Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany

Family Murders

5 A young man, about to end his life on the gallows, begs first that he might kiss his father one last time. As the old man leans forward for the kiss, the son instead bites off his nose. “If you had disciplined me in my youth, I would not have come to shame,” he says. This story, from Johannes Pauli’s hugely popular collection Schimpf und Ernst (Fun and Earnest), was labeled a joke (Schimpf ), but one with a moral point. It gained wide currency and appeared in many different versions. Although far from the world of actual crime and punishment, the scene opens cultural connections that can help make sense of the widespread familial mayhem of topical crime discourse. The link between crime and improper parental discipline was a commonplace. Especially when committed by youth, crimes could be about family failure even when no other relatives were involved. The criminal threat to family went far beyond this, however, as household killings strongly colored the murderous picture of printed crime accounts. When read together with a broader literature on danger to families, from Pauli’s sardonic gallows tale to ominous reimaginings of the prodigal son, these accounts point to an intense complex of anxieties about family relations and reproduction . Reaching a high point in the late sixteenth century and carrying on into the seventeenth, the wave of familial crime and commentary connected danger in the home with broader threats from devilish conspiracy and gender disintegration. Pauli’s collection of jokes and exempla first appeared in 1522 and went through dozens of editions. He attributes the gallows story to Boethius , but it was Pauli’s version that gave it new life in the sixteenth century . Youth, he says, must heed their parents to avoid the hangman. In wasting their goods they find plenty of helpful comrades, but when reduced to beggary they are spurned and wind up on the gallows.1 Crime here emerges from poverