century were described as schizophrenic, as the victims of incurable mental decay, on the basis of these "symptoms." Similarly, at the beginning of the twentieth century homesickness is stigmatized in Jaspers' work on 39 See also Regina Schulte, "Dienstmadchen im herrschaftlichen Jaisjajt. Zir Gemese ojre Sozialpsychologie," Zeitschrift fur bayerische Landesgeschichte 41 (1978), 879—920. 40

Ibid., p . 23. Mbnkemoller, "Psychopathologie," p. 211; Dr. Hellwig, "Brandstiftungen aus Aberglauben," Monatsschrift fiir Kriminalpsychologie 6 (1910); even in the early modern period, medicine had put forward scientific alternatives to common demonological explanations of certain conditions. See Esther Fischer-Homberger, Medizin vor Gericht, Gerichtsmedizin von der Renaissance bis zur Aufklarung (Bern, 1983), p. 143. On the perception of ethnologists — as late as the second half of the twentieth century — of the peasants of western France, see Favret-Saada, Wbrter, pp. 1 0 - 1 1 . 42 J. L. Casper, Denkwiirdigkeiten zur medizinischen Statistik und Staalsarzneikunde. Das Gespenst des sogenannten Brandstiftungstriebes (Berlin, 1846). 43 Reiss, "Psychopathologie." 41

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The mad-doctor's gaze "Homesickness and Crime" with the label of "degeneration," which disregards all individual cases and subsumes everything under the abstract concept of illness. 44 A vital element in the psychiatric discussion of homesickness as a trigger for the compulsion to commit arson is the focus that was placed on puberty. After the transition from the parental home to service - for many maidservants at the turn of the century synonymous with the move from the country to the city, from their peasant surroundings to a strange, urban household — came the transition from childhood to adulthood, or, in the language of psychiatry, from the "unconscious, instinctual life" of the child to the conscious life of the cultivated, socially well-adjusted, and working adult. 45 The psychiatric literature regarded puberty as a dangerous time, an indication of things to come. It is the beginning of the vagrant's schizophrenia, the parting of the ways between madness and normality. In Emil Kraepelin's interpretation - he is the founder of the doctrine of dementia praecox - puberty is the period of the most rapid development of "hereditary degeneration." 46 Most important, however, it was through puberty that psychiatrists raised the issue of sexuality. The descriptions in some works are like evocations of a mythical danger: Furthermore, it is known that the tendency to commit arson appears in both sexes precisely in the years of puberty. Quite certainly it is the dark sexual impulses to which I have repeatedly returned that afflict human beings at this time, tormenting them and in such cases unleashing the sadistic delight of the destructive urge.47 To begin with, there is an undefined urge to destroy; then, aggravated by the influence of disturbances in the sexual development of young persons of the female sex, . . . owing to a disturbed puberty, to chlorosis, to consequent neuroses and emotional disorders, often objectivized as homesickness and linked with feelings of anxiety, tricks of the senses and fixed ideas as the leitmotivs of the deed, in female individuals acts of arson play a prominent part.48 Although initially the fires stem from the innocent urge of "semiinfantile creatures," all the texts that deal with this issue gravitate toward female sexuality. Just ''''Jaspers, "Heimweh"; Jaspers' descriptions of the lives of homesick servant girls evince concern and sympathy, yet all he can do is fit them into his rigid psychiatric pattern. 45 In the village the girls normally integrated into the group of young people. Their workplaces were near the homes of their parents, and their futures were, to a certain extent, predictable. Their puberty was accompanied by the demonstrations of the customs and rigid social control that characterized their later positions as village women. But the village world also had a tradition of coping with departure and homesickness. This is impressively demonstrated by the wedding rituals in which preindustrial European peasant societies formalized the bride's weeping as an integral part of the transition from the parental home to the bridegroom's; these survived into the twentieth century. See Ina-Maria Greveras, Der temitoriale Menscb: tin literaturanthropologischer Versuch zum Heimatphanomen (Frankfurt a.M., 1972), on the bride's departure in peasant societies. See also Michael Miteterauer, Sozialgeichicbte der Jugend (Frankfurt a.M., 1986), pp. 60-1, and David Lowenthal, "Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory," Geographical Review 14 (1975). 24 ^Kraepelin, Psycbiatrie. Ein Lehrbuch fiir Studierende und Aerzte (Leipzig, 1896), p. 87, on the general laws governing "hereditary degeneration." 47 Erich Wulfen, Der Sexualverbrecher (Berlin, 1910), p. 330. 48 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Gerichtliche Psychopathologie (Stuttgart, 1892), quoted in Monkemoller, "Psychopathologie," p. 202. 71

Peasant society and the individual as in pregnancy a woman enters a state of "curious desires," so "menstrual disorders," particularly in puberty, could lead to states of unpredictability.49 Youthful and female sexuality is associated with a destructive urge, the origins of which are presumed to lie in the "obscurity" of undomesticated instincts. Indeed, Iwan Bloch sees the bright red of the fire as the symbol of this explosive destructiveness that is rooted in sexuality. In his Psychopathia Sexualis he classifies the urge to commit arson among the perversions.50 Time and again it is the lack of an intelligence able to master the instincts that comes to occupy center stage in the psychiatric discussion of the arson urge. It is the basis of the arsonist's "otherness" and asocial character. Inability to control one's urges is interpreted as a series of brain dysfunctions in conjunction with "pathologizing" environments. And, like arson out of homesickness, arson for revenge is also subject to these interpretations.51 The desire for vengeance was the key motive for rural arson. Country judges might still be acquainted with the economic and mental background to such acts of arson. In the interpretive procedures of psychiatry, the background disappeared as an economic and moral factor and, with it, the substance of the social conflicts of peasant society. Revenge was translated into vengefulness, a morbid character trait that was attributed to the individual. The observation that the motive was out of all proportion to the damage done had, to a certain extent, already diverted attention from the social and personal dramas behind acts of arson. It was hard to compare money and feelings. Nonetheless, the calculations of damage in court records - estimates of the number of livestock, the quantity of grain, hay, and so on - still revealed social and economic differences and relationships between the arsonists and their victims. But now along came psychiatry and claimed no longer to perceive the crime but the criminal, not the act of vengeance as an act of social behavior but the "disease" of vengefulness. It was not concerned, as the arsonist and the judge were, with right and wrong but with the clinical classification of the arsonist's asocial nature. As different pathological categories were distinguished toward the end of the nineteenth century, psychiatric interpretations became increasingly biological. The compulsion to commit arson gave way to a variety of mental disorders. As a result, motives for arson that had previously been considered "normal" were now given a psychiatric classification. "To gain insight into the psychology of the arsonist, one would have to study a whole series of arsonists without any omission, being particularly

careful to include in this exploration those who still wear the mask of the 'normal' arsonist."52 Above all, this applied to the many who had started fires to exact revenge. "Vengefulness" might be a "symptom" of the most diverse diseases. This is impres4 'Gross, Kriminalpsychohgie, pp. 419-20; Monkemoller, "Psychopathologie," p. 226; Wollenberg, "Die forensisch-psychiatrische Bedeutung des Menstruationsprozesses," fAonatsschriftfllrKriminalpsychohgie 2 (1906), 44-50; Biittel, "Menstruationsanomalien und Brandstiftung," Hitzigs Annalen 1844, vol. 28, P- 350

Iwan Bloch, Beitrage zur Aetiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis (Dresden, 1903), vol. 2, p. 117.

51

Cf. Monkemoller, "Psychopathologie," p. 208.

72

"Ibid., p. 205. Italics added.

The mad-doctor's gaze sively demonstrated in analysis of 240 cases of arson compiled by psychiatrist Otto Monkemoller early in the century, including cases of arson motivated by "vengefulness." His list of deficiencies had indeed grown. Homesickness joined vengefulness as one of the designations that actually denied the last remaining social links implicit in the terms themselves. The diagnoses were now: imbecility, idiocy, retarded development, dementia praecox (schizophrenia), dementia paranoides, mania, melancholia, epilepsy, hysteria, degenerative psychosis, general ethical degeneration, and so on.53 In the face of the schematic scientific definitions of ill and healthy, normal and abnormal, the peasant world's paradigm for interpreting revenge, homesickness, and the special crimes had become irrelevant. In fact, the village's "superstitious" and "backward" world view became suspected of possessing pathological traits itself. The peasant origins disappeared from the faces of the farmhands, maids, day laborers, farmers' sons, and craftsmen who belonged - like the majority of vagrants - to the rural underclass. As sick people they became interchangeable; the mesh of the social network from which they came seemed to have disintegrated. As the opposites of all that is healthy and normal (the definitions of which psychiatry had appropriated, from the outset, on behalf of bourgeois society), they were now reclassified, detached from the real significance of their "differentness," and thus rendered controllable. Furthermore, society no longer needed to go in dread of them — not simply because the incomprehensible and "irrational" had found a rational explanation in them but because they no longer had anything to say about the society that felt threatened by them.

CATHARSIS OR DISEASE? "It ends in defeat, because you can only take revenge on those who are your own. Those two up there belong to another time. They are our prisoners, and yet no revenge is possible. They would never know what we were avenging."54 Thus speaks a peasant to his horse in a story by John Berger. The peasant had realized that the two inspectors, who - against all the village rules - had charged him with illegally distilling schnaps and whom he had now locked up in a goat shed, were incapable of understanding what he was doing to them. He had been unable to humiliate them. Can the doctor of the Munich district lunatic asylum understand the story related to him in fragments by Josef Riessl?551 shall recapitulate it, this time from Riessl's own vantage point, that of the village. He set fire to his neighbor's house because she had accused him and his grandfather of stealing peat. Like him and his grandfather, she also belonged to the village "Ibid., p. 285ff. John Berger, "The Value of Money," in Berger, Pig Earth (New York, 1979), p. 100. "SrAM, St Anw 1635. )4

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Peasant society and the individual lower class, and, like his own family she ran a small farm and depended on day labor to supplement her income. Riessl managed well in the village and was described by those who knew him as an "industrious and able worker." He also knew how dangerous a fire could be, was aware of his responsibility and ensured that the right wind was blowing so that his fire raising did not damage anyone else's property. An accusation of theft could have serious consequences for him within the village community and might become even more threatening to his livelihood if transformed by gossip into "common knowledge." A thief despised property, the material basis of survival. A thief would not long find any work in the village, if there were enough other workers available. And Josef Riessl knew this. The neighbor's charge was all the more serious in that she included his grandfather. She had thus branded them as family, not just Riessl as an individual. If the grandfather and the grandson were thieves, the family honor was called in question. Riessl's arson contained several levels of meaning as an act of vengeance. He was paying the neighbor back for what she had done to him and his family; he was now damaging the basis of her livelihood and thus restoring the material balance. Furthermore, by committing arson he was, as it were, publicly bringing an action against her and accusing her of being a liar. This countercharge was, simultaneously, an attempt to restore the family honor in the eyes of the village. He had evidently taken the prison sentence into account from the very outset. It was part of the damage that the neighbor had inflicted on him and the price that he was prepared to pay for his own honor and that of his family. He announced the fire in advance; it was in his interest to be recognized as the arsonist and for his message to be understood. But how was Josef Riessl supposed to convey the logic of his actions to the doctor? And did he want to? There can be no dialogue — or at any rate, hardly any dialogue - between the psychiatrist and the arsonist. They belong to two different cultures, they are strangers to each other, and they mean fundamentally different things when they talk about arson. Each of them speaks his own language, and both talk about themselves. And the village, too, which after all had handed the arsonist over to the law, was not primarily marginalizing a madman, even if he was considered a "dimwit," but stressing the fact that the avenging fire posed a basic threat to peasant property. The psychiatrists' texts on arson also speak of danger, and this appears to be symbolized in the figure of the arsonist. But what is it that is endangered? Is it the house, the village community? Rather, it is the unknown, the alien, the irrational and difficult to define, wildness that was liable to penetrate bourgeois society, to penetrate through to its very core. The threat is ultimately given female features and has to do with sexuality. The image of the homesick maidservants arriving in the city in puberty, entering the bourgeois household, carrying within them a fragment of destructive "wildness" and setting the household aflame, conveys the terror and the compulsiveness with which the new hegemonial culture looks out for 74

The mad-doctor's gaze 56

its own security. The "red glow of fire" was liable to flare up in the very place where the bourgeoisie kept these highly dangerous instincts domesticated. It is probably precisely this fantasy that gave arson such importance in the field of psychiatry. It draws on fascination and fear. Just as the core of the threat can become naturalized and the subject of a universal, scientific concept, those who are identified as its carriers - the still "semisavage" peasants, the lower classes, and the young girls from the country - also become part of a natural world that it is up to bourgeois culture to civilize. The specialists identify the danger in the bodies of those concerned: the arsonists and the homesick adolescent girls. Here, in the body, which appears as if reduced to its physical functions, the terror can be described: in the monstrous features of the arsonist Riessl, for instance. And having been described, categorized, and classified, it is exorcized. The healing or storage must be undertaken by bourgeois society itself, with its psychiatrists, because the village, the laymen, are not able to perceive the "illness" in the first place, and having been declared incompetent, they must also be relieved of responsibility. The criteria for judging what is "normal" and "healthy" are in the hands of those who define the natural state, the cultural requirements, and the ability to function, and they will reconstitute the fragmented body in accordance with their own perceptions. At first, however, it might appear as if the peasant arsonist was unaffected by the efforts going on around him. The silence and the "equanimity" of the arsonist Riessl must have been interpreted by the district mad-doctor as another symptom of his disease. But perhaps it was just that the arsonist had regained his inner peace. His language was the fire, and his speech was addressed not to the doctor but to the peasant, the village, the family, and sometimes the Lord God. And he wanted to assume that he had been understood, because he had involved them all in his tragedy. In the statements of the accused people to the mad-doctor and their laments for their ruined lives, few evince much guilt: "There is little trace of remorse";57 rather, they respond to the interest shown by the questioner. Perhaps it is more accurate to see their speech as a sign that after the fire they had rediscovered their language and were once again able to perceive their reality, however terrible it may have looked. "See also Regina Schulte, Sperrbezirke. Tugendhaftigkeit und Prostitution in dtr biirgtrlichtn Welt (Frankfurt a.M., 1979), p. 119fF.; Karin Walser, Dienstmadchen. Frauearbeit und Weiblicbkeitsbilder um 1900

(Frankfurt a.M., 1985), pp. 57fF.; Leonore Davidoff, "Class and Gender in Victorian England," in Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan, and Judith Walkowitz (eds.), Sex and Class in Women's History (London, 1983), pp. 17-72"StAM, St Anw 1635; cf. StAM, St Anw 1613.

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PART II

The status of women and the place of children

The bridal wagon

But when we arrived at the form, there stood a huge open-frame wagon, decked out with ribbons, greenery, and garlands, adorned with jugs and pictures, and laden with the household goods of the future Mrs. Lackenschuster. Pride of place in the center was taken by the four-poster bed, with its well-filled down pillows and bedspreads; in front of it, the cradle was prominently displayed, and on it the richly carved house-altar. Behind all this stood the wardrobe, doors wide open, boasting all sorts of silk petticoats and fashionable gowns, heavy bales of linen bound with braided linen thread interlaced with ribbons, silk shawls, splendid prayer books, and cleverly wrought wax tapers. From the wardrobe doors hung rosaries, scapulars, and a profusion of holy pictures. . . The wagon was drawn by six oxen, Sonnenreuth's seamstress allowed herself to be lifted up to the spinning wheel, the cow of the late Mrs. Irscher came trotting out of the cow shed, adorned with garlands and bunches of flowers, led by the local carpenter. . . . As the wagon left Watzling for Pellham it was an impressive sight to behold, and everybody said that Reischl's prospective wife had put together a splendid dowry.1

The procession of the bridal wagon (Kammerwagen or Kuchelwagen) through the village, accompanied by musicians, is a spectacle and a statement. The bridal wagon's journey from the bride's house to the bridegroom's a few days before the church ceremony not only marks the beginning of a great feast, a peasant wedding, which was celebrated on a grand scale by the bridal couple, their families and kin, the servants of the farms involved, and by the village. The bridal wagon is the symbol and tangible expression of a complex process of circulation within the farming community. At the same time, the procession is always the conclusion and outcome of a successful transaction. First, in Upper Bavaria, where the eldest son inherits all, it is preceded by the transfer of the farm from one generation to the next and the buying out of his brothers and sisters. Second, it is the sign of a successful quest for a bride. Finding the "right" bride was equally subject to the rules of the peasant economy as the transfer of the farm from parents to son. The lavishness of the wagon showed how much the bride was contributing to her future household, what sort of dowry she had. The cash contribution had already been the subject of nego'Christ, "Mathias Bichler" (1914), p. 337; see also the description of a Kuchelwagen journey in Karl von Leoprechting, Bauernbrauch und Volksglaubi in Oberbayem (1855; Munich, 1975), p. 218.

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Status of women and place of children tiations prior to the wedding. Just as she had first visited the farm of her future husband, he had been handed documentary evidence of her wealth. Marriages were contracted between equals, and women and property circulated within a specific stratum of peasant society. The timing of the transfer and the wedding was not haphazard; after all, the prospect of a "favorable" marriage had played a crucial part in the decision to hand over the farm to the son. A bride had been found whose dowry was at least equivalent to the dowry that one of the family's own daughters would receive. The transfer thus entailed monitoring the marriage procedure. The bigger the farm, the more necessary it was to monitor the marriage - and the harder it was to find an appropriate bride. The young farmer knew the size of the farm from which she came; he knew down to the last penny how big her dowry would be; and he knew that she was in good health and capable of hard work. He could take it for granted that she knew how to run a farm and how to command the respect of the servants; she had learned these things at home.2 Through the information network of his family and kin and from the news that emerged when the farmers got together at the market, he knew what sort of reputation the family had. After all, he was allying this family with his own through his marriage, a link that was supposed to increase its power and influence. People's perception of the bride's beauty was inseparable from these factors, and from their opinion of her as a prospective farmer's wife. Affection would grow during the course of the marriage and as the children arrived - and this was safer, too.3 Love was something for young people but nothing on which to base a marriage. People in love were fools, said an old Upper Bavarian folk song, and everyone could see as much.4 But the bridal wagon was also symbolic of the inner workings of the new household. It denoted the place to be occupied by the bride. First, it demonstrated that she had already spun, woven, and made things during her youth. Second, it showed what her duties were to be from now on. Last, it testified to her ability to perform these duties. Not only had she made these bales of linen herself; her trousseau was "splendid." This was how the women of the village assessed the young farmer's wife's capacity for work and the delicacy of her fingers. The aesthetic value of these peasant objects was inseparable from their utilitarian value. The life of the young girls was preparation for their subsequent duties as mistresses of their own peasant households. They learned their skills while living at home with their parents or as farm servants in the homes of others.5 At the end of the nineteenth century, the cradle, the linen, the spinning wheel, the household equipment, and the cow still comprised a powerful symbolic description of the work of a farmer's wife. At the same time, these "goods" were the bride's personal contribution to her future home. Her babies would lie in the cradle, the family and servants would eat the food cooked in the pots, her linen would cover the bridal couple's bed and the festive table, and the 2

Cf. Thoma, "Hochzeit," pp. 223—4. 'Yvonne Verdier, Dm Frauen. Das Leben auf dem Dorf (Stuttgart, 1982), p. 318. 4 Kiem Pauli (ed.), Altt Oberbayerische Volkslieder (Munich, 1934; reprinted 1980), pp. 24off. 'See Chap. 4.

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Bridal wagon cow would bring forth a new generation of calves and supply the farm with milk and butter. The moment the young wife moved in, the hearth would pass to her. The bridal wagon's procession was a statement about the bride's origins and her Rechtmassigkeit, or "legitimacy" - that is to say, a demonstration that her origins, as evidenced by the way the wagon was equipped and the wealth with which it was laden, befitted the farm of which she was about to become mistress. But since the bridal wagon was also the symbolic equivalent of what the bridegroom was offering her, it was also a statement about his status and property. The witness of this public announcement was the village. The journey of the bridal wagon documented the couple's status and household, setting the standard by which the village would henceforth judge them. "Respectability" was linked to the measure of agreement between their external self-portrayal and its material substance. A small farmer who put on a lavish wedding such as better became his wealthier neighbor showed that he did not know his place, and for having introduced an element of uncertainty into the village's perception of the status quo he lost credibility. In the final analysis, the festive progress of the bridal wagon and the whole wedding ritual in and for the village was more than the presentation of a new household; it was an affirmation and confirmation of the village order. Thus it was not merely part of the wedding of an individual couple but a statement by the village itself. It was not the bride who sat on the bridal wagon but the village seamstress, who had helped the bride prepare her trousseau. And it was not the bridegroom who followed the wagon but the carpenter who had made the couple's wardrobe and bed. The village documented its role in bringing about the wedding; it had been directly productive in setting up the new household. Finally, it was a public figure in the village — the Hochzeitslader — who had summoned people to the festivity and announced the official "legend" of the marriage. The village was more than the audience; it was one of the actors. The wedding ritual was at once a stage play and a moment of total material truth. For the majority of young women in the village, however, one of these processions was "a demoralizing sight..., because one of these wagons represented more wealth than anyone from the lower classes could ever dream of accumulating."6 It attested to the diversity of village relations, which formed a hierarchy. It put on display the gender relations in the village and the actual conditions in which they were embedded, at an appropriate moment for showing things in their proper "order." Nonetheless, the poorer people such as cottagers, day laborers, and small craftsmen were also members of this structure and had a part in its symbolic representation. Clearly, their daughters were unable to put on the lavish display of a rich farmer's daughter, but Lena Christ, who herself witnessed processions like this as a little girl, 'Fintan M. Phayer, Religion und das gewb'hnliche Volk in Bayern in derZeit von 1750—1850 (Munich, 1970), pp. 162-3. On the interpretation of peasant wedding processions and their symbolic meaning within the village structure, see also Nicole Belmont, "The Symbolic Function of the Wedding Procession in the Popular Rituals of Marriage," in R. Foster et al. (eds.), Ritual, Religion, and the Sacred, Selections from Annales Economies, Socittls, Civilisations, vol. 7 (Baltimore, 1982), pp. 1—7. 8l

Status of women and place of children shows how important this ritual must have been to the women: "I don't know if it's like that still, but in those days it was customary for poor brides to ask their richer friends for the loan of their household treasures, so that the bridal wagon was not lacking in splendor when it was driven so publicly through all the streets."7 The time it took for young men and women to reach the stage of actually getting married varied. But it was a long and difficult path; just how difficult is shown by the stories of women for whom it proved a dead end. 'Christ, "Matthias Bichler," p. 342.

82

Silent births

During 1894, 30 women charged with killing their newborn, illegitimate babies appeared before the assize courts in Munich. With the aid of fragments from the "criminal" biographies of such women, contained in a total of only 60 public prosecutors' records, from 1878 to 1910, in the state archives in Munich, I shall attempt to shed some light on the social and psychological conditions that made infanticide possible. In criminal law, the act of infanticide was and is an offense under section 217 of the Penal Code, which is based on a "natural" conception of the mother—child relationship and thus takes material and psychological conditions into account only insofar as they constitute mitigating or aggravating circumstances. Infanticide emerges as an individual psychiatric aberration or as a deviation from nature, which itself is intrinsically immutable. In contrast to the interpretations of the courts, I shall attempt to describe infanticide as an event with its roots in everyday life and work. Using the findings and observations of the police and the criminal justice system, as preserved in the records of the Munich assize courts, I set out to reconstruct the subjective, emotional, and material significance of love affairs, motherhood, and maternal love in the context of the social network and labor. As a consequence of this way of regarding the issue, the criminal or legal aspect of infanticide almost completely disappears from the analysis. But it remains there, nevertheless, detached from the social biographies of these women, becoming a reality only when they are brought before the court and sent to prison.

WOMEN WHO COMMITTED INFANTICIDE The 60 women in the records of the Munich assize court accused of infanticide had, with one exception, been born in the country and grown up there. They were the children of rural lower-class families with a small plot of land. The records show their parents' occupation or their rank within the hierarchy of peasant landowners. Only one of the women, a farmer's daughter, came from a better-off background; the parents of the others included 14 cottagers, 4 day laborers, a woodworker, a 83

Status of women and place of children miner, and a quarry worker, and 13 craftsmen and small tradesmen who plied their trade in the villages: cobbler, cabinetmaker, plumber, miller, bricklayer, tailor, innkeeper, and so forth. In 7 cases, the names of the women's unmarried mothers are given, and in 2 cases the names of the foster parents. In 16 cases, the records make no mention of the parents, though the place of birth and place of residence are known. 1 The life of this segment of the rural population — from which most women who committed infanticide came - ranged from poor to wretched, depending on the size of the property, the nature of the soil, and the profitability of their extra jobs. Tied down by owning land, they were not mobile enough to find work in the new industries. After all, their little plot of land was their sole guarantee against ending up on the lowest rung of the social ladder, the place occupied by landless rural laborers, most notably farm servants, who were also seeking to acquire property and start a family. The cottagers' livelihood, like that of the farmers, was dependent on the weather, the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, and disasters such as hail, livestock epidemics, and illness in the family, which all undermined the viability of the small farm. Generally speaking, living conditions were simple in the extreme, and the living quarters were mostly wretched and dilapidated. 2 In some extreme cases, men and beasts still shared the same room. 3 Owing to the way work was organized in the countryside, almost everywhere the children were required to work in order to ensure the family's survival. In every family, the biggest as well as the smallest landowners, the children have to work as soon as they can and as much as they can. At first they are put to work after school and in the school holidays, looking after animals and doing light domestic chores, the older ones also helping to mind the younger ones and working in the kitchen and stable. But as soon as they are strong enough, the children have to share in all the jobs that the farm requires. Many large families earn substantial supplementary incomes by picking bilberries and cranberries, gathering fir cones, etc.4 At harvest time the children worked in the fields beside the adults or replaced the women in the house. In some areas it was chiefly children who were set to work picking potatoes. By the time they finished school, these children had long been working. Cottagers' children, in particular, were now forced to earn a living outside the family. The children of medium-sized and large farmers generally continued to work on the parental farm - that is, unless they were the heirs - until they married or died. 'On the rural lower classes: Schnorbus, "Landliche Unterschichten"; Hermann Grees, "Landliche Unterschichten und landliche Siedlung in Ostschwaben," Tubingen GeographischeStudien 58 (1975); John Knodel, "Two and a Half Centuries of Demographic History in a Bavarian Village," Population Studies, no. 24 (London, 1970), pp. 353-76; Alan Mayhew, Rural Settlement and Family in Germany (London, 1973), pp. 124-5; Wilhelm Kahler, Gesindewesen und Gesinderecht in Deutschland (Jena, 1986), p. 100. 2

Untersuchung in 24 Gemeinden, pp. 453—4.

'Ibid., pp. 231—2. 4 Ibid., p. 231; see also pp. 169, 200, and 260.

84

Silent births They were cheaper and, because of their interest in, identification with, and membership in the family, easier to retain than outsiders. But a small cottager's farm had no need of the children's manpower once they were grown up. As long as they stayed on at home without bringing in a wage, they were a liability.5 Some children - mainly sons, according to Munich court records - went day laboring along with their parents. Every day they would go off to work with their fathers or brothers to dig peat or to work as woodcutters or quarry laborers. The second half of the nineteenth century saw an increase in migration to the industrial areas and the towns. According to the surveys of the Standing Committee for the Furtherance of the Interests of Working-class Women, at the beginning of this century it was principally the daughters of cottagers and day laborers, whose marriage prospects in the country were anything but good, who moved to the towns to work as maids. They were also looking for regular working hours, wanted to learn more "refined" ways, and hoped for higher wages and greater freedom.6 Nonetheless, a substantial proportion of lower-class village youth at this time would still go into service in a nearby village as laborers or farm maids. In the Upper Bavarian village of Schoffau, the farm servants still comprised a quarter of the total population in 1895.7 A l ar g e number of young villagers under 14 belonged to this group, which roamed from village to village and farm to farm. On 2 February every year, at Candlemas, when farmhands and maids were hired and fired, there was a renewed surge of movement.8 Forty-one of the 60 women who committed infanticide worked in farming, 33 of them as farm servants. Their places of work were generally not far from their home villages, within 2 or 3 hours' walk. Five of the women still lived at home, working on their parents' farms and occasionally as casual laborers, one as a seamstress who would sometimes eat and sleep at the house or farm where she was working at the time. The farm maids, the day laborers, the seamstress, and a waitress in a village inn lived in this village or peasant environment. Sometimes the farm maids would also take temporary work as day laborers or waitresses. The peasants' world of work prevented rigid specialization in a particular occupation; its members had to take what work came along, and their workplace was also where they lived and took their meals. The seamstress, day laborer, and farm maid would eat at the same table as their employer, and as long as they worked for him they were members of his household. A prosperous farmer's daughter and a cottager's widow are the exceptions among these women; they were not working in the service of others. Finally, 19 of the 60 women had "recently" been in service in Munich. But a good many of them had also worked in farming before leaving home. For servants, the city meant 5 See Michael Mitterauer, "Auswirkungen von Urbanisierung und Friihindustrialisierung auf die Familienverfassung an Beispielen des osterreichischen Raums," in W . Conze (ed.), Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europai (Stuttgart, 1976), p. 87; cf. Schweyer, Schoffau, pp. 124—5. 'Kempf, Arbeits- und Lebensverhaltnisse, p. 38; Schnorbus, "La'ndliche Unterschichten," p. 835. 'Schweyer, Schoffau, p. 124; cf. Untersuchung in 24 Gemtiden, pp. 511—12. 8 Cf. Schlicht, Bayerisch Land, p. 56; Untersuchung in 24 Gemeinden, pp. 511-12.

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Status of women and place of children a social step up, which is also evident from the fact that 5 of these servant girls had advanced to the position of cook.9 At the age of 14, and sometimes even earlier, girls normally left their parents and took a position on the bottom rung of the servants' hierarchy as a goose girl, under-maid, or "little maid" - the titles varied from one region to another - or as a day laborer. Few went straight to the city. They went into service to earn their own living, independently of their parents, and also to save enough in the years that followed to acquire the material basis for marriage at some date in the future.10

THE TIME SPENT AS A MAID Moving and belonging When they entered service, farm maids embarked on a period of moving from village to village, between different farms and households, since many of them changed households every year, though every 2 or 3 years was more usual. In this way, maids gained experience of different places of work, farms of different sizes, and families of various types within a particular region.11 From the day girls left home and went into service, their status as members of a household was no longer primarily defined in terms of a family relationship but in terms of their place in the working organization of the farm that employed them. The peasant household accepted farmhands and maids as members of the family; the shared table bore witness to the fact that those who worked together also "reproduced themselves" together. With some exceptions, the old patriarchal system was preserved up to the turn of the century: "In this respect, things follow their peaceful, time-honored course."12 In the village of Schoffau in Upper Bavaria, farm servants lived in "complete domestic community with their masters and are generally regarded as members of the family."13 The village's 22 farms employed 75 servants: 43 farmhands and 32 farm maids. The largest farm employed 12 farm servants on its own. Under the rules of the old patriarchal servants' law, being "members of the farmer's family" meant nothing less than being subject to the authority of the employer, the head of the peasant family, and showing him obedience.14 Living with the farmer and his wife, sleeping under the same roof, sharing work and holidays, 9

Die Kriminalstatislik ftir dasjahr 1895—1900, Hrsg. im Reichs-Justizamt urtd im kaiserlichen statistischen

Amt, Statistik ties Deutschen Reicbs, n.s. vols. 89—139 (Berlin, 1897-1902), contains a similar breakdown of the personal circumstances of the accused. It also shows that in the second half of the nineteenth century infanticide was concentrated in rural areas. Of 92 cases of infanticide in Prussia, only one occurred in Berlin, though 61 out of 191 abortions were performed there. 10 Cf. Hartinger, "Bayerisches Dienstbotenleben," p. 606. "This is how the life of servant girls is depicted in the police records; see for example, StAM, St Anw 1177. 12

Unlersucbung in 24 Gemtinden, pp. 231-2. Schweyer, SchSffau, p. 126. 14 Kahler, Gesindewaen, p. 221. 13

86

Silent births and eating at the same table and out of the same bowl, as was still the custom on medium-sized farms at the end of the nineteenth century, meant being integrated into the hierarchy and power structure of the household, day and night. 15 Although the maids and the farmhands were counted as the children of the farm on which they served, they differed fundamentally from the farmer's own children in their rights and their share in the farm: They were the former's paid servants; they would inherit nothing from him and had no material interest in the property. The peasants' interminable, age-old complaints about farm servants' lack of interest in their work, their failure to identify with it, were no doubt related to the shortage of labor, the migration of the younger generation to the new industrial regions and to the towns. 16 But it is quite possible that servants had never identified in quite the way a farmer might expect his own children to. Although the farm maids performed the same work as the farmers' daughters, the dowry that the latter could expect bore no relation to the trousseau a maid could scrape together over the years. For a farm maid, membership in a peasant household also entailed membership in the village community; it was part of her social identity. She became a member of the village as the maid of some farmer or other. Except for those who were in service with a local farmer, being accepted into the village presupposed marriage and one's own household, which also meant having property of one's own - a house and piece of land. This was the only possible way of acquiring the right of domicile (Heimatrechte), and it ruled out anyone who was in service.17 District authority records show the lengths to which a village would go in order to rid itself of an unemployed, and possibly sick, servant girl who no longer belonged to a household. A typical case is that of Anna Kolb, who was badly injured in a threshing machine accident and, to make matters worse, was suspected of being pregnant. She was temporarily living with the foster mother of her first illegitimate child. The village mayor applied to the district office at Ebersberg for an expulsion order: Anna Kolb, an unmarried woman from the Upper Palatinate, living in Schalldorf, though not hailing from here, is residing in this parish against the wishes of the undersigned parish officers, causing a great deal of time-consuming work for which the parish does not consider itself responsible, after suffering an accident in the parish of Assling, which temporarily rendered her unfit for work. Furthermore, there is a risk that in her condition she will become a burden on the parish sickness fund, as she is without any income and has no relatives in this parish liable for her maintenance. It has therefore been decided to expel her from this parish, allowing her 3 days from today to leave the district.18 As other applications for expulsion show, unemployed, single form maids - especially those who had run away from their positions - were also considered a danger "For example, Schweyer, SchSffau, p. 126; also Untersuchung in 24 Gemeindat, pp. 45, 60. "ibid., pp. 17, 259, 373, 421, and 488-9. "On the right of residence and restrictions on marriage in Bavaria, see Klaus-Jiirgen Matz, Pauperisms und BevUlkerung. Die gesetzlichen Ehebeschrankungen in den sUddeutschen Staaten wahrend des 19. Jahrhunderts

(Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 22 iff. 18 StAM,LRA 78105.

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Status of women and place of children 19

to public morals. With no family or household, it was feared that they would not only strain the village's meager resources but also pose a threat to the prevailing code of sexual conduct. An illegitimate baby whose father came from the village would become a drain on the poor relief fund or on one of the village families. Thus an unemployed maid did not live under the established forms of social control and responsibility that, up to a point, a village offered; she fell into the category of outsider. The years in service and moving from one household to the next meant a life on the borderline between belonging and being an outsider. If they failed to comply with the rules governing the commencement and termination of service, they were very soon relegated to the status of interlopers and asocial elements. Records of convictions list farm maids sentenced for begging, vagrancy, and theft, showing how difficult life could become for them in the peripheral areas between farms, villages, and households. 20

Work The farmers complained that "farm maids will not stay longer than 2 to 3 years on any one farm,"21 but the frequent change of employment not only contained elements of vagrancy; it was the only thing that enabled young servant girls to rise in the servants' hierarchy. Promotion was dependent on the maid's age, physical strength, and experience: First, when they are 13 or 14, girls are employed to help the farmer's wife with housework and looking after the children. As she grows in strength she advances to under-servant and starts learning farm work; then to middle-servant, who milks and feeds the animals under supervision; and finally to upper servant, who must be capable of responsibly supervising work in the cow sheds. One or other of the stages of this training may be omitted, depending on the size of the farm, the age of the girl when she entered service, and the training received at home.22 The names given to the various level of servants varied from one part of Bavaria to another: under-maid, middle-maid (first maid), and upper-maid (second maid); sometimes a maid might even begin her career as a gooseherd. 23 A maid's place in the servant hierarchy also indicated the type of work and function assigned to her within the peasant economy: work in the house, in the cow shed, and especially in the fields at harvest time. Ideally, a farm maid would learn all the tasks that comprised a woman's work on a farm during her period in service. As a kitchen maid, she would help keep the house and kitchen clean, prepare the food, preserve meat and vegetables, and dry fruit from the kitchen garden in autumn. She would learn how to purify honey and the various operations involved "Cf. StAM, LRA 78101. Cf., for example, StAM, St Anw 840, 1177, 1458.

20 21

Kempf, Arbeits- und Lebensverhaltnisse, p. 82.

"Ibid., p. 76. 23 Cf. Untmuchung, pp. 59, 80, 93, and 337; Platzer, Gescbichte, p. 207.

88

Silent births in slaughtering an animal. In Bavaria, dairymaids and stable maids worked mainly in the cow sheds. They looked after the fodder for the cattle and hand fed the calves, cleaned out the stalls, and later did the milking. Pigs, geese, and chickens were also the women's responsibility. Dairymaids often spent the entire day in the cow shed. The day began at 6 A.M. in winter and as early as 3 A.M. in summer (the milking had to be done before breakfast) and did not end until seven or eight o'clock in the evening, after the last feed.24 Most of these jobs had to be done on Sunday as well. When a cow was calving, it might mean working all night in the cow shed. As a result of all this time spent with the livestock, a maid acquired an intimate knowledge of the individual animals, their behavior, diseases, and past history. This knowledge was a vital asset in successfully treating an ill animal or hand rearing a sickly calf. The dairymaid was considered to play a vital part in raising a herd of cattle, and the importance ascribed to her was reflected in the bonuses to which she was entitled on the sale of an animal.25 The trust placed in an experienced maid may be gauged from the life of the Alpine dairymaids of Upper Bavaria, who often spent the entire summer alone in a mountain pasture or with only a little boy to help, looking after the cows, milking them, and making butter and cheese.26 The heaviest work on a farm was the seasonal work in the fields. Because it was dependent on the weather, particularly at harvest time, there were times when every available worker had to get out into the fields and meadows, including even the women who mainly worked indoors, such as the farmer's wife.27 Mowing with a sickle and stacking hay and grain were women's work,28 despite their strenuous nature, particularly when, like most harvest work, they had to be carried out in the dry, torrid heat of summer. Finally, the farm maids were detailed to help with the threshing in the autumn, which might entail working for a neighboring former as well as their own, when it was the neighbor's turn for the threshing machine. Consequently, they were frequently exposed to the dust, noise, and danger of the work for two whole weeks.29 Reports on agriculture abound with complaints about maids who ran off just before harvest time because the work was too hard for them.30 It is difficult to ascertain how large the number of such cases really was. But it is constantly brought home to us - witness, for instance, farmers' fears that a maid might be pregnant31 how awkward it was for a farm if there was a sudden shortage of labor at harvest 24 Frankenstein, Verbaltnisse, p. 156; see also Lena Christ, "Rumpelhanni," in Gaammelte Werke (Munich, 1970), pp. 505-672, especially pp. 564-5; for a description of the part played by women in slaughtering a pig, see the fascinating book by Yvonne Verdier, Fafons ck dire, fagons de fain. La laveuse, la couturihre, la cuisiniire (Paris, 1979), pp. 24ft. "Frankenstein, Verbaltnisse, p. 156. 26 See Christ, "Mathias Bichler," pp. 318-19, and Max Haushofer, Arieitsgestalten aus den bayerischen Alpen, Bayer. Bibliothek 4 (1890). 27 StAM, St Anw 185, 693. 28 Kempf, Lebensverhahnisse, pp. 82, 102; Christ, "Rumpelhanni," pp. 516, 553. 29 StAM, LRA 78105; Kempf, Lebensverhahnisse, p. 87. ^"Untersuchung in 24 Gemindtn, pp. 511, 373. "StAM.St Anw 185.

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Status of women and place of children time, when replacements were hard to find. True, a maid who deserted her master in midharvest would find it hard to get a position. She had forfeited her reputation as a reliable and valuable servant, a quality that was not only sought after by formers but would be of importance to a prospective bridegroom. For this reason it may be assumed that the number of runaway maids was not particularly high. The frequency of the complaints probably reflects the seriousness of such cases both for the former and for the maids themselves. The development of a hierarchy and a strict division of labor were found only on farms that required a large number of servants. Medium-sized and small farmers were not in a position to employ several maids for the various different jobs that needed doing. A maid would often perform the kitchen chores, in addition to working in the cow shed. She was responsible for the kitchen garden and might also have to mind the children. If she was the farm's only maid, she had to be capable of standing in for the farmer's wife when the latter was confined to bed during childbirth or owing to illness or when she went to town to go shopping or went to visit relatives in another village. It follows that a "good" maid had to be able to carry out both domestic duties and farm work efficiently and on her own initiative. The peasant economy did not permit any rigid division of labor based on gender between male and female farm servants; it would have conflicted with the requirements of this particular mode of production. Farmhands and farm maids performed the same type of duties, or at least they complemented each other, especially at harvest time. They went out to the fields together in the morning and finished work at the same time. On smaller farms, in particular, the maids also had to perform outdoor labor.32 In the cow shed the maid's duties were feeding and milking the cows, while the farmhand fetched the fodder and also cared for the horses and oxen.33 The only areas of work that were exclusively female were the house and kitchen, which meant that in general maids had a longer working day than the farmhands: After finishing work in the cow shed and fields, they still had to help with the evening meal and do any other jobs that were still undone after a full day's harvesting. And last, well into the nineteenth century, a maid would spend the winter evenings at the spinning wheel with the farmer's wife and her daughters, spinning flax into thread to weave into bales of cloth destined for the linen cupboards of the farmer's wife, her daughters' bottom drawers, and the maid's own chest, which she would take with her to her new home when she married. By the end of the century, spinning and weaving were no longer the usual occupation of the farmer's wife and maids on winter evenings, at least in districts close to the towns, having been 32

Kempf, Lebetuverhaltnisu, pp. iO2ff.

"StAM, St Anw 185, 682, and 693; Kempf, Lebensverhaltnisse, p. 105. By the end of the century, work in the cow shed was already being turned over to professional dairymen (Scbweizer) on large farms in regions of intensive dairy farming. The establishment of dairy cooperatives and the increase in cheese making in the Allgau and in the mountain pasture regions of Upper Bavaria gave a major boost to the number of dairy cows, and market-oriented milk production also required specialized know-how that had to be acquired outside the daily routine of farmwork. See Kempf, hebensvtrbaltnisst, pp. 106 and 127; Adolf Sandberger, "Die Landwirtschaft," in Spindler, Handbuch, vol. 4, pp. 735ff.

90

Silent births supplanted by darning and sewing. Material could be purchased more cheaply in town and, as the dictates of fashion advanced into the countryside, homemade cloth came to be considered rough and coarse.34 Wages Pay varied according to a maid's age and place in the hierarchy. This was particularly noticeable in the part of her wages that was paid to her in cash every year at Candlemas. In Upper Bavaria in 1890, housekeepers received 240 marks per year, cooks 150 to 180 marks, housemaids, dairymaids, kitchen maids, and under-maids 120 to 180 marks.35 In some areas, particularly close to the towns, it became the custom toward the end of the century to pay employees weekly.36 Pay was boosted by cash bonuses in recognition of hard work when livestock or farm produce such as hops were sold and to mark festivals such as Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun and village fairs and annual markets. These bonuses amounted to 12 to 15 marks per year, though a dairymaid might earn another 15 marks extra from tips when cattle were sold. Part of the wages paid in kind also took the form of bonuses, particularly at Christmas. These "emoluments" consisted of flax and linen thread, up to 20 ells of linen and cloth, often a beeswax taper, working clothes, aprons, shoes, sometimes scarves and a Sunday dress. But as domestic production of yarn, linen, and cloth by the farms declined, spinning wheels and looms ceased to form part of the winter work routine, and people started buying clothing and material in the towns, it became increasingly common for these emoluments to be paid out in cash instead. Like weekly wages, this practice was chiefly found in areas close to the towns.37 As a rule, maids paid their annual wages into a savings account. For instance, at Candlemas 1895 the farm servants of Eberfing in Upper Bavaria paid their wages into the savings bank in nearby Weilheim, and the people of Polling took their savings to the district savings bank in Miihldorf.38 Bonuses paid out on feast days and special payments for extra work enabled the servants to meet occasional needs without having to touch their wages, which were the basis of any future dowry. Furthermore, they often had to pay maintenance for illegitimate children out of their wages. The emoluments also had a dual function: As well as meeting the maid's immediate clothing needs, such items as flax and linen were a contribution to her trousseau. Both the thrift practiced by the maids and the emoluments they were given were geared toward their subsequent marriage. 34

Schweyer, SchUffau, p. 79; Kempf, Lebensverhaltnisse, p. 34. "Frankenstein, Vecbaltnisse, p. 184. "See, for example, Unursuchung in 24 Gemeinden, p. 80. "Frankenstein, Verhaltniise, p. 184; Untersuchung in 24 Gemeinden - for instance, pp. 17, 45, 80, 94, and 260. is Untersucbung in 24 Gemeinden, pp. 29 and 43. On the rapid rise in wages caused by the labor shortage between 1873 a "d I 9 I 4 . s e e Schnorbus, "Landliche Unterschichten," p. 843. 91

Status of women and place of children

The Dowry The farm maid's life was oriented toward her subsequent marriage. When all was said and done, marriage was a woman's only way of achieving financial security for herself and her children, as well as status, standing, and a place in the village community. During their years in service, maids worked and saved to amass the dowry they needed to be attractive as marriage partners. Even among the poorer sections of the community to which the maids belonged, money was a consideration for a man with marriage in mind, particularly the sort of dowry his intended wife was able to offer. The dowry consisted of several different components. The first was money. In order to buy or take over a small holding - vital if a family was to make a living in peasant society - and to equip the holding with the most necessary domestic and agricultural implements and buy some livestock, some initial capital was required, to which the woman was expected to contribute. If she had nothing to come from her parents and at most a small payment from her brothers, who, under Bavarian law, usually took over the family farm, she had to save. The records show that between 1880 and 1910 a maid could save 400 to 500 marks in 10 years. An anonymous poison pen letter that one of the women who committed infanticide wrote about a servant girl to her fiance illustrates the importance of these savings as a sign of a women's marriageability: "Don't you know that Klara doesn't have a penny? Don't you know that after 13 years in service she hasn't saved a penny? Believe me, if you marry her, you may well see your things auctioned off, and your thriftiness may turn out to have been in vain."39 The emoluments given to the maids at the end of each year of employment and at Christmas - the flax, the linen and cloth, which might amount to a great deal over the years - were the nucleus of her trousseau, the second part of her dowry. By saving her wages, a maid demonstrated her thriftiness. She had proved that she possessed one of the essential virtues for running a peasant household. The size and finish of her trousseau were evidence of her specifically female skill at handicrafts; to a certain extent, her trousseau represented her future household. Since it would also reflect on the households in which she had served and learned her job, it was in the interest of the farmer's wife to see that a maid had a fine trousseau when she came to get married.40 The other women, especially her future mother-in-law, would be scrutinizing and judging the dowry. The third component of a maid's dowry was the knowledge of housework and farm work and the proficiency that she had acquired during her years in service and needed later on in order to run her own small holding, with a plot of land and a few animals. As a married woman she would also have to carry out some of the farm work on her own, because her husband would have to take casual work as a day laborer or supplement their income by working in some trade or other. Wit3

'StAM, St Anw 1177.

40

See Christ, "Mathias Bichler," pp. 342-3.

92

Silent births nesses' statements about maids by farmhands and day laborers — potential suitors — in court records of infanticide cases show that future husbands placed considerable value on a maid's skills and capacity for work. Having worked together in the cow sheds and fields, a maid and a farmhand had a fairly accurate idea whether or not the other would be able to manage a small holding and make a success of things.41 An important part of a maid's dowry was the social network of ties and relationships which she brought with her from home and her own family or which she had formed during her years of service. Working together with other maids and farmhands, she may already have established links that would stand her in good stead later on. After all, the servants would one day be the parents of the future generations of the lower classes in the villages, and they formed a distinctive group among the young villagers of marriageable age. The servants had "social knowledge": They knew all about the farms and farmers within a certain area and the rural lower-class families from which they themselves sprang. The reputation of her future family and the support she might expect depended largely on how well a maid managed to integrate into the women's communications system, for these were the women who would later become her neighbors, and perhaps helpers. Thus", when they married these maids already had a share in the informal power that was the women's way of exerting their influence on the life of the village.42

LOVE AFFAIRS BETWEEN UNMARRIED FARM SERVANTS In the second half of the nineteenth century, the farm servants of Upper Bavaria were exclusively single men and women; the station of a servant was incompatible with marriage and children. The economics of running medium-sized and large farms up to 50 hectares (125 acres), on which most servants worked, simply ruled out servants having children as a source of fresh manpower. Although there were no longer any restrictions on the marital status of farm servants, the financial aspect and the demands of farm work made late marriage necessary. Like the farmers (though with them it was due to the inheritance arrangements), servants tended to marry around 30 years of age.43 Interbreeding between the land-owning farmers and the lower classes was unthinkable, to the farmers at least; the social hierarchy of the village remained intact, as in Flechting by the Starnberger See: 41

See, for example, StAM, St Anw 185. See Susan Carol Rogers, "Les Femmes et le Pouvoir," in Lamarche, Rogers, and Karnoouh, Paysaru, Femmes et Citoyem. Luttes pour le pouvoir dans un village lorrain, Editions Actes Sud 1980, pp. 97ff. 4 'See Hartinger, Bayerisches Dienstbotenleben, pp. 625S.; Antje Kraus, "'Antizipierter Ehesegen' im 19. Jahrhundert. Zur Beurteilung der Illegitimitat unter sozialgeschichtlichen Aspekten," Vierteljabresschrift fu'rSozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 66 (1979), p. 188; Knodel, Bavarian Village, p . 361. The average age of the women who committed infanticide, both in the Munich records and in the criminal statistics, is 25 years; 11 of the 60 women were over 30; the oldest was 38. 42

93

Status of women and place of children Apart from a number of well-to-do fishermen, a miller, and a few cottagers, at this time there were nothing but large farmers in Flechting, and marriages only took place between families of equal status, or with even larger farms, but not in the opposite direction, with cottager families. People were careful to establish good, useful relationships through such alliances.44 A cottager's daughter or farm maid who wanted to marry a farmer's son would not have been in a position to observe one of the key wedding rituals, the bridal wagon, as she would have been too poor to equip it properly. The fact that this gulf was a popular subject of contemporary literature and folk tales probably tended to reinforce and mythologize it, rather than call it in question. Its symbolism was also a direct expression of property relations. As a lawyer, Ludwig Thoma represented the rural population in their disputes and their economic struggles at the end of the century in the courts of Dachau and Munich. He describes the village's portrayal of this hierarchy in the cemetery, where the village and its divisions are visible: At All Souls' one could see who had money in Erlbach. The graves of the richer people were decorated with wreathes of everlasting flowers, from which, hung glass beads. Large lanterns with red and blue glass cast their distinctive light on the stone angels, crosses, and anchors. . . . Beside all this, the graves of the ordinary people looked even more miserable. The wooden crosses had worn away, and the inscriptions were by now so illegible that the Good Lord would have had the utmost difficulty in telling the cottagers and farm servants apart. Here there were no artificial flowers or wreathes adorned with glass beads but fronds of fir and laurel. Here and there a crooked lantern emitted a light as wretched and unassuming as the lives of those who here awaited the Resurrection.45

Relationships Like the women who committed infanticide, the fathers of illegitimate children also came from the lower class. Where the records do not give a clue to the identity of the father (because paternity was uncertain, owing to the number of lovers the accused had or because the records were incomplete), the lists of witnesses indicate the circles in which the father might be sought. In the case of 21-year-old Maria Ederer, an unmarried farm maid working for a farmer and innkeeper in Jachenau, all we know about the father is that he would have been prepared to pay maintenance. The witnesses are listed as follows: Katherina Frank, 20, an unmarried farm maid of Riedern; Katherina Hauser, 36, an unmarried farm maid of Weissbach; Maria Kroll, 25, an unmarried farm maid of Geissach; Michael Lachner, 30, an unmarried farmhand of Petern; Martin Seitz, 25, an unmarried farmhand of Jachenau; Otto Stacheder, an unmarried farmhand of Sachenbach; the midwife and the constable of Jachenau; and the provincial court doctor assigned to the case.46 The places mentioned are in the ••••See Oskar Maria Graf, Die Chronik von Flechting. Ein Dorfroman (Munich, 1925), p. 7. 45 Ludwig Thoma, Andreas Vb'st, in Werke (1906; Munich, 1978), vol. 3, p. 49; on the hierarchical structure of the village, see also Grees, "La'ndliche Unterschichten," pp. 4 8 - 9 . 46 StAM, St Anw 1235, cf. 1264.

94

Silent births vicinity of Jachenau in the Bavarian Alps, where Maria Ederer worked in 1896. The farm maids and farmhands were summoned to appear before the court to testify about the love affairs, pregnancy, infanticide, and character of the accused. They therefore belonged to her circle of close friends and acquaintances. They worked beside her or came into contact with her in some other way. We can assume that the father of the child was one of the farmhands present in court; a comparison with other court records shows that this is likely. Another woman, Maria Weber, 23, an unmarried farm maid of Eisenhofen, had relationships simultaneously with three farmhands from various villages near Schwabhausen, where she worked in 1898. 47 Many of the fathers were farmhands, the others being day laborers, craftsman's assistants, cottagers' sons, a married farmer, and a married miner. Their backgrounds were thus in keeping with those of the accused.48 Relationships between maids and farmhands often started at the place of work. They spent the days working together and the nights under the same roof. "Last year [1881], I was in service with a farmhand, Corbinian Groll, who engaged in intimacy with me on several occasions in the house of my master. He is now employed by Maier of Reichersbeuern." Another stated: I have been in service here as a maid with Strasser the brewer since Saint James's Day last year [1888). I am busy all day in the cow shed and at night sleep in a room over a staircase, which I share with Strasser's waitress, Theres Kemp. . . . The father of my child is the brewer's laborer Georg Neder, who entered Strasser's service in October last year and left again on 1 December. . . . . . . After I found out I was pregnant I often allowed the brewer's laborer Jakob Sax of Tittmong [also in Strasser's employ] to sleep with me.49 Accounts of their relationships shpw that contact could be rapidly established between farmhands and maids. The workplace made this possible. There was no rigid demarcation between the farmhands' work and the maids'. Both worked in the cow shed and in the fields; their tasks were related and supplemented one another. A maid might spend her working day moving almost imperceptibly between house, cow shed, and fields, and at harvest time it was solely the amount of work that needed doing and the weather that determined how many hands, including the children and even the cook, were required in the fields.50 The peasant world needed the servants' labor, but their love lives and pregnancies might disturb the orderly working routine. It was in a former's interest to prevent a maid from getting pregnant, because he needed her to perform at her best. The farmer Corbinian Reiser "soon noticed that he {the farmhand] was intimate with •"StAM, St Anw 1482. 48 Of the 32 known fathers, 14 were farmhands, and the other 18 were day laborers, artisans' assistants, cottagers' sons, 1 married farmer, and 1 married miner. •"StAM, St Anw 185, 682. !0 Cf. StAM, St Anw 693, 682, 185, 1177; see Barbara Duden and Karin Hausen, "Gesellschaftliche Arbeit — geschlechtsspeziflsche Arbeitsteilung," in Annette Kuhn and G. Schneider (eds.), Frauen in der Geichichte (Dusseldorf, 1979), pp. i^fF.; see also Beck, Naturale Ockonomii, p. i95ff.

95

Status of women and place of children the maid and dismissed him after 6 to 8 weeks, so that he now works for Maier."51 There were probably never any lasting threats or checks that could have prevented servants forging liaisons. Farmhands and maids were not bound by the demands of their own families or by the obligations incumbent on heirs, and in the long run neither the farmers nor the state could seriously threaten their livelihoods. Consequently, they had little to lose and were thus able to make the decisions concerning their love lives themselves. Their material interests were the same, hierarchies of ownership few, and the selection of a lover was much more a matter for feeling and chance than would have been possible for a farmer's daughter, with her obligations to her station and property. 52 Everything that was not work was done in secret. The servants had devised a system of communicating with their eyes, through allusions and gestures alone. If a farmhand offered a maid his pocket knife during dinner and she accepted it, the others could be sure that he would be sharing her bed that very same evening. And of course, there were women who would immediately undo a man's fly buttons and start rummaging away in his trousers. The farm servants tried to see that the nights were theirs, at least.53 It is also clear from the records that the maids played an active part in such goingson. Agathe Seidl sought the company in bed of Michael Bader, the farmhand with whom she worked, so openly and insistently that she apparently caused him some embarrassment. The latter "went on to say that Seidl had often tried to persuade him to spend the night with her . . . but that he, Bader, a harmless and stupid man in this respect, had not done so." 54 The policeman's description of the farmhand implies that he is a "dimwit," clearly showing that the maid's request was felt to be perfectly understandable. The closeness and intimacy of the dealings between maids and farmhands emerge from a farmhand's statement about Therese Zeller, to the effect that "he had to bring her grass every morning to feed the cattle and had once observed, as she was washing her body, that she was heavily bloodspattered." 55 The pregnant maid Anna Holl discusses her condition with the farmhands in the fields; she would like to hide it, but because of her size she is forced to offer an explanation. She takes it for granted that the men will notice her state and show an interest in it, and also that they will expect an explanation. 56 The shame threshold is very low: The men are quite familiar with the signs and mechanics of pregnancy and birth. They are not passed over discreetly but are the talk of the whole house. Witnesses' statements indicate that if a farmhand lived under the same roof or on the same mountain pasture as a maid, 57 it was conclusive evidence of 51

StAM, St Anw 185. »Ibid. "Franz Innerhofer, SchSm Tage (Salzburg, 1974), p. 26. This autobiographical novel describes how the author, who was the illegitimate son of a farm maid, is taken away to work on his father's farm as a "serf among farm servants and day laborers. 54 StAM, St Anw 616. "StAM, St Anw 682. 56 StAM, St Anw 185. "StAM, St Anw 616.

96

Silent births paternity both in the eyes of the village policeman and in the public mind. Similarly, casual work together in the fields or bogs, affectionate behavior at a dance, going home together late at night after a village function or holiday or after a market day, or simply a joint drinking session in the inn or a Sunday afternoon spent together were sure signs, as far as the villagers and the village policeman were concerned, that a child had been conceived on the occasion in question. This is confirmed by those involved. The transitory nature of these love affairs is fully apparent from the records, farmhands and maids generally staying no more than a year or two at the same place of work. Although the women who did not make their way to Munich tended to restrict their travels to the villages of a particular area often no more than a dozen miles from their home — in many cases contact ceased as soon as one of the partners left the place of employment. Thus it was that Therese Zeller "heard no more from Georg Neder, about whom I can furnish no more details than that he is.supposed to be from Wurttemberg." Anna Holl states that the father of her fifth child, which died after a premature birth or was aborted, was "a Tiroler called Josef Auer," though "I do not know from where . . . , just that 12 years ago he had worked for Meyer in Waakirchen, where I met him."58 The testimony of Franz Polsterl, the father of a child resulting from such a liaison, is typical: "Beischl left last Candlemas, and since then I have not had any contact with her," although it was by no means very for to Ismaning, where the woman was working.59 The duration of the relationship was thus primarily determined by the common workplace; in many cases there appear to have been no closer ties that might have entailed separation problems or plans for the continuation of the affair. On the other hand, many women did have hope that these relationships might evolve into marriage and kept in touch after being separated from the man in question, especially if the affair had resulted in an illegitimate baby. If they subsequently married, it was not uncommon for a young couple to have two or three children already.60 Illegitimate Children The following letter, written by Agathe Seidl, underlines one aspect of the life of maid servants: their amorous relationships and their concern for the illegitimate children resulting from them. Sprittelsberg, 19 August 1894 Dear Josef, Once again I take up my pen to write you a little letter. It is hard, believe me, but I have to. You know my parents have little to spare and cannot bring up the boy for nothing, and by the time he is 11 they may well be dead. They cannot wait that long. You must see this yourself. I wish you nothing but well and am certainly not angry with you. If only I could manage alone I would not pester you, but I'm afraid I simply can't. Oh Josef, my dearest, 58

StAM, St Anw 682, 185.

"StAM, St Anw 693.

97

«Cf. StAM, St Anw 1177, 1668, 194, 700.

Status of women and place of children how I have thrown away my happiness and trampled it underfoot. It is a good thing I have got away from home, so as to take my mind off it a little. Worrying about it was driving me quite crazy, but now I don't have the time, there is that amount of work to do. Andreas the miller's lad will probably have told you that I have returned to my old farmer in Sprittelsberg, and I'm supposed to be staying here 'till Candlemas, but I'm not so sure about that. I must also tell you that if you pay off all the maintenance at once, father will let you off half, as there is no chance of us getting together here, as sure as I am writing these lines to you. Father does not want it all, he will even go on bringing up the boy for awhile, as long as mother and father are alive he will be provided for. They look after him, and I can go wherever I like, but they won't have you there any more. But they like it when I come to see them on Sundays, so do my brothers, Anton has adopted Josef as a godfather. I must finish now. With all my love, I remain yours for ever, Agathe Seidl. . . . I beg you once again with all my heart.61 The situation of the unmarried farm maid Agathe Seidl was by no means unusual. Many maids had illegitimate children. Extramarital pregnancy was not in itself considered a disgrace in nineteenth-century Upper Bavaria.62 Although Therese Zeller had by now had her third illegitimate baby, locally she was regarded as "a good, industrious, hard-working person, with nothing known to sully her good name." By the end of the century, the illegitimacy rate was no longer as high as it was in midcentury. It fell from 25.51 percent in 1859 to 13.71 percent in 1875 and in 1901 stood at about 13.2 percent. The highest rates at this time were recorded in Upper Bavaria, with 18.9 percent in 1901. 63 The high rates for Upper Bavaria were registered in the rural areas, not the urban districts. Indeed, in places such as Miesbach, Tolz, Traunstein, Laufen, and Berchtesgaden the trend was actually upward between 1862 and 1901, as it was in the country districts around Munich. 64 Illegitimacy in Bavaria was integrated into the social structure of peasant society and did not clash with the requirements and standards of the family as the basic element of farming life. The attitude of the Upper Bavarian villagers did conflict with that of the bourgeois assize courts of Munich, though. In the eyes of the courts, extramarital pregnancies were an aggravating circumstance, even when the village vouched for the woman's good character. 65 In the district of Thalhausen, for 61

StAM, St Anw 1177. StAM, St Anw 682. On the history of illegitimacy in Bavaria in the nineteenth century, see the debate: W. R. Lee, "Bastardy and the Socioeconomic Structure of South Germany," in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 (1977), 403—25; Edward Shorter, "Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution, and Social Change in Modern Europe," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1971), 237-72; Shorter, '"La vie intime.' Beitrage zu seiner Geschichte am Beispiel des kulturellen Wandels in den bayerischen Unterschichten im 19. 62

Jahrhundert," in P. C. Ludz (ed.), Soziologie und' Sozialgeschichte (Kb'lner Zeitschriftfur Soziologie undSozialpsych.,

suppl. 16) (Opladen, 1973), pp. 530-549. See also Michael Mitterauer, "Familienformen und Illegitimitat in landlichen Gebieten Oesterreichs," Archivfttr Sozialgeschichte 19 (1979), 123—188; for basic background on the subject: Mitterauer, Ledige Matter. Zur Geschichte unehelicher Geburten in Europa (Munich, 1983); Franz Lindner, Die unehelichen Geburten als Sozialphanomen. Ein Beitrag zur Statistik der Bevo'lkerungsbewegung im

Kb'nigreich Bayern, Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsstudien mit bes. Beriicks. Bayerns, no. 7 (Leipzig, 1900). 63 Lee, "Bastardy," p. 410; Schweyer, Schbffau, p. 38. M Lindner, Uneheliche Geburten, pp. 70, 77. 63 See, for example, StAM, St Anw 89, 185, 529, 599, and 15482.

98

Silent births example, at the end of the nineteenth century, illegitimate children were entitled to inherit a family farm, although Roman law excluded such children from the institution of the family. The unmarried sisters or daughters of farmers frequently continued to live on the parental farm with their illegitimate children until they married or died.66 In the Munich records, only one former's daughter, 20-year-old Maria Sattler of Linern in Schleefeld, who was wealthy enough to support her child, with 2,300 marks to come from her mother's estate as well as property from her father, cited as a motive for infanticide fear of the disgrace "which she might expect from her acquaintances, particularly in her home village."67 As is evident from this case, the position seems to have been most difficult for farmers' daughters with illegitimate children when the child's father did not meet the requirements that would have made a fitting match possible. It was a disgrace to sell oneself at too low a price in the general estimation and to become a public laughingstock; illegitimate children were not an economic problem for the farmers, and a landed farmer's daughter with a child was still sought after as a marriage partner. The crucial thing was that the economic foundations on which the peasantry rested were not eroded, particularly from below. Disgrace fell on those who had slipped down onto a lower step of the property hierarchy; they were deemed to have succumbed in the universal struggle to maintain their position. Until the end of the century, peasants continued to arrange their children's marriages with a view to protecting and increasing their property, and any manifestation of love that strayed beyond the prescribed group of suitors was outlawed as a threat: It was a disgrace.68 The disgrace was shown, as the accused claimed, in the conduct of the "acquaintances of her home village," among them the young peasants, who remained a group apart. The problem of disgrace and dishonor did not, on the face of it, apply to farm maids. Many of them already had illegitimate children.69 They lived with the mother's parents or in foster care. The foster parents also came from the lower classes, being day laborers, cottagers, or craftsmen, for whom the fostering allowance was an extra source of income that often amounted to half the wages of a maid. This was also the level of the maintenance an unmarried father was required to pay. The father of Agathe Seidl's first child paid - on being pressed to do so - 80 marks a year to her parents, who had undertaken to care for the child. They lived at Kohlgrub in Steigerein on an indebted small holding of six Tagwerk and considered the amount "Lee, "Bastardy," pp. 416-17; cf. Rainer Beck, "Illegitimitat und voreheliche Sexualitat auf dem Land. Unterfinning, 1671-1770," in van Diilmen, Kultur der Einfachtn Ltutt, pp. 112-50. 67 StAM, St Anw 1595, trial record of 20 June 1895. ^Graf, Ltben miner Mutter, p. 128; Lena Christ, "Madam Baurin" and "Die Freier," in Christ, Gesammelte Werke (Munich, 1970), pp. 678-9 and 809-19, on the struggle to get together the dowry, which dominates peasant love stories, in particular. "Of these 26 illegitimate children, 17 were still alive at the time of the trials. Thus, including the victims of infanticide, these 60 woman had had 86 pregnancies, an average of 1.43 each. Illegitimate children were not, however, systematically recorded in the records and often figure only in connection with aggravating circumstances and the evidence of character witnesses.

99

Status of women and place of children too small; although he was a farmhand, he was considered wealthy, since he stood to inherit property from his parents.70 None of the women, however, had been able to keep the child with them, even for short periods. Anna Nagl, who had herself been brought up by her grandparents as the illegitimate daughter of an unmarried farm maid and said that she had never been able to stand her mother, put her first illegitimate child into foster care. It died before it was a year old. "I never had the child myself," she said.71 When childbirth neared, the maids normally left their place of work for a day or two and went home, or to the midwife's or the future foster mother's house, and surrendered the child immediately after the birth. Until the mother married or became independent, the children lived with their grandparents or foster parents, and this often became their real home. Maids who did not marry had scarcely any chance of ever living under the same roof or in the same household as their children. They would visit them on their Sunday afternoons off. In these circumstances, brothers and sisters often grew up separately. Thus it was in the case of Anna Holl from Reichsbeuern, who was 38 and still single when she was arrested for infanticide by the T0I2 constabulary in January 1881. She already had three illegitimate children, and her last pregnancy was her sixth. The surviving children were Anna, Anton, and Maria. Anna was 15 years old and already in service, like her mother. Anton, 11, lived with Anna Holl's mother in Waakirchen, a neighboring village, and 8-year-old Maria was cared for by the Meyers of the post office in Reichersbeuern.72 If the mother did eventually marry, the family would still not be united.73 In many cases, when parents married late in life it was not their own children but their children's children they brought up. Many children were not born into a father-mother-child family. The legal triangle of bourgeois law did exist, in propitious circumstances, but was far from typical of the family structure of the rural lower classes in Bavaria. A child's "social parents" were often the grandparents, while the biological parents - the "legitimate parents," in legal eyes - continued to live far apart on separate farms, scraping together the modest capital needed to purchase a small holding or waiting to take over their aging parents' family farm, which could not feed more than four mouths. In this social context, an "illegitimate" child was no disgrace but a member of a family in the making or a family that already existed, thanks to the involvement of the grandparents. Even farm maids who did not marry the fathers of their illegitimate children were still part of this system. 70 StAM, St Anw 1177; in 1893, 80 marks was about 40% of a farmhand's annual wage in Upper Bavaria. See Ludwig Weissauer, "Lohnbewegung in der bayerischen Landwirtschaft im Laufe eines halben Jahrhunderts, 1870—1924," typed dissertation, Staatsbibliothek Miinchen, p. 60. Cf. also StAM, St Anw 179, 185, 194, 672, 682, 693, and 616. "StAM, St Anw 1854 a; see also Innerhofer, SchSnt Tage, p. 189; and the autobiography of Lena Christ, "Erinnerungen einer Ueberflussigen" (1912), in Christ, Gaammlte Werke (Munich, 1970), pp. 7-246. She grew up at the turn of the century, the illegitimate daughter of a farm maid, in the care of her grandparents, together with other foster children. "StAM, St Anw 185. 73 Cf. StAM, St Anw 185, on the situation of Anna Holl's three illegitimate children.

IOO

Silent births Many married the father of their second child; in some infanticide cases the fathers stated that they intended to marry the dead children's mothers in the foreseeable future. But the writer of the letter quoted earlier, Agathe Seidl of Sprittelsberg, was in a particularly awkward position. As the court records show,74 the farmhand and farmer's son Josef, whom she had met while they were working on the same farm, was not prepared to marry her and tried to avoid paying any maintenance. At her next place of employment she embarked on a new relationship with another farmhand working there, Michael Gostl. She became pregnant again, and Michael Gostl was not even willing to admit responsibility. Like Josef Deger, he was a farmer's son with expectations of property, whereas Agathe Seidl was the daughter of a day laborer and woodcutter. She came from a lower class than the fathers of her children, and her lovers had never considered her as a potential bride. But the future of their maids was not the farmers' concern, and there was no provision in a peasant household for a maid's pregnancy, even less the birth of a child. What counted was a maid's ability to work, and that was the reason why she was employed: Employing farm servants is like buying livestock: If you don't want to be cheated, you take a good look and think it over carefully. If something is wrong from the outset, it's best to say no right away. With livestock, it's only legal errors that count, whereas others cannot stop dealing and yet let the cow sheds go to rack and ruin and empty their purses to no avail. Would anyone claim it's different with servants?75 Evidence as to character collected by the courts in connection with investigations among the peasants related solely to the women's ability to work; their love affairs and illegitimate children were of no interest. Even in cases where the woman in question was described as "dissolute" by the other party, it was only her conduct at work that mattered: "a good, industrious, hard-working person, with nothing known to sully her good name"; "highly spoken of as a worker"; "a very useful, hard-working person"; "at her job Beischl was hard working and competent."76 Even arrest for infanticide failed to have an adverse effect on these statements.77

WITH THE ANGELS Work and Childbirth If an employer began to suspect that his maid was pregnant, her job was in danger for a few weeks, as in the case of Anna Holl, mentioned earlier: It had been evident for some time that Holl must be pregnant. . . . It is now about 8 weeks since I told her I didn't want her bringing any problems into the house and to make sure she left in good time, I'd be happy to keep her on as long as possible. She answered, "I'm 74

StAM, St Anw 1177. "Christ, "Rumpelhanni," p. 612. 7l5StAM, St Anw 682, 693 and 185. "StAM, St Anw 185, for the period following her release from prison. IOI

Status of women and place of children all right, I'm not pregnant, I've got an ulcer, and I've got to have an operation." But she went on getting bigger, and I kept telling my wife to get her out of the house.78

Like the maids' love affairs, pregnancy and childbirth were also set against the background of work - particularly the changing seasons, with their differing demands on the women. Some describe childbirth as work; for them it is a conscious, undramatic experience. Giving birth alone and in hiding, they had to manage without the aid of a midwife. A secret pregnancy and the birth, which almost all of the women who committed infanticide endured alone, were a tremendous exertion and demanded complete reserve in the face of questions and offers of help. The reply of one of the maids to the constables interrogating her indicates as much: "Then I asked her why she had killed the baby, and she answered, 'I thought I was pretty healthy and I would be able to stand it.' I don't know what she meant by that, but I assume she meant that she felt strong enough to keep the birth secret."79 Maids who kept their pregnancy secret and did not leave their jobs in good time, as was expected, were a threat to the working rhythm of peasant life, which could not stand the loss of a maid, least of all at harvest time, when labor was hard to come by. Pregnant maids were aware of this and worked all the harder. They performed the full quota of work expected of them until the moment of labor and then carried on as if nothing had happened. This is evident from the following statements by the maid Leokadia Beischl, a farmhand who worked alongside her, and the farmer's wife: I admit that yesterday morning on the twentieth of the month [August 1888] I went out into the fields first thing, was caught unawares by the pains, and gave birth to a child. The baby came out next to a path leading across the field. I bent over because I was in pain, when all at once I felt it come, and then there it was, lying on the ground. The umbilical cord was already torn, I didn't have to cut it. The baby didn't move, I thought it was dead. I put earth in its mouth, perhaps some grass was mixed up with it, too, wrapped it in an apron, and laid it in the grain field. I was going to go back and get it at midday. I worked next to the field. I put the earth and grass in its mouth to stop it from crying if it woke up. I didn't take it home with me at midday because there were too many people around. . . . How long it took me to get from where it was born to where it was found I don't remember, but I think it was quite a long way. Twenty minutes' walk, perhaps. I worked all day and didn't feel anything and even went to bed without washing. I didn't clean myself up until I was in the jail in Ismaning. . . . I threw the afterbirth into a field next to the red signpost at the crossroads.

All the farmhand noticed was a slight interruption in the regular pace of work: I worked on Drax's farm alongside Beischl. On the twentieth of this month I went out into the fields with her at 6:30. I went first, Beischl followed. At the red cross she stopped. I didn't know what she did there. I had already been working for quite a while when she came after me. She may have been there for half an hour. When I asked what she had been doing, she answered that she had had a nosebleed. She spent the morning with me working 78

Ibid.

"StAM, St Anw 179. 102

Silent births in the field, and at midday we went home. It is quite correct that there were various other people there. Beischl always denied being pregnant. We noticed that she was not quite so big any more. To the former's wife she said, "If you'd bet that I was pregnant you'd have lost 10 marks." In the afternoon we worked somewhere else. When we got back in the evening she went straight to bed after supper. The farmer's wife confirmed that the working day had passed in the usual way: Beischl worked for me in the fifth month. I reproached her for being pregnant, but she always denied it. She even wanted to bet me 10 marks that she wasn't. On the twentieth of the month she went out to work as usual and came back at midday. She acted as if nothing had happened, and so I didn't notice that she had gotten thinner. She even said to me, "Now you've lost 10 marks, mistress, if you'd bet that I was pregnant." In the evening she finished all her work and then went to bed. The constables and Dr. U. came the same evening. . . . Beischl was hard working and good at her job.80 On the evening of 18 December 1880, 27-year-old Katharina Stacheder from Salzburghofen carried out her job at the inn as usual, had a baby in the night and killed it, and in the morning went on working. She made sure that she had completed all her duties before going to her room to give birth. The official record of the investigating judge in Traunstein describes work-birth-work as a process without interruption. After 9 o'clock on the evening of Friday the seventeenth of last month, while I was performing my duties at my place of work, I suddenly felt pains, but I went on working. After the customers had left, the pains got worse; I stayed in the serving parlor opposite the guestroom, walking up and down, when suddenly I felt a loss of blood and water, sat down on the steps in the room, and thought to myself, "I'll hang on here as long as I can," though I could have called for help, since the maids sleep on the ground floor, but I didn't want to wake them up. I had already locked the front door, and when I couldn't bear it any longer I went upstairs to my bedroom, where the cook sleeps in the other bed. I had no light, and lay down on the bed after getting completely undressed and spreading out my outer dress on the bed, as quietly as I could, so as not to wake the cook. Then the pains came back again, very strong this time, and about a quarter of an hour later I had a baby. It didn't cry, but I thought it moved. . . . On Saturday the eighteenth, at about 6:30, I cleaned up the serving parlor, carried out my duties as normal; on that day I was very hungry and ate a lot, and it wasn't until Sunday the nineteenth that I began to feel really miserable.81 Because the peasant household was not prepared for a maid to give birth to a baby and it was an unwelcome event, it was in the nature of things that every place of birth was also a place of work. Few maids had their babies in the bedroom, which they generally shared with others, and even at night they left the room to keep the birth secret. Many of them gave birth in the privy, treating the birth as an act of defecation - an everyday event that had to be fitted into the daily course of work with as little apparent disruption as possible. Others gave birth in the cow shed or 80

StAM, St Anw 693.

81

StAM, St Anw 179. 103

Status of women and place of children stable: in the horses' stall, in the hayloft, in the barn, beneath the cows - at their familiar place of work where they spent most of their time - and, in extreme cases, carried on with their work immediately afterward. Through watching the livestock give birth, they had also acquired some knowledge of the process, which gave them some measure of independence when they themselves gave birth. It is a striking fact that in Bavaria's late nineteenth-century autobiographical peasant literature, animal births and human births are experiences that merge into each other. Animal births are described with the same tenderness as human childbirth and are just as welcome in economic terms; the context does not imply a devaluation of childhood, nor does it imply that for the maids. But the woman who gives birth in the cow shed is certainly no farmer's wife, whose children are awaited and have a special bed prepared for them to be born in, surrounded by the rituals framing and protecting the peasants' soul, life, fertility, and property.82 "Something Came Out" - or the Vagueness of the Body's Messages In the conduct of these women during pregnancy and childbirth, there are indications that they denied the children any social existence from the outset. Most of them made no preparation whatsoever for the birth and care of the child. The women denied that they were pregnant, many of them subsequently testifying that they were not even aware of their pregnancy. Although "something came out," they claimed that they did not know that it was a child. Even women who had already had one or more children used this argument - the upshot being that they could not have killed a baby about whom they were in ignorance. This line of reasoning, together with attempts to conceal or deny the birth, is a pattern of behavior that recurs in many of the cases. In fact, this seems to have been a shared strategy among these women, and it cannot be attributed to the fact that they knew one another or that there was some kind of collusion among them; it must have been rooted in the shared living conditions in which they gave birth.83 Despite the keen eyes of those around them, who nearly always discovered the pregnancy, they persisted in their denials; some did at least manage to create a measure of uncertainty about their condition through their assertions and explanations. But there was more to the maids' secrecy and denials than simply the hope of hanging onto their jobs. Their roots went deeper and were not directly connected with the credibility that the maids wished to give their assurances. By denying the child, they are depriving it of any identity in the eyes of the outside world and, most importantly, in their own eyes: The child remains a piece of nature, without a history, which they rid themselves of in the privy and which they also devalue. 82

See Graf, Lebenmeiner Mutter, p. 12; Max Hofler, Volksmedizin und Aberglaube in Oberbayerns Gegenwart

und Vergangenbeil, "new edition" (Munich, 1893), p. I98ff.; Bavaria, Landes- und Volkskunde des Konigreichs Bayern (Munich, i860), 11, p. 409; Kempf, Arbeits- und Lebersverhaltnisse, p. 121. 83 R. W. Malcolmson, "Infanticide in the Eighteenth Century," in J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England 1550—1800 (Princeton, 1977), pp. I94ff., describes similar tactics of denial and concealment in English infanticide cases.

IO4

Silent births I never thought I was in the family way. I was stouter than usual, but that was left over from my first confinement. At 6 o'clock in the morning of 23 December, after feeling nothing all night, I felt an urgent need to go to the privy. There I noticed that lumps of stuff were coming out of me - 1 couldn't see what it was - and that my period had come. The return of my period also explains the traces of blood by my bedside and between the bed and the privy.84 Anna Holl testified: I spent all evening working in the cow shed. At about 6 o'clock the farmer's wife was just feeding the calves when I said to her, "I can't hold it any more, I must go to the privy," and in her presence I went to the privy in the cow shed. The mistress and the farmhands went in to supper, but I couldn't move from the cow shed for the pain in my belly. . . . Then it felt like it feels when your water goes before childbirth, in two minutes it was all over, I didn't feel the baby coming out; I didn't cut or tear the umbilical cord, nor did I feel anything between my feet afterward. . . . I didn't know anything about the baby until it was found by the sergeant; I thought I was just giving off clots of blood.85 Childbirth in the privy is merely a drastic expression of the women's relationship with the child: It is described and experienced as excrement or clotted blood, as a sick and dirty discharge. When the women claim that they "didn't know" that they had had a baby, it is possible that they are not necessarily lying - even if, like Anna Holl, they had already had five children and were quite capable of identifying the physical signs of pregnancy and childbirth. They restricted pregnancy and childbirth to the dimension of a purely physical process. Despite their knowledge of pregnancy, they deny any knowledge of the child and refuse any commitment to motherhood. No picture of the unborn child is allowed to take shape; no speculation is permitted as to its existence after its birth. It remains ambiguously vague, a marginal status that is not resolved until birth and thus obviously inspires fear in many women. 86 A childbirth which is staged and experienced as a bowel movement enables the women to avoid looking at the newborn baby. They are obviously afraid of the sight of it. The fictitious vagueness and amorphousness of what "came out" of them can only be maintained if the child is not identified as a small human being, as a boy M

StAM, St Anw 736; Maria Schaller from Munich, according to the judgment record of 25 February 1889. 85 StAM, St Anw 185; cf. also StAM, St Anw 89, 194, 700, 736, 858, 940, 984, 1446, 1482, and 1358. "Notions and fantasies about the unborn child vary greatly from one culture to another. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), p. 95: "Take,

for example, the unborn child. Its present position is ambiguous, its future equally. For no one can say what sex it will have or whether it will survive the hazards of infancy. It is often treated as both vulnerable and dangerous." On contemporary attitudes to the body, see also Duden, Geschichte unter der Haut. Niles Newton compares different cultural attitudes and patterns of behavior towards unborn infants: M. Mead and N. Newton, "Cultural Patterning of Perinatal Behavior," in S. A. Richardson and A. F. Guttmacher (eds.), Childbearing — Its Social and Psychological Aspects (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 152ff.; according to Max Hofler, Volksmedizin, p. 26, "the former popular belief was that a child less than 6 weeks old did not yet possess a soul. 105

Status of women and place of children or a girl. Women who did not give birth in the privy avoid closer scrutiny of the child. They leave it lying between their legs, where it is just "something moving," with no outline or face. Katharina Stacheder covers the child with an apron, "so as not to have to touch it, because I was frightened." Therese Zeller, who gave birth in the hayloft, cannot give the child's sex, "because I didn't dare to look at it and because I immediately regretted it so much." They prevent any contact with the child. Even the fear that the baby might cry has two sides to it: It is partly the fear of being found out and partly fear of being confronted with the needs of the helpless infant and her own feelings, fear of experiencing it as a living being.87 Some of the women killed their babies in the most brutal way, by smashing their heads in. This method of infanticide required great strength and resembled the way in which animals, particularly poultry and small animals, were dispatched. It seems to have been an expression of strong repulsion and of inchoate feelings of fear and helplessness with regard to the newborn child.88 Perhaps the reason we know so little about the feelings of these Upper Bavarian women toward their newborn babies is because they would not have killed a child with whom they had established contact and that had acquired a voice, a face, and a sex.89 And perhaps the child would then have had a soul. For another fact indicates that these women had not granted the children they killed a place in their world: They were also excluded from the women's religious ties. Why did I not find any sign, in 60 cases of infanticide, that the women had given the children some kind of hurried baptism? For centuries, peasants all throughout Europe, including Bavaria, had tried to baptize premature and stillborn babies, even in secret and against the will of the church. Votive pictures depict instances of "child signing," the "waking" of a stillborn baby so that it could be baptized and buried in hallowed ground. Desperate parents would take their stillborn babies and babies that died before the christening to places of pilgrimage and implore the Mother of God to bring them briefly back to life.90 In nineteenth-century Bavaria a child was christened as soon as possible after its birth, at any rate no more than 24 hours later, in order to save its soul for heaven if it should die91 and to ensure it a place among the dead in the village cemetery.92 8

'StAM, St Anw 1446, 1623, 179, 682; on the importance of "looking," see Ann Oakley, Housewife (London, 1974), pp. 200—1; also Maria W. Piers, "Kindermord — ein historischer Riickblick," Psyche. ZeitscbrififirPsychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen 30 (1976), 425: "In the experience of twentieth-century children's institutions responsible for the adoption of illegitimate children, it is easier for the mothers if they have not seen their children." This means that there is no emphatic contact, which can also result from touching the child or hearing it cry. 88 Cf., for example, StAM, St Anw 388, 1482, and 1628. 89 Cf. Piers, "Kindermord." "'Arthur Imhof, Die verlorenen Welteti. Alltagsbewaltigung durch unsere Vorfahren — und wesbalb wir urn heute

so schwer damit tun (Munich, 1984), pp. 163-4. See also Sigrid Metken (ed.), Die Ittzte Reise. Sterben, Tod und Trauersitten in Qbtrbayern, exhibition catalog, Munchner Stadtmuseum (Munich, 1984), pp. 107ft; Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck, Das Votivbild (Munich, 1958), p. 66; Jacques Gelis, "De la mort a la vie: les sanctuaires a repit," Ethnologic Frangaise 11 (1981), 211—24. "Cf. Knodel, Bavarian Village, p. 359. 92 Thoma, Andreas Vist, pp. 8ff. 106

Silent births So what about the women who killed their babies? Were they too distraught after the birth? Did they have so little compassion for these unwanted babies? It cannot be assumed that they were any less religious than the rest of the peasantry and knew nothing about the absolute necessity of baptism for the attainment of eternal life. They had nearly all been baptized Roman Catholic and had grown up sharing the religious life of the village, with its constant ritual reminders of religion and its obligations. Although the peasants might distrust the institutions of the church, they had begged for a "sign" from the child (Kinderzeichen) and the baptism of stillborn babies, often flying in the face of the church's ban. There was even a kind of popular peasant religious tradition that maintained direct communications with the deceased and the life hereafter.93

The Search for Motivation It does not seem possible to infer from the reasons given by the maids for killing their babies that, compared with other unmarried mothers, they suffered from such extreme conditions that they were driven into a position of "utter hopelessness" or "profound mental and material distress." An argument often advanced was the father's refusal to pay, which meant that he did not intend to marry the woman, either; or he refused to accept paternity, or various different men claimed to have had intercourse with the mother. Many of the women took it for granted that the father would try to dodge paying maintenance. Barbara Dodl decided to kill the baby "because my lover had repeatedly stated that he would not acknowledge paternity of the expected baby." Maria Weber asserted that she did not know that the father had a fortune. Maria Gostl was frightened of the father: He "threatened me, if I were to say that he had got me in the family way." Another killed her baby "because it didn't have a definite father," a frequent occurrence if the women concerned had had several lovers.94 Generally speaking, there was no prospect of marriage, although it was what the maids wanted. Thus the children were not "premarital" but outside any kind of family context, even though the formation of a family was initially - and long remained - no more than a fantasy and a vague hope for the future. A fatherless child was to some extent extraneous to the life for which they were saving and, indeed, posed a threat to it. To Katharia Stacheder it occurred that "I already had one child to support, and the burden of providing for the newborn baby would also be mine alone to bear, so my fortune would go on getting smaller, and for this reason it would be better for me if I didn't have the child, and so I made the decision to kill the child."95 93

Cf. Horger, Dorfreligion II, pp. 142-3.

94

StAM, St Anw 974, 1482, 529, and 542. In 15 cases it is explicitly stated that the fathers would not pay; five wished to pay; and in two cases marriage was planned. "StAM, St Anw 179. 107

Status of women and place of children In many cases, however, the records of the assize court do not contain any clear indication of a motive for the deed - which was then generally described as "material distress" {materielle Notlage). In other cases, the statement of the accused conflicted with the evidence given by witnesses. Agathe Seidl, for example, stated that she could not impose a third child on her parents, who were already looking after two illegitimate children, in view of the poverty in which they lived. But the parents stressed that they had never put any pressure on their daughter over the two children and would not have "scolded" her. "She would have received the same treatment if she had turned up with yet another child . . . It would have been brought up like the other two, and Agathe Seidl had no need to be afraid of her parents. That was not the reason why she had got into trouble, as she had claimed." 96 As in this case, the judge often saw no "serious difficulties"; "there was no special motive for the deed," the accused "had no particular disadvantages to fear," was "not particularly upset" or mentally unbalanced.97 Therese Zeller, who already had one child in foster care, worked as a dairymaid and also possessed some property in a form of a small holding inherited from her parents, expressed the ambivalence shown by many of the women: I didn't want to kill the child just like that. I thought to myself I'll leave the baby where it is; if it dies, so be it, and if it doesn't, that's all right, too. . . . I did not need to kill the child out of distress and worry over how to support the child; I would have gone away with it, even if it meant not being paid.98 No "special" motives emerged from the questioning, either - certainly not any that might have been relevant in legal terms. But the lack of apparent motive was not in keeping with the bourgeois notions of law, which saw a conflict between natural maternal love and the salvaging of a woman's sexual honor, and could therefore ascribe infanticide only to the "honor-saving" motive or to "special" circumstances and a clinical picture of mental disturbance. 99 The point is whether the maids viewed the killing of their children as infanticide, in the meaning of bourgeois law, at all. The situation was not a "special" one, there were no "special" motives: In most cases, the women's interest in the child was not sufficient to make them want to keep it in spite of the conditions in which they lived. In accordance with a decision made earlier, the babies were killed in a form of delayed abortion, before the mother had set eyes on the child, before there was even the most rudimentary relationship between mother and child that might have had the effect of inhibiting them from killing it. Accordingly, the offenders show hardly any signs of grief or guilt; their reactions after the deed relate to its possible consequence: fear of being discovered and fear of going to jail. 96 StAM, St Anw 1177. "Comments of this kind were made in 15 cases, by the accused or by the court. ' 8 StAm, St Anw 682. "See Wilhelm Wachterhauser, Das Verbrecbeit des Kindttmordu im Zeitalter der Aufklarung. Eine rechtsgeschichtliche Untersuchung der dogmatiscben, prozeisualen und rechtssozhlogiscben Aspekte, Quellen und

Forschungen zur Strafrechtsgeschichte, no. 3 (Berlin, 1973), p. 146. 108

Silent births The Love of Children The actions of these women did not conflict with the customary attitudes toward children in Upper Bavaria in those days. A specific relation with the life and death of children arose here, rooted in the peasant way of life and prebourgeois methods of socialization. Infanticide, which according to the crime statistics was virtually restricted to the countryside, may be seen as the most dramatic manifestation of this — though in actual fact it was an everyday experience.100 It was not usual to make "a big fuss" about children: "Every year one was born. If it died, it was a pity; if it lived, it was good." 101 Children are a blessing from God, but if there are many of them the blessing may easily become too great. It is a well-known fact that the poor are worse afflicted than the rich. Many a wealthy farmer bemoans his lack of an heir, while his next-door neighbor, the cottager, has a swarm of small hungry mouths to feed. On average, however, a great many children are produced - a good dozen for every marriage, at an estimate. Parents are delighted with the first couple of children, particularly if one of them is a boy, but after that none of them is welcomed with open arms. Anyway, few of these children survive, four to the dozen perhaps, while the others pass on at an early age. The death of an infant rarely causes much sorrow: He has gone to heaven, and we've enough to do looking after the others. But if an older child dies just before he is due to begin working, everybody laments it: So much work and effort, and all in vain, it would have been better for one of the younger ones to expire. . . . But this is not due to coarseness, nor do the parents love their children less; anyone who has to earn his daily bread has no choice, especially in summer: he cannot wait upon his children as the rich do. But the inner love is the same.102 The women accused in Munich had grown up in these conditions and had probably witnessed the death of younger brothers or sisters and noted the ambivalent nature of parental love, like Anna Drax, only 3 of whose 14 siblings were still alive; or Lorenz Klar, 6 of whose 11 siblings died in early infancy.103 They also realized that up to a point the ability of children to survive depended on the parents' wishes. The high rate of child and infant mortality was a result of malnutrition and poor 100 See Keith Wrightson, "Infanticide in Earlier Seventeenth-century England," Local Population Studies '5 (I975)> 10-25, 11: "The discussion of infanticide thus uncovers a perplexing relativity in popular attitudes towards the value of infant life which contrasts markedly with the clear prescriptions of contemporary morality." On infanticide among the Eskimos, see Milton M. R. Freemann, "A Social and Ecological Analysis of Systematic Female Infanticide among the Netsilik Eskimo," American Anthropologist 73 (1971), 1011-18; Asen Balikci, "Female Infanticide on the Arctic Coast," Man 2 (1967), 615-25; Carmel Schrire and William L. Steiger, "A Matter of Life and Death: An Investigation into the Practice of Female Infanticide in the Arctic," Man 9 (1974), pp. 161-84; Joseph B. Birdsell, "Some Predictions for the Pleistocene Based on Equilibrium Systems among Recent Hunter-Gatherers," in R. B. Lee and I. Devore (eds.), Man the Hunter (Chicago, 1968), pp. 236-7; Claude C. Meillassoux, "Die wilden Frlichte der Frau." Ueber hausliche Produktion und kapitalistische Wirtschaft (Frankfurt, 1976), p. 42. 101 Graf, Leben meiner Mutter, p. 12. 102 Leoprechting, Bauernbrauch, pp. 213, 216. 103 StAM, St Anw 1879a, 1828a. On infant mortality in cottagers' households, see also Kempf, Arbeitsund Lebensverhaltnisse, table on pp. 68-9.

109

Status of women and place of children diet - few women breastfed their babies - and poor medical care.104 Parental affection and attention tended to wane most noticeably after the birth of their fourth and fifth children. Infant survival must be seen against the background of the "nationwide practice" of "letting them go to heaven to be with the angels," a sort of "postnatal family planning"105 through more or less deliberate neglect. The religious notion that superfluous children were better off in heaven as angels may have served as justification and consolation. Illegitimate children who were placed in foster homes were, though tolerated by society, even worse off than those who grew up with their families. Foster mothers do not seem to have taken much interest in the children.106 Whether ot not family planning in the form of contraception and abortion was attempted cannot be considered here. Devices and methods for inducing abortions were well known, at any rate, and it would appear that some of the infanticides had been preceded by attempts at abortion.107 The infanticide records do not allow us access to the feelings that accompanied the death of the children. Feelings do not appear to have existed. Many of the statements breathe indifference, sometimes even callousness and brutality; they rarely show a hint of concern. The evidence of witnesses' statements conveys the same impression. Of course, there are difficulties in inferring the presence or absence of feelings from oral or written statements. For one thing, this means that the language used by the women during the questioning, which is their everyday language, at least when speaking to the village policeman, may not have developed the range and vocabulary necessary to the individual expression of feeling, with the result that an apparent inability to articulate emotions gives the impression of general emotional poverty. The specific nature of the interrogation must also be taken into account. For another thing, the transcription of statements in standard German does not allow for the differentiation of expression and gesture only possible in dialect. Neither the specific attitude toward the life and death of young children nor this muteness entitles one to draw the conclusion that the children would not have been loved. The case of Agathe Seidl demonstrates that affectionate relationships between 104

Cf. Schweyer, Schtiffau, p. 33; Knodel, Bavarian Village, p. 359; Lee, "Bastardy," pp. 417, 422.

Between 1879 and 1888, 33.5% of all children born in Bavaria died before the age of 1 year or were stillborn. For 1850 to 1899, Knodel gives an average of 2.9% stillbirths and 37.7% deaths in the first year, 45% of which occurred in the first tenth of the first year. Between 1888 and 1889, only 7% of the children who died of "weakness," "frailty," or stomach infections had received medical attention. 105 H6rger, "Familieneformen einer landlichen Industriesiedlung im Verlauf des 19. Jahrhunderts," ZBLG 41 (1978), p. 779; see also Jeggle, Kkbingen, p. 167; Malcolmson, "Infanticide," p. 206; Wrightson, "Infanticide," p. 9, on "infanticidal nursing." 106 Lee "Bastardy," pp. 417—18; cf. the report by a district court medical officer in 1909 in StAM, St Anw 1854: "How far the care staff were to blame for this state of affairs is hard to say. It need not always be malicious intent but inadequate cleanliness and a lack of hard work and ability to breastfeed, which is invariably the case with women of this type, may result in the same sorry picture." See also StAM, St Anw 682 and 194. The mortality rate for illegitimate children in Upper Bavaria from 1815 to 1869 was between 38.9% and 42%. 107 Hofler, Volksmedhin, pp. 115-16 and 197, lists the abortants known to Bavarian popular medicine. In the case of Anna H., StAM, St Anw 185, her bedroom had been searched for arbortants. Cf. also Leoprechting, Bauernbrauch, p. 100. IIO

Silent births parents and children could coexist with the idea that a child might be killed. In a letter to her parents she inquires tenderly and anxiously after her two children, who are living at home. At the same time she made the decision, while in prison, to kill her next illegitimate child. Her mother voiced this suspicion: She later told the constable "that her daughter told her when she came out of prison in Sulzbach last year that there were so many women who had killed their babies there, from whom she shrank in horror, thanking God that he had not put the idea into her head when she had her last illegitimate child, although she had had a rough time of it there. . . . Since then . . . her parents believe that she has had the idea on her mind: that if she should have another baby she ought to do the same and kill it."108 Similarly, we learn from one of Therese Beiferl's former lovers that Beiferl had often told him that "she loved her child very much, never that she was displeased at its existence."109

TALK In many cases the thing that leads to the discovery of infanticide or the exposure of the culprit is the "talk" that has built up, a "rumor" that has gotten around, or the "voice of public opinion." The vehicle of this talk is an anonymous body that in some respects represents the village: I hereby officially report to the royal district court that for the past few days a rumor has been going around in the villages of Piesenkam and Sachsenkam to the effect that the unmarried farm servant Anna Holl of Waakirchen, at present in the employ of farmer Josef Schieder of Stumbach near Miesbach, had aborted the fruit of her womb. I therefore went to Stumbach early this morning and made inquiries with respect to this rumor.110 Thus runs the report of the policeman of Waakirchen constabulary in the district of Miesbach. The constable of Salzburghofen finds out "by chance that something must have happened, that the waitress Stacheder was said to have had a baby" and investigates the rumor by observing the waitress in the inn in question.111 The first official report of a policeman in Tittmoning whose inquiries were prompted by the discovery of a baby's body in a tributary (the Altwasser) of the Salzach states: "Public opinion points to the maid Therese Zeller of Tittmoning, born on i October 1859, as the mother of the child whose body was discovered."112 The village policeman investigating "rumors" and "talk" is going on knowledge which was established long ago, quite independently of any interest in crime. The policeman is himself a member of the village community or the market; the hints gleaned from talk are as authoritative for him as they are for other villagers. The reports of 108

StAM, "°StAM, '"StAM, 112 StAM,

St St St St

Anw Anw Anw Anw

109 1177. StAM, St Anw 194. 185, police report of 14 August 1878. 179, witness's testimony of 2 January 1881. 682, police report of 21 June 1888.

Ill

Status of women and place of children these policemen introduce village talk as an element possessing its own impetus, describing it as the "voice of public opinion" (allgemeine Volksstimm). The bearers of this talk, or its purveyors - those who first let the policeman into the secret remain anonymous. Even in the witnesses' statements the origin of a "rumor" or "gossip" is not identifiable. In the police records of inquiries in the home village or workplace of the offender, the rumor or gossip that eventually led to the matter being reported is deciphered as a discourse that had grown up around the maid within the village and at her place of work. The "people" involved in this discourse turn up in the records as a circle of village and personal witnesses. In the case of Anna Dresel, an unmarried crofter's daughter from the moorland hamlet of Kolbermoor, the witnesses' testimony consists of the statements of 32 people who were involved directly or indirectly in giving evidence:113 The parents and the brothers and sisters of the accused 9 women: crofters' wives from the locality, day laborers, and maids 7 men: crofters, farmhands, day laborers, and her employer - including the accused's lover Further: a midwife, a female "healer," the doctor, the constable, and the vicar As a member of the village, the constable is involved in this discourse, initially just passing on what he has heard. To this extent, the policeman's actions are not only consistent with those of an official but also with those of someone who is involved by virtue of his knowledge. He is an officer of the law and a prime witness. In the course of the police investigation, the concealment of the pregnancy and the birth of the child provides the initial reason for questioning the friends and acquaintances of the accused, especially the women. The investigation sought to establish whether the infanticide was planned and if the pregnancy was concealed for this reason. Questioning reveals how maidservants were surrounded by people intent on observing, supervising, and judging them; in this living and working environment, any attempt to keep things secret - even if constantly repeated - was bound to fail. Denials were confounded by knowledge; for example, one policeman reported that "the accused Beischl had been pregnant for a long time but continued to deny her pregnancy. . . . She was also generally pointed out as the culprit."114 In the case of Therese Zeller, "the rumor that Zeller was pregnant . . . had gotten around because she was conspicuously stout, as is only the case in females who are pregnant." Her unusually thick girth had been observed by Anna Hauser, a married cottager's wife from Kai, Maria Huber, a washerwoman of Tittmoning, Helene Luger and Anna Stelzl, day laborers from Tittmoning, who had been told by Zeller a few weeks earlier that she was suffering so badly from abdominal pains that it was imposu3

StAM, St Anw 672.

"4StAM, St Anw 693, police report, Ismaning, 21 August 1888. 112

Silent births sible for her to perform her work in the cow shed, for which reason she had wanted Stelzl to stand in for her but had been unable to find her. . . Furthermore, the rumor spread among her fellow servants.115 It was other women, especially, who noticed the immediate physical changes in the pregnant woman. It was almost impossible to conceal a pregnancy from the knowing and inquisitive gaze of the women, particularly the local midwives. In their statements they describe the parts of the work process and the daily round at which they first suspected that the maid might be expecting a baby from small irregularities in the woman's physique and bearing. For instance, she might leave them during work in the fields and vanish into the woods without a word of explanation; she might be warmly wrapped up in the summer, which might indicate that she wanted to hide her belly; she might put on weight, change her eating habits suddenly, or go to see a quack doctor. The servant who shared her bedroom was best placed to observe her closely. The records of the trial contain a neverending discourse between the women, hinging on the fact that the maid had not had a period for months and whom she had last gone with. It appears as though the women were claiming some sort of "right to know." If the pregnant maid denied her condition, there was no end to the speculation; this state of not knowing gave rise to the "rumor." And the maids appear to have accepted the demand for an explanation. They were forever struggling against the rumor, trying to preempt the questions they expected by talking about their state of health, reporting illnesses that gave a false impression of pregnancy and mentioning doctors whom they had consulted and the different diagnoses they had given. The discourse about the maid spread to the village and became "talk." The court's paternity investigations show this wider level of perception, extending beyond the maid's immediate world, her place of work, and the household to which she belonged. There are certain special occasions on which village opinion notes love and pregnancy: holidays, festive occasions, weddings, church feast days, markets, dances, and so on. Knowledge of the maid's pregnancy became a public secret. In the village, information about the pregnancy is immediately linked with speculation as to the baby's father. In the case of Anna Holl from Waakirchen, the gossip centered on her relationship with a married crofter. The gossip is reproduced here in the words of some of the witnesses: Both the midwife and the farmer's housekeeper . . . confirm that to judge by her appearance at the time, Anna Holl was pregnant and that it was no longer any secret in Sachsenkam and Stumbach that Anna Holl was having intercourse with Marti of Piesenkam, a married farmer. . . . according to the unmarried housekeeper . . . the farm maid Anna Holl publicly talked and acted as if she were the lover of the crofter Sebastian Sachs of Piesenkam at a dance in Sachsenkam this summer, whispering in his ear when she got on to the dance floor, at which they both laughed as if in love and danced time after time with each other, which attracted attention. A farmer from Piesenkam, Josef Auer, told me." u5

StAM, St Anw 682, Tittmoning, 1 August 1888.

"3

Status of women and place of children [The midwife said,] "I saw Anna Holl at the end of May or beginning of June - it was the . . . anniversary in Sachsenkam - at the dance, and she was undoubtedly in an advanced state of pregnancy. Everyone was saying, 'Fancy her being so big and still dancing.'" [The girl's mother had heard from other people that she was pregnant:) "She was also told that she [Anna] was seeing the crofter from Piesenkam, and that she had denied one thing and the other. . . . The mother of the accused also admitted that the latter had been at the last market in Tolz with the crofter Sachs and that the two of them had gone home together on their own." [A farmer from Piesenkam stated:] "There was all manner of gossip about Marti and the way he was carrying on with the old girl!" [The farmer from Piesenkam said that the relationship between the two was no secret, and] "that in the circumstances Marti could not be blamed for it, as his wife no longer treated him as her husband, she is a real harridan, won't cook for him or do anything else for him, so that he is forced to act the housemaid and play tricks on her."116 The maid and her alleged lover denied the relationship, and yet the statements of the people were still more in the nature of a judgment - as in the following case, in which the paternity of the child was in dispute. Seidl's mistress, Anna Fassl, and many of the inhabitants of Steigerain and Sprittelsberg asserted that it was more likely that Seidl had been impregnated by the farmer's son Josef Deger, with whom she had already had an illegitimate child, as he had often called to see her at her parents' house the previous autumn, when she would keep him company part of the way when he left. Rumor has it locally that this happened very frequently, and Seidl would often boast to her mistress when she got back on Sundays that today her "darling" Deger had been there again.117 Such "talk" showed that people, the village - in the Munich cases it is chiefly the delivery boys, shopkeepers, small tradesmen, and servants in the immediate neighborhood — knew the whole story. It may be assumed that they observed the pregnancy, knew the father, and knew when and where the child might have been conceived. This was also the circle, rather than her fellow workers, that might give a maid a reputation as a "loose woman." From the point of view of the farm, it was the maid's work that mattered, nothing else. Thus it is quite possible for a woman to have a reputation for being "loyal, industrious and hard-working" and yet be described by others as a "loose woman." This would not affect her chance of finding work, but it would harm her chances of getting married. Judging by the records, these were chiefly women who associated with married men, had several lovers, particularly those who gave themselves to "fellows from outside," 118 and women with several children by different fathers, especially if the fathers were unknown. Women who were known thieves also came close to being "loose." Whether a woman was considered "respectable" or "loose" was dependent on a complex set of circumstances. Agathe Seidl was not only regarded as an unreliable "*StAM, St Anw 185; see also StAM, St Anw 672. u7StAM, St Anw 1177. u8 Cf. the murder case in StAM, St Anw 7852: In 1887, a farm maid was killed by a farmer's son and a farmhand, on the grounds that she had given herself to "outsiders."

114

Silent births worker but was also accused of stealing. Her reluctance to work and lack of respect for the property of others had already lost her the solidarity of some women before her pregnancy became the talk of the village. For the second time she had had an affair with a man from the village who was not of her own class but the son of a rich farmer. By doing so, she had not only breached the village's established class system, but she had also usurped a hearth that was not hers; she had forgotten her proper place. This failure to understand where she came from was ultimately blamed on the girl's mother: She had spoiled her daughter and let her get away with too much. The farmers' wives were party to this gossip. They kept each other informed about their maids, fearing the intrusion into their homes of a daughter-in-law who was poor as well as being their social inferior, or the drain on the household budget of maintenance payments for children fathered by their sons or husbands. Even lower-class women joined in the chorus of disapproval. The full extent of a woman's fear of having to pay maintenance for another's child — which was evidently quite common - is illustrated by a letter from Andreas Deger to Agathe Seidl: I don't believe anything you say any more. . . . I've had enough; she just made a fool of me and had another man at the same time as me and just wanted me as the father, like most of them. Your father has probably told you: He knows all about what went on at Thomas market and that the other fellow was always running after Gustl. I haven't been with her since then, and I will make sure that I don't, believe me. . . . I do not wish you to get into trouble, or perhaps you call it happiness, getting beer or more besides from Christl when you need it than from Sepl perhaps nothing at all. But unfortunately it turned out as I thought, and that was the way you wanted it. Our tears have been shed, the good times we enjoyed are gone for good [?], what's done is done. . . . I guess what you said about going a long way away is quite right, where you are not known, but I am not advising you. . . . What do you think your father would say if you moved down here to my place? You would have the best . . . in the . . . to yourself, mother would not have to know that you were with me, and I would have to know when you were coming

119

If the woman had love affairs with various men, not only was she branded a "loose woman" by the men themselves - it was, after all, in their interest to avoid having to pay maintenance - she also became "fair game." The fact that the young men kept one another informed of a young woman's love affairs reveals a monitoring system below the level of official prescriptions and proscriptions, that worked through observation and gossip. Even among the farm servants themselves, signs of sexual attraction between farmhands and maids were noted and discussed. In one case, a farmhand actually cited his fear of being observed by the other servants as grounds for turning down a maid's invitation to come to her bedroom: Because his love for her was "much less and because he did not dare, because he thought his workmates would spy on him and betray him." "'Ibid.

Status of women and place of children "I wasn't able to do anything else, with the other two always watching to see if I go upstairs or you go down. I heard them saying so once."120 This fear also shows that a farmhand who went to a maid in front of the others assumed a responsibility in their eyes. As soon as they knew about it, he might end up paying maintenance, if the worst came to the worst. The records show that secrecy often became the motive for the monitoring, judgmental "talk." It is a breach of the right to know that the village required of a woman, pregnant or not, if she wished to live as a member of the parish or community. By withdrawing from its surveillance, she abandoned the ground of common notions of order — that is, she was a potential threat to it, and hence to the given economic base, which had to be preserved. As a means of social monitoring, gossip exercised power. Within the village world, whose social relations were largely conveyed through property and inheritance, "knowing" about pregnancies and births meant control over the village property and power structures. The village's resources could not be divided up arbitrarily. Children who had to be raised by the community in the poorhouse and whose fathers were unknown were regarded as unwelcome scroungers. Unmarried mothers or pregnant maids who were unemployed were often expelled on the grounds that the woman might become a burden on the village relief fund and was thus a threat to morals.121 Upper Bavarian tales and village stories written down and peddled in the streets for years contain ample instances of how children of uncertain origin were treated. In an autobiographical novel by Lena Christ, an "alien bastard" is excluded from church rituals, since no one can be sure that the interloper is not a gypsy child. His uncertain origin might harbor menacing demonic forces that could upset the old established order, under which the inhabitants were allotted closely defined economic and social positions. "People said that it was a sin for a stray rascal like him to serve at the Lord's altar. 'Who knew,' they said, 'from whom he was descended and what sort of godless trade his parents might have followed!' And several farmers said, 'We have boys of our own; we don't need outsiders!'"122 The strategies used to expel outsiders were also applied in certain circumstances to native inhabitants. In the village the most powerful means of creating these "outsiders" was the spoken word: Gossip might brand a woman "lewd" and thus put an end to her "respectable" existence. The material power of the spoken word in assigning a person a role and the rapidity with which it could destroy somebody's livelihood are exemplified by an Upper Bavarian story about a seamstress with four illegitimate children, who was reputed to be a Trud, a sort of witch. The farmer's wife had forbidden the seamstress to set foot in the house, and for this reason the illness had been inflicted on her by the woman. She was a wild and wanton woman, l20 Ibid. The dangers of a visit to a maid's bedroom window are demonstrated by the nocturnal battle with wooden billets outside the window of two maids in Thai in September 1890 between rival groups of farmers' sons and farmhands, in which a farmhand was seriously injured: StAM, St Anw 15447. 121 See StAM, LRA 78105, 78106. '"Christ, "Mathias Bichler," p. 254.

Silent births who already had four children without fathers, and she was also suspected of being a Trad. She made the Kuissen farmer's marriage bed for him, and from that moment on he was unable to sleep a wink. When they opened up the bed, they found beneath the head a packet of bones, hair, and spent matches; they burned it, and after that everything was all right again. There was a lad, a fine young man, who she wanted to sleep with her. But he didn't want anything to do with her and felt nothing but revulsion for the abomination. But from that day on he was constantly ridden by a hag at night. . . . He gathered together a few lads from the village and went to the seamstress's house. . . . The lads then beat her to a pulp, so that if she hadn't led such a hard life she would have perished. After that, no good came of her ever again, neither in the village nor in the locality.125 As the charges set out in the court records show, the village - particularly the village gossip - seems to have determined, to a certain extent, whether or not a woman stood trial for infanticide. The village pronounced a sort of prejudgment, in which the decisive" factor does not appear to have been the infanticide itself but the woman's previous reputation, her conduct, and her position within the village community. The records also contain cases of solidarity with the infanticide. She is backed up by silence or actively through appropriate statements. Moral condemnation of infanticide does not figure in the statements by witnesses in the records. The judgments and condemnations in the gossip and the statements always relate to the accused's reputation and way of life, more than anything else. For instance, in the case of Therese Zeller, who was well respected, the infanticide would never have been reported if the child's body had not happened to come to light a few days later. 124 According to the police report, female day laborers and neighbors had spread the rumor that Therese the farm maid was pregnant. Yet when questioned by the policeman looking for the mother of a child whose body had been found in the Salzach, the farmer's wife who was the maid's mistress, the midwife who had examined her, and a maid who slept in the same bedroom all stated that they had not noticed that the maid was pregnant or - in the case of the midwife - stated that she had not given birth to a child. These statements initially outweighed all others and put an end to the neighbors' gossip. But from the statement of the maid herself we know that she really had been pregnant and had killed the baby on birth. Looking at the matter from a purely legal angle, we must assume that the midwife had passed on false information and that the former's wife and the maid who was her fellow worker must have seen more, and at least suspected more, than they were willing to tell the policeman. In fact, had she not gone to the examining magistrate of her own free will, Therese might never have been convicted. The case would never have come to court, and the pregnancy would never have left the sphere of the seeing and knowing women; it would have remained the subject of their "talk" and, ultimately, their silence. A comparison with other cases makes this conclusion likely. A comparison of this kind is also the only way of forming an idea of what happened in our example. Pregnancy and birth are social events that are shaped by talk and silence. 123

Leoprechting, Bauernbrauch, p. 52.

124

StAM, St Anw 682. "7

Status of women and place of children In the end, the decisive factor was the maid's good name in the village and on the farm where she worked. She came from a respected cottager's family, and she was a hard-working and reliable worker. The fact that she already had two illegitimate children does not seem to have harmed her reputation. Since she stood to inherit her parents' small holding, with this wealth and her wage she was well able to support her children, who were cared for by her parents. As she herself said, she would probably have been able to raise the third child, too. Lastly, a conviction for infanticide did not necessarily entail the woman's exclusion from the village community. After serving their sentences, which varied between 2 and 7 years in the cases studied here, the women were often accepted back into the village. In the case of Anna Holl, who was pardoned after serving three-quarters of her sentence in the Wiirzburg jail, a letter was sent to her home village inquiring into her prospects of earning a living after her release. The parish authorities replied "that Anna Holl is an excellent agricultural worker who will easily find a good job, since workers like her are always scarce and much sought after."125 123

StAM, St Anw 185.

PART III

The disputed boundaries of the village

Poaching: Economics, culture, and sexuality

Anyone going through the reference works of the Munich State Archives in order to learn a little more about the peasant mentality by exploring the crimes of rural Upper Bavaria may suddenly come across "mobs" and gangs, individuals surrounded by bands of followers. They were all "criminals" because they had engaged in poaching. They had broken the law and shot game, in forests, meadows, mountains, and on their own land or on the preserves of a neighboring landowner - an industrialist from Munich or a rentier, perhaps - but especially on the king's extensive personal domains. Yet most of them could claim to have led respectable lives, as respected farmers with sons and farmhands, day laborers and other villagers of good repute. How was it possible for them to be criminals at the same time? Was there some pathological factor in village society which prompted them - en masse - to forget the game laws from time to time or to ignore them repeatedly? The peasants' game rights had been stripped away over the centuries. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the poachers were the target of the game laws, and hunting was the right of the gentry,1 not the farmers. In Bavaria, from the thirteenth century to i February 1849, hunting was the prerogative of the ruler or the state, and since the early Middle Ages game rights had chiefly been a matter of dispute among the feudal lords. With the decline of the power of the estates and the strengthening of princely absolutism, the princes increasingly gained a monopoly on game rights. After 1667, the granting of game rights was a "princely favor."2 But this favor was vouchsafed only to aristocratic landowners and nobles. A number of prelates, founders, and patricians from the Bavarian towns were also among the privileged few.3 But they were allowed only to hunt for humbler game such as foxes, hare, wildfowl, and so on; hunting for "big game" such as deer, wild boar, ibex, 'Essential background on the history of hunting is provided by Hans Wilhelm Eckardt, Hemcbaftlicbe Jagd, bauerliche Not und biirgerlicbe Kritik. Zur Geschichte der fiirstlichen und adligen Jagdprivilegien vornehmlich im siidwestdeutschen Raum (Gottingen, 1976). 2 M Endres, "Geschichte des Jagdrechts in Bayern," Forstwirtschaftliches Zentralblatt, n.s. 23 (1901), 171-2. 3

Ibid., Eckardt, HenscbaftlicheJagd, p. 42.

121

Disputed boundaries of the village and chamois was reserved for the prince, and later the king.4 Not only were game rights graduated by aristocratic rank; there was even a hierarchy of game. The peasants had lost their right to hunt, once and for all, in 1508,5 though from then on they continued in vain to demand it back during the Peasant War and a number of revolts.6 For them, there remained hunting taxes and hunting service. The lords' ever-increasing game devoured the crops in their fields, trampled growing seed under foot, uprooted their turnips when grazing, and grubbed up their potatoes. Overnight camps and game paths mowed down crops and churned up pastures and meadows. Hare gnawed the bark off fruit trees and left vegetable gardens bare, while foxes attacked domestic poultry. The insatiable appetite of all this well-protected game threatened the peasants' livelihoods, since they were not even allowed to take effective action to defend themselves, let alone shoot game eating their crops in front of their very eyes. They rarely received compensation, and when they did, it was very little.7 The peasants also had to perform compulsory hunting service. They had to provide board and lodging for the hunters during the hunting season and rear and keep hunting dogs. When the hunt was in progress they were required to perform manual service, provide a team of horses, and work as beaters. These services were not only expensive to provide but also took the peasants away from their work precisely at times of the year when their own crops were ready for harvesting.8 Game was the peasants' enemy and their masters' hunting, a curse. The poaching which the peasants had engaged in for centuries must be viewed against this background. But whatever the motive — whether hunger or crop protection - it was classified as a political crime. Hunting was a privilege of the aristocracy and the prince, and peasants who hunted were calling this privilege in question, especially if they went out after the noble, aristocratic "big game." In the first half of the nineteenth century, young men in the district of Rosenheim were even forbidden to wear blackcock feathers in their hats' because the aristocracy also reserved such symbols of virility for their exclusive use; they could only be awarded to "legitimate" hunters, not to mere peasants. The penalties for poaching were severe, and in view of hunting's growing importance in satisfying the aristocracy's need for prestige and self-reassurance they had been increased. Since 1751, poaching on one's own land had been punishable under the Penal Code in Bavaria by 4 to 12 weeks' forced labor, and persistent offenders could be banished from the country. 4 Endres, "Geschichte," p. 177; cf. Franz Hocht, Systematische Darstellung da im recbstsrbeinischen Bayern geltenden Jagdrechts (Munich, 1893), p. 3.

'Endres, "Geschichte," pp. 187—8. 'Eckardt, Herrschaftliche Jagd, pp. 3 iff. 'Ibid., p. 85; cf. Andreas Suter, "Troublen" im Flirstbistum Basel (1726—1740) (Gottingen, 1985), pp. I9iff. 8 Eckardt, HarscbaftlicheJagd, pp. H3ff. 'Ernst Schusser, "Feste und offentliches Leben in Oberbayern urn 1850 — Ausziige aus den Landbeschreibungen der Jahre 1846 bis 1849 von Joseph Lenter," in Volksmusit in Oberbayern, edited by the District (Munich, 1985), p. 236; cf. also Eckardt, Herrschaftliche Jagd, p. 48. 122

Poaching But a poacher caught poaching on the land of others faced the galleys or the death sentence, as did his helpers, accomplices, and receivers. From 1806, poachers were liable to prison terms of up to 16 years. There was a war going on in the forests and mountains, for game wardens had the right, or orders, to fire on fleeing or merely suspected poachers and capture them "dead or alive."10 This state of affairs lasted until 1848. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, all that had changed. A new game law was in force. The privileged right to hunt on others' land had been abolished without compensation for the owners of hunting preserves, and every peasant was now entitled to hunt on his own land - if he owned enough of it: 240 Tagwerke in the plains and 400 in the mountains.11 But even the poor were allowed to hunt, now that the district councils leased out the hunting rights for smaller areas, and they could buy game licenses, if they could afford them.12 Poaching was now "a crime like any other in terms of the penalties it carries."13 Every subject in the Kingdom of Bavaria thus had the right to hunt, if he owned enough land, if he was rich enough to lease a hunting preserve, if he was not too poor to afford a game license. But the villagers still did not seem satisfied. They went on illicitly hunting on the land of others - the lord of the manor, rich bourgeois from Munich, and factory owners, who, it should be said, had to pay good sums of money into the parish coffers for their game rights. And these poachers did not even spare the king's own domains. Indeed, the changes in the game laws since 1848 do not seem to have done anything at all to stem poaching by the peasants. Poaching was no rarer, the poachers' methods and even the poachers themselves were unchanged, and the conflict between the villagers and the authorities persisted unabated. One is left with the impression that the changes wrought by the game law amendment of 1850 had not been accepted as a fundamental improvement; they were not considered "fairer." What was it that prompted the peasants to go hunting, against the law? Do the terms "poaching" (Wildern) and "poacher" (Wilderer) describe other realities that are not intelligible through the text of the laws alone? I shall now try to shed light on a state of affairs that might appear criminal and pathological to a bourgeois judge and consultant psychiatrist, laying bare the various layers of reality assigned to it by nineteenth-century peasant society in Upper Bavaria. At the end of the chapter, I shall come back to the "liberating revolution" of 1848 in order to examine how the peasants came to be "liberated" and allowed to hunt. But the fact that the will to go poaching still lived on at the end of the century shows that the conditions 10

Ibid., pp.

n

Die Bayerische Gattzgebung liber Jagdausiibung, Wildschadtnsersatz undjagdfrtvel mil den hierzu erlassenen Vollzugs-Normen und Polizeivorscbriften. Neue Ausgabe, hg. mil Genehmigung da k. Staatsministarium da Innern

(Munich, 1864), articles 1-3, pp. 5ff.; Hocht, SystematUcht Dantellung, p. 22. n Bayerische Gesetzgebung, articles 4-23, pp. 7ff., on the conditions governing renting from local councils and the granting of hunting permits. "Ibid., "Gesetz, die Bestrafung der Jagdfrevel betreffend," pp. 20ff. 123

Disputed boundaries of the village that might have made it possible to end poaching had certainly not been established - and perhaps never would be, as long as there was a peasant population whose relationship with the forests and with game was beyond bourgeois law. I shall therefore take seriously the fantasies and dreams of the peasants in this prebourgeois period and finally proceed to view poaching as a part of peasant culture.

"NOTHING BUT SHOOT GAME" Laufen, 14 July 1899: To all the district court's local police authorities . . . For the past year and a half, the notorious Johann Georg [dial., Hans Gorgl] Roiss of Labenau, alias Labenauer Hansgorgl, has been roaming around the district, making ends meet by burglary and poaching, work-shy individual that he is. When engaged in his criminal activities, he is dangerous and a threat to people's lives. This existence is only possible because he has the support of cronies with whom he can leave his booty for safekeeping and who help him to sell it, and because certain people are willing to shelter him in their houses. To bring this dangerous subversive to justice, the full cooperation of the local police and the people of the district is required, especially game tenants and the holders of hunting licenses.14 From 1899 to 1906, the police forces of the district office in Laufen and the police stations of Salzburghofen, Teisendorf, Waging, and Fridolfing tried to catch this notorious, "dangerous" poacher. The number of policemen deployed was steadily increased, special police stations were set up, whole companies of constables were sent out to comb the woods, barns, sheds, and houses for him; local mayors, game tenants, and the local people were urged to help in the search. The Ministry of the Interior was continually approached for more money to finance the deployment of more officers, but all to no avail. "Labenauer Hansgorgl" seemed to be everywhere, yet nowhere was he to be found. The problem for the police was evidently lack of cooperation on the part of the local people. The reward of 200 marks that was eventually offered remained unclaimed, although there were constant reports from the public of the poacher's whereabouts. And the local police, who were close enough to the people to hear what was said, always seem to have heard too late. The police stations wrote reports, the mountain of paper grew, and with it the phantom. In 1901, the increasing expense prompted the Chamber of the Interior to cut back the funding for the search. The people in Munich did not seem to be quite clear about the nature of the threat posed by this "public danger." And the people did not wish to understand, either. "Though the populace know this Roiss quite well, nobody will betray him," the luckless constable in Salzburghofen had to report to Laufen in 1901. "People just 14 StAM, LRA 140062, Akten des Bezirksamt Laufen (unpag.), p. 18. The references in the next several notes are to this file.

124

Poaching say, 'Oh, Hansgorgl - all he does is shoot game.'" He reported that the poacher had not been seen in his district since May of the previous year. He avoided the district because the people knew him. The policeman in Teisendorf contradicted him: "Roiss would never avoid a district, even where people know him, because he knows that no peasant would betray him. Furthermore, according to the constable in Waging, 'Roiss is a shrewd devil but a shy one, too, who tries to keep his presence as secret as possible, even avoiding his best friend, and only trusts those who put him up, at most, and would never clumsily give himself away.'" But how could it happen that on 7 July 1899 the poacher sat in the inn while the whole district was being combed for him by a huge force of police and managed to write that insolent postcard to the Petting constabulary saying, "Am sitting in Petting and have just heard that constables are waiting for me in Kindl. Johann Georg Roiss"? The constabulary saved face by presuming that someone had been playing a "clumsy practical joke" on the station superintendent, who was known as a "loudmouth." The police authorities also ventured some psychological reflections. They explained their failures by reference to people's fear of this "dangerous" poacher's revenge. Yet the constabularies' irritation grew, since "after the various rumors that are continually being started and spread that Roiss has been seen and recognized in different parts of the district, on closer examination all of them turned out to be false, no doubt put about by friends of Roiss with the intention of deceiving the constabulary." Uncertainty about the poacher's whereabouts became even greater as the police increasingly came to suspect that people reported him quite properly, but only when they were sure that he had left the district once more. The police's power struggle grew into a quarrel with the public; discussion no longer centered on how to catch the poacher but how to get the public to betray him. Who were the poacher's "cronies"? In the district of Traunstein he "was put up by several smallholders;" in the area around Laufen he was aided by "various persons," "in that they offered him lodging and received the proceeds of his crimes from him." He was "even supported by most of the better inhabitants of the district," among them game tenants and game-license holders. Eventually the constabulary had to concede "that the man in question receives shelter and succour from the majority, if not all, of the district's inhabitants," indeed that the local inhabitants support this dangerous subversive in every possible way, for all instructions and exhortations to inform the constabulary immediately on the slightest sign of Roiss's presense are to no avail. They have been told by Roiss himself that whenever he has committed an offense or has been seen by someone, he leaves the district for a while, and so, if they have seen him or notice his presense, they delay reporting it until they think that he has had time to put himself in safety.15 After almost 2 years of fruitless searching, the government of Upper Bavaria stated in April 1901 in a summary report that Labenauer Hansgorgl "is given lodging "Ibid., pp. 31, 41-2. 125

Disputed boundaries of the village and other aid by the people, not only from fear of revenge but also of their own free will." One reason they assumed this was because "blatant cases of breaking into other people's property, which would in all probability be ascribed to Roiss, have gone unreported." Who, then, was this Johann Georg Roiss, known as "Labenauer Hansgorgl," wanted by the police as a dangerous poacher, yet shielded and sheltered by the local people, who would even take the game he poached off his hands? We do not know any more details. Perhaps Labenauer Hansgorgl exchanged game for board and lodging; perhaps he also sold it. In the Laufen wanted notice he remains a phantom, put together from traces and the descriptions of a few villagers. His voice is not heard. We learn that he was an unmarried farmhand and that, on his release from a prison sentence for poaching in 1897, he had worked as a farmhand for a while. His father had once evidently owned a place called "Labenau," presumably a farm, in the vicinity of which he had been staying at the time of the search and where he had last been employed. What did he look like? In January 1899 he was described as follows: "quite tall, well-built, a dark moustache, carried a full knapsack on his back, a double-barreled smooth-bore shotgun, coarse pronunciation, dialect as spoken around here, aged between 40 and 50. . . . Clad all in green, a green hat with a brown feather, his clothes are good quality and the hat still new." Two years later, in February 1901, "Roiss looks pretty down-at-heel, wearing a green hat, greyish green jacket, dark trousers in need of repair, lace-up shoes, grey stockings." Later, in 1906, his dress was described as "rustic."16 From the hiding places raided by the constabulary we learn something of Labenauer Hansgorgl's way of life, his "household," as we do from the few thefts reported - always far too late - to the police. In 1901 a hideout was traced and the contents of the knapsack noted. It contained a quantity of potatoes (seed potatoes), a chunk of black bread, a piece of smoked bacon (about a pound and a half), a crowbar, two files, a latch for opening doors whose latch had been removed, a pair of scissors, a cartridge, a box of matches, a bar of soap, a "woollen horse blanket with a check of broad grey and black and narrow greenish stripes," and another old blanket. Later another hideout was discovered in a barn; this time the signs were that the poacher had been cooking on tiles and had been preparing to live there for some time. The main items on the list of things stolen were: "comestibles, cigars, schnapps, cutlery, clothing, money, and playing cards." Apparently he never stole large sums of money; the food - bacon, cheese - kept him going for a few days. "He carries out his thefts by creeping into inhabited buildings through stables and barns," helping himself to "meat and other foodstuffs, also taking sheep away with him and some money, should he need any." If a cow had been milked dry, the farmer might assume that Labenauer Hansgorgl had been there. Since he rarely spent the "Ibid., pp. 4, 10, 39, 46, 97. 126

Poaching night in people's houses, considering it too risky, he sought out hiding places in the forest and in sheds and barns. The police records also contain details of a female companion of Labenauer Hansgorgl. The constable of Fridolfing had been told by a road construction worker in February 1901 that "in warm weather Roissl likes to travel with a woman." She was "40 years old and very corpulent." The constable asked for an inquiry, "as it cannot be ruled out that Roiss, with his purloined cheese, is being put up by this woman." Five years later, shortly before his arrest, the police found another reference to a woman: His hideout in a barn contained "a picture postcard produced at the photographer's in Laufen, showing three peasant girls in traditional mountain costumes. They were identified as two innkeeper's daughters from Loebendorf and Mrs. Reiter, mistress of the farm at Zabhauser."17 Labenauer Hansgorgl was not caught until 16 October 1906, more by chance than anything, in a farmer's barn. The farmer's son had heard something and immediately informed the constables; the records do not show whether or not he knew who was in the barn. The reward of 200 marks was paid to those who took part in the poacher's capture. The farmer's son received 60 marks - half a farmhand's annual wages. The last we hear of Labenauer Hansgorgl is a note in some records at Laufen Prison, stating that Roiss died on 7 January 1912 in the institution for incurably ill males in Attl.18

A TRADE ON THE EDGE OF THE VILLAGES Labenauer Hansgorgl emerges from the police records as an ill-defined figure. It is hard to say to what extent his poaching constituted a criminal offense. He was protected by the villagers and even by the game tenants on whose preserves he allegedly poached and whom he robbed, instead of being promptly reported by them to the authorities. Labenauer Hansgorgl and his exploits differ sharply from professional poachers and their activities. This other form of poaching is much more clearcut in terms of motive and easier to pin down legally. The position of the villagers was obviously firmer in cases where a gang of professional poachers and receivers of stolen property were engaged in systematic poaching. These poachers were not protected by them. On the contrary, peasants were even prepared to testify against them. What distinguished commercial poaching from the poaching practiced by Labenauer Hansgorgl? Why were the peasants ready to cooperate with the forces of law and order where certain types of poacher were concerned, and how far did this kind of poaching offend their own sense of justice? In 1885, eleven people were brought before the provincial court of Traunstein charged with the professional setting of snares, poaching, and receiving stolen goods: 17

Ibid., pp. 48, 97.

18

Ibid., p. 103. 127

Disputed boundaries of the village three unmarried farmhands, an unmarried miller, an unmarried musician, two millers, a milliner, a cottager, a day laborer and a farmer.19 The judgment of the Munich assize court in a similar case in 1890 emphasizes the organized nature of commercial poaching: In the vicinity of Berchtesgaden there has been a considerable increase in poaching, dating back some time. The reason for this is that the poachers' activities are well organized and it is extremely difficult to keep a watch on them; they make little use of guns, but snares are becoming increasingly common; they are supported by spies, by people who handle the sale of the game, particularly in Berchtesgaden and Reichenhall, by their own tanners, who treat the hides of the dead animals, and by innkeepers, who take the game from them and give them every support.20 Game was trapped on demand. The musician and poacher Maier had been told to "bring what he could catch" by the Miihldorf milliner and receiver of stolen property, and another receiver, an innkeeper, admitted that he did not inquire into the provenance of the game offered to him. 21 The nature and origin of the meat did not seem to concern the innkeepers, who were keen buyers of cheap game to turn into lucrative meals for their guests. "A poacher is never paid as much as a hunter!", the poacher Alois Reiser was told in another case by the landlady of an inn in Rosenheim, when he objected that 10 to 12 marks was too little for a roe deer. Reiser had a thriving business in Kolbermoor and Rosenheim selling roe deer that he caught in traps. He came to an agreement with another innkeeper in Rosenheim, called Bacher, that the latter "would pay him 10 marks for each roe deer he supplied, and Bacher would keep the profit. Reiser gave Bacher to understand that he was catching so many deer he did not know what to do with them all." 22 And 19

In StAM, St Anw 15409: 1. Johann Hubner, 22 years old, unmarried farm servant 2. Johan Bauer, 31, unmarried farm servant 3. Martin Schwindner, 23, unmarried farm servant 4. Sebastian Haselwimmer, 21, unmarried miller 5. Sebastian Heilmaier, 38, married milliner of Muhldorf 6. Peter Wiihrer, 69, married miller of Kraiburg 7. Ignatz Friedl, 51, married former miller of Neuotting 8. Jakob Kreuzer, 26, married cottager of Hart 9. Ludwig Kirmaier, 27, unmarried musician of Neuotting (zither) 10. Franz Xaver Kock, 50, married day laborer of Hart 11. Joseph Aichner, 30, married farmer The accused were sentenced to prison terms of between 8 days and 1 year in prison, according to their degree of complicity. (It was the milliner who was sentenced to 1 year.) The poachers — the first four men on the list — were sentenced to 6 months, 9 months, 6 months, and 6 months 3 days' imprisonment, respectively. Cf. also the list of those sentenced in StAM, St Anw 15434. 20 StAM, St Anw 15448, from the pronouncement of sentence. 21 StAM, St Anw 15409; cf. StAM, St Anw 15434. 22 StAM, St Anw 15343; cf. StAM, St Anw 15448, from the pronouncement of sentence: "For years, one of the most notorious inns had been the Dietholdkafer in the parish of Bischofsweier, a meeting place for a number of poachers who ran up large bills and often paid with game. This inn had formerly been rented by a married couple, Friedrich und Maria Therese Weidmann, and then after they took over the inn Zum Kappl-(Lowen-) Wirt in Berchtesgaden, by another couple, Joseph und Magdalene Prexl. Joseph Prexl, in particular, enjoyed the poachers' confidence." 128

Poaching business did appear to be booming: The Miihldorf receiver indicated that he could take unlimited quantities, and a professional trapper seemed to have no problems supplying this market with cheap meat. When peasants started to figure among the commercial poachers in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was not considered an honorable business by the peasants. In fact, most of them were among the injured parties, for even the game reserves of small tenant farmers were not spared by the professional poachers. But more than anything it was the methods of this type of poaching that disgusted the villagers. Peasants in the witness box spoke bitterly of having found roe deer in snares - dead, rotting, partly eaten.23 The setting of snares was despised by the villagers. "Well, if only you used a gun instead of tormenting the game," an old day laborer said to a farmer's son from Schliersee who lived by snaring roe deer.24 Wanton cruelty not only offended the village hunters' sense of honor but also seems to have breached the peasants' relationship with wildlife and game. When a retired farmer, George Lenk of Hintergschwendt, saw a stag being hunted in the closed season, with one of its hind legs completely shot away, he called to one of the beaters, "You tormentor!," whereupon the beater turned around and made off.25 The hunters' inability to kill a stag cleanly was assessed and condemned as pitiless cruelty. The peasants, who had continually sued for their age-old right to hunt, considered that it went hand in hand with the ethics of the true hunter, who could shoot and showed respect and compassion for the game.26 Professional poaching infringed the peasant order not only because it offended against the notion of a life of hard work but also because it scorned the code of the peasant hunter-poacher. Commercial poaching also threatened and breached the peasants' property rights, for it was liable to turn into ordinary theft at any moment. This is exemplified by events centered on an inn known as a "poachers' den," the "Kappler Inn" run by a married couple, tenants called Krexl, who aroused the anger of a number of peasants in 1890.27 According to the testimony of a waitress, both game and mutton were prepared in the kitchen of the inn, roe deer and sheep being delivered in the middle of the night by masked figures. The origin of the mutton seemed as dubious to the waitress as that of the venison. Farmers had already complained that dogs from the inn had been savaging sheep, when a ewe with lamb, a ram, and a breeding sheep were 23

StAM, St Anw 15109. StAM, Ar 3150/129; cf., for instance, StAM, AR 3151, and StAM and St Anw 13402 on the practice of setting traps. StAM and AR 3145/27 also show that villagers were reluctant to conceal poaching with traps for purely commercial purposes. A farmer called Zeiser, who, with his son and his wife, had set a network of traps throughout the region and sold the game in Munich and elsewhere, was eventually betrayed by four young people — three servants and a carpenter's son — who testified against them in court. On commercial poaching and receiving by farm laborers, see also StAM, AR 3149/112 and StAM, St Anw 15409, 14448 and 15423. 2> StAM, St Anw 15476. 26 Criticism of the pitiless hunting down of a stag that had already been hit might also be interpreted as covert criticism by the peasants of the "perverse and degenerate" hunts indulged in by the upper class. Cf. Eckardt, HemchaftlicheJagd, pp. 52-3. 27 StAM, St Anw 15448. M

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Disputed boundaries of the village stolen from the pasture, and there were reports of trout having been stolen from the river Achen. It was the farmers and fishermen, both poor and wealthy, who were affected by sheep stealing and illegal fishing. The loss of a ewe in lamb, a ram, and a breeding sheep threatened the herd's very existence; the theft of them signified contempt for and ignorance of the shepherd's job. What is more, the animals in question were not "suitable" for the butcher, according to the testimony of one of the farmers who had been robbed.28 It was not the illegality of secret poaching that enraged the peasants; after all, they went poaching themselves. Rather, it was the specific nature of this commercial poaching, the setting of snares and the dealing in animals killed and stolen indiscriminately that made the commercial poachers the peasants' enemies. This type of poaching debased the villagers' traditional poaching, downgrading it to a dirty business. It denied any social, cultural, or political context, which alone made poaching "respectable." Viewed in this light, Labenauer Hansgorgl appears as a potential antithesis to the commercial poacher. Like a hunter, "clad all in green," wearing "a green hat with a brown feather," carrying "a full knapsack on his back" and "a doublebarreled smooth-bore shotgun"29 - this was the picture of the ideal poacher the village witnesses conjured up for the police records; but by describing him, they simultaneously make him impossible to find. I should now like to reverse my way of looking at the matter. I shall not seek the poachers in the village but track down the village itself in the announcements about poaching, the context in which a figure like Labenauer Hansgorgl acquired his real and symbolic meanings. To this extent, the court records are read and interpreted not simply as a text setting out the legal view of poaching as a village crime but also as a way for the village to make its voice heard.

THE VILLAGE GOES POACHING Poaching in Bavaria is an everyday offense and a Sunday treat. Police records show that men and youths of all classes and ages went poaching; indeed, women too sometimes appeared before the judges of the provincial and assize courts.30 The records 28 Ibid.

2 'StAM, LRA 140062. Cf. also the description of another poacher in StAM, St Anw 15455: "Conducts himself like a hunter, green hat with broad green band and feather, jacket, waistcoat, and trousers of green material, the first two items trimmed in green." 30 Cf. StAM, AG 34813: In 1853 t n e constable of Partenkirchen told the forestry office in Partenkirchen that it was not only unmarried youths who went poaching; experience showed that "married men who could not be forced out of the district were also involved in poaching." Apparently, nobody initially suspected that women were involved, too. Cf. StAM, St Anw 15402, the statement of the unmarried day laborer, Josefa Steiner, who went poaching with Josef Augstetter, an unmarried day laborer, setting and watching the traps while collecting wood; he subsequently collected the booty and sold it: "nobody suspected us women, though they would have had Sepp right away if they had watched him, because he was under suspicion as it was." Nevertheless, the active part played by women in poaching was small; their "complicity" consisted chiefly in being aware of what was going on and processing the resulting joints of meat.

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Poaching also show that poaching was not regarded as criminal by the villagers themselves, which probably explains why only a fraction of the offenses committed were reported and ended in the arrest of the poacher. Some of these arrests could be ascribed to the game and forestry officials, who waged a permanent vendetta against the poachers. But many cases also show that, when it came to the crunch, without the cooperation of the village and the willingness of witnesses to come forward, the evidence was often insufficient to convict a poacher, even though he had been caught and arrested. At first glance the 70 records of poaching cases presented a tangle of apparently indissoluble village relationships, and in the end the results of investigations by the police and magistrates which they contained appeared dubious. The genesis and early history of all these networks, expressions of support, and denunciations can sometimes, perhaps, be sensed after lengthy research into rural, peasant society, since the records show traces of fresh recognition of old conflicts. Nonetheless, they are often not enough to enable us to say whether Farmer A really had been poaching with his farmhands, whether the testimony of maid B was affected by the fact that she worked on the farm, or whether character witnesses testified out of solidarity or dependence or genuine knowledge and goodwill. How typical is the case of Farmer Botterer, who was frightened of having to perjure himself and finally declared that he was mentally ill, because his solidarity with his poaching relatives threatened to jeopardize the salvation of his soul?31 The investigating magistrate made witnesses first swear an oath, precisely because he wanted to be sure that they were telling the truth.32 But did that prove that the peasants would abandon their piety in the toils of justice, if their obstinacy was apparently not so easily broken otherwise? After the oath, did the peasants really tell the truth, and if so, what truth? Ultimately there was confession, which promised a way out of mortal sin and salvation of the soul - for would the minister, who knew his poaching, authority-hating villagers, really require them to tell the truth, as a form of penance? A few prayers and a donation would probably be enough, and anyway the minister stood to lose his position in the village if he was too obedient to authority and aloof from the villagers.33 We are not engaged in detective work, nor is it our business to clear up cases of poaching. What interests us here are the conditions of life in which poaching occurred and the networks of human relationships that, time after time, led to the denunciation of poachers. Precisely in the cases that cannot be solved using criminal investigation techniques and appear particularly nebulous, the relationship with the village will tell a different tale about the case and show the deeper human relationships of village society in action. "StAM, St Anw 7114. "Ibid. "On the untroubled relationship between villagers and clergy, see also the study by Rainer Beck, "Der Pforrer und das Dorf. Konformismus und Eigensinn im katholischen Bayern des 17./18. Jahrhunderts," in Richard van Dulmen, (ed.), Armut, Litbt, Ehre. Studien zur historhchen Kvlturforschung (Frankfurt a.M., 1988), pp. 107—143. Thoma, "Andreas Vbst." 131

Disputed boundaries of the village T h e Poor On 18 November 1896 the cottager and bricklayer Michael Eger of Altenhausen made the following statement to the senior district court judge of Freising: I own nothing but a mortgaged cottage, have had no work or income for 6 weeks now, and have a family consisting of a wife and eight children to support. Just recently my family has been short of the basic essentials. Yesterday morning at half past six, my wife told me to get some flour so that the children would at least have something to eat at midday. But having no money to pay for flour and already in debt to Walber, I took my gun, an old double-barreled shotgun, and took the road as far as Wieskirche and then turned off into the state forest of Wiesenholz, with the intention of shooting game. I had scarcely walked 200 paces into the forest when the forest warden Oberhauser came along, aimed at me, and shouted to me to drop my gun. I threw down my gun, and Oberhauser apprehended me. I had not fired a shot. I only did it out of need, and I ask to be let out of jail, as there is no question of me running away.34 The cottager Eger went out in the morning to get food and ended up in jail. The property report requested by the court confirmed the abject poverty in which the family lived. A farmer and a cottager from the village gave him a good character, testifying that he was a respected cottager: "Eger is a very thrifty, industrious, and careful husband and father, who can only manage to keep himself and his family by going without a lot of things. Eger has no convictions and an excellent reputation." 35 The joint Sunday poaching expeditions of Johan Lachner, a day laborer and father of seven children, Kaspar Weng, an unmarried day laborer, Josef Schnitter, a married woodcutter, and Josef Bacher, a married cooper, were also said to be born of necessity, in a statement to the investigating magistrate. 36 For the day laborers it was hard to find work at this time, October 1854, and Johan Lachner decided "to go hunting and shoot some game to make some money and buy some bread for my children." The other two, Schnitter the woodcutter and Bacher the cooper, owned half each of an old crofter's cottage that was heavily mortgaged. "Bacher had no money left at all and was complaining on Sunday morning about our awful plight, and it occurred to us to get food for our families by shooting some game." 37 Early M

StAM,AR 3161/234. "Ibid. StAM, AG 34816, cf. StAM, AG 34813. The men arrested as poachers in October 1854 appear in a record file of 1850 as witnesses and neighbors. The witnesses' statements often refer to the accused by their nicknames, such as "Kraher" (crower), "Bratimartl," "Walserkaspar," "Labenauer Hansgorgl," and so on. Some of the names occur in records in the Garmisch area from time to time, in their absence, as notorious poachers. In the case of the poaching day laborers cited here, it was originally assumed that the poacher known as "Walser," now "Walserkaspar," must have been one of those who went poaching almost under the noses of the gamekeepers. "StAM, AG 34816; cf. also StAM, AG 34813, the statement of Kaspar Pfenning, a day laborer arrested for poaching in Partenkirchen in 1850: "I had no money left, had to pay the revenue office 3 gulden for wood, knew no way of earning any, so the idea occurred to me of trying to earn something through poaching." He also went shooting with a friend on Sunday morning. 36

132

Poaching on Sunday morning, Schnitter's mother came to Johan Lachner's house and informed him that their son and Josef Bacher intended to go hunting and that they would soon be waiting for him at the foot of the Gamsberg in the royal forest domain of Garmisch. However, the three of them were spotted and pursued by the game warden; they received prison sentences ranging from 4 to 20 days for this weekend hunting trip. The records show that in earlier attempts at poaching they may have been more successful in bringing home a joint for Sunday dinner. In 1852 two cottagers from Garmisch, Michl Lock and Josef Schnitzer, were sentenced to three weeks in jail after the court found them guilty of shooting at a chamois in the king's own hunting preserve.38 They had not been clearly identified, because the two poachers pursued through the mountains by the gamekeeper's assistants had painted their faces as a disguise.39 Lock, a married man of 38 or 39, insisted that he had been mowing his meadow at the time in question. A witness who had met him finally confirmed his statement: "After he told me that he had just been mowing, I said that must be a terrible job for one man on his own and received the reply that he could manage all right."40 Schnitzer, 36 years old and married, also claimed that he was mowing a meadow at the time in question. The fact that the two were "industrious" men was confirmed by the investigating magistrate and other inhabitants of Garmisch, and also that they owned little in the way of property, "as they only possess small cottages, which are both heavily mortgaged." It might well be true "that they go in for hunting," but the farmer Anton Kieling "had no specific knowledge of it." Lastly, the mayor stated that they had long been known as notorious poachers, but they were "industrious men."41 In fact, these three cases of poaching only came to court because the gamekeepers and foresters had observed and followed the men. If the village witnesses questioned knew whether the men were known poachers, they kept it to themselves, or they had genuinely not heard anything.42 Their statements focused on the honesty of these day laborers, small craftsmen, and cottagers, based on their reputations as good fathers and hard-working men. They pinched and scraped to earn a meager living doing casual farm labor and on their tiny small holdings, "mowing their meadows." And they became poachers because, with the scant livings they were able to make, they and their children were threatened with hunger and poverty. A measure of respect is apparent in the villagers' statements in these cases, stressing as they do the men's "industriousness," countering the picture put forward by the forest and game administration that they were "work-shy" poachers who posed a 38

StAM, AG 34811. "On the wearing of masks by poachers, see also StAM, St Anw 401 and 15448. •""StAM, AG 34811. "'Ibid. 42 The statement (in another case) of Creszenz Holdrich, a maid, is typical: "I must also point out that Simon Schrotter and Mathias Geiger were, and still are, generally considered to be poachers in the village .. . , but I don't know." StAM, AG 34815.

133

Disputed boundaries of the village "danger to safety." In the village, on the other hand, these "gangs of poachers" were perceived as a brotherhood of the poor, living under a mortgaged roof. Farmers and Farmhands In the summer of 1898, the three accused, Michael Lechner, Martin Ziegel, and Xaver Herberger, were all in the employ of Johann Wald, a farmer of Langenbach, within the jurisdiction of the district court of Freising. On the morning of 23 August 1898 they were all in a field belonging to their master, situated amid the common land of Langenbach, reaping wheat. They were assisted in the work by a day laborer from Neustift called Anton Wegner, who was also employed by Wald at the time. As they worked, a young hare suddenly sprang out of the wheat field and took refuge in a neighboring, field of clover. On being urged by Anton Wegner to catch the hare, Xaver Herberger and Martin Ziegel chased it into the clover field. Ziegel succeeded in catching it, seized it, and carried it back to the wheat field to Michael Lechner, who took it and punched it on the back of the neck, half killing it. He then threw it down on the ground, and Xaver Herberger killed it with another blow. On returning home, the three accused took the dead hare with them back to their master's house, where they threw it onto the dung heap.43 This story, recounted by the judge of the Munich II Provincial Court in his detailed judgment, sounds prosaic at first - indeed, it seems positively astonishing that such a trivial, everyday incident should give rise to a court case and an exhaustive poaching report. An old day laborer and three young farm youths are reaping a wheat field for their master when a hare dashes from under their scythes into an adjacent field of clover. A chase ensues; the two boys - Xaver Herberger is 13 and Martin Ziegler is 14 - forget harvesting for a moment and seem to become children again. They chase the hare and catch it. When the two boys bring their prize back to the older farmhand, 18-year-old Michael Lechner, the game takes a turn that may have been something of an initiation for the younger boys. Lechner deals the hare a near-fetal blow on the back of the neck, whereupon 13-year-old Xaver Herberger imitates him and finishes off the hare with a second blow. In the eyes of the law, this made all three of them poachers, and because the day laborer Anton Wegner reported them, they ended up in court. The two younger boys were protected from punishment by their ages; the court took the view that they did not know that their actions were against the law. They were sent back to their parents, as the court saw no reason, "given the nature of their offense,... to order their committal to a reform school or institution for young offenders." But being sent back to their parents meant the loss of their positions. The verdict treated the two young farmhands as children, attributing ignorance and innocence to them and sending them back to their parents. The farm work they had been performing just 43

StAM, AR 3152/165 from the statement on the verdict. 134

Poaching before they caught the hare - the strenuous task of cutting a field of wheat on a day in August - was glossed over, as were the consequences of being sent back to his parents for a boy who was already dependent on the wage he earned as a farmhand. The character and property report on 13-year-old Xaver Herberger ordered by the court not only stated that he had a good reputation but also that his parents lived on poor relief and that he had no relations capable of supporting him. He was already dependent on "his" farmer. The court sentenced only the eldest of the three farmhands: The accused Lechner, who was already 18 at the time of the offense, had to be punished for it, however. His frank confession, his unblemished character, and the face that he had been persuaded to commit the offense by the circumstances, particularly by Wegner's prior exhortation to catch the hare, all speak in favor of a light sentence. The fine of 5 marks imposed pursuant to paragraphs 28 and 29 of the statute book, with the alternative of one day's imprisonment, therefore appeared appropriate.44 From the outset the hare may have been more than just a diversion from work, the mere object of a quick game of chase. A detail from the questioning of the witnesses that is omitted from the judgment would appear to indicate as much. In his first statement to the police, the day laborer Anton Wegner, who was taking part in the reaping and ended up reporting the others to the local constabulary for poaching, said that the farmhands had taken the hare into the farmer's kitchen. The servants, however, claimed to have thrown it onto the dung heap. Anton Wegner's version conjures up a different scenario. Taking the hare into the farmer's kitchen would imply that — in Wegner's absence — the farmhands had shared the hare with the farmer's family, having handed it over to the farmer's wife to put in the pot. The farmer and his wife would then be accessories, and the shared hare would have created a community of poachers requiring feigned ignorance and solidarity vis-avis the outside world - a lie, perhaps, about a hare being thrown onto the dung heap. According to the later version involving the dung heap, however, the hare hunt in the wheat field was no more than an innocent, childish game of chase. The game over, its object was superfluous. Lastly, acceptance of the farmhands' version by the court protected the farmer and his wife from the charge of complicity. The day laborer could not say what happened to the hare after it had been handed over to the farmer's wife in the kitchen: He had not been there. He was asked by the possibly rather surprised policeman why he had reported the three farmhands. He replied, "I reported them because Lechner, who finished off the hare, couldn't stand me, either." 45 Wegner obviously felt rejected, perhaps also excluded from the farmer's kitchen. The point is that he did not actually get any of the hare to which he himself had drawn the farmhands' attention. His version conjures up the picture of a meal in the large kitchen of a farmer who could afford to pay three farmhands as well as a casual laborer at harvest time. The latter took his revenge in the end, •"Ibid.

'"Ibid. 135

Disputed boundaries of the village and he could dare to think of revenge because something that was a natural, indeed banal part of everyday country life had to be recorded by the constable as a punishable offense. This apparently very insignificant act of poaching opens up various perspectives. First, it shows how children and young farmhands may have had their first encounters with poaching. But the fact that the venue was a wheat field and the time was harvest time sheds new light on the previous poaching of two day laborers. "Mowing a meadow" and killing game are no longer seen purely as opposites, in the contradiction between "industriousness," on the one hand, and poaching, on the other.46 Rather, the game was running around in the farmers' meadows and fields, right under their scythes and guns. The evidence of the peasant who assured the constable that his poor day laborer neighbor was "industrious" and had been mowing his meadow could thus not be deemed to disprove the charge of poaching.47 Peasant work and poaching could take place at the same time and in the same spot. Mowing the high grass and grain might be linked in the peasants' minds with the picture of the game jumping around in it. Working in the fields introduced children and young farm servants at an early age to the forbidden, exciting world of hunting, which to them was one of the experiences of everyday peasant life. This minor act of poaching gave the three farmhands a better knowledge of society, since poaching necessarily involved the village in conflict with the authorities. An incident that was utterly insignificant to begin with led to the calling out of the constabulary, the intrusion of the forces of law into an apparently genuine peasant milieu, and, finally, to charges being brought against the three farmhands and the conviction of one of them. The presense of the police had provided a convenient channel for a conflict that had sprung from resentment, exclusion, perhaps also envy, and above all a readiness to denounce others. At the same time, though, it looks as though the authorities used village quarrels as a way of teaching the people lessons that were no less effective for being (in this case, certainly) fairly inconsequential. The judgment alludes to the possibility of the corrective institution, though rules it out on this occasion. From now on the offender has this threat hanging over him. The sentence of 5 marks imposed on 18-year-old Michael Lechner was, after all, almost half the monthly wage of a young farmhand. And the alternative of a day's imprisonment might thus mark yet another stage in the experience of a young poacher: poaching as a village conflict with authority for the right to hunt freely. Lastly, it is a moot point what punishment Michael Lechner would have received if he had denied the offense and his reputation had not been so good. As in this case, many acts of poaching give us a glimpse directly into peasant households and their immediate environment. At the end of the century the teams of poachers are very similar to what they were like in midcentury: peasants, their sons, and their farmhands, as well as relatives and neighbors - other peasants, day 46

StAM, AG 34811.

47

Ibid.

136

Poaching laborers and youths.48 In many cases poaching occurred in the immediate vicinity of farms, in the farmer's fields and meadows. For example, in 1896 Josef Brandmeier was charged by the village constable with having "shot a roe deer on his grainfield in the vicinity of his farm in the district hunting preserve of Angerbettenbach" and having given a neighboring cottager some of the meat. Furthermore, his farmhands had wounded and killed hare while mowing, and the peasant had taken them home - "Brandmeier took them, threw them into the soup pot, and carried them home" - where they were cooked for the farm servants' meal on Saturday.49 In 1885 a farmhand, Franz Stelzl, "not far from his master's farm, shot a roebuck in a field of clover."50 Hare and roe deer were injured during harvesting and taken home to be cooked and eaten. In the foothills of the Alps, the poaching area also took in the mountain pastures and their surroundings, where the cows were taken in the summer and tended by cowherds and dairymaids, who lived and worked there for several months. Poaching and work were carried out in the same places, and the trail of denunciation leads back to these places. How did the village constables find out that peasants and farmhands had been poaching? The constable in Grassau had received an anonymous letter,51 the constable in Helferndorf had heard about a poaching incident,52 and in Grabenstatt it was a maid "who informed me earlier of the business."53 The interrogations that followed the charges show that references to poaching stem from extremely complicated relationships: working relationships, masterand-servant relationships, and kinship and neighborhood relationships. The following case from 1896 of a farmer called Brandner from Helferndorf exemplifies all the elements of a typical conflict, a conflict that appears to have flared up between the farmer and his servants. The constable of Helferndorf was obviously falling back on this trouble spot when he decided that in future he would only question farm servants, instead of "respected persons": "As none of the neighbors or other respected persons was willing to testify, and no confession could be expected of the abovementioned accused, I had to go and see the former servants of the two accused."54 The maid's evidence against the farmer who had killed the roebuck and his farmhands who had brought home the hare injured during mowing indicates that the conflict that led her to denounce them was rooted in the hierarchy of the peasant household. According to her statement, the game 48 Cf. StAM, AR 3162/239: In 1896, the village constable of Heimhausen charges Farmer Josef Brandmaier and his men with poaching. His companions were Josef Deger, a married carpenter; Johann Breitsameder, an unmarried farmer's son; three single farm servants employed by Farmer Brandmaier; and Andreas Kratzl, a married cottager. StAM, St Anw 15410: In 1885, the unmarried farmhand Franz Kletzl of Grabenstat was charged, along with his master, Farmer Heigenmoser and the latter's son, with receiving stolen property; likewise Josef Maier, a day laborer who lived with the farmer, [as well as] another farmer and an unmarried sawyer, "who had all taken part, partly for their advantage and partly to save the accused from punishment." StAm, St Anw 7114: In 1893, the village constable of GraBau charged the farmer Martin Rachl and two companions, his farmhands Philipp NieB and Josef Schmuck, with poaching. StAM, AR 3145/27: In 1897, in Zorneding,'Farmer Johann Reiser, his wife and three sons and companions were charged. 49 StAM, AR 3162/239. 50StAM, St Anw 15410. 5 1 StAnw7ii 4 . "AR 3162/239. "St Anw 15410. MStAM,AR 3162/239.

137

Disputed boundaries of the village was eaten jointly by masters and servants, but she would not have received any meat, only some sauce, if she had not stolen some in the kitchen. . . . What is more, Josef Wildgruber [a farmhand] told her that he often went hunting with Brandner [the farmer] and had been his beater. Asked whether he had been given any of the game, he replied, "Not much, a rib or something is all they used to give me."55 Another of the farmhands said that the hare "had been eaten at a family meal in which he had shared. He never received any other game." Yet the same farmhands who complained to the maid that they had been given some of the hare but none of the roebuck did not inform on the farmer. In fact, they covered up for him during questioning by the constable, stressing that they knew nothing about his poaching and had seen nothing, contradicting the maid's evidence. The conduct of the farmer, who had drummed into the farmhands in advance what they should tell the constable, was the model for the response of the farmhands, who were involved in poaching themselves.56 After questioning the maid, the constable was obliged to note that "other farm servants who have worked for Brandner deny any knowledge of poaching on his part."57 Involvement in the peasant economy may have meant the implication of the farmhands in illegal hunting from the outset, from the killing of the hare in the wheat field; it turned the farmhands into the farmers' accomplices but also strengthened their dependence. In the secret hunt for roe deer, the farmhands were the beaters and bearers, the farmer the hunter who fired the shots.58 Feudal conditions prevailed on the farm, and thus the farmhand had no right to partake of the roe deer that he had driven within range of the farmer's gun; at most he might be entitled to a small reward: "a rib or something is all they used to give me." Instead of which, according to the farmer, the hare were cooked "for the servants" on the Saturday. The inequality between the farmer who shot a roebuck and the farmhands who worked as his beaters and occasionally caught a hare for a servants' meal while at work in the fields was evident not only in the difference between the objects of their poaching - roe deer and hare - and the weapons used - the farmer's shotgun and the farmhands' hands — but also on the farmer's table. The hierarchy of the large peasant household was retained even when lawbreaking was involved: Hare was for the servants, venison for the masters, the farmer.59 If a farmhand went poaching with his own shotgun, it was up to him to do so secretly and without the farmer's knowledge. "Ibid. Cf. StAM, St Anw 7114. The relationship between farmer and farmhands in the poaching affair involving Bachl resembles that in the case of Brandner, the farmer. The number of farmhands in each suggests that their (arms were large. "StAM, AR 3162/239. 58 Cf. also St Anw 7114. Farmer Bachl gets his young farmhand Ries to carry a roe deer he has shot back home along a difficult mountain road. "On food imagery as a means of analyzing peasant communities and their forms of communication, >6

see David Sabean, Das zwehchneidige Schwert. Herrschaft und Widerspruch im Wiirnemberg der frlihen Neuzeit

(Berlin, 1986), pp. I3of.; originally published in English, Power in the Blood (Cambridge, 1984).

138

Poaching The Brandner case demonstrated that, even if charged, the farmer was in a better position than his farmhand. The constable had already discriminated between the "respected persons" and the farm servants. After it had become plain during the course of the investigation that the farmer had been poaching, two "respected" members of the village, the innkeeper and the mayor, went with him to see the owner of the game preserve. They would support his request for forgiveness. The bribe he offered the village constable for withdrawing the poaching charge amounted to roughly the value of two stags, or half a good farmhand's annual wages.60 And even if the farmer ended up in jail for a few weeks, this had little impact on his farm and property, which constituted an economic force in the village and underpinned his reputation and influence in peasant society. There was only a limited measure of solidarity among farmers, farmhands, and poachers. The existing hierarchies are evident in the illegal act of poaching - which to the peasants was no such thing - just as much as in legal activities. A Topsy-turvy World However, on the estate of Reinthal the feudal poaching system seems to have been turned on its head in 1896. In the absence of the master, a brewer, responsibility for running the household had been taken over by the senior figure in the servants' hierarchy, one Matthaus Neif, the steward. He ruled as the "sovereign lord of the estate." But on his own authority he had also risen to the rank of senior hunter: "Accompanied by his men, Neif continually went hunting illegally, and had the roe deer that were shot prepared by the cook then employed at Reinthal. . . , and ate the meat in company with the servants who were placed under him."61 The master had left the house, and the "master's meal" became an everyday feast for the servants. The hunting privileges were suspended for awhile. It is not evident from the records why this new, topsy-turvy order finally broke down, who it was that reported it to the authorities. One innkeeper had refused to buy one of the poached roe deer because "he wanted nothing to do with such things." Or were the poaching and the ensuing feast simply a topsy-turvy world, illegality, excess - but not everyday life for the peasant servants? Was there eventually a revolt against the new "master"? When the feasting ended, the servants made statements to the police, apparently quite willingly. In this case, too, it was a maid - the cook - who turned out to be the main witness. Her status on the estate would probably have surpassed that of the other servants. Trained in the hierarchy of the estate's kitchen, where her art could not be separated from her knowledge of the gentry's "taste" and the food that befitted the servants, perhaps she saw her status as the gentry's cook being eroded by the "wild" venison dinners; the usurping of the estate kitchen by these new masters might have contributed to her indignation. The servants' poaching on the estate was also a brush with the forbidden, a vio"StAM, AR 3162/239.

6l

StAM, AR 3144/11.

139

Disputed boundaries of the village lation of the gentry's rights in a broader sense than the mere hunting privileges of the upper class. The poached and consumed roe deer constituted an attack on and incorporation of upper-class property. The "masters' meals" indulged in by the servants were a breach of social norms, which were relevant within the estate household. The reversal of conditions on the estate was aimed at the internal order of the peasant world, in which there was general agreement about the place occupied by master and servant in a peasant household. What really mattered was not so much the poaching as the exchange of roles that had occurred.

The Families Clearly, the servants roaming from farm to farm often became involved in the clashes that occurred at another level within the villages: peasant households and their kinship networks. In 1892 rumors had begun to circulate that Farmer Bachl of Achberg and his two farmhands, Muck and Riess, had been poaching. 62 Again, the main witness was a maid, Viktoria Reiser, who had formerly worked on Bachl's farm. She furnished detailed particulars of the frequency with which game was eaten at the Bachl farm, the hunting habits of the farmer and his farmhands, and the game they brought home. Her parents told her to tell the truth in court and "leave nothing out." The whole case had been set in motion by an anonymous letter, and a farmer, Karz, who claimed to have received the anonymous letter, persuaded the maid to reveal all there was to tell about Bachl. "If I did not receive a witness's allowance, he would give me something toward my journey to Traunstein," the maid told the investigating magistrate. She came under suspicion of having been incited against Bachl, with the farmhands giving statements that made her appear a liar. The course of the questioning shows that she had inadvertently ended up between the great millstones of two families and their supporters. The honor of both parties hinged on the maid's credibility. Her father stated: I cannot believe it of Karz, that he somehow or other incited my daughter against Bachl and his farmhands; he is an upright man both in his business dealings and socially, hardworking and industrious, and is greatly respected by people around here. He also said that another farmer, one Bacher, a brother-in-law of Bachl, had sought to induce his daughter to perjure herself. This was not much help to the constable: Whether the former, Josef Bacher of Etting, had sought to induce other persons in addition to Reiser . . . to commit perjury could not be established, since the inhabitants refuse to make any statement and do their utmost to make the Marti farmer, Bachl, out to be innocent. . . . Furthermore, I wish to point out that Bacher and all Bachl's kith and kin are doing their utmost to make him out to be innocent. 62

StAM, St Anw 7114.

140

Poaching While the maid's father had emphasized his daughter's honesty and Farmer Karz's respectability, in his testimony Farmer Bachl contrasted the maid's "wantonness" with his own good name: As young as 14 or 15 she carried on with a certain G. . . . in a most immoral manner, running in and out of the houses, and she often lied to us, my wife and me, which is why we fired her, and now she is only accusing me and my men, Muck and Riess, of poaching out of spite, or because she has been set against me by her parents or maybe her cousin, Karz. . . . Except for her, not a single inhabitant of Achberg has yet been found or will be found who could truthfully say that he had ever come across me poaching, either alone or with others, particularly Riess or Muck. Farmer Bachl's place in his extended family was very secure, as was his position in the village, and he was right in what he said. The constable found no one willing to testify against him. The fact that he actually had been poaching came out only because of a revised statement by his hitherto "loyal" farmhand Riess, who thereby wished to end his imprisonment on remand, which was evidently grinding him down. Bachl was convicted of poaching but acquitted of perjury and incitement to perjury, which had not been committed by him personally but by his brother-in-law, Bacher, on his behalf. Bachl made no confession and persisted in his denials. The maid, Viktoria Reiser, had thus been telling the truth; she was in the "right." But in asserting what was legally "right" or in placating those who had put her up to it, had she not breached another agreement, a convention of peasant society: the arrangement among the farmhands, some dairymaids who had worked for Bachl, his extended family, and the villagers that nobody knew anything about this poaching, as far as the constable was concerned? The testimony of the mistress of the farm where she was in service at the time of the interrogations points to this village consensus. She was said to be " 'honest and trustworthy' . . . she had only lied in a dispute over wages, "like other farm servants, she had the fault of informing on her master and mistress.' " From a legal point of view, it was the maid's testimony that ultimately prevailed. But the powerful and authoritative "truth" in the village had been the farmer's: After all, his conviction was obtained only after the confession of the farmhand, worn down by imprisonment. The conflict was apparently not solely rooted in the relationship between the farmer's family and the maid but also in a power struggle between Farmer Bachl and his kin and Farmers Radler and Karz, from which Bachl had emerged triumphant from the viewpoint of the village. The village had not betrayed him but assigned to the other party the role of informers without honor. Even the village officials appear to have been firmly enmeshed in the network of solidarity surrounding poaching. Village mayors refused to testify.63 They were also 63 Cf. StAM, AR 3145/27. The burgomaster of Zorneding refused to make any comment in 1897 for fear of revenge.

141

Disputed boundaries of the village friends, neighbors, relations, peasants: They belonged. Farmer Brandner had been supported by the mayor when he had begged the noble game tenants for leniency.64 Heading the hierarchy of those able to testify to a good name for himself and for others, the mayor was ultimately the mayor of the village more than he was the agent of the authorities. His power and position were of peasant/village origin, and this was frequently a stumbling block for the authorities when they demanded that poachers be handed over. In fact, it seemed to the powers that be that there were districts that even kept a "village poacher," who was, in a manner of speaking, employed by the district council and, as a quasi-official herdsman, given carte blanche to poach in the mountain pastures.65

THE YOUNG MEN The authorities and the forestry offices assumed that a good deal of the poaching that went on could be attributed to the "single young men" among the villagers.66 Periodically the young men were subjected to close surveillance by the constabularies. It was feared that they would conspire against the forestry and game officials. They were regarded as a special, closed group. They also acted as such, as one gamekeeper of Zorneding found out in 1894.67 He had caught a cottager's son, Josef Scholl, who had just completed his latest prison sentence for poaching, with a shotgun. Having heard a number of shots, he had taken the firearm from the youth, whom he suspected of renewed poaching. A group of youths then surrounded the cottager's son; the official report states: "A few days after the incident, the youths of Zorneding collected money for Scholl, enabling him to flee; he was last seen in Munich!" Of course, the young men did not normally go poaching in large groups. Generally, two or three young men were charged with joint poaching. The village's usual hierarchy, based on property ownership, seems to have lost its importance where poaching companions were concerned: farmhands not only went with other farmhands but also with farmers' sons, millers' boys, sawyers, herdsmen from the mountain pastures, and day laborers. Often it was because they worked on the same farm that a servant and a farmer's son would go poaching together, go drinking in the inns, get into fights with the youths of a neighboring village, attend village festivals, and turn up outside girls' bedroom windows. The herdsmen of the mountain pastures formed a secluded community of their own, far away from patrolling gamekeepers and the village policeman and free of the orderly routines of the farm house"StAM, AR 3162/239. "StAM, AG 34815. The council-employed herdsman, who worked in Murnau and was also well known as a poacher, acquired his qualifications as a former hunter in Leiningen. The prince of Leiningen achieved some notoriety himself in the nineteenth century for employing experienced poachers as gamekeepers, thus rescuing them from their "reprehensible way of life." See Ludwig Thoma, "Erinnerungen," in Werke, Jubilaumsamgabe (Munich, 1978), vol. i,p. 52. 66 StAM,AG 34813. "StAM, AR 3147/68. 142

Poaching holds and kitchens: There - and only there - they could cook and eat the game they killed. This is what happened on the feast of Corpus Christi in 1898 at one of the pastures in the mountains above Schliersee.68 On the morning of that day, two herdsmen from the Vorlepper Alp and the Furst Alp and a farmhand had shot a roe deer. According to the police report, it was "then eaten for dinner in the cabin where Rasteiger is the herdsman, by Rasteiger, Zaglmeier, Schmies, and some other young men, who could not be identified." In August the same group consumed an illicitly shot chamois buck. The meal was cooked by the poachers themselves, not by women. Schonfeld Alp, Schweiger Alp, Spitzing Alp, Furst Alp, Vorlepper Alp: In all these pastures in the royal game preserves of His Royal Highness Duke Karl Theodor of Bavaria, men were merrily hunting and eating like nobles, and generous gifts were made. Rasteiger's neighboring herdsmen on Schonfeld Alp and Vorlepper Alp were each given a few pounds of meat by him: "Here's a good, square meal for you!" He courted the dairymaid of Vorlepper Alp, who already had another suitor, with a joint of meat from a young stag that he had poached: "There's some meat from a young stag, that'll make a fine meal for you." Through joint poaching expeditions, gifts of game to the older herdsmen on the alp and to the dairymaid of whom he was fond, social relationships were formed and rendered visible. At the ensuing feasts, knowledge of the violation of the law and the jointly poached booty were literally assimilated, as it were. The acceptance of the gift of meat from the poacher Rasteiger appears to have marked the beginning of a relationship with the dairymaid, Maria Geigenbauer, since at the time of the trial she was evidently his lover. It was a rift in this community that eventually jeopardized the illegal exchange of gifts. In September the constable in Schliersee came to hear about events up in the pastures: "As a result of a quarrel between the herdsman Rasteiger and another herdsman in the pasture and another quarrel between Rasteiger and some woodcutters, the matter came to light about three weeks ago and was talked about among the pasture folk. The hunters only heard about it last week." It was only because of these denunciations that it was possible to bring charges concerning this poaching, which had been going on for months, perhaps even years. The records of the interrogations in the Rasteiger case show the quarrel in the pastures from the time of its peak until it subsided. In court, during the trial, the witnesses retracted their testimony against the poachers: The sense of community that united the herdsmen, woodcutters, and dairymaids who lived together in the mountain pastures appears to have been restored in the courtroom. But the court insisted that the statements made during the dispute, before this fresh outbreak of pastoral harmony occurred, had greater validity: "The witness's testimony on this point appears to lack credibility, as for obvious reasons she is standing by her comrades in the pasture and declines to betray them." In making this assessment, the court also assumed, of course, that this community of poachers and pasture folk would perjure themselves

143

Disputed boundaries of the village to a man, that respect for the court and for God would take second place to the peasants' sense of justice. Punishments would undoubtedly be meted out, if the court refused to believe them, but peace was nevertheless restored; and when Rasteiger and his companions had served their sentences (two of 2 months, and one of 9 months), the herdsmen's next summer would be just about to begin. Passion Like fights in the village inns, poaching was one of the customary tests of courage of the village youths. Roaming the woods was dangerous. The young poachers left the village rule system behind them for a while, fleeing the interior spaces of their families and households. Hunting, which necessitated roaming the forests and mountains, took them into a dangerous zone, where the boundaries between village civilization and "wilderness" were permeable and the hunter might at any moment become the quarry. They were at once hunters and hunted. While stalking their prey, they had to be constantly on their guard against the gamekeepers watching them, pursuing them; they had to play tricks on them and outwit their declared enemies.69 This aspect of poaching may have provided danger and thrills in one. The legends woven by the youngsters out of their hunting experiences praised their adventures and successes stalking and shooting, as well as their pranks and physical victories in everyday skirmishes with the gamekeepers and their staff. It was not only the gamekeeper's shot that was dangerous. Poachers' stories are full of the potential dangers of the return home from the wilderness and the hunt. The real danger, they admitted, lurked in the poacher's heart. It emerges in the imagery of the passion for hunting, the compulsion that will not let go. The raftsman Georg Sigel attempted to justify his poaching with his passion for hunting.70 After his arrest he stated that he was "willing to rid himself of his firearm and other gear, so as not to succumb to the temptation of hunting any more." Johann Groll, a farmhand, shot three roe deer all on his own in the space of 4 weeks, "because," as he said, "I am very fond of shooting; I have always enjoyed hunting, and I took it up because in my home village I was always roped in as a beater whenever there was a shoot."71 The enthusiasm for hunting is depicted as an affliction to which one is liable to succumb. Attempts to escape its spell could fail, as in the case of a 23year-old farmhand, Sebastian Kahlhaus.72 For a year, following his dismissal for poaching, he had increasingly withdrawn into the woods, poaching roe deer and selling them to a dealer in game in Munich. M

On encounters between poachers and gamekeepers, see, inter alia: StAM, AR 3152/166; StAM, AR 3145/43; StAM, St Anw 378; StAM, St Anw 401; StAM, AG 34807. Cf. Thoma, "Erinnerungen," pp. 5 iff. Thoma was familiar with the gamekeeper/poacher milieu. His grandfather and great-grandfather had held senior posts in the Bavarian Forest Administration. In 1861 his father became district forester in Partenkirchen, and in 1865 senior forester in Vorder-Riss, near Lenggries, in Upper Bavaria. 70 StAM, AG 34808. "StAM, AR 3145/19. "StAM, St Anw 15455.

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Poaching He was pursued as a poacher by Duke Arco's game supervisors and eventually seized, after an exchange of shots with them and an ensuing search, in the summer of 1891. By this time he had apparently become extremely suspicious and reclusive in his solitude, in marked contrast to the gamekeepers' picture of him as an "insolent fellow." In fact, this contradiction characterizes the figure of Kahlhaus. He was a hunter hunted, and the police record shows the extent to which he had also assumed the external appearance of a hunter since living in the forests far from the village. He dressed "like a hunter, with a green hat with a broad green stripe and feather, jacket, waistcoat and trousers of green material." He identified with the legendary figure of "Bavarian Hiasl," the late eighteenth-century poacher chieftain and Robin Hood of the Upper Bavarian forests. When he suddenly encountered the farmer and game tenant Josef Schwaiger in the forest and the latter spoke to him, he cried out; "It's not Blasi, it's Bavarian Hiasl!" His next sentence showed how completely he had assumed this new guise, how far he had taken over the personality of his model: "I've reached the point now where I don't know which way to turn." [The game tenant] "asked him, 'What do you want, then: Are you going to shoot me?' Whereupon he said to me he wouldn't hurt me. . . . We went on talking, and I specially urged him to turn himself over to the court." {They met again some time later in the village inn:] "He invited me to

have a drink with him and pushed the glass over to me, saying, 'Don't come any closer,' and snatched up his gun . . . every time he grabbed his gun it was out of fear, not as a threat. . . . Apart from his passion for hunting, Kahlhaus was always a decent fellow and a hardworking farmhand, he never drank too much or started tights; I've never caught him poaching myself. Unlike Duke Arco's gamekeepers, who chased the young poacher, the game tenant, coming from the village, tried to help him. He obviously sympathized with him and spoke of him as a decent, hardworking fellow, "except for his passion for hunting." Other villagers also tried to protect this young man who was running wild, forever waving his gun around, and seemed concerned about him. A miller whom he had also threatened with his gun made an effort to get closer to him: I calmed him . . . , telling him to renounce the life he was leading and give himself up to the court. He seemed moved, and had practically agreed to it, when he saw the gamekeeper coming. Then all was in vain. . . . He used to be a good boy and an excellent worker. He never told me anything about his shooting. A 60-year-old farmer called Rachl, who had also heard the shots exchanged by Kalhaus and the gamekeepers, knew him from his previous employment: Last year Kahlhaus was employed by my neighbor, Haber, and visited my house almost every day, as his sister was one of my maids. All I heard about him was that he was decent and hard-working, cheerful and good-humored; I had no idea that he went poaching, and never heard anyone mention any such thing. In contrasr to the overdramatized statements in the police records about the "notorious poacher" whose gun was "already blazing away" when the gamekeeper 145

Disputed boundaries of the village swiftly took aim, the testimonies of his former master and the mayor paint a picture of a desperate youngster: But he was a good, hardworking servant until 15 June 1890 . . . , and I said to him, "Didn't they shoot you then?" and he replied; "They didn't hit me, but I heard the whizz of the bullets. It would have been better if they had shot [me]!", as he couldn't stop hunting, and he was weeping as he said it. Eventually Kahlhaus went to see the mayor and requested the return of his employment book: Because he had left his job with Feichtner, the miller. . . , he'd been hunting in the woods, the gamekeepers had almost caught him, so he had to go. I reproached him, saying why didn't he quit hunting, and he replied in tears that he had tried to, but he couldn't give it up. As for his conduct in other respects, I haven't the slightest complaint. From the young poacher's statements, it seems that he no longer went hunting for pleasure but was driven by an inner compulsion, in the grip of an obsession that he was unable to shake off. He saw his situation as so hopeless that he would have liked to die: "It would have been better if they had shot [me]." The testimony of the witnesses may be pointing to a deeper layer of village experience, at which poaching no longer appears merely as an everyday breach of the law. It was not so much the fact that Kahlhaus went poaching that people found disturbing but the single-minded obsession with hunting that had him in its grip and had cut him off from the reality of everyday village life. His relations with those around him and his self-perception had assumed fantastical traits. He had become the green-clad poacher chieftain, "Bavarian Hiasl." He had walked out on his job and had his employment book returned to him: "He was no longer mowing any meadows." Before that, he had been a "good boy" and a "hardworking farmhand," described by the farmers as "cheerful and good-humored." He had even shunned the company of his peers. He went poaching alone and did not share in the sense of adventure that lay behind the poaching expeditions of the young men, with their mocking confrontations with the gamekeepers, which were open to all sorts of interpretations. He sold the deer he shot, so they were not communally cooked and eaten; he took no part in general social exchanges nor formed any close relationships. There were no girls whom he sought to woo with a haunch of venison, whom he might have impressed with his courage and skill as a hunter. It is probably no coincidence that the relevant witnesses were older men from the village, such as the boy's former master and the mayor; it was not farmhands, farmers' sons, and friends who appeared before the judge to give the youth a good character. For the cottager's son Josef Scholl the young men of the parish of Zorneding had at least collected money to enable him to flee before he was rearrested. In the case of Sebastian Kahlhaus, however, we find father figures surrounding him like a protective rampart, revealing the police legend of the "dangerous poacher" to be the story of a young farmhand whose life in the village had been seriously jeopardized by his passion for hunting. 146

Poaching "Shooting a Hind" - and the Meaning of the Words According to the police records, this poaching story involving two young men gets off to an almost annoyingly straightforward start. 73 On 21 November 1897, Johann Wagner of Lochausen, of the parish of Langenpettenbach, in the district of Dachau, went to the head gamekeeper ("Lersch" Kottermeier) for Theodor Krisch, a businessman from Munich, and said: "Listen, Lersch, there's something I must tell you, I've been wanting to tell you for a long time: Our farmhand, Dionysius Schelm, shot a roe deer on Thursday before the Altomiinster market." The gamekeeper informed the Indersdorf constable, who made inquiries. He searched the farmhand's possessions, looking for arms and ammunition, but to no avail. Finally he questioned the farmer's son who had betrayed the farmhand, first warning him not to speak against Schelm the farmhand "out of spite" and only to say things that he could swear to under oath. The 19-year-old Wagner then made the following statement: On the Thursday before the Altomiinster market - the market was on 10 October, eight days before the church festival - on the evening of 7 October Schelm loaded his shotgun in the stables as he was feeding the horses, saying: "Tonight I'm going out." When I entered the stables on the morning of Friday, 8 October, Schelm was picking roe deer hairs out of his jacket. I asked, "What are you are up to?" To which Schelm replied, "I've got to get them out, otherwise I'll pay for it." I went on, "Did you get anything?" Schelm answered, "Yes, I shot a hind in Schwarz's field." In his report the policeman goes into more detail about the scene of the poaching, Schwarz's field: "The afore-mentioned field is right next to the forest, which is why the roe deer like to go there on moonlit nights like the.night of 7 October." In his quest for evidence of poaching and the whereabouts of the roe deer that had been shot, the constable finally uncovered the background to the whole business, in the light of which he thought he understood why the farmer's son had informed on the farmhand and why the weapon could not be found, and also why the farmhand might have been warned and managed to get rid of the evidence: The farmer's son, Johann Wagner, and the farmhand, Dionysius Schelm, both living with the farmer Josef Wagner of Lochausen, were on intimate terms last summer. At the beginning of November they fell out and became bitter enemies, for the following reason. The farmer's son, Johann Wagner, was having an affair with a maid. But Wagner's father, the farmer Josef Wagner, was absolutely opposed to his son's relationship with this maid and strictly forbade him to have anything more to do with her. Johann Wagner promised his father that he would break off his relationship with the maid but later returned to her bedroom window nonetheless. When Johann Wagner went back to the maid again, the farmhand, Dionysius Schelm, gossiped about it in public and also told Johann Schelm's father. This was the beginning of the enmity between the two of them, and Johann Wagner said in public: "Now I'm going "StAM.AG 34805.

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Disputed boundaries of the village to tell them all about that Schelm; I'll tell Lersch, too, that he shot a roe deer on the night of 7 October." As expected, the farmhand denied ever having owned a shotgun or having done any poaching. Nor could the constable prove anything against Schelm's brothers or his father, Ulrich Schelm, a day laborer, whom he considered known poachers. As the report states, "No witness able to confirm this rumor could be found." The chief witness remained the farmer's son, Johann Wagner. However, by the time he was questioned by the senior district judge in Dachau, on 28 December 1897, the farmer's son's recollections of the farmhand's poaching were rather different. He had said all sorts of things about the farmhand, he claimed, that he could not maintain with certainty. "Once in October Schelm did tell me that he had been out in the forest and fetched home a hind. But by hind he had meant his sweetheart, whom he had arranged to meet in the forest." He had seen the farmhand's shotgun himself, but he could no longer remember what sort of hairs the latter had been removing from his jacket. "Whether on this occasion he was talking about shooting deer, I don't know; it is possible that he was talking about deer, although he might also have meant that he had slept with his sweetheart. It is true that in my anger at Schelm I said in front of people that I would tell the gamekeeper that he had shot a roe deer the night before." The farmhand's statement to the provincial judge is also relevant to the story: "It is correct that on the morning of 8 October I told Wagner I had shot a hind, but it was just a roundabout way of saying that I had had a woman." Aside from that he continued to deny any involvement in poaching, nor had he ever noticed any such thing while living at home. The farmhand was found guilty of poaching. The request for a pardon, dated 1898, concluded with praise for his diligence, honesty, and good moral conduct, which had earned him the recognition of his superiors. This record contains various stories. A farmhand is charged with poaching, found guilty by the court, and sentenced. The rest of the record reveals a new stratum: A farmer's son accuses a farmhand working beside him on his parents' farm of poaching, to avenge himself for a betrayal. In the end, the story the district judge is told is that the farmhand had gone to meet his sweetheart. Concealed beneath the poaching charge, the threads of three relationships are entangled. Friendship between the farmer's son, Johann Wagner, and the farmhand, Dionysius Schelm; both worked on the farm of Johann Wagner's father and were, as the constable put it, "on intimate terms last summer." Part of this intimacy between them was possibly the farmhand's knowledge of the farmer's son's secret and forbidden love affair. The son's love for a maid, to whose bedroom window he continued to go, although his father had strictly forbidden him to see her, probably because she was too low in the village property-owning hierarchy, seems to be central to the conflict described in the poaching records. The farmhand's betrayal is the betrayal of this secret love affair to the public and to the youth's father. This breach of confidence, this "blabbing" in public, provoked the vengeful reaction, the anger in which the farmer's son in turn divulges the farmhand's secret, forbidden 148

Poaching story "to people" and the gamekeeper - a story the final version of which is eventually submitted to the district judge as a love story. The intimacy between the farmer's son and the farmhand may have arisen at their place of work, but it is interwoven with their shared knowledge of forbidden stories — of love and poaching — of secret places which they visit at night and which are forbidden to them by the father and by the game authorities. The statements of the two men suggest an association between these two contexts. Love stories and poaching complement each other. To the farmer's son, the maid's bedroom window is the forbidden place where he leaves behind him the rules of his father and farm; to the poacher, the field on the edge of the forest to which the roe deer like to go on moonlit nights is the forbidden place, and it becomes the place where the farmhand meets his sweetheart. The poacher's moonlit meadow is at once a metaphor for the maid's bedroom window and the real meeting place of the loving couples. As the farmer's son tells the district judge, "arranging to meet at the meadow," "shooting a hind," or "fetching home a hind" can also "mean" that the farmhand had "slept with his sweetheart," and this is how he speaks of village love affairs and his own relationship with the maid. The farmer's son and the farmhand are once again speaking a common language before the district judge, and the farmhand explains its meanings. When he said that he had shot a "hind," "It was just a roundabout way of saying that I had had a woman." During the questioning, the object of the poaching took on many meanings. It struck me that both the farmer's son and the farmhand talked about a hind (Rebgais), not a roe deer (Reh), as the constable does at the beginning of his report. For this roe deer had always had a sex: In the parlance of the farmer's son and the farmhand, a hind becomes a vehicle for speaking about lovers. The story of the hind also sheds new light on the unfortunate "passion for hunting" that obsessed the farmhand Sebastian Kahlhaus in the preceding case. At the age of 23, the young man's sole passion was still hunting the animals of the forest. It was a compulsion from which he was unable to escape, which left him on his own, even excluding him from the clandestine nocturnal expeditions in which the other village youths took part. The poaching story of the farmer's son and the farmhand, on the other hand, seems to hint at a way out and some kind of development. As the farmer's son's interprets the story's verbal formulation - "shooting a hind" - the hunted game is transformed into the sweetheart. This meaning-cuminterpretation may well have been invented on the spur of the moment for the judge's benefit, out of solidarity with the farmhand. But, as I shall try to show later in this chapter, it also reveals a collective erotic fantasy among the village youths and suspends the poachers' one-sided fascination with the animals of the forest for a moment by directing their desire toward the village girls, the maid and the sweetheart. It leads us back to the social context of the transition to manhood and relations between the sexes in the village. Two languages collide in the judge's chambers: a clearly defined understanding of the illegal poaching of a roe deer and the imaginary semantic field of "shooting 149

Disputed boundaries of the village a hind," a genuinely male, peasant code, in which the young men's poaching and love affairs are distilled into an erotic text. The village policeman's talk of a "field right next to the forest," to which "the roe deer like to go on moonlit nights," evokes a new image in this context: the village's courting couples mingling with the roe deer on the edge of the forest. The language of the court eventually deprives the peasant imagination of its richness and ambiguity; the district judge is enlightened by the farmer's son and the farmhand; the "truth" must be extracted from the ambiguity of their language and brought to light. Although a bright light is cast on the circumstances surrounding the poaching, the darkness and the special light of the night in front of the bedroom window and in the "moonlit meadow" have been lost. The peasant youths' erotic images have been rendered fit for the courtroom - as an irrelevant lie. The farmhand is convicted of poaching and the love story dismissed as a convenient lie. Who can tell whether it was or not? The significant thing about this case for us is the ambiguity of the language used. On the one hand, it was accepted by the court as an account of the facts of the case and legally recorded. But the village had understood it at quite a different level of meaning. This is demonstrated by the request for a pardon, stressing the farmhand's honesty. There is only a faint echo of this level. But what language is really being spoken here? Is it possible to penetrate the semantics of the village's tacit approval through another type of source material?

THE REALITY OF FANTASY Court records provided the material for the analysis of poaching in the preceding sections, and they introduced poaching as a criminal offense. Day laborers, farmers, and young fellows came to the notice of the authorities and the judiciary as lawbreakers, as notorious and dangerous poachers. Supported by the solidarity of the village or their comrades, they were let off or sentenced to a term in jail: days or months, but rarely years. But beneath the superficial offense of poaching, which was a matter for the investigating magistrate and the court, the peasant world seethed with the conflicts that had led to the denunciation of individual poachers in the first place and to charges being brought against them. The records reveal another story about the lives of the accused than that expressed by the formal charges, one that culminates in the exposure of the offense against the game laws but only oversteps the bounds of the village in this one clash with authority. We shall consider poaching as an explicit power struggle between village and authority in a later chapter; in the cases just described it was chiefly a foil to the internal conflicts in the village and a channel through which these conflicts had sought a solution, a release into the outside world. But before leaving the village, in accordance with the dictates of authority, and reentering the courtroom - the arena of the law that rules all - I should like to take another look at the villagers' language before they answer the list of questions laid down by the legal system. The individualizing ap150

Poaching proach of the court records may have concealed the village consensus that preceded all poaching and made denunciation possible at all. At this collective level, self-understanding (that is, self-identification with a particular group) emerges in a shared fantasy in which everyday reality is wedded to anthropological metaphors. The illicit hunting of the Upper Bavarian peasants assumes a shining countenance. It occupied not only everyday life but also the imagination, and the images of poachers gave these fantasies language and form. This is what happened in the poaching songs that arose in the nineteenth century and have, at least in part, been handed down. 74 They may be melodramatic, poetic, or humorous. Their sometimes clumsy and jerky verse is a game with reality at a level of the imagination where this reality appears reshaped and reinterpreted. Thus the songs are also fragments of the language of the collective unconscious, in which the current prohibitions of the day and lawlessness in general are celebrated in a defiant, rebellious, plangent, and plaintive text. Like children's fairy tales, it cleverly transforms the monstrous giants who browbeat the hard-pressed peasants into preposterous, cowardly figures and elevates the peasant's own powerlessness into something magnificent. Here, the wretched poaching failures of Sebastian Kahlhaus the farmhand take on a heroic aspect.75 But beneath the mask of the poaching metaphor we also espy the dream images and phantoms of the village "interior," its prohibitions and its excesses. Only by referring back to the village's material, emotional, and hegemonic reality, however, does it become apparent how important these fantasies are, how powerful they may have been; and it is evident, too, that these songs offer a possible way of dispelling these fantasies. Because folk songs come from the peasant world and are often passed on orally,76 we must assume that, even as they were being written down, the texts handed down to us were already being detached from the area in which they were sung and constantly re-created, spontaneously sung again and again and subjected to erosion.77 Their transmission must be viewed against the background of the encroachment of bourgeois culture, which wished to secure and preserve the traces of a traditional world. 78 But this new interest in peasant culture also made possible the transmission of hundreds of songs, among which, in the Alpine regions, poaching songs figure prominently. With the aid of examples, I should like to reconstruct the traces 74

See Horger, Dorfreligion I, p. 139; also Leopold Schmidt, "Das Volkslied in der Wissenschafts- und

Sammlertatigkeit der Volkskunde, in R. W. Brednich, L. Rohrich, and W. Suppan (eds.), Handbucb da Volksliedes, (Munich, 1975), vol. 2; p. 14 refers to the importance of "peasant ballads," which, as late as the nineteenth century, had played such an important part in promoting understanding of the "nature" of the poacher, whose attitude emerged so clearly from the songs. See also K. S. Kramer, Grundriss einer ncbtlichen Volkskunde (Gottingen, 1974). "See the section in this chapter entitled "Passion." 76 See articles from the journal Aurora (1828). "Vollcstanz und Volkslied im bayerischen Oberland zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts," reprinted in Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Volksmusik in Bayern, Atisgewablte Quellen und Dokumente aus sechsjahrhundertat (catalog for exhibition held in Munich, May 8—July 31, 1985), pp. I7ff. "Walter Schmidkunz (ed.), Das Uibbaftige Liederbuch (Wolfenbuttel, 1938), p. 13. 78

See Hans Moser, Vom Folklorismus in unser Zeit, pp. 336-58.

Disputed boundaries of the village of an oral and gesticulatory peasant culture that had no place in the language of court records. I shall examine two collections of songs in particular, both distinguished by the methods used to collect the songs and the collectors' familiarity with the peasant world and the area under study. 79 The first collection contains 278 old Upper Bavarian songs, including 35 poaching songs, collected by Kiem Pauli, a musician at the Tegernsee Bauernbiihne, born in Munich in 1882.80 At the suggestion of Ludwig Thoma, Kiem Pauli made several expeditions around the countryside on a bicycle, bringing along a folding zither, to note down the songs and tunes that were still being sung by older peasants.81 He later collaborated with a young Munich musicologist, psychologist, and professor, Kurt Huber, with whom he published a number of collections.82 The second collection, published by the ethnologist and writer Walther Schmidkunz in 1938, contains songs from Bavaria and Austria, with brief notes and detailed source references, partly drawing on the major collections put together in Austria and Germany during the nineteenth century.83 Schmidkunz claimed that he and his collaborators, Karl List and Wastl Fanderl, had been familiar with old Bavarian Alpine songs "from their earliest childhood."84 These two song collections are supplemented in the present study by other transcriptions of songs from Austria, especially the Alpine region. The basic form of most of these songs is the Stanzl or Schnaderhiipfl, which originated chiefly in Upper Bavaria and Austria. In the nineteenth century, the Schnaderhiipfl was regarded as an original form of peasant poetry, as it still is today in contemporary folk song research. Finally, the Stanzln of dialect poets such as Franz von Kobell were also included in these collections, if their affinity with the the peasant folk song was convincing enough, or if they had been taken over as such in the Alpine regions.85 I should now like to analyze three main groups of poaching songs: first, the poachers' and dairymaids' songs that may be counted among the love songs of the village youths; second, songs of mourning and lament for poachers shot by hunters and gamekeepers; and, third, songs about the king of the poachers, Bavarian Hiasl. The various layers of meaning that poaching had for Upper Bavarian peasants and villagers seem to be addressed in these three groups of songs and to reflect each other. Presumably songs from all three groups were frequently sung on the same "On the criteria, see Oskar Elschek, "Der Quellenwert alterer Volksliedaufzeichnungen," in Brednich et al., Handbucb des Volkslitdes, vol. 2, pp. 502-3. These Upper Bavarian songs are generally composed of Stanzln or Schnaderhiipfl. See Klaus Beitl, "Schnaderhiipfl," in Brednich et al., Handbuch da Volksliedes, vol. 2, p. 617; on pp. 621 and 639 he refers to the fact that the short song form consisting of a verse of four lines is rightly regarded as "the largely autonomous creation of the ordinary man of the people." On the "authenticity" of these Stanzl, see also Hermann Bausinger, Formen der Volkspoesie (Bern, 1968), p. 262. 80 Kiem Pauli (ed.), Alte Oberbayerische Volkslieder (Munich, 1934; 6th ed., 1980). 81 Cf. ibid., "Nachwort," p. 441; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Volksmusik in Bayern, p. I73ff. 82 Bayerische Staatsbibliotek, Volksmusik in Bayern, with notes on the collections of Kiem Pauli and Kurt Huber. ''Schmidkunz, Liederbuch. M Ibid., p. 8. 85 Cf. Beitl, "Schnaderhupfl," pp. 651-2. 152

Poaching occasion. Elements of each song category also crop up in the others. Love songs and laments often have a similar opening, beginning with a jolly young man's departure for the mountains and the game and dairymaids that live up there, his comrades being enjoined to come along. The outcome of the adventure is far from certain, for the hunter is lying in wait for the youth.

T H E CHAMOIS I N T H E M O U N T A I N S Das Gams im Gebirg

The chamois in the mountains

:,:hat si langs einidraht,:,: hat sie lings einidraht bei mein Deandl die Liab :,:schlagt wia's Uhrwerk scho stad:, - bei der Nacht!

turned sideways, turned to the left my lass's love beats steady as clockwork - in the night!

Und's Gams im Gebirg :,:hat an Bart, an gspitzten,:,: hat an Bart, an gspitzten, und die lustigstn Buam :,:san die Wildpratschiitzn:,: - bei der Nacht

The chamois in the mountains has a pointed beard, has a pointed beard, and the jolliest lads are the poachers - in the night.

Und's Gams im Gebirg :,:hat scho abapfiffn:,: hat scho abapfiffn: "Wanns a Bleikiigerl habts :,:tuats mas auffaschickn!":,: - bei der Nacht!

The chamois in the moutains whistled down, whistled down, "If you've a lead bullet, send it on up!" - in the night!

Und's Gams im Gebirg :,:hat an Arsch, an weiss'n:,: hat an Arsch, an weiss'n wia d'Madeln am Samstag :,:wanns d'Pfoad wegschmeissn:,: - bei der Nacht

The chamois in the mountains has an arse so white, has an arse so white, like the lasses on a Saturday when they drop their shifts - in the night.

Und's Gams im Gebirg :,:tuat an Schuss nit scheuch-n:,: tuat an Schuss nit scheuch-n und mei Deandl im Bett :,:tuat aa nix dergleich-n!:,: - bei der Nacht.86

The chamois in the mountains never fears the shot, never fears the shot, and my lass in bed doesn't fear it either! - in the night.

86 According to Schmidkunz, Liederbuch, pp. 137-8; he also wrote down the tune. He says that the song is well known in various Alpine regions with differing verses. The song is a sequence of originally four-line Schnaderhiipfel or Gstanzl that with eight lines evolved into the Landlerlied. According to the criteria cited by Beitl, "Schraderhiipfl," p. 638, the song belongs to a category of alpine pasture and hunting

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Disputed boundaries of the village How are we to decipher this song, which brings together the chamois in the mountains, the girl, and the poacher? The poacher is the singer. His song has five verses; the first two belong to the chamois, which has turned sideways and turned left, has a pointed beard and a white rump, and is not afraid of the gunshot. The middle verse also belongs entirely to the chamois and her challenge to the poachers to send their lead bullets up to her, to shoot at her. The poacher figures in the second verse. The two lines about the chamois's pointed beard lead on to the jolly fellows, the poachers. The chamois with the beard is placed in relation to the poacher. Here the song talks of das Gams, making the chamois neuter, whereas it is normally feminine in German {die Gams), but its sexuality is restored by the relation with the poacher or the girl. At the end of the first verse the girl appears with her love, which beats as steadily as clockwork, and is described in the comparisons the singer makes with the chamois: She has a white rump like the chamois, and like the chamois she is not afraid of the poacher's shot - at night, as each verse concludes. The song opens with the chamois in the mountains and ends with the girl in bed. The rhythm of the song about das Gams with the pointed beard is transferred to the jolly poacher, and similarly the image of the girl is evoked through the chamois. In the middle of the song, the chamois issues the challenge to shoot; the girl in bed at the end is not afraid of the shot. What does the chamois say about the girl, and vice versa? What is the nature of the relationship established between them? Is the chamois, the game, also an object of love, or is the girl game to the poacher, like the chamois? Is the girl also challenging the poacher to shoot, through the chamois, or is the chamois the mediator between the poacher and the girl? Is the young fellow, as a poacher, enticing the girl, employing the chamois's voice? I should like to go into these questions by looking at another song. The poacher is on his way to the mountain pasture, with two blackcock feathers in his hat: He Buam, es wisst's, das i a frischa Wildschiitz bin, ja weil mi's Schiassn freut, des liegt mia stets im Sinn, das i auf di Alma geh und oft a Gamsal schiass weil des die Jagasbuam so stark voadriasst. songs that set the tone among the Schnaderhiipfl angeben. He also quotes another version of the last stanza, which he introduces as a typical, simple Schnaderhiipfl: Da Gams auf dar Aim Hat von Schufl a Scheuch"n; Mei Deandl in Bett Thuat nix dagleich'n. According to Beitl, "Schnaderhiipfl," pp. 651—2, Upper Bavaria and the Alpine regions of Austria are the central areas of the Schnaderhiipfl. On the eroticism of the Schnaderhiipfl and the attempts of nineteenthcentury collectors to expunge it, see Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, "Erotisches Lied," in Brednich et al., Handbuch des Volksliedei, vol. 1, pp. 575-615. Gisela Rosch, "Kiltlied und Tagelied," in ibid., pp. 483-550, introduces the poachers' songs as Kiltlieder (songs sung during a young man's evening visit to a girl). She distinguishes between sequences of Schnaderhiipfl leading to the category of dance songs and a second category in which a conversation scene forms the core. On p. 499 she notes that chamois figure in the poaching songs and Kiltlieder as part of the natural background but goes no farther than this in her interpretation.

Poaching Und wia tuat mi net der Weg auf die Aim gefreun, wo tuat die Sennerin den frischn Budan ruhrn, juche schreit sie, wann's mi nur sechn tuat, a krumms paar Fedan auf mein greana Huat. Und wia i da so zu der Hiittn kimm, da hang i's Stutzal auf hinta d'Hiittentur nacha fangt sie da scho zun Kocha o, was i am liabstn mag, des woass sie scho. Und wia ma dann mi tsamma gessn habn, da fragt mi d'Sennerin, ob i net stad schiassn kann, und a soichas Gams, des auf zwea Fiiassn steht, und an stadn Schuss am liabsten hat. "Liabste Sennerin, des woasst du eh scho lang, das i mit mein Stutzerl net stad schiassn kann, und a soichas Gams, des auf zwoa Fiiassn steht, des ha i gsechn nia, wia san denn dia?" "Liabsta Wildbratschiitz, du kannst mi net vasteha, du muasst bei mia dableibn und mit mir schlafa geha, dann wer i dir sagn, was du no nia hast geerscht, wia a soichas Gamsal gschossn werscht." Nacha legn ma hait die ganze Nacht beinand bis auf das erste, erste Vogelgsang, nacha muass da Wildschiitz vo da Sennrin scheidn und ins hohe, hohe Gamsgebirg steign. Liebste Sennerin, die Vogel singen scho, i dank fur d'Liegastatt und was i gessn ho, das i daher jawohl gwissa nimma kimm, i ha an andan Weg hinaus in Sinn. 87 Boys, you know I'm a keen poacher, I like to shoot, and often get the notion to go up to the pasture and shoot a little chamois, because it irks the huntsmen so. And how I like to journey to the pasture, where the dairymaid churns fresh butter, she shouts hurrah when she sees me with a few crooked feathers in my green hat. And when I arrive at her hut, I hang my rifle behind the door, 87 Kiem Pauli, Volslieder, p. 147, sung by Lena Marksteiner and Maria Hafer, Brandenberg, Tirol. According to the classification of Rosch, "Kiltlieder," p. 49;, this song belongs to the second category of Kiltlieder. Cf. the similar "Wildschutzenlied," which Kiem Pauli, Volkslieder, pp. I42ff., obtained from the brother and sister Pepi and Berta Schiefer, of Laufen in Upper Bavaria. Also the song entitled "Almalied" in ibid., pp. 125—6.

Disputed boundaries of the village And she starts cooking right away, She knows what I like best. And when we've eaten together the dairymaid asks me if I can shoot well at a chamois that stands on two feet, and likes a good shot best. "Dearest dairymaid, you know full well that I cannot shoot steadily with my rifle, and I've never seen a chamois that stands on two feet, tell me, what are they like?" "Dearest poacher, you don't understand me, you must stay and sleep with me, and I'll tell you something you've never heard, about the shooting of such a chamois." We lie together all through the night until the first birds sing, then the poacher must part from the dairymaid, to go up the high, high chamois mountains. Dearest dairymaid, the birds have started to sing, I thank you for the bed and for the meal, I'll surely not come this way again, for I've another path in mind. This time it is the dairymaid herself who exhorts the poacher to shoot at the chamois. She is the seductress, for she is das Gams (the chamois), with both feet on the ground. She urges him to stay and sleep with her, and then she will teach him things he has not heard. She initiates him in a long night until the first birds are heard. Then the poacher "must" take his leave of the dairymaid and climb the high chamois mountains. Where is he going, and what is the significance of these "high, high" chamois mountains? The dairymaid has cared for him, cooked for him, and initiated him into her secret in the night. What is the connection between staying at the dairymaid's hut and climbing the high chamois mountains? Compared with the preceding song, a reversal appears to have taken place. This time, the road leads not from the chamois to the girl; instead, the dairymaid - who is also a chamois - lives on the road to the "high chamois mountains." In the dairymaid the poacher has met the chamois, and yet is only at the start of his journey into the realm of the chamois. What awaits the poacher up there in the high mountains, and what sort of place is it? How does it differ from the dairymaid's hut on the boundary between the valley and the mountains? The poachers of the songs do not hunt just any animal: It is chiefly red deer, blackcock, and, in most songs, chamois that excite their interest. 88 With the aid of 88 Schmidkunz, Liederbuch, pp.134 &• "Der Wildschiitz." He describes this song about chamois hunting as the most widespread poaching song at the beginning of this century; he also provides information

156

Poaching a much-sung song that is not specifically about poaching, I should like to decipher the meaning of chamois hunting, and its uniqueness. In the "Chamois Hunter's Song," we encounter a key experience in hunting, which the illicit hunter also seems to be seeking and must "have": s'Gamsjagerlied

The Chamois Hunter's Song

Koa lustigers Leben - mein Oad als jagn in die Berg umanand! Is der Weg oft schmal oder brat, geht a Grabn her oder a Wand: des is ma oa Ding! Wanns nacha nur Gamsln gnua geit, ache i alles gar gering. Herunten leicht Jager der fragst auf Henna und Hasen und Fiichs: Aber drobn, wo's Edelweiss wachst, da taugen oft die mehresten nix! Aber i - bi dabei! Denn: "Wia hocher, wia liaber!," des is mei Spruch alia wei!

There's no jollier life, on my oath, than hunting up in the mountains! Be the path narrow or wide, if I walk by the gorge or the mountainside: It's all the same to me. So long as there's plenty of chamois, I couldn't care less for the rest. Down below you can ask the hunters for chicken, hare or fox, but up here where the edelweiss blooms, most of them aren't worth a fig! But I, why I'm in my element, "The higher, the better!" is my motto, you see.

Siachst'n stehn, wia(r)a hofft, wia(r)a schaugt, wia da Teufi, so schwarz und so wild: A seller Bock is's, der ma taugt und i trau ma zua, dass er's verspielt! Denn a so — oder a so: Und steigat er eini in d' H611! I kriagat'n do! Schone Granln a Ringei wohl ziern, und es gfreit mi und gfallt mir a guat, wann der Spielhoh' sei Schaar muass verliern, und i steck ma s'aufi am Huat! Da bring i mir zwegn an wachladn Gamsbarscht - vastehst! - is alls nix dagegn!89

Gin you see him standing, hoping and looking, like the devil, so black and so wild? A buck like that is the one for me and I trust he'll lose the battle! For one way or another, even if he flees into hell, he won't escape me! Pretty little balls adorn a ring, and it pleases me so when the blackcock loses its feather, and I stick it in my hat! But when I get myself a chamois beard — you know! Nothing compares with that!

The song confronts the wilderness of gorges and rockfaces, of chamois and edelweiss, this rare and precious flower, with "down below," the valley of the hens, on its spread in the second half of the nineteenth century and on a number of similar songs, pp. 130—I, 142, and 145. Cf. "Wildschutzenlied" in Kiem Pauli, Volkslieder, pp. 144-5, where instead of a chamois buck, "a proud stag" appears. 8 'Schmidkunz, Liederbucb, pp. I32ff. An identical version of the song occurs in Styria and was recorded by Kiem Pauli.

157

Disputed boundaries of the village hare, and foxes, the prosaic animals of everyday life. But high up in the mountains the chamois hunter had a unique adventure in store, the encounter with the chamois buck, who stands there waiting for him, watching, as black and wild as the devil. The duel with the buck takes the poacher to the edge of hell. 90 The marksman's victory trophy will be the chamois's beard. Just as the chamois buck is the counterpart of the hare and foxes of the valley, the blackcock, whose feathers adorn the poacher's hat, is the counterpart of the hens. The chamois beard and blackcock feathers are the symbols of daring and courage (Schneid), and anyone who has won them will wear them on his hat, provocatively visible to all. The strength and beauty of the animals, the blackcock and the chamois, are transferred to the wearer of their feathers and beard.91 The hunting adventure can culminate in a love song. After shooting the chamois buck, the poacher returns to the dairymaid, the beautiful Schwoagerin: Die schone Schwoagerin

The Fair Dairymaid

Griiass di God, du schone Schwoagerin, mach ma auf dei Hiittntur: A Gamsei han i gschossn, lass mi eina zu dir! Holari holdje huldjo iri, hildjo iriaho!

Greetings, fair dairymaid, Open the door to your hut, I've shot a chamois, Let me in! Holari, etc.

A Gamsei han i gschossn, an zottatn Bock, iatz kaf i glei da Schwoagerin an ghau'sltn Rock!

I've shot a chamois a thick-furred buck, now I'll buy the dairymaid a gathered skirt.

, . , . .. My sweetheart is a dairymaid hat vierazwanzig Kiiah, ., , , , and has twenty-four cows, und a Jungfrau is sie nimmamehr, . , .. ,, a, shes not a maiden any more, hats selber gsagt zu mirP2 , ., , , ,a 6 6 she told me that herself! The poacher has shot the buck: Does this give him special admission rights to the dairymaid's hut? Where does he go now? The mountain pasture has suddenly grown bigger; the dairymaid has twenty-four cows. In many songs the dairymaids are at work when the poacher returns from the mountains to stay with them. They Mei Schatz, des is a Schwoagerin,

w

'°Cf. this motif in the short story by Arthur Achleitner, "Steig i aufFi auf d'Alm" (1890), in Andreas Aberle, Es war ein Wildscbiitz in seinen scbonslen Jabren (Rosenheim, 1972), p. 56, about a poacher who has just been released from prison. The encounter with the devil while out alone at night is a key theme of legend and song in the Alpine region and is one of the tests of young men's courage. See Ilka Peter, Gasslbrauch und Gasslspruch in Oatemich (Salzburg, 1981), pp. 142—3. "Cf. Rosen, "Kiltlied," p. 490; Peter, Gasslbrauch, pp. 126ft".; Andreas Posch, "Wildschiitzenlieder," Singer- und Musikantenzeitung, Zweimonatsschrift fiir Volksmusikpflege 26 (1983). '2Schmidkunz, Liederbuch, p. 123. He heard this song in the area of Rosenheim, Upper Bavaria. For another version of this Schnaderhtipfl, see Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Volksmusik in Bayern, p. 9. A Schnaderhiipfl quoted by Kiem Pauli, Volkslieder, p. 149, also offers variations on the chamois buck/dairymaid motif.

158

Poaching milk, make butter, strain the milk, cook for the poacher, make pancakes, and look after him. The descriptions of the working dairymaids and their movements followed the rhythm of the dances to the tunes to which the songs were sung. The poacher finally leaves chamois hunting and the mountain pasture and the dairymaid behind and returns to the valley: When I bring my father a chamois, he pays me in wine When I sing the song at the inn, all the poachers will rejoice!

Warm i mein Vatan a Gams hoambring, zahlt er mir an Wein wann i des Liadl im Wirtshaus sing, muass's alle Schiitzn gfrein!93

Why does his father buy him wine, and who are the marksmen listening to his song in the village inn? Part of the context surrounding these songs was that they were sung - not just by the poachers themselves but by other men (and women) in the villages of Upper Bavaria and other Alpine regions. They were sung in the village inns, in the mountain pastures, in the farm gardens, and on festive occasions.94 Poaching songs are part of the village song repertoire, just as much as love songs and Gasslreime (Alpine village street songs). They are love songs and, at the same time, they continually adopt a provocative tone toward the game authorities: for only the poacher, not the hunter, is welcomed by the dairymaid, and after spending the night with her the brave poacher puts the hunters to flight.95 How can these things be understood today as a text about those who sang them? They deal with the poacher setting off for the mountains to go hunting in defiance of the law, with girls and dairymaids, the lovely high mountains and the animals that live there, with chamois and blackcock. Before they were finally written down —or at least a substantial number of them were — in the nineteenth century by collectors of folk songs, they were passed on orally, changing as the singer improvised and acquiring different linguistic tinges in different regions.96 In this living process of singing and "erosion" of these songs, there is, nevertheless, a fixed core of images and motifs that are repeated, just like melodies and the versification that determined their form. What is renewed here, continually redefined and evoked through singing and dancing? ""Bei meiner Liabsten bleib i net," in Schmidkunz, Litdtrbuch, pp. 147-8. He also refers to other versions of this song in the area near the Achensee in Upper Bavaria, dealing with the poachers' bold adventures. On buying acceptance among the young men of the village with wine, see Rosen, "Kiltlied," p. 486. M On the occasions at which these songs were sung, see Beitl, "Schnaderhupfl," pp. 639-40; Schusser, "Feste und offentliches Leben .. . Joseph Lentner," pp. 219—79. 95 Cf. Schmidkunz, Liederbuch, p. 1421!. "Der lustige Wildschiitz", and pp. 1341!, "Der Wildschiitz"; Kiem Pauli, Volkslieder, pp. 1421!, "Wildschiitzenlied." '6Cf. Aurora, pp. 191T. The unknown author of these sketches from 1828 claims that the "guardians of these national songs," as he calls the Scbnatkrhiipfln, were, above all, the girls, many of whom were able to remember hundreds of them and immediately learned any new ones they heard. Many of the songs collected by Kiem Pauli are also from handwritten books of songs belonging to women.

159

Disputed boundaries of the village It may prove valuable to look at the songs from the point of view of the village rather than that of the solitary life of the mountains and alpine pastures. They then appear not so much as accounts of curious encounters in the mountain pastures but as a textbook embodying collective village — especially male — fantasies. By "fantasy," in this context, I mean the reality of the village at the level of the imagination. I should like to view these fantasies, or their expressions in song, as texts of an unconscious yet powerful reality in the village. The songs about poachers and dairymaids sing of relations between the sexes and sexuality. The poacher of the song is a young man, as yet unmarried. In the village he would belong to the peer group of farmers' sons and farmhands. This group was strictly organized in the alpine regions, in societies (Burschenschaften) and drinking clubs (Zechen). It was possible to leave adolescence and attain manhood only by undergoing the initiation rites of the young men of the village. Strict membership rules applied, as they did for acceptance into a Burschenschaft: anyone who was under 18 and had not worked his way up as aformer'sson or farmhand was excluded.97 The first contacts young males had with girls took place in the watchful company of the group, which collectively went visiting girls' bedroom windows ifensterln gehen) or calling up to them from the street (Gassl gehen).

As in many other parts of Europe, young men's courting in Bavaria and Austria was linked to the activities of the societies and drinking clubs and had its own "special times" and "particular rhythm."98 On certain weekdays, and on Sundays and holidays, the group of young men went out. It was often late at night, when everyone was asleep, when they started roaming rowdily through the village and crossing meadows, fields, and woods to get to solitary farmhouses. Often, especially in spring, they were on the move all night, getting involved in brawls with Burschenshaften from other districts, occasions which gave them the opportunity to show their strength and courage and to defend their claims to the girls who were the real targets of their noctural ramblings.99 On more official occasions, such skirmishes were staged in ritual fashion - for example, fighting for the blackcock feathers in an opponent's hat.100 The demonstrative unruliness of the young men's nocturnal goings-on obscures the established nature of these courting customs. They were governed by rules that become apparent when the young men finally reach their destination, where the girls are at home, waiting in their bedrooms. " K . R. V. Wikmann, Die Einleitung der Ehe. Elite vergleichende ethno-soziologische Untersuchungtiberdie Voritufe der Eht in dm Sitten des scbwediscben Volkstums (Abo, 1937), pp. I26ff.; Peter, Gasslbrauch, pp. 1 iff.; see also

the chapter on groups of young people in Hungary in Edit Pel and Tamas Hofer, Proper Peasants, pp. i86ff. '8Beck, "Illegitimitat," pp. 139-40. "Ibid.; Peter, Gasslbrauch, pp. 22-3. 100 Beck, "Illegitimitat," pp. 113—17; I. G. Kohl, Reise in Steiermarck und im bayerischen Hochlande, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1853), pp. 342ff.; see also Schusser, "Feste."According to Lentner's accounts of rural life, dance songs and blackcock feathers were prohibited in the districts of Rosenheim and Prangenburg in the Inn Valley. On fights between youths in Bavaria, see also Bernhard Miiller-Wirthmann, "Raufhandel. Gewalt und Ehre im Dorf," in van Diilmen, Kultur der einfachen Ltutt, pp. 79-111. This study is based on court records. 160

Poaching Singly or in small groups, the young men paid their visit beneath the bedroom window, devoting themselves to the game that signified the encounter between the sexes. A game of skill in verbal exchanges, challenges, and rebuffs; a testing of behavior in the form of exhortation and refusal and rivalry for the distribution of success and respect within the village youth's collective. . . . To "go windowing" {Fensterln gehen] might mean calling up to the window, forging a link between outside and inside, the street and the bedroom, that was confined to the exchange of words; or . . . it served to gain one or more youths access to the inside, to the girl's bedroom.101 But between staying outside and climbing in through the window into the bedroom and the girl's bed stood the social relations of the village, in all their complexity. Status and property, ideas of respectability and knowledge of any given individual's place in the village, formed the invisible bars at the window through which a girl might, or might not, allow a youth to enter. And until the girl had selected a sweetheart from among the youths she had let in, or the young man started to limit his visits to one girl only and became engaged to her, they slept together chastely, sharing the bed for one night or more "im Gewand" (fully clothed). 102 The observance of these internal village rules governing relations between the sexes needed no official edicts or supervisory body consisting of village elders. That most spectacular moral court, the Haberfeldtreiben, or charivari - when pressed into service — comprised the same players as the gangs of youths that, bawling and brawling, assembled to do the rounds of the girls' windows. For it was they, the young unmarried men, that with nocturnal, masked tricks and antics drove those who had breached the moral code to which all were subject into the Haberfeld [treiben], and sometimes out of the village altogether. 103 The poaching songs confirm and compensate for the "orderliness" of the young villagers' sexual relationships by staging the violation of these rules. 104 Beyond the established networks of premarital courtship and preparation for marriage, they evoke 10l

Beck, "Illegitimitat," pp. 140, 143. See also Rb'sch, "Kiltlied," p. 489. Beck, "Illegitimitat," p. 142. According to Rbsch, "Kiltlied," pp. 490-1, in these circumstances it was considered an honor if a girl received a large number of Kiltganger, sometimes as many as 40 or 50. 103 There is abundant literature on the Haberfeldtreiben (charivari). For Bavaria, the reader is referred to the new study by Helga Ettenhuber, "Charivari in Bayern. Das Miesbacher Treiben von 1899," in van Diilmen, Kultur der e'mfachen Leute, pp. 180-207. For a study written from an ethnological viewpoint, see also Martin Scharfe, "Zum Riigebrauch," Hessische Blatter fir Volkskunde 61 (1970), 45-68. On the importance of peer groups, especially the importance of groups of adolescents for the attainment of adulthood in the peasant community of the early modern period and its role as the village's moral court, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule," in Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (London, 1975), pp. 97-128, especially vol. 2, pp. 104-9. F° r a n anthropological-psychoanalytical interpretation of puberty rites, see Bruno Bettelheim, Die symbolischen Wunaen. Pubertatsriten und der Neid da Mannes (New York, 1954; Munich, 1975). The classic study of initiation rites, which is still relevant today, is by Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (in French, 1909; London, 1960), especially chap, io, pp. 656". Central to van Gennep's approach is the distinction between "physical puberty" and "social puberty." See also the new study by Heilce Behrend, Die Zeit des Feuers. Mann und Frau-bei dm Tugen in Ostafrika (New York, 1985), pp. jiff. In this particular tribe, the "birth of man and woman" takes place, like other rites depassages, in three stages: (1) separation from the habitual world; (2) "dying in the wilderness"; and (3) the return to the inhabited world as a social person. 104 Cf. the carnival-like infringements of village rules by the "kingdoms" or "abbeys of youth" in Davis, "Reasons." 102

161

Disputed boundaries of the village the realm of the forbidden wilderness and "stolen pleasure." The poaching songs hymn the footloose fantasies of young males, hidden beneath the rituals of the Burschenschaften, and give these fantasies a shape. They also evoke the solitude in which the young man must have his experiences. In these songs, youth is associated with a sort of mythically enhanced poaching. The night spent "walking the streets," indulging in Gassl gehen, is verging on wildness. The vagabond life, illicit hunting in the forest, is dangerous. It might end fatally, if the poacher clashes with the game official, the guardian of order. Everyday experiences of poaching supply the song's imagery. A night's poaching is a nonstop brawl for the insignia of courage and manhood acquired by hunting. A rival might be a better or faster shot - in brawls between Burschenschaften he will steal the blackcock feather - but for the poacher on the prowl a hunter's shot might be fatal. The time of poaching was the time when the young men's sexual identity was still inchoate, still roving freely and contested. The scene of the poaching, the forests and the high mountains, lies outside the prescribed boundaries of the villages. For a moment the poachers have left behind the ordered pattern of work and the hierarchies of the village, they have fled the interiors of the households and families, establishing their independence of the domestic hearth, living off the game they shoot, cooked in the open air by their own hands. They have thus left the maternal sphere, a transitional phase before they seek out the female sphere. The poaching period is a period when the boy emerges from puberty into a wild period of his own; the forests and mountains are also the realm of wild animals, of untamed, undomesticated forces. In the "joy of hunting" of which the poachers sing, in their euphoric, get-up-and-go passion for hunting we seem to see the wakening libido directing itself at the animal, at the game. But the game is not only the target of the hunting fever; it is also a forbidden object desired by the poacher, for which he must undergo perils and adventures — for ultimately the game, the blackcock and the chamois, possess things for which he must fight, things that he wants: the blackcock feather and the chamois beard, the symbols of strength and Schneid (daring, courage). When the poacher on a lonely mountain peak looks into the eye of the chamois buck as he stands there waiting, he encounters his own inner animal, his alter ego that makes him afraid, his sexuality, which is still inchoate, undomesticated, and wild, over which he must triumph and establish control. The boundaries between the animal and the youth become blurred: With the blackcock feather in his hat and the chamois beard, the poacher has assumed the properties of the game; the relationship is still played out solely between him and the animal. The poaching songs are primarily about the struggle surrounding the burgeoning sexuality of the young men. Not necessarily tied to everyday practice, the songs also suggest a means of compensating for sexual desire by living it as fantasy. Homosexuality is despised in this peasant society: The young men keep an eye on one another. 105 In actual fact, the period of sexual uncertainty and solitude is often 105 On the ambivalence of erotic relationships in the youth gangs of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, see Philippe Aries, "Ueberlegungen zur Geschichte der Homosexualitat," in Ari&s, A. Bejin,

l62

Poaching alleviated by the familiar proximity of animals. Sexual relations with animals - cows, horses, sheep - come more easily among these raisers of livestock and are less anxiety-ridden. Legal records of vice cases testify to the frequency of bestiality among young farmhands and farmers' sons but rarely mention homosexual practices.106 The poaching songs do not evoke this everyday life directly, but at the level of the imagination they assimilate the image of the early encounter with sexuality as an encounter with animals; in enhancing these experiences in the encounter with the chamois and the magical chamois buck and his wildness, however, they are also expressing their need to be socialized into the male-female relationship. The poacher must one day lie down with a woman, lest he become completely wild and uncivilized. The poaching period corresponds to the period spent by the girls in bedrooms and mountain pastures, the period of waiting for the Gassier (boy in the street outside), the poacher. Their sphere is the workplace, the sphere of the domestic animals, cows, calves - the sphere of farm work, and women's work, in particular: milking, butter making, cooking, spinning. On one side, the sphere of the outside, the Gassier, the poacher - the sphere of lawlessness, vagabondage, danger, wildness; on the other side, the inner sphere, the place of the girls and the peasant households. Yet between these two areas there lies a threshold where they meet, where the limits of domesticity and wildness become permeable. In the reality of the village, the youth perches on a ladder or a window ledge and talks to the girl through the window. If she has chosen him as her sweetheart and if they know that they will be getting married, then the village rules permit them to sleep together. The village demands a high degree of supervision in the dealings between boys and girls, which applies as much to the girls in the bedrooms around the village as it does to the dairymaids up in the mountain pastures. The poaching songs break up this controlled reality; the poacher and the dairymaid meet in the imaginary realm of freedom in the mountains. Here, too, there is the same dichotomy between inner and outer: the woman's sphere, on the one hand, and the young men's itinerant life, on the other. Here, also, the two meet on the threshold between the domesticated sphere and the outside, but the outside is not the outside of the village in the night; it is the realm of the chamois mountains. Nor is the dairymaid's hut the girl's bedroom back in the village, under the watchful eye of her parents and employer. Up in the mountains the dairymaid lives a free, independent, and largely solitary life. The exuberant songs of the dairymaids as they walk up the mountains in spring hymn this realm of freedom for the young women, just as the poaching songs do for the young men. The time spent as a dairymaid is thus to a certain extent the equivalent of a young man's poaching years. The songs speak of the stages of initiation into a love relationship with a woman as M. Foucault et al., Die Masken da Begebrem und die Metamorphosen der Sinnlichkeit. Zur Geschichte dtr Sexualitat im Abendland(Frankfurt a.M., 1984), pp. 90, 95, originally published in French, Sexualitls occidentales (Paris,

1982). lW

For example, StAM, AR 3145/29, AR 3149/105. See also Imhof, Verlorene Welten, p. 78.

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Disputed boundaries of the village a road that first leads through the wilderness. And the dairymaid plays a part in it. She is not just the girl in the bedroom or in the hut; she belongs to the empire of the animals, she is a chamois or a little forest bird.107 Young men and girls alike are denoted by the metaphors of the forests, mountains, and the animals that inhabit them; they possess their properties. Their identities and their sexes may change, because they are not yet definitely established.108 The stories tell the tale. The call of the chamois is followed by a night with the dairymaid; the chamois turns into a girl, the poacher's sweetheart; the dairymaid lives halfway between the valley and the mountain, on the poacher's route up to the high mountains. After spending the night with her he will be able to shoot the chamois buck. Because he has shot the chamois buck, the poacher is allowed in to spend the night with the dairymaid; he wears the proof of his courage in his hat, and his erotic allure will open her door to him. Love for the dairymaid has given the poacher the strength to conquer the chamois buck; the conquered chamois buck gives him the Schneid to win the love of the dairymaid. The dairymaid also woos, urging him to stay. After all, she is the one who teaches the poacher love for a woman, bringing him back from the realm of the chamois into her mountain hut. But by entering the dairymaid's hut, the poacher is also entering the realm of the alpine pastoral farmers, the world of cows and calves, milking and butter making. He is given women's food to eat - pancakes, muesli — and has to wait until she has finished her work before she gets into bed with him. The dairymaid, who lives on the boundary between the village, with its households and women, and the high mountain zone, initiates the poacher into this social space. It is no longer the sphere of the mother, which he left on reaching puberty; it is the sphere of the woman and future farmer's wife. This encounter with woman is a way station on the road leading out of the youth's vagabond existence in the forests and mountains into the peasants' social sphere. She socializes him, she gives meaning to the strength and the victory that he has wrested from the chamois buck and the blackcock. In this sense the dairymaid is also a magical figure. Her dangerous opposite in Upper Bavarian stories is the witch - the Trud or Hexe — into whose toils the young man is liable to fall in his wandering years. She does not milk the cows but drinks the milk of her neighbors' cows, so that they sicken; she drinks the milk out of the breasts of mothers, whose children go hungry; and at night she rides the men and makes them impotent.109 Her actions are a frontal attack on fertility. Not being bound by the laws and ways of the peasant economy, she is forever banished to the empire of the magical, destructive forces of nature. Against the background of the 107 See also the old poaching song "Oder was!" in Schmidkunz, Litdtrbuch, pp. I48ff., which is a mixture of Tagelied ("dawn song," about the parting of two lovers at daybreak) poaching song, and Bavarian Wall song and was known in various different versions in many regions. 108 Similar toying with the ambivalence of sexuality before it is fixed occurs in the "topsy-turvy" world of disguises and Karneval. See the account of Francois Laroque, quoted by Aries in Aries et al., Metamorphosen, P- 95""Leoprechting, Bauembrauch, p. ioo. Cf. Segalen, "Sein Teil," pp. 135-6.

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Poaching fantasies about Truden, the significance of the picture of the dairymaid emerges more clearly. It is she who guards and shapes the space of fertility - which is precisely why she is the "good object" of all desire, evoked by the poaching songs. The poaching songs are not only texts that express peasant fantasies; they also confirm norms. Not only do they show the stages through which the young men's sexuality has to pass for them to attain adulthood in the village community; they also assign women their role. Just as the rules of the Burschenschaften regulated courting and the preliminaries to marriage in the everyday life of the village, the songs structured and banished to the realm of fantasy the youths' desire for freedom and their passions during the courting stage. At the same time, the goal of development from youth to adulthood appears to be predetermined. The poacher returns to the village: Warm i mein Vatan a Gams hoambring, ast zahlc er mir an Wein — warm i des Liadl im Wirtshaus sing, muass's alle Schiitzn gfrein!110

When I bring my father a chamois, he pays me in wine When I sing the song at the inn, all the poachers will rejoice!

The legend of the triumphant poacher will be sung in the male space, in the village inn. His song will proclaim his manhood and his future authority over women, as well as underpinning his position vis-a-vis his father. Yet there is another factor to be considered. The songs were not only sung by the young men in the village inn; the villagers also danced to them, performing a country dance called the handler, at weddings, village feasts, church festivals, evening get-togethers in the garden at home, and whenever an occasion offered itself to the young people.111 The dance created direct erotic contact between the young men and the girls they were courting, as well as giving their encounters a form in terms of rhythm and tempo. When danced, the songs open up a new dimension of experienced reality: 110 See note 14; Rosch, "Kiltlied," p. 486, says that "buying in," in the form of a gift of money or wine, entitled the young man to take pan in the social life of the group in question. '"See Beitl, "Schnaderhiipfl," p. 639. The Scknaderhiipfl, as a Singtanz song or handler song, was divided into eight-line verses to go with the dance. According to Schmidkunz, hiederbuch, p. io, the handler, varied and developed, had become the dominant melody of Alpine song. Another dance form, which preceded the handler in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the Schuhplattler. The author of "Skizzen iiber das altbayerische Hochland," Aurora, pp. 17—18, provides a vivid description of the mime-style dance game, which he compares to the Spanish fandango. According to Lentner (in Schusser, "Feste und offentliches Leben)," both handler and Schuhplattler were danced in Upper Bavaria in the mid-nineteenth century, as was the waltz. According to Lentner, in Schusser, "Feste," pp. 226S., and the author of the Altbayerischen Skizzen, the handler and the Schuhplattler had the same basic movements: The couple danced apart, with the girl turning continuously and the boy circling round her; the Bavarian handler, in particular, was said to be "stiirmisch und lebendig" (stormy and lively). The boy was expected to show joy, affection, and longing as he danced. Time and again the dance would turn into a waltz, and the boy and the girl would put their arms around each other; then they would once again split up, and the game of pursuit, seduction, and courting would recommence.

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Disputed boundaries of the village Das Gams in Gebirg hat si langs einidraht, Hat si lings einidraht bei mein Deandl die Liab schlagt wia's Uhrwerk sho stad - bei der Nacht!

The chamois in the mountains turned to the side turned to the left, my lass's love beats steady as clockwork - in the night!

The dancers follow the chamois's movements, turning this way and that, in handler tempo. The chamois's movements fuse with those of the singing, stamping, dancing couples. The tempo of the dance dictates the rhythm and movements of the peasant couple, whereas the text of the Stanzln challenges the fantasy in defiance of the established rules of premarital relations between youths and girls.112 The songs themselves are, in fact, as much a means of binding young people to village courting customs as they are an invitation to dance on the brink of transgression, to dance in the realm of the poacher and the chamois - "at night." For the poaching songs always evoke not simply the reality that is banished to the level of the imagination but the actual love affairs that took place between poachers and dairymaids in the mountain pastures and in the girls' bedrooms in the village at night. Laments and Curses From the start of the nineteenth century, a second group of poaching songs comments on the almost daily confrontations between poachers, hunters, and gamekeepers: songs of lament and grief. Sung and recited to the tunes of street ballads, they spread out across the Bavarian highlands.113 Their titles show that just about every village had its own song to offer. Just as the tune might be borrowed from neighbors and be familar to the ear, the arrangement of the text and the story told might be similar. For in all these songs it is basically the same tragic conflict that is related. The songs are about a figure who "belonged," who hailed from the village a farmhand, a farmer's son, a woodcutter, a farmer, or a father. The titles often contain the names of villages, as in the "Poacher's Song from Stoissberg," the "Lenggriess Poacher's Song," or the "Poacher's Song from Weisbach."114 But they often bear the names of the poachers of whom they sing: "Andreas Trischberger," "Thomas Wasensteiner," "Maxei vo Kammerlouh," "Joseph Bacher," "Zacherl Toni" from Tegernsee, or "Wiessepp."115 Everyone knew the men, since they were the children or the fathers "2See Aurora, p. 19: 'The thought is the main thing in them, and thefeetthat it enters into the melody, even if it often has to be forced in." u3 Kiem Pauli wrote this song down during his travels. Schmidkunz, Liederbuch, p. 155, also draws attention to the large number of "such characteristic verses" in Kiem Pauli's anthology. u4 Kiem Pauli, Volksliedtr, pp. 122ft"., 89*!, and I5off. '"Ibid., pp. H5ff., n8ff., 136-7, 147-8, and I55ff. See also the "Trauerlied fur Georg Gastager" (Georg Gastager's funeral song) — Gastager was a poacher shot by a gamekeeper in Waich on 30 July 1858 — and the "Trauerlied fur Johann SchmauB", shot by a forester near Rbthelmoos in 1883; both in Alf Gall, Ruhpolding. Cbronik auf der Grundlage da Heimatbucha von Peter Bergmaier (Ruhpolding, 1983),

pp. 504-5.

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Poaching of neighbors, whom people had met at work, in the inn, or at church and with whom they had perhaps even shared the fun and excitement of poaching. In them, the famous figures of Bavarian poacher legend, such as Matthaus Klostermayer, alias "Bavarian Hiasl," and Georg Jennerwein, were reborn. 116 As opposed to the Bavarian "national saints," they are the "village saints," their myth scarcely extending beyond the parish boundaries — though this very feet may have made them all the more important to the village. After all, places such as Miesbach, Tolz, and Tegernsee all had their own local church patrons and church-festival saints, whose feasts were jealously observed in rivalry with those of neighboring villages. The laments are largely composed in street ballad form. They were often sung at the funerals of poachers who had been shot. They were a gesture of grief and, as we shall see, of rebellion. The opening of the song may describe the departure for the mountains but may also begin to formulate the accusation: Let us start a new song about the poacher's fete. He took up his rifle cheerfully and went happily out to the woods.

Ein neues Lied wollen wir anfangen, wie es dem Wildschiitzen ist ergangen; er nahm sein Stutzerl lustig auf, und ging mit Freuden in den Wald hinaus.117

The song evokes the poacher's cheerful departure and the joy of hunting. Unlike other poaching songs, however, it is not the poacher who describes his departure for the mountains; the "we" of the first line announces a story that is no longer told by the poacher himself. The street ballads generally foreshadow the unhappy ending of the story in the first verse: O horet, Leute, was ich euch erzahle, merket fleissig und sagt mir dann, wie gliicklich ist doch jedermann zu nennen, ja der nicht weiss, was Jagerrache kann.118

Listen, people, to my tale, pay close attention and tell me how happy he may be accounted who knows not the huntsman's revenge.

Beginnings of this type contrast sharply with the Stanzl placed in the mouths of the poachers themselves, describing in an insolent, provocative manner how they "'A subsequent section goes into the songs about Bavarian Hiasl in more detail. The famous "Jennerwein-Lied," recorded in 1910 (in Kiem Pauli, Volkslieder, pp. 140— 1) was still sung at poachers' funerals in the early part of this century and continued to be sung until quite recently. On Jennerwein, see Posch, "Wildschiitzenlieder," pp. 10—11. Georg Jennerwein was a woodcutter and poacher in Westerhofen near Schliersee and was shot in the back by a gamekeeper on the Peissenberg near Tegernsee on 6 November 1877. Legend has it that it was partly from jealousy - a common theme in poaching stories. Hans Moser, "Der Folklorismus als Forschungsproblem der Volkskunde," in Volksbraucbe, p. 380, describes the traditional "Jennerwein-Lied" as "an alleged folk ballad" and as "humorous folklore." '""Wildschutzenlied," in Kiem Pauli, Volkslieder, pp. 139-40, was written by Franzi Giglmeier, a cottager's wife on the Hoischbacher Gutel near Laufen, born in 1862. "8"Thomas Wasensteiner," in ibid., p. 118 (first verse). The events take place, as the song says, in the cold winter of 1895.

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Disputed boundaries of the village got the better of the hunters. Here they are replaced by gloomy descriptions of nature, presaging disaster: Oh, how heavy is my heart O wie wirds mir urns Herz so bange, wenn ich werf einen Blick nach Siiden hin, when I look over to the south, wo in den Alpengauen Felsen prangen, where the cliffs soar over the alpine valleys, da kann man seinem Schicksal nicht and a man cannot escape his entfliehen.119 fate. The relationship between man and nature is seen as fateful, personal, and mutual. Nature itself bemoans the poacher's lot: "Mountain sphere - the green mats of the valley are draped today in a veil of mourning," "every rock and every spring weeps," "trees and bare walls" are called upon as witnesses, and in order to grieve for Wiessepp, who has been shot dead: Die Walder, die sich sonst so stolz erheben, sie senken jetzt betriibt ihr Haupt, den Schiitzenkbnig bracht man urn das Leben, ihm ward sein junges Leben geraubt.120

The forests, otherwise so proud, now bow their heads in sorrow, the poacher-king lies slain, robbed of his young life.

The dramatic climax of the song is often the encounter between the brave, cheerful poacher and the cowardly, treacherous hunter or gamekeeper, who "crept up" on the poacher "like a wolf on its prey," who had "no courage" {Schneid) and "no strength." On seeing a poacher, he immediately grabs hold of his gun: Und wia er kimmt auf d'Liachtn raus, woad grad da Schtttz an Gamsbock aus. Da Jaga schreit net, o liabsta God, schiasstn glei nieda mit die Schrot.121

And as he came to the clearing, a poacher was just gutting a chamois. The huntsman gave no warning cry, dear God, but shot him down on the spot.

The hunters have no conscience, and their honor is "a disgrace and a mockery"; they know "nothing about any Commandment." Time and again it is the "old, gray," the "ice-cold hunter," the "bad hunter," the "cold forestry assistant" who shoots the young poacher in the back. The song about the poacher's climb up the mountain and his fatal encounter with the hunter evokes two strata of village reality. On the one hand, the fateful experience of nature - of which the hunter is also a part, as an old, gray wolf, ice-cold in "'"Andreas Trischberger," in ibid., pp. ii5ff. 120 "Lied vom Wiessepp," in ibid., p. 147. Anton Wohlmut, from whom Pauli obtained the song, was born in Wegscheid near Lenggries in 1859. 12 '"Lenggrieser Wildschutzenlied," in ibid., p. 99.

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Poaching comparison with the hot-blooded poacher (other songs show that he also has demonic features and is in league with the devil). 122 He is the figure that every young man must meet one day, in order to become a man. 123 The poacher's death is thus comprehensible as a possible outcome of his test of courage. And the dead poacher thus becomes capable of entering legend. In the laments, death assumes a face - the face of the hunter, the treacherous wolf, or the demonic aspect of the devil. In them, the angry, irreconcilable element of grief is given a text: revolt against the unjust death that strikes in the middle of life is finally directed against those upper-class oppressors, the hunters. At this point the other reality of the street ballad assumes its full importance. The dead man and the hunter have a name in the village, and each has an individual face. The dead man and his encounter with the (demonic) hunter are transferred from the space of the wilderness into the social space of the village. Thomas Wasensteiner war sein Name, beschaftigt war er stets im Elternhaus, er ist kaum 27 alt geworden, durch einen Schuss haucht er sein Leben aus.124

Thomas Wasensteiner was his name, He always worked for his parents, he was scarcely 27 years old, when, shot down, he drew his last breath.

or: Anton Gollner war sein Name, von kaum noch 32 Jahr, er einst vom kalten schwarzen Janscheck im Wald erschossen war.125

Anton Gollner was his name scarce 32 years of age he was shot down one day in the woods by cold, black-hearted Janscheck.

Parents, brothers and sisters, friends, and the entire village gather together in the songs, weeping and lamenting for the dead man when he is brought home from the mountains and buried. The poacher is certain to be given an "honorable" funeral, and even the minister and the Lord God himself are on his side. The funeral procession is a manifestation of solidarity and the certainty that he belonged, that he was one of them. Ein Trauerzug folgt jetzt dem Leichenwagen betriibt und weinend nun dem Kirchhof zu, 122 Cf. the "demon" of the gamekeeper, shot by "Joseph Bacher" in 1874 between Krottental and KleinTiefental, in ibid., p. 157, and the "Wildschiitzenlied von Weissbach," pp. I52flf. 123 Peter, Casslbrauch, pp. I42ff. The encounter with the devil was one of the adventures and perils to which the Gassier was exposed on his nocturnal rambles. Segalen, Mart, p. 136, shows that a woman may also be the devil. l24 See note 118. 125 "Der kalte Janscheck," in Kiem Pauli, Volkslieder, p. 124. He is the gamekeeper shot by Anton Gollner. The fact that this song was contributed by a gamekeeper from Ruhpolding, a certain Brandner, shows that the gamekeepers were also familiar with the songs of which they were the butt.

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Disputed boundaries of the village er ist befreit von alien Erdenplagen und im Tode fand er seine Ruh. "Ihr lieben Freunde, macht euch keine schwere Scunde wegen dem Tod, der mich so schnell verbannt, ich ftihl nicht rnehr den Schmerz von meiner Wunde, sie ist geheilt so schnell durch Gotteshand." Aller Augen waren nass und voller Tranen, als des Pfarrers Leichenrede war, Wir rufen alle: "Deine Seele sei in Frieden!" die wir an deinem Grabeshiigel stehn, "Ohne Abschied bist du von uns gegangen, im Himmel werden wir dich wiedersehn."126 Mourners follow the hearse, sorrowful and weeping, to the churchyard, he is free from all earthly troubles, having found his peace in death, "Dear friends, do not be downcast because of death, which snatches me away so soon I feel no more the pain of my wounds, healed so quickly by the hand of God." Not an eye was dry, all wet with tears, when the priest he spoke his eulogy . . . We all cry out: "May your soul rest in peace!" Standing on your grave mound; "You left us without parting words, we shall meet again in Heaven." The laments are not merely the text accompanying the funeral, but the villagers act through them by allowing the dead man to be present. They have called out the name of the poacher who has been shot, and he now speaks back to them, consoling them. In his presence the village finds reassurance about itself and about the age-old history of domination and oppression for which the poacher's death stands.127 And this presence extends into eternity, where the poacher will be reunited with the village and divine judgment will be passed on the hunter. 126 "Andreas Trischberger," in ibid., pp. 117-18. This particular poacher was shot on 20 October 1878 at the age of 21. Pauli obtained the song from Anni Bauer, of Gaissach near Tolz, who had, he emphasizes, slept in the very house in which the dead man had lived. Similarly, the "Schiitznfreud," in ibid., p. 154 f. (verses 6 and 7), and the last three verses of "Thomas Wasensteiner," p. 12. 127 Cf. Otto Gerhard Oexle, "Die Gegenwart der Toten," in H. Brat and W. Verbeke (eds.), Death in the Middle Ages, Mediaevalia Lovaniensa, no. 9 (Leuven, 1983), pp. 25ff., on the commemoration of the dead as a form of legal and social action constituting the presence of those remembered.

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Poaching The poacher is in heaven, because God is just. The funerals become demonstrations of the peasant conception of right and justice. And they provide the opportunity for a declaration of war on the enemy, the hunters. Many of the songs end with a curse: Der schlechte Jager wird es wohl erfahren am Jiingsten Tag, wie dieses Unrecht ist, wenn man einen jungen Menschen in Rucken mit der Kugel schiesst. Denn es ist wohl eine schwere Sache, wenn Gott - der rechte Richter - einstens spricht: "Das Blut, das kommt und fordert seine Rache, das du so schandlich hast vernichtet!" O verfluchter kalter Forstgehilfe, liegt dir der jiingste Tag nicht in dem Sinn, dass du mit beiden Laufen auf den Rucken zieltest hin?128 The evil huntsman will learn on Judgment Day what a wrong it is to shoot a young man with a bullet in the back. For it will be a serious matter, when God, the just judge, one day says: "The blood will come and seek revenge, that you so shamefully destroyed!" Oh, cold accursed forester, thought you not of Judgment Day, when you aimed with both barrels, at a man's back?

The songs anchor the legend of the poacher shot by the hunter in the village's everyday struggle for the right to hunt. As the "Weissbach Poacher's Song" shows, it did not necessarily take the recent death of a poacher to unleash the laments' curse on the hunters and gamekeepers. A dead poacher might just be a stylistic device, a prelude to a litany of insults directed at the hunters. The "Weissbach Poacher's Song" is no longer a lament but a poacher's fictitious warning of the wickedness, arrogance, hypocrisy, flattery, and blood lust of the hunters, who were rascals and scoun128 "Andreas Trischberger," in Kiem Pauli, Volkslieder, verses 18-20. See also note 14. Cf. the last verse of "Schiitznfreud," in ibid., p. 155. The poacher mourned here was shot on the Oxenberg mountain in 1866. The song was sung by one Maria Drechsler, a raftsman's widow, from Wegscheid near Lenggries. Cf. also the penultimate verse of the "Wildschiitzenlied von WeiBbach," in ibid., p. 152. He obtained the song from Mayor Schmuckec of Ruhpolding.

Disputed boundaries of the village drels who went out hunting with their dogs and the devil as company, looking to bring down misfortune on others. 129 The villagers in the songs do not rely solely on the righteousness of divine judgment, for the deaths of Kaspar Gerg and Nikolaus Seibold of Lenggries had been avenged by their friends, who had strangled Grimm, the hunter. 130 The "cold Janschek," who was Count Arco's gamekeeper, was later tied up and stoned but rescued.131 The final verse of the Lenggries poaching song is an open invitation to wage war on the gamekeeper: Drum Schiitzn, warts halt a net lang, wenns mit an Jaga drauss kemmts zamm, entweda rafts oda schlagts glei o, denn fur an solchan is koa Schoad.132

So poachers, don't wait long, if you meet with a huntsman, put up a fight or knock him down, Don't feel sorry for a man like that.

But fear of authority remained very much alive. If someone sings out his fantasies, his feelings of hatred and contempt and his insults, nobody must betray him. Perhaps the composer of the song is the collective soul of the village, on whose cohesion and solidarity he or she is dependent: Zum Schluss tua i enk bittn, da mi koana vorat, net das d'Leut moan, des Liad han i dacht. Ja bloss zu dem Zeitvertreib ha is probiert, i bitt enk, das koana a Wartl vorliert, d'Jaga de liabn ma, wann ma weit san davo,

Finally I bid you, don't betray me, so people won't know I wrote the song. I just did it to pass the time, I pray you, don't mention it to anyone, The huntsmen are fine so long as they're far away, Boys, my singing is none of your business,

Bavarian Hiasl But there was one who was not afraid - nor was he shot in the back. He rose to be the prince of the forests, and an army was required to capture him. In many songs Matthaus Klostermaier, known as "Bavarian Hiasl," is the symbol of the mountain realm, of the poachers and of the war against the gentry's gamekeepers: I bin da boarisch Hiasl, gar a lustiga Bua, steck i a paar Fedan aufi auf an grean Huat. Koa Jaga is imstand, koa Jaga ha a Schneid, der mir halt mein Gamsbart vom Huat abakeit. 12 'In ibid., pp. 150ft". According to Krista Ruehs, "Auch 'bose' Menschen haben ihre Lieder. Zur Rezeption von Wilderern in osterreichischen Volksliedern des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts," in Jahrbuch fUr VolkslieJforschung (Berlin, 1984), pp. 32-57, p. 33, the song was composed in the nineteenth century. 130 "Lenggrieser Wildschiitzenlied," in Kiem Pauli, Volkslieder, pp. 100. 131 "Der lcalte Janscheck," in ibid., p. 124; see note 125. 132 "Lenggrieser Wildschiitzenlied," in ibid., p. 100. '""Wildschiitzenlied von Weissbach," in ibid., p. 152.

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Poaching Es seids oft nach mir ganga, es habts mi oft gnua gsehgn, habts oft auf mi gschossn, seids ma ganga aufs Lebn. Wenns Bixerl frisch tuat knalln, des Ding tuat ma gfalln, mir san enkre Kugln all in Sack einigfalln.134 I'm Bavarian Hiasl, a jolly fellow, I stick a few feathers in a green hat. No huntsman is so clever, no huntsman would dare to steal the chamois beard from my hat. You've dogged me long enough, and seen me too, shot at me and sought my life. The rifle's report, how fine it sounds, your bullets all fell right into my sack. The songs about Bavarian Hiasl confront the hunting authorities with another "authority," a prince who knows the peasants' rights, who protects them, who is the personification of "pluck," shrewdness, and superiority at hunting, and whose magical powers make him invincible. The hunters' bullets cannot harm him; they fall into his bag and merely go to boost his firepower. Bavarian Hiasl is the hero outside the law who, although outlawed and executed by the authorities, nevertheless lived on. His rule was based on different laws from those of the Bavarian monarchy and state: It was the laws of resistance and revenge and the legend of his heroic exploits that made him a prince. His empire was founded on natural and divine law. The "Hiasl songs" with which the Bavarian peasants enthroned their anti-prince are at once fantastic and a "real" challenge: I bin der Fiirst der Walder, und koana is mir gleich, so weit der Himmi blau is, so weit geht a mei Reich. Das Wild auf weiter Erde is freies Eigentum, drum lass i mi net hindern, denn wers net schiasst, war dumm. Es gibt koa schonres Lebn, wia i fiihr auf da Welt, de Bauern gebn ma z'essn, und wenn is brauch, a Geld. Drum tua i d'Felder schutzn mit meine tapfren Leut, und wo i a nur hikimm, o Gott, da is a Freud! Und kommt die letzte Stunde, und schliess i d'Augen zua, Soldatn, Schergn und Jaga, erst dann habts 6s a Ruah. 134 The "boarisch Hiasl" in ibid., pp. iO2ff. (verses 1-4). Pauli records 6 Hiasl songs, while 17 songs of this type are recorded in the appendix of Victor Zack and Victor von Geramb, "Die Lieder vom boarischen Hiasl in Deutschosterreich," in Bayerische Hefte fur Volkskunde 6 (1919), vol. 1/4, pp. 1—33, app. pp. 15-32. Gerlinde Haid, Der "boarische Hiasl" in Oesterreich, contains six Hiasl songs from Karl Liebleitner's collection in the Austrian Volksliedarchiv and in the Volksliedarchiv fur Niederosterreich und Wien.

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Disputed boundaries of the village Da wird sich's Wild vermehren und springen kreuzwohlauf, und Bauern werden ruafn: "Steh, Hiasl, steh doch auf!"135 I'm king of the forest, no equal have I, my kingdom's as big as the broad blue sky. Across the wide world, game belongs to us all, so I let nothing stop me, he who doesn't shoot's a fool. There's no finer life than the one that I lead, the farmers give me food and the money I need. So I hunt in the fields with my brave boys, and wherever I go the people rejoice. When I close my eyes and my time has passed, then soldiers, lackeys, and huntsmen can rest at last. The game will increase, giving farmers no peace, 'till they cry in despair, "Come back, Hiasl, please!" Bavarian Hiasl is a historical figure. Around 1770 he was the "undisputed, absolute leader"136 of a gang of poachers chiefly recruited from among the peasants. Its members were peasants who were wanted by the authorities for poaching and were in hiding. In its composition Matthaus Klostermeier's gang differed from all the other gangs of robbers and tramps of the day, which mainly consisted of vagrants and other marginal groups excluded from society. He was born in 1736 in Kissing near Augsburg, the son of a day laborer, worked as a servant and gamekeeper, was dismissed, entered service as a farmhand, and began to go poaching regularly. He was eventually caught in 1765, and, after serving a 9-month prison sentence, with the encouragement of peasants and former companions he built up a strictly organized gang of poachers. It was the period from 1767 until his execution in 1771 that saw his rise to fame.137 He was one of the peasants and championed their interests, a peasant rebel and social bandit, as Karsten Kiither characterizes him. 138 Matthaus Klostermaier, called "Hiesel," was regarded by the populace as their defender against poverty, high-handedness, and oppression. He never lost his ties with the peasant population of his home district, from which he 135 "Da boarisch Hiasl" in Kiem Pauli, Volkslieder, pp. iooff. (quotation on p. I O I ) is taken from the songbook of Kathl Kaffl, a farmer's daughter of WornsmUhl near Miesbach. "^Karsten Kiither, Rauber und Gauner in Deutschland. Das organisierte Bandenwesen im 18. undfriihen I O . Jahrbundert (Gottingen, 1976), p. 53. "'Ibid., pp. 52—3. On Hiasl's life, see Paul Ernst Rattelmuller, Matthaus Klostermaier, vulgo Der Bayerische Hiasl (Munich, 1971); Johann Nepomuk Noggler, Der Bayrische Hiesel. Wahre unentstellte Geschichte des Matthaus Klostermaier. Vtrfasst unter sorgfaitiger Benutzung getreuer Auszttge aus den gerichtlichen Akten sowie der zuverlassigsten Traditionen (Reutlingen, 1867). 138 Kiither, Rauber und Gauner, pp. 106-7. His assessment of Hiasl as a peasant rebel is based on the criteria employed by Eric J. Hobsbawm in Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester, 1959). See also Eckhardt, Herrschaftliche Jagd, p. 4 1 .

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Poaching himself had emerged; to champion their interests was his declared aim. As long as he lived he was an integral part of their community. His slogan that the game belonged to those who caught it met with general sympathy, particularly as game seemed to be damaging the crops. Unlike the peasants, he was prepared to fight the ruling class with the same violence that they themselves employed, though without seeking a fundamental change in the status quo. . . . In return, they [the peasants] gave him such resolute and unlimited support that even when the hunt for him was at its most intense he did not need to restrict his "public" way of life. He gave what amounted to audiences, staying at inns (generally as the guest of the local peasants) and making public statements explaining and justifying his actions.139 After his death, Hiasl became a "popular saint" to the Bavarians and Austrians. 140 During the nineteenth century, countless Hiasl songs spread throughout the Alpine region. The subject matter was always the same. Typical of them all, however, was the fact that the places mentioned in connection with Hiasl were frequently the very places where the songs were sung. 141 Out of the folk traditions surrounding Bavarian Hiasl there finally evolves a figure that was characterized in the early years of this century by the ethnologists Zack and Geramb as follows: Everything the Bajuwar [Bavarian] deems truly heroic was vested in this figure: In the first place, there is the indomitable desire for freedom that prevented the young shepherd's son, born in Brantanhause near Kissing in 1736, from becoming tied down to any one place or woman - least of all to the might of the armed forces and the ruling class. Then there is his death-defying courage [Schneid\ and his firm stand against a world of enemies, his absolute loyalty to friends and his patriarchal concern for his comrades, ability to cope with every situation, his adventurous physical strength, skill, and hardiness, his generosity and protective helpfulness toward the poor, peasants, and women. In addition, there were smaller, individual traits: his incorrigible love of hunting and his firm conviction that the right to hunt was the right of all.142 The idealized rebel of the peasants, the oppressed, and the poor is found in many preindustrial agrarian societies.143 Robbers, bandits, smugglers, poachers, and leaders of various gangs had become legendary in medieval and early modern Europe: Robin Hood in England,144 Cartouche and Mandrin in France, Joan de Serrallonga in Catalonia, Stenka Razin and the Cossack rebel Emilian Pugacev in Russia, the "generous bandit" Diego Corrientes in Andalusia, Angiolillo in Naples, Captain Kidd, Rob Roy, and Dick Turpin in eighteenth-century Britain,145 and finally Hiasl in Bavaria. Peter Burke has advanced the theory that these figures were capable of 139 Kiither, Rauber undCauner, pp. 115-16, 119, on the sabotage of official attempts to capture Hiasl by the peasants, who regularly notified him when a patrol was due. Similar support was given to Labenauer Hansgorgl by the local people of the district of Laufen at the beginning of this century (see pp. 182-3). 140 See Zack and Geramb, "Lieder," p. 1, and Haid, "Hiasl," p. 190. 141 Zack and Geramb, "Lieder," p. 5. H2 Ibid., p. 2. 143 See Hobsbawm, Sozialrebellen, p. 18. 144 See Rodney H. Hilton, "The Origins of Robin Hood," Past and Present 14 (1958), 30—44. 145 Cf. Peter Burke, Helden, Schurken und Narren. Europaische Volkskultur in derfriihenNeuzeit (Stuttgart,

1981), p. 179.

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Disputed boundaries of the village creating legends because they possibly "satisfied suppressed wishes by allowing ordinary people to avenge themselves in their imagination on the authority to which in real life they were subject."146 I should like to develop this theory from a different viewpoint by examining the example of Bavarian Hiasl. The songs about Bavarian Hiasl not only had a compensatory function but described an inner reality of peasant society. Not only did Hiasl play the part of the rebel on behalf of the peasants; his figure, as evoked in the villages, stood for continual revolt, repeated again and again as the singers assured each other of their readiness in song. The songs described an embodiment of rebellion to which Hiasl gave a face, a name, and an established legend - which, however, existed before and independently of him, being resurrected and living on in the local laments and dairymaids' songs. The most famous Hiasl song147 is a synthesis of dairymaids' song and lament. It not only tells the story of Matthaus Klostermaier, the most famous Bavarian poacher, but also creates an "ideal type" for Alpine poachers and their lovers.148 The freedom of the mountains, the poacher's courage, his battle against the hunting authorities, and his love for a dairymaid all fuse into one. The many variations of this song also show the freedom with which the figure of Hiasl and the famous pair of lovers Hiasl and Resl are described. At the beginning of this century, the "historical" Hiasl story only knew one sweetheart, the love of his youth, Marie, besides a miller's daughter, Therese, from the Lech area, who made sporadic, peripheral appearances.149 The "Reserl," Resal, Resl, Thresl, or "virgin Thresl" of the songs is the Alpine peasants' dairymaid. The most popular and tenderest description of her is found in the Hiasl songs: Die Kiiah san gmolcha, die Milli is ausgsiegn, da is mei liabs Reserl zun Hiasl neigstiegn.150 The cows are milked, the milk has been strained, my dear Reserl has gone to Hiasl. The poaching songs are a piece of the history of peasant poaching. But they are more than just narrative documents; they are action that has hardened into text. i46

Ibid. Cf. similar arguments in Ruehs, "Auch 'base' Menschen," p. 56. See also Haid, "Hiasl," p. 190. '•""Der Boarisch Hiasl" in Kiem Pauli, Volkstiukr, pp. 109ft". Zack and Geramb, "Lieder," pp. I5ff., reprint the song in an identical version to demonstrate that the same themes are used in Bavaria and Austria. They claim that the song is from the Landshut area. One version of this song appeared in Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Achim von Arnim und Clemens Brentano, but - as Zack and Geramb put it — was ruined by translation into Standard German, and probably out of prudishness, too. 148 Zack and Geramb, "Lieder," pp. I O - I I . 149 Ibid., p. 7: "In the historical account of Hiasl, he has only one sweetheart, the love of his youth, Marie. . . . Only sporadically does Reserl appears in the Volksbuch as the 'miller's daughter Therese,' as when she and Hiasl are attacked by 'Black Martin's' band of robbers. In the songs, the entire incident, which occurred near here in a mill in the Lech district, has been transferred to the high mountains. The miller's daughter, Therese, has become 'Schwoagerin Tresl,' the scene of the attack is the dairyman's hut, and the attackers are not a gang of robbers but the tame gamekeepers of the upper class, who are forced to bear of the full scorn of the people and their hostility to the game rights of the nobility." 150 Cf. note 47. In Des Knaben Wunderhorn this verse reads: "Wenn die Kuh ist gemolken, / Die Milch ist geseiht, /So will ich schon kommen, / Da ist es noch Zeit." (When the cow has been milked / the milk is strained / 1 will come to you / Then there is time).

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Poaching The singing of the songs at home, in the garden, in the village inn, at village festivals and weddings, is part of the subversive, unceasing reappropriation of nature and poaching. As long as these songs are sung, the game rights of a privileged few remain an unjust law. As long as the singers, peasants and their wives, young men and girls, make up poaching verses and songs and even dance to them and provoke the authorities with them in the village inn,151 they keep the wilderness occupied and proclaim their cultural roots. The practice of singing and composing new songs, the incessant evocation of murdered poachers and Bavarian Hiasl, prevent oblivion and constitute a present in which the peasant still enjoys the age-old, almost Godgiven right to hunt freely. The bourgeois statute book's concept of property is powerless, because by their very nature forests and game, as peasants saw them, could not belong to anyone and could not be treated as commodities. Seizure is an arbitrary act, an intervention in an overall context — forest, fields, mountains, and game - that is not salable. In the mocking, rejoicing, lamenting poaching songs, the Upper Bavarian village and its entire way of life declared its opposition to an order of things set up and ruled over by outsiders. The songs are two things: a revolt against this order, and the proclamation of a liberty that remained "poached": which the villagers took for themselves. '"See Ruehs, "Auch 'Bose' Menschen," p. 33.

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Domination in jeopardy

The following story from 1848 is intended to shed further light on the poaching of the Bavarian peasants, but this time from a different angle. Chronologically it predates by many years the accounts of poaching in the preceding chapter, which began with the hunt for Labenauer Hansgorgl around 1900. But in my opinion the full force of its significance only becomes apparent once it is realized that the concept of "poaching" stands for a many-faceted reality of peasant life and culture. The central character of this story is not a famous (or notorious) poacher but a provincial judge from Miesbach, who was suddenly shaken out of his orderly routine one day while working on official business in his office by the gunshots of the revolution — which in his district were chiefly aimed at hare, roe deer, and chamois. The account that follows is based on the records of the provincial court in Miesbach, which include the judge's extant correspondence with the government of Upper Bavaria, the constabularies and local mayors in his judicial district, and the forestry offices of Munich, Rosenheim, and Tegernsee.1 This material contains little of the glamor and fearful awe with which songs have surrounded the poachers. Instead, they paint a picture of the laborious job of a man who is supposed to maintain peace and order and is suddenly sucked into a maelstrom of events that he is hard put to understand, as he struggles to find ways of protecting his district from their onslaught.2 THE EVENTS Poaching had always gone on in his district, as elsewhere in the Alpine foothills, and dealing with charges of poaching was part of the provincial judge's daily round. According to government investigations, poaching had risen rapidly in the preceding 10 years. The war between poachers and hunters, which had claimed an average 'Staatsarchiv Miinchen, Amtsgerichtsakten Miesbach, StAM, AR F 2824/1385. On the 1848 revolution and the agrarian movement, see Veit Valentin, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848-1849, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1930; reprinted 1970); Giinther Franz, "Die agrarische Bewegung im Jahre 1848," Zeitsckrift flir Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 7 (1959), 176-93; Manfred Gailus, "Zur Politisierung der Landbevolkerung in der Marzbewegung von 1848," in P. Steinbach (ed.), Problemepolitischer Partizipation (Stuttgart, 1982), pp. 8 8 - 1 1 3 ; Hermann Kessler, Politische Bewegungen in NSrdlingen und dem bayerischen Ries wahrend der deutschen Revolution 1848/49 (Munich, 1930). 2

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Domination in jeopardy of 4 lives a year between 1823 and 1837, and 16 a year between 1837 and 1843, had risen to 29 a year between 1843 and 1846, a feet which had provoked "veritable wars of revenge," as the government put it. 3 But since March 1848, a new situation had arisen. It was no longer just poachers with blackened faces and false beards who were the problem; the entire male population quite openly went hunting. There was an orgy of poaching in the forests and mountains between Miesbach, Tolz, and Tegernsee, as the battle between poachers and locals, on the one hand, and gamekeepers and forest wardens in the royal game preserves, on the other, reached a critical stage. Royal decrees and prosecutions for poaching brought by gamekeepers and foresters seemed to be having no effect. So the government of Upper Bavaria threatened to send in the army - and make the local parishes foot the bill for the operation.4 The predicament of the provincial judge in Miesbach was now apparent. The government expected him either to ensure peace and order or to call in the army. He had already tried to stem the "mischief," however, and now turned to the royal Court of Appeal for support: The nuisance of poaching in large bands and stalking by individuals day and night has persisted unabated for some time now. With the military detachment on its way, however, the former has virtually ceased, but not the latter, and complaints are regularly received from the forestry offices of Tegernsee and Rosenheim. The country folk have been misled by various rabble-rousers into thinking that the royal proclamation of 6 March made hunting legal and that the game belongs to them. They therefore go hunting quite undeterred under the noses of the gamekeepers, and although it has frequently been announced that poaching is still forbidden and that military action would be taken if the local authorities were unable or unwilling to maintain order, they continue to indulge their liking for hunting. What is more, strangers often come from other areas to take part. . . . Recently about 33 such individuals have been charged with poaching by the forestry officials in the various parishes and brought before the court as usual, although the hunts are shortly to be handed over to the local authorities and a royal amnesty has only recently been promised for all such offenses, though only for those committed in the past. Even worse, he said, was the feet that the Miesbach police station was too small to hold the ever-increasing numbers of poachers and others detained: As stated above, it is impossible to accommodate so many people, and even if it were possible — which it is not — who would conduct the investigations, with so many new cases arriving all the time?. . . Even if there really was room for so many prisoners and the court had time to investigate their cases, with the hatred of the country folk for the foresters and the general agitation that is everywhere in evidence, the gamekeepers would be in extreme danger and, given the audacity of the local mountain people, there is every reason to fear that they would attempt to storm the forestry office.5 3 K. Regierung von Oberbayern, Kammer des Innern (hereafter abbreviated K.d.1.), ErlaB vom July 26, 1847, an samtliche Polizeibehorden. The casualties suffered by each of the belligerents are not specified. 4 K.d.I., ErlaB vom May 1, 1848. 'K.. Landgericht Miesbach an das k. Appellationsgericht vom 18.5.1848. See also Endres, "Geschichte," p. 184, on the people's hatred of the electors' gamekeepers.

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Disputed boundaries of the village This letter and others, especially those to the Chamber of the Interior, clearly reflected the new turn in this conflict. It is not just a matter of poaching as practiced in this area since time immemorial; the way in which poaching was now "getting out of hand" at this particular juncture was directly linked with the events of 1848. For the peasantry, the revolution brought an end to tithes and rule by landlords and bailiffs - that is, the end of feudal property rights and patrimonial jurisdiction. On 4 June 1848, the Bill on the Abolition, Assessment, and Redemption of Feudal Dues was promulgated. On the same day, the right to hunt on the land of others without compensating the game tenant was abolished in Bavaria east of the Rhine, by a law taking effect on i February 1849. These laws had been announced in March, and poaching in "gangs" of up to 20 men - peasants and their sons, farmhands, woodcutters, and day laborers - had evidently commenced with the announcement and almost led in early May to military intervention by the government of Upper Bavaria.6 A decree from the Chamber of the Interior on 1 May 1848 points to a second set of circumstances with a bearing on poaching at this time. Alarming increases in the number of large game animals and inadequate culling had "led in several districts to great discontent and agitation and even in some cases to self-help." The master of the royal hunt had already been ordered by the king in March to start culling deer in the royal hunting preserves to forestall any more complaints from the landowners — peasants and village smallholders — about the damage caused by game.7 The action brought in the provincial court by the mayor of Fischbachau on 6 July 1848 illustrates the villagers' dilemma. The royal promise to cull big game "until it reached the level where it would do no harm" had been reiterated time and again, but nonetheless, many large game animals are still running free in the Fischbachau district, damaging fields, meadows, and gardens everywhere. The same is true at Aurach in the Schliersee district, and so it is no surprise that people are becoming angry and distrustful at all these broken promises. The inhabitants of Aurach, Hagenberg, Bichl, Sanbichl, . . . Fischbachau, Geschwendt, and Durham even had their grainfieldsand vegetable plots trampled underfoot and eaten up by the game. On one occasion, for example, seven roe deer were spotted byformersin a grain field in Aurach.8 According to the provincial judge, people did not dare to claim compensation for damage caused by game for fear of reprisals from the gamekeepers and foresters: 'See Hans Rail, "Die politische Entwicklung von 1848 bis zur Reichsgriindung 1871," in Spindler, Handbuch, pp. 228-82, pp. 2 3 0 - 1 . Cf. Zorn, Kleine Sozialgeschicbte, and HScht, Darstellung, pp. 7 - 8 ; Die

bayerische Gesetzgebung iiber Jagdausiibung, Wildschadenersatz und Jagdfrevel. On the discussion surrounding the abolition of hunting privileges in 1848-9 and the modification of the new game law, see Eckardt, Herrschaftlichejagd, pp. 232ff. Cf. also StAM, AR F 1804/1002, the report of the provincial court of Miesbach for April 1850, "Die allgemeine Volksstimme betreffend" (On public opinion), which says that the new game law had not been favorably received and the local people were showing little inclination to rent game rights or buy hunting licenses. 'K.d.I., 1 May 1848, 7 May 1848; cf. also the game list of the royal hunt of 30 April 1848. 8 K.LG, 6 June 1848; cf. also Eckardt, Herrscbafilicbejagd, pp. 76-112.

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Domination in jeopardy they would be denied straw and leaves for bedding and wood for shingles. Besides, a complaint cost more in time and money than the amount of any compensation that might be obtained. The continuing spate of hunting that had started in March was also due to the everyday exigencies of peasant life. The game that was eating the crops in the peasants' fields would in future no longer be hunted by outsiders. For this reason, the new game law ought to have declared the hunting rights of landowners, men of private means, canons, provosts, and even the king himself null and void once and for all. People now believed that the king himself had granted them leave to hunt the reserved game that again began to ravage the countryside in the spring of 1848. Yet it seems to me that the problems of damage caused by game and inadequate culling of larger game animals are no more than the uppermost, most obvious level of a conflict that triggered an orgy of poaching by the peasants and a government threat of war in spring 1848. Might more efficient administration of the royal hunt have averted the whole problem? Or were the difficulties of upholding law and order due to the wretched facilities of the Miesbach provincial court, which was unable to represent the forces of law credibly because the provincial judge was too "lazy," the jail too small, and the system of registration too antiquated? "And even if it were possible - which it is not," and "Even if there really was room for so many prisoners and the court had time," the judge wrote in his letter to the government; time after time, he seems about to conclude: "it would be no better." What was the judge trying to say, again and again? To what were the government's responses a reply? I should like to examine this clash between the two authorities in order to construe the deeper meaning of the conflict over the old and new game laws. The chronological account of events will be interrupted by a search for the hidden structures of the conflict - structures that in more peaceful times would only have displayed their untroubled surface but were turned over and exposed to view by the impact of the 1848 revolution, a time of extreme tension between the government of Upper Bavaria and village society.

THE PROVINCIAL JUDGE ATTEMPTS TO MEDIATE The provincial judge of Miesbach tried to deal with the conflict that this popular orgy of poaching provoked in two different ways. First, he called on the constabularies and the local mayors in his district to keep poachers under surveillance, to maintain calm and civil order, and to carry out regular house searches with the aid of the gamekeepers and foresters, in accordance with government instructions. He wanted to prove that he was capable of taking decisive action and, at the same time, avoid military intervention at all costs. Second, he appealed to the public directly, announcing that poachers were still subject to the old punishments and that shooting in the streets was prohibited, a practice that had increased sharply since the arming of the populace to create a voluntary militia. The practice targets now a 181

Disputed boundaries of the village common sight in the villages were to be taken down. But the local councils showed increasing reluctance to heed the order to carry out patrols "unexpectedly from time to time with the help of the constabulary and game officials," enlisting the aid of "several reliable local men in combing the woods and searching the homes of suspected poachers or those already known to the mayors as poachers" and to turn in the guns and poachers.9 On 30 May the mayors appeared en bloc before the provincial judge "without being summoned"; they wanted it officially recorded that the orders of the government and the provincial judge were "entirely in vain and therefore pointless" in their local districts. They were, the men said, irksome, because peace and order prevailed everywhere, there has been no gross excesses as in other rural areas, and anyway poaching and shooting practice in the villages had subsided. The gamekeepers were said to be exaggerating the dangers by making unfounded charges, because they were after revenge for something that had happened long before and wanted to "make trouble for many an honest man": But that cannot prevent us from doing our duty and telling the truth as it is. If one studied the facts it would soon become apparent that it was not just a lot of noise about nothing. It is true . . . that to begin with, when the royal decree on the shooting of game was announced, there were many people who misunderstood the issue and thought that anyone could now shoot game, just as they liked.10 The mayors stressed that they had explained matters to the people both verbally and in writing, well beyond the call of duty, Because everyone was asking what it was all about, nobody was doing anything wrong, and there had always been poaching in the mountains. . . . But we know that the game officials hate us and are always trying to point the finger of suspicion at us, especially now they know that their days are numbered anyway. The mayors asked to be relieved of the many reports and patrols, at least in part; and, most of all, to be freed from the obligation to call upon the help of the hated game officials. Such measures would "only make the otherwise good people confused and suspicious, indeed might even lead to an uprising." Finally, they also requested that the councils be permitted to set up shooting ranges for the mountain marksmen, "as has been done for centuries. The Royal Provincial Court is also requested to inform the Royal Government by letter from time to time that all is quiet here and that it may always count on our enthusiastic cooperation in maintaining order." 11 The record was signed by 14 mayors. The provincial judge's note beneath it shows that he acceded to their request for some relaxation of the measures. The judge must have realized that the mayors would not collude with the game officials in moving

'K.LG to local mayors, 21 May 1848. K.LG, 30 May 1848. "Ibid. 10

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Domination in jeopardy against the local people. He had already stated, in a letter to the Chamber of the Interior dated 12 May, that neither the royal constabulary nor the forestry staff would have dared to make an arrest, because inquiries would be difficult to carry out and the results would be dubious, "as there is not a single case in which a witness will be found who would tell the truth, even under oath." 12 This instance of solidarity with the villagers against the forestry officials and the authorities is initially lost from view behind the argument that fear of the poachers "was too great and too widespread and by no means without foundation." In the same connection, however, the judge warns the government of the consequences of opening the investigations against the poachers already charged by the gamekeepers and foresters. Only someone who is familiar with past confrontations between hunters and poachers can appreciate the resentment against the game officials that would seize the people, who are now quite quiet. Only by placating the parishes can peace and order be maintained. However, investigations, prison sentences, and military action would unleash a storm, with who knows what consequences.13 In a letter to the government written on 5 May, even before the visit of the 14 mayors, the judge had defended a stance that was closer to the mayors' than the government's, implicit in the instructions he had dispatched to the constabularies and the mayors. But on the very day the judge received the mayors, the government sent him a letter criticizing him for idleness. It claimed that the provincial court had either done nothing at all about the charges of poaching in gangs that had been brought before it or merely opened inquiries that had proceeded very slowly or had been forgotten altogether. 14 As the presiding judge of the provincial court, you must therefore be reprimanded yet again for your irresponsible inactivity, helplessness, and obvious fear. . . . You are informed that the next time this occurs a commissioner will be dispatched at your own expense. . . . You are reminded once again that it is your duty to intervene actively and energetically, and your attention is drawn to the fact that your dereliction of duty hitherto has in no way been disguised by long and most uninformative teports.15 This was not the first letter the judge had received from the government, rebuking and threatening him. 16 But his conduct and his explanations - the "long and uninformative reports" - remained unchanged. The government in Munich was 12

K.LG, 12 May 1848. "Ibid.; of the military forces dispatched to the area of Miesbach and Bad Tolz in Upper Bavaria in 1848, Veit Valentin remarks: 'The safest thing was undoubtedly not to test the mettle of the Bavarian Army with any tasks of an unduly serious nature; while the peasants of Tolz plundered the royal forests in gangs, the Munich infantrymen were only too happy to join in - and did so with alacrity." Valentin, Guchichte, p. 434. 14 K.d.I., 30 May 1848. "Ibid. 16 Cf. also the K.d.I. reprimand to the provincial judge of 15 May 1848, his reply of 22 May, and the K.d.I.'s response to the judge's report of 7 June.

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Disputed boundaries of the village unable to intimidate him; he clung stubbornly to his accounts of events, his view of the situation, and his sympathies. He continued to manoeuver between the government, whose dutiful servant he considered himself to be, and the "good-natured mountain folk," whose anger must not be aroused and whom he saw it as his duty to placate, to tame: I have acted here as I have elsewhere, that is to say, I have done nothing but placate the people by reasoning with them calmly and calling for a return to orderly behavior. This end was achieved by calling all the local people together several times, explaining the situation, and urging them most earnestly to cooperate in maintaining peace and order. Your obedient servant has spared neither eflfort nor expense in visiting several parishes in person and delivering the needed lectures.17

THE

G O O D - N A T U R E D M O U N T A I N FOLK AND T H E "STORMY T I M E S "

What perception of events and their protagonists was behind the judge's recalcitrance? At first he persistently tried to contrast the "poaching excesses" in his district with the revolutionary events in Munich. He differentiated between the counryside and the town, the peaceful populace and the "agitators" of Munich, the new urban unrest and the age-old resentment of the mountain folk. The dismaying events that have so frequently disturbed peace and order in the capital recently could not be without adverse effects and repercussions for the adjacent highlands, in view of the considerable contact between them. Whereas in the city people are more inclined to pursue spiritual advantages by violent means and in defiance of the law, here, as elsewhere in the country, people are more concerned with material things, hunting being one of them. Those who used to poach secretly or not at all have been doing it quite openly and in full view of the hated gamekeepers in these stormy times. . . . At this critical time, in which all the thrones of Europe have been tottering, in which the newspapers have been full of nothing but rebellion and the expulsion of the servants of the state and the clergy, in which the authorities, even at the very highest level, have been powerless, and subsequently been obliged to proclaim an amnesty, covering all the crimes committed with the mantle of oblivion, it would have been the most unforgivable, unjustifiable folly to seek with the flimsiest of means to stem the torrent that threatened to overflow and destroy everything.. . . Royalty and other high-ranking persons have been mocked, laws trampled underfoot, and all order turned upside down in the face of the royal and ruling authorities. And thus it was in many other cities, market towns, and villages throughout the country, while here in the highlands the greatest peace and quiet prevailed, with hardly any excesses aside from poaching, something that is in the local people's blood.18 "K.LG Miesbach, 12 May 1848; cf. the judge's reports to the K.d.I. of 26-28 May 1848. K.LG, 26.5.1848. This report by the judge to the K.d.I. elicited a reprimand from the government the very next day. The judge's remarks recall the importance attached by W. H. Riehl to the peasant in the 1848 revolution; Riehl considered that the peasant had formed "the natural dam stopping the French Revolution from overflowing into the lower classes of the people." Riehl, "Volkskunde als Wissenschaft," p. 57. 18

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Domination in jeopardy The revolution appears in the judge's texts and letters 19 as a natural disaster that is breaking in, unstoppable and untamable, turning laws and regulations upside down, rendering them null and void, not even drawing the line at the most sacred things. The revolution is like an infectious epidemic against which he must protect his district. He is afraid that his mountain folk, who have known no other excesses than poaching, might be kindled by a spark, that a "mighty torrent" might be unleashed in the people in such a "deeply agitated storm." In the judge's estimation, it is not - as in Munich - the agitation of intellectuals or spiritual and moral errors that made the situation potentially explosive; it was to do with the "character" of the mountain folk, the landscape in which they are at home, and a "deep-rooted hatred" of gamekeepers and foresters. The characterization of the "mountain people" is a key element in his argument against the military intervention against poaching proposed by the government. He calls them a "good-natured," lively people, "daring" in character, with poaching "in their blood": The mountain folk cannot and should not be treated like those who live in the lowlands. . . . The mountain dweller is an experienced marksman, and the position of his dwelling, surrounded by forest, fuels his predilection for poaching, for which he also has the time, whereas the lowlander is always tied to his domestic and economic business and has no time for the pleasures of hunting.20 Complete freedom to hunt, for which the local mountain folk live and die and are willing to risk all, cannot be more keenly desired than in the mountain country, where the scattered houses are surrounded by bushes and woods, and the game, so they say, practically runs into their stables, and nature itself everywhere offers the opportunity and the incentive to poach. This is why there is a poacher to every dwelling almost, and the inclination to poach is so deeply rooted in the richest peasants and their sons that they will sacrifice life and honor to satisfy it.21 The judge sees the "naturalness" of the passion for hunting as a source of potential disaster. In the midst of this countryside, where the dividing lines between poacher and game were permeable, artificial, and constantly breached, the old sense of justice lived on, and with it an equally deep-seated hatred of those who disputed the mountain dweller's right to game and the forest and the joy of hunting, harassing them and, in 1848, engulfing them with a flood of poaching charges. . . . and thereby make themselves even more hated by the people, who all have clear memories of similar instances of harassment. This popular hatred of the gamekeepers has grown so strong that only recently a simple peasant was heard to say, "The word 'hunter' should be erased from the German language." . . . Action against persons suspected of poaching, which include many members of households and the fathers and sons of respectable families, would have the direst effect on the mood of the people here and lead to the expulsion of all gamekeepers and forestry officials. . . . The Supreme Presidium does not know, nor "K.LG. The judge's reports for May and June 1848 to the K.d.I. and the royal court of appeal. K.LG, 7 June 1848. 21 K.LG, 26 June 1848. 20

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Disputed boundaries of the village can it know, how much long-standing and deep-seated hatred and resentment there is in these mountain districts for the game and forestry officials. It is a hatred that neither military force nor any other means is capable of assuaging.22 The judge confirmed his interpretation of the situation by pointing out that this was not only his view but also that of many other trustworthy and experienced men, "who know the spirit and character of the local people very well indeed." In the tension between the people and the game officials, he sees, first and foremost, the explosive potential of the revolution in Munich; at first there seems to be no direct connection. As he depicts events in Miesbach, he did not equate individual Munich agitators with individual poachers, emphasizing instead the "mountain folk" in their natural opposition to the gamekeepers. Their enmity went back as far as aristocratic hunting itself and "has undergone a marked increase recently, owing to dismaying events elsewhere [the revolution] and will not die out until the hunts have ceased altogether." It is a political step that takes him from his descriptions of the "nuisance of poaching" and his statements about popular hatred to his generalization about the individual habitual poacher as the natural inhabitant of the mountain country. To protect the mountain people from military action and to prevent an insurrection, a storm, "raging masses," and atrocities, the judge finally peels away the "growing menace of poaching" and the "nuisance of poaching due to misunderstanding of the new right to hunt" to reveal the political kernel: a popular rising against the ubiquitous and detested authority of the game and forestry officials and the storming of the jail in Miesbach, "for it is impossible to imprison all the people who have been charged and should be taken into custody, because there is every reason to fear that the people would liberate them by force."23 The possibility that the threat of rebellion might be connected with the new freedom from the landlords, who in the final analysis also belonged to the hunting caste, does not emerge directly from the judge's account; nor does the possibility that poaching and the sometimes fatal conflicts between peasants and hunters, which had increased rapidly since the 1830s, might have been an expression of the peasants' growing selfconfidence as they progressively freed themselves from feudal ties.24 Possibly, however, this is indicated by his assumption that in future poaching and the tensions associated with it would continue to increase as long as the hunt remained in existence. In his attempts to justify himself to the government of Upper Bavaria, the judge is obviously in a dilemma. On the one hand, he wanted to portray the mountain folk as peaceful, law-abiding, and, as he constantly emphasized, loyal to the king. This meant that he had to characterize them as a people intent on staying out of the political conflicts of 1848; hence his claim that mass poaching was apolitical, an aberration rooted in their very nature. On the other hand, he sought to 22

K.LG, 26 May 1848. K.LG, 28 May 1848. 24 Cf. also Koch, Agramvolution, p. 367, and Eckardt, HemchaftlicheJagd, p. 35. 23

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Domination in jeopardy

make the risk of insurrection seem sufficiently convincing to prevent military intervention and the ensuing popular uprising and its suppression.

MANHOOD AND EXECUTION The judge was eventually placed under the authority of a government commissioner whom the government of Upper Bavaria dispatched to Miesbach in June. 25 This commissioner was supposed to ensure that government regulations were enforced and, if necessary, impose a military solution. The judge's attempts to mediate between the villagers and the government may have borne fruit nonetheless. He apparently succeeded, with his restrained and conciliatory attitude, in preventing military intervention and the outbreak of an armed conflict and in imposing his authority as the advocate of the inhabitants under his jurisdiction. But, in fact, there was little chance of mediation between the mountain people, on the one hand, and the government and the royal forestry offices, on the other. This is evident from the orders that deluged the parishes both before and after the judge's long, explanatory, and conciliatory letters to the government. These orders give a clear picture of the government's interpretation of poaching: 1. Above all, care must be taken to ensure that single young men do not sit around at home unoccupied, only have sham jobs, or work as day laborers; instead they are to be assigned to proper jobs. Parents who fail to ensure that their children are properly employed and mayors who fail to report such idleness and the failure to take up proper employment are to be punished. 2. The lists of suspected poachers are to be thoroughly revised in consultation with the appropriate royal forestry office and the royal hunt directorate, and appropriate police surveillance of the individuals in question is to be carried out by the royal constabulary and the local police. They must be watched with special care at night, on Sundays and holidays, and at other times that might offer an opportunity. The gathering together of several suspects at the same place of work must also be prevented. Other points deal with the surveillance of weapons owned, of the trade in game, and of occupations that might be linked with the purchase of game and the receiving of stolen goods. The government order continues: 7. If, despite this order, there is a sharp increase in poaching in any local district and the suspects are not charged, an immediate request for military action is to be made; any such action will be implemented with severity and at the expense of the district in question.26 These orders were intended to be read before the assembled people of the district, and chairmen of councils, constabularies, and district authorities were com"Erlass der K.d.I., 12 June 1848. 26 K.d.I., Erlass vom 26 July 1847; cf. also the decrees of 12 and 14 June 1848.

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Disputed boundaries of the village pelled on threat of punishment to carry out their duties zealously. Instructions sent to the police stations also laid down in detail a new system of surveillance. Ludwig Thoma, who was considered a genuine expert on rural life in Upper Bavaria in* the nineteenth century, wrote about the way village authorities dealt with poaching offenses: "Only newcomers to the constabulary from other parts of the country bothered to investigate; the older ones knew that people back home would habitually lie to the authorities without the slightest hesitation."27 The judge seems to have been familiar with these rules and, moreover, to have acquired a good understanding of the way things worked in country districts. But the poacher that figured in the government's orders was an unemployed or work-shy youth who required the strictest social control. This control was extended to include the household of which he was a member, and to the village itself, in the person of the chairman of the council. This was, implicitly, more than just a means of keeping a firm grip on the village's youthful work force, an aim that emerges with even greater clarity from other orders, recommending the authorities to commit offenders to the workhouse immediately. It also implied the potential criminalization of village youths as a group - the unmarried farmers' sons and farmhands, who "are not merely estranged from their work by poaching but grow accustomed to an itinerant, dissolute way of life," which "can only be maintained by further crimes against property."28 They are thus already placed outside the system of work and law, being regarded as thieves and "addicts." This view of the village youths placed them outside society, separating them as a group, along with the propertyless lower classes, from the village community, which was built upon the fundamental principles of labor and ownership, among others, and depended on them for its perpetuation. Why did the village not betray them? Why did even the judge "forget" to deal with the poaching cases reported to him? Would it not have accorded with the mentality of the peasantry to protect itself from thieves and idlers? Who could guarantee that these poachers would not turn their attention to the property of the peasants and the villagers? As the preceding chapters in Part III have shown, the poacher did not stand outside the village order. Judging by the records, anyone might be a poacher: family men, farmers' sons or farmhands, alone or in groups. If credence is given to the judge's view that poachers were born rather than made, it was the fact that they were mountain people that accounted for their love of hunting. To them, game was not just property belonging to a third party but had strayed into their outbuildings, as it were. Nor was game something "alien"; rather, its alienation stood in contradiction to the composed nature of rural life and life in the mountains. The game moved "within" this life. "Dispossessed," it remained distortedly "familiar." The farmers and their sons who had not lost their liking for hunting, despite the law restricting hunting to the upper class, were turned from hunters into poachers and themselves became the quarry. The almost instinctive belief 27 Ludwig Thoma, "Kaspar Lorinser," in Werke, vol. 5, p. 323; in 1848 Thoma's father was a forestry assistant in Tb'lz. 28 K.d.I., ErlaO vom 14 June 1848.

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Domination in jeopardy that the game and the forest were free to all and the lingering memory of this ancient right of theirs may explain why they hailed the repeal of the old game law so spontaneously and naturally, as the restoration of the freedom to hunt, without realizing that the old game law would be replaced by a new one. At this moment, then, poaching appeared to the judge a "natural" crime. It had to be explained to the local people once again, in the months that followed, that it was also a crime and that their passion for hunting had to be curbed before it all ended in confrontation. The government's identification of poachers with the groups of village youths was accurate insofar as poaching, with its requirements of courage and audacity toward the authorities and its dangers to life and limb, was one of the village's secret initiation rites for young men. The government of Upper Bavaria was also familiar with the Haberfeldtreiben, or charivari, which were viewed with disquiet by the authorities; the prime movers behind these popular "trials" were also single farmers' sons, farmhands, and day laborers, and the masks worn may have been reminiscent of the way poachers disguised themselves. After all, part of the secret fascination of poaching — in addition to stalking and shooting game — was the opportunity it offered to provoke the authorities. Folk songs and literature include this theater of lawlessness, with its blackened faces and false beards, in its scheme of things: its rebelliousness, its love stories, its feasts, and the melodrama of life and death.

A FANTASY OF RECONCILIATION The Miesbach peasants' orgy of hunting occurred in the interlude between the announcement of the repeal of the old game law at the beginning of March 1848 and the promulgation of a new game law in June of that year. What was no more than a minor announcement had aroused great expectations among the people, culminating in the fantasy involving peace with the old powers and simultaneous emancipation from all the old burdens: The desire for a royal hunt is particularly keen in the above-mentioned parish. But any appearance by His Majesty the King in our court district would arouse feelings of indescribable joy toward His Majesty among the people. Indeed, they have been heard to express such a wish often enough already. "If only the King," they say, "would honor us with his presence here and see for himself that peace and order are more prevalent here among us than anywhere else, we would adorn his crown of thorns with flowers." And the judge continues, a little farther on: "nowhere can complete freedom to hunt, for which the local mountain folk live, die, and would stake everything, be more passionately desired than in the mountain country."29 All will hunt, king and 29 K.LG vom 26 June 1848; on the Upper Bavarian peasants' allegiance to the king, see also Valentin, Gachichte, p. 435.

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Disputed boundaries of the village people alike. The Miesbach peasants feel at one with the king: To this extent, there is peace and order in the district covered by the provincial court. But to this extent, too, the Miesbach hunting orgy is an orgy of delusion at every level: about the king, the authority of the state, and the power of popular customs, culminating in the fraudulent fantasy of harmony between the emancipated people and their king.

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Conclusion: On the threshold between two worlds

The conflicts in peasant society and the form in which they appear in the records of the bourgeois judicial system of the late nineteenth century have merged and become one. Only by analyzing the specific form of the actions, images, words, and gestures in these testimonies, by perceiving them as a text of cultural mediation and encounter, can we move beyond the individual case and the preformulated facts of each case and glimpse the face of the society about which they are speaking. By way of conclusion, I should like to link the anthropological and historical dimensions of my study, using these forms and symbols to give this face new, sensuous features, the traces of which emerge from the records. The specific historical location of this society emerges more clearly from the symbols employed than from the individual criminal acts or any combination of them. It is only at this level that the temporally specific and archaic structures overlap. These symbols make it possible to embed a temporally limited conflict in a context of life and sense that transcends the moment or identifies it as temporary. But it may also turn out that historically new conflicts are experienced and processed in a more archaic way than might be supposed if taken separately, or that for a specific kind of conflict a mode of enactment is sought that is no longer capable of disclosing itself to the spirit of a new age. I should like to discuss this point in greater detail by comparing the cases of arson dealt with here with those that occurred in the England of the industrial revolution during the first half of the nineteenth century. The farm laborers' Captain Swing movement turned setting fire to haystacks and barns full of crops into a specific, political form of action. But by the same token these acts of arson already betray their transitional character; they will be followed by another, new form of organized political struggle. Their effectiveness does not consist in an individual burning an entire farm to the ground but in the number of small fires lighting up the horizon at any given moment. This is indicative of the mass nature of the protest and its class context. They, too, constitute a language, a symbol - but this particular language conveys a different content from the fires of the arsonists of Upper Bavaria. The Bavarian arson cases describe three things: the perpetrator, the object of the arson, and the language of revenge. The group of potential perpetrators consists of 191

Conclusion all the male inhabitants of the village - especially farmhands and day laborers, farmers and their children and fathers, but also strangers, and even aformer'swife. But only the object of the fire, the house, often an entire farm, can tell us about the substance of the conflicts, because it is the vessel containing them. The houses and farms are the places where* the peasants and their families and farm servants live and work together and as such provide an indication of the structure of human relationships. The farms and the peasant households are also the places that give rise to the unmanageable feelings of hatred, of humiliation and impotence, that finally fight their way to the surface through acts of arson. With regard to arson by farmhands and day laborers working on a particular farm, the working relations between servant and master have proved to be structured, to a very large extent, through feelings. Dismissal or unfairness in the payment of wages, for example, often signified to the servant concerned that he was rejected, that he was not loved. The familybased workplace reproduced the emotional ties of infancy, paving the way for regressive experiences of being wronged. The family-based farm was the foundation of peasant production. The strength of the feelings rooted in this form of production shows that, as well as being a source of security and belonging, it also entailed existential dependency for the individual. And in order to exist in the village, the individual needed a household, a house, to belong to. Denial of a place under the roof amounted to rejection from the village; a stranger refused lodging or a character like Martin Haberer, whom a farmer's wife would not allow under her roof, were potential arsonists to the anxious villagers, regardless of whether anything actually happened or not. In this context, the fire is primarily the expression of the peasants' concern for their property. If the village hierarchies and systems restricting property were to be upheld, they had to be internalized, and, generally speaking, a generation-spanning stability made this scheme of things second nature. But the injustices of property division could also lead to psychological distress if this peasant socialization "failed," as evidenced by the apparently incurable sibling rivalry and jealousy, the hatred and resentment, between eldest son and younger brother. It is only in circumstances such as these that it becomes plain how rigidly the stipulations of the law of inheritance had to be enforced on the emotional level, too. The circumstances surrounding the transfer of, and succession to, property turn out to be a balancing act, in which power struggles and the love of parents and children cannot be regarded as distinct and incompatible. The eldest children set fire to their parents' farms because they could not marry and become "adult" as long as the father refused to hand over command of the farm. An old man wept and finally set fire to the farm that he had passed on to his son, because he felt wronged by him and his daughter-in-law. Property occupied the emotions, and the peasants attached their emotions to property. When Tertullian Bauer, having bankrupted his farm, found his wife and children gone and the house empty, he set fire to it. Likewise, the miller's wife set fire to the mill which she had to leave because the miller had not been able to run it properly. The "abandoned" farm, the "empty" house, and the auctioned mill 192

Conclusion ultimately stand for the collapse of emotional ties, and in the worst cases that weighs more heavily than the value of the business on which everything depended. The "emptiness" is also an inner emptiness. The miller's wife expresses it; she is "unhappy," and she cannot "live" with her husband any more. The arson cases thus mark not only a failure — or, to use a modern term, a labor dispute - but an existential "loss," too. To this extent, the fire is a language that violently breaks out of the "interior," always has some measure of right on its side, and is understood, though not excused, as a sort of emotional self-defense. In many arsonists, the "emptiness" is filled almost naturally by the complement of their powerlessness: a fantasy of omnipotence. "The Lord" made Josef Reissl start the fire; the moment Tertullian Bauer is threatened with the loss of all he owns, "only an extraordinary act" can "put a stop to his despair." With the loss of the external world, the internal world also seems to have collapsed; "putting a stop to" despair hints at suicide. Revenge turns impending self-destruction outward, bursting out of the internal anguish of pent-up feelings and exploding into the social arena of the village. The compulsion to seek revenge and destroy whatever or whoever has cast doubt on one as a farmhand, a villager, a son, a father, a farmer, or a farmer's wife demonstrates the inexorable nature of the villagers' feelings and the difficulty, or even impossibility, of escaping their grip. These feelings reflect the peasant, village order. Instead of leaving the village - one way of resolving the conflict that seems fairly obvious - the arsonists court disaster and a public accusation on the stage of the village. The arson upholds the age-old stability of the way of life, which precedes any "objective" possibility of a new mobility. Arson appears as a translation of an inner text to a level of reality that forces everyone to participate. Arson strikes at the heart of peasant life by attacking property and turning the spotlight on the conditions under which it is maintained and perpetuated. To judge by the circle of offenders, arson would seem to be a male business; the miller's wife who set fire to the mill was virtually playing a male role, assuming responsibility for the mill in a reversal of gender roles. This male-dominated tragedy was set in the public sphere of the village. It was male in another respect, too, in that the fires indicate exile from the fire of the hearth, and thus from woman as the center of the household's inner life. Nowhere is the uncomprehending nature of the bourgeois, scientific justification of judicial intervention as clear as it is here: It distorts this expression of male powerlessness in the village to relate it to the sexuality of homesick adolescent girls from the country. The infanticides, on the other hand, point to an "inner" space. This space is female. The infanticides were predominantly the work of farm maids, and their stories, as they unfold in the courtroom, are mainly concerned with women's work, their love affairs, and their illegitimate children. They reveal the working and living space of the farms, right down to the smallest details of the daily and yearly routine, the places the women visited, and the work they carried out. As with the arsonists, their work, their time, their movements, and their strengths were completely tied up 193

Conclusion with the family-based peasant household. And this peasant household had neither the time nor the surplus energy for a pregnancy, no place for an unexpected childbirth, and no room for a maid's illegitimate child. The pregnancies of the women who committed infanticide took place in secret and had to be kept quiet; they were not permitted to disturb the rhythm and the smooth surface of everyday working routine. The stories of pregnancy and childbirth are texts about "hushing things up," about not letting such disturbances become visible. Even childbirth can only be reconstructed from the odd times when the maids leave the context of work for a moment, and the places of birth remain hard by the places of work. The births can only be described within the constraints of the work routine. In the descriptions given by several maids of their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, the disturbance in the social structure caused by their condition is symbolized in a heightened form: They describe the unwanted pregnancy as a disorder of their bodies, a cancerous growth, a clotting of the blood, a disease. The' social disturbance has penetrated the bodies of these women. Childbirth was consequently experienced as liberation, rejection, purification. The fear of the newborn baby which some of these women express appears as a fear of the amorphous, threatening thing that they have produced. The light of day, which might, after all, reveal what the women's bodies had concealed, uncovers the social crisis, partly before the village community. In these cases of infanticide, however, it was not the female culprits who spoke publicly. Rather, it appears that withdrawal of the crisis into the imaginary space of the body's interior, into the women's bellies, was an attempt to prevent it from erupting. The social discourse which at first surrounded the women was a predominantly female one, concerned with the signs the women's bodies let slip. Subjection to the village discourse of gossip, the "voice of public opinion," continued on another level the disorder which the women had symbolically located in their "insides." This discourse affected the women's "honor" - and demonstrated that the disturbance in the women's bellies was also a public one. The moment the question of paternity arose and the maid appeared "wanton," the woman's prospects in life were placed in jeopardy. These had centered on marriage, and many of the maids had not wanted a child because this particular pregnancy out of wedlock would have jeopardized their prospects in life. Illegitimate children were in themselves no disgrace among the rural lower classes of Upper Bavaria in the nineteenth century, but they frequently brought disgrace to light. An illegitimate child resulting from a mere love affair was a disturbance of the village order, at least if the love affair was not a preliminary to marriage - if a maid simply gave herself to a "wanton" passion without further ado. When the bridal wagon rolled through the streets, it was confirmation that sexuality needed the dowry to be fruitful. Otherwise, it had to remain hushhush and unproductive. Not every woman had to be able to represent the symbol with material goods, but there was no escaping its meaning. "Gossip" revealed a situation of rigid village supervision, focusing not on the issue of illegitimacy but on the women's "honour." When the gossip had subsided among the village women, 194

Conclusion a wider public opinion took shape that now included the men, and the claim that a particular maid was "wanton" could destroy her chance of earning a living in the village. From this vantage point, it is also clearer why children had no room in this world: it was their place within the socioeconomic context of the village, and not merely in the life of an individual woman, that was questioned. Women's language and imagery about pregnancy and childbirth point to their subordination to these processes, and also to the way in which they had "internalized" this subordination. In her study of Moroccan women, Vanessa Maher has shown how rituals of possession indicate a context in which women symbolize, through their bodies, feelings deemed "illegitimate" by society.1 In this way, though, they remain trapped in the body and in the female cognitive framework. Conflicts are expressed without ever reaching male space - that is, without affecting the men's public sphere. The places where arson and infanticide are spoken of appear to me to reproduce the gender-specific division of village space. The fires, terrible as the results might be, claim the attention of the village public for a moment, forcing the villagers to look. In this way they subject the constraints of village life to public debate. The women who killed their babies seek to conceal their troubles, and the living thing in their bodies ends up taking on the form of menace and oppression. In "poaching" the focus is once again on the whole village. In the first place, poaching is an offense against the law. But this obvious meaning conceals a manylayered cultural context. The semantic fields "poaching-poacher-wilderness," on the one hand, and "hunter-hunting-forest," on the other, conceal a real space and an imaginary one. The dichotomous structure of this semantic field replicates a Western way of thinking in terms of wilderness and civilization, nature and culture - a polarity that always implies the cultural and political domination of nineteenthcentury bourgeois society: domination over nature, which it domesticates and exploits, domination over the "primitives," the backward peoples who must be civilized, and domination over the imaginary, which, as the irrational, is repressed and forced into a forbidden space. This dichotomy expresses bourgeois culture's domination over and its suppression of other cultures, whose existence must be denied. In the process, it also suppresses the resolution of the anthropological tension that was inherent in the village order and its relationship to nature, the limits of which had to be constantly renegotiated at a conscious level, while persisting at an unconscious level. For the side of the wilderness in this polarity is always part of culture, because it is part of an intellectual construct. The poaching peasant's "wilderness" turns out to be an imaginary space, a metaphor in a text on the makeup of peasant reality in terms of economics, popular culture, and politics. On the face of it, the police records on peasant poaching testify to the everyday nature of the offense. The villagers go poaching because poaching can be a lucrative I Vanessa Maher, "Mutterschaft and Mortalitat. Zum Widerspruch der Frauenrollen in Marokko," in Medick and Sabean, Emotions, pp. 143-178.

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Conclusion business; they go poaching because they are poor and their children need something to eat; they go poaching because they are fond of hunting and because it gives them the opportunity to demonstrate their courage, and thus win a place in male village society. But other stories are hidden beneath these obvious motives, which are quite comprehensible to the law-abiding, too. As poaching is not a real crime in the villagers' eyes, almost every charge of poaching stems from an act of denunciation. At this level the poaching records relate stories about conflicts between men, the families, and the youths of the village. Denunciation for poaching is a means of channeling village conflicts outward and bringing justice to the village. Beyond the actual offense itself, official records of poaching cases give us access to two further sociohistorical levels of village life. But "poaching" produces "another" history in yet a third sense, a text that illuminates the village's imaginary interior space. In this space, the poacher, the game, and the animal, the wilderness of the mountains and the night, are imaginary figures in dangerous and forbidden terrain that must be traversed and domesticated. This terrain is both an interior and an exterior space, at once real and fantastic. In the poachers' love songs, the young men at first represent their burgeoning sexuality as an encounter with an animal, which is simultaneously a woman and a part of their own ego. Then it becomes a struggle with the menacing dangers of aggressive masculinity, in the shape of the huntsman and the devil. The period of poaching is that of the perilous transition to manhood. At the same time, the poaching metaphor lends this experience its specific cultural form, in which a peasant society gains control over a particular stage in the life of young men, and, through them, of young women, too - by evoking this stage and by allowing desire, the forbidden, and danger to be lived as fantasy. This form demonstrates that hunting and poaching mark a structure in the internal order of popular culture. Puberty and love, unjust death and war with the authorities, populate this landscape in the portrayals of slain poachers. Through an antiking, the peasants proclaim the landscape as the realm of peasant rebellion and resistance. Whether sung as songs, recited as poems, or danced, these fantasies of manhood and resistance were a feature of Upper Bavarian peasant festive culture. With the slain poacher's elevation to king of the forest, to be celebrated in a fantasy of peasant society's natural liberty, the melancholic elements of the funeral dirge are transformed into a Utopian dimension. In 1848 it seemed to the peasants that this Utopia was close at hand. The breach of authority that drove the urban populace to the barricades and prompted citizens to discuss constitutional issues appeared to the mountain folk to abolish the privilege that had deprived the peasantry of its right to hunt game. In the country, the revolution took the form of an outbreak of poaching that was an assertion of ancient rights and of male freedom. The villagers did not realize that access to hunting had merely been transformed from a feudal privilege into a salable commodity. Many of them, to be sure, could have afforded to purchase the right to hunt, but that 196

Conclusion would have shattered the illusion of freedom and transferred the difficult transition to manhood in conflict with nature to the level of property and turned it into a mundane adjustment to a new normality. The fact that peasants were still poaching at the end of the century, even though the new game law offered them the opportunity to hunt legally, shows the extent to which they had overestimated the power of their own fantasy. But perhaps the peasants were concerned not so much with hunting as with all the cultural meanings embedded in the act of poaching. This language was evidently still in use at the end of the last century. What had changed was the language of authority. Instead of being publicly executed in a grand ritual, Labenauer Hansgorgl died in the madhouse. This study set out not so much to describe how life was lived in Upper Bavarian villages in the nineteenth century, but rather to describe how villagers experienced these conditions. That is, I have attempted to describe, using certain exemplary areas of conflict, a reality constituted by subjective experience. In order to understand what this "subjective reality" tells us, it was also necessary to delve into the objective and manifest level of reality, which is, after all, in constant dialogue and exchange with that of experience, feeling, and conflict. How can we look for subjectivity in traditional village society? Do we not run the risk of projecting a bourgeois notion onto a way of life that recognized no such concept? It was necessary to historicize the term itself and to look for other ways in which human individuality was at once anchored in the material and symbolic order of this traditional society and instrumental in this society's creation, maintenance, and further development. My investigation is an attempt to avoid the view of human beings as overwhelmed by the objective structures of society, a view in which human faces end up disappearing altogether. If human subjectivity is seen as a context of experience arising out of a web of human relationships, rather than as a monadic structure, we can discover how societal order and structures touch, are appropriated and endured, sink into the unconscious, and must continually be reproduced afresh in everyday life. What were the circumstances above the level of subjective experience? Which circumstances had burrowed into the heart of the individual or the village as emotions, compulsions, or threats and structured the inner landscape of village life? Put another way: Where and why did the order of peasant life dissolve into disorder, and what does this disorder tell us? What was it that fell into disorder? Subjective experiences left their traces, so that today it is possible to reread them. A nineteenth-century village society is not independent of its historical situation. It was part of a society — bourgeois society, which had taken it upon itself to resolve village conflicts and village disorder, or to judge, if they could no longer be resolved within the village. The Upper Bavarian village began to become part of a social development that exerted an influence on the village's internal structure at various different levels: through the market, through science, and through the legal system. Industrialization had created new jobs that enabled those who were unable to find food and shelter in the village to move away. The beginnings of rationalization in agriculture affected methods of working and farming, resulting in increas-

Conclusion ingly market-oriented dairy farming, making the maximization of output essential and bringing new skills and knowledge that could not be provided by everyday, practical experience alone. These developments altered the division of labor on the farms, also affecting relations between the sexes. For example, when professional dairymen took over the work previously carried out by peasant women, the specialized knowledge of this sector - along with the resulting income - passed into the hands of men, as dairy farming became part of the capitalist economy. But just like the introduction of steam threshing machines, at the start of the century these developments affected no more than a few large farms. On the medium-sized and small farms characteristic of the economy and social structure of the villages, the necessary conditions had not yet evolved. I have explored the village of the people who stayed behind. From the inside, too, it "broke up," though in a different way, providing insights into those who appeared before the bourgeois courts and whose statements and conflicts reveal part of the inner life of the village. Bourgeois society catches those who have reached the limits of their life in the village and therefore been marginalized by the village. The moment they fall out of the village social structure, they are caught up in bourgeois society's system of interpretation, providing the context of motives whereby it can impose its standards on the village. It sends its representatives: first the constables, then the provincial doctor, and lastly the judge, behind whom there stands a new kind of representative of medicine, who projects the violation of social norms back onto the offenders' bodies. At this moment the deep structures of the conflicts and disorder become visible, precisely because they have entered an alien system of interpretation. The psychiatrist's very "strangeness," his status as an outsider, prompts the peasants to speak, extracting a consent which, although finally of no consequence, once again expresses what was already present in the deeper structures. The discovery of revenge as a pathological "obsession," as well as the discovery of the "farmer," signifies more than just the subjection of the villagers. These discoveries also signal their incorporation into a universal context of meaning. How can peasant society's self-interpretations be communicated with the interpretations that bourgeois society provides for them? Riehl attempted to do this as an ethnologist and ended up by formulating a bourgeois fantasy. The Miesbach judge made an attempt at reconciliation and ended up in a Utopia divorced from reality. He is on the threshold between two worlds, one of which, the bourgeois one, is seeking to impose its culture on the other. The village is not autonomous, nor is it a structure sufficient unto itself. When conflicts shake its rule systems and the internal village checks or resources fail, it has to rely on the alternatives offered by the bourgeois outside world and the courts, which can now effectively assume control over decisions concerning right and wrong. In this structural dependency of internal village contradictions, a process of norm setting from outside begins, whereby bourgeois society penetrates peasant society, initiating a structural transformation and burrowing into the villagers' unconscious through the questions and proposed interpretations of the judges and psychiatrists. 198

Conclusion The relation to the surrounding, gradually solidifying society is the new factor which, in the twentieth century, will not only erode the village's material and quantitative significance but also undermine the validity and integrative power of its traditional order. The village thus gets out of step with its cyclical rhythm and an understanding of work, honor, nature, and immediate power that it had associated, under the ancien regime, with the authorities. At the end of the nineteenth century, though, the old order was still very much alive, even if its power had been somewhat diminished. It is in confrontations that we can read its meaning. In court, this institution that belonged to another world, village society acted in contradiction with its own nature: It spoke on the record.

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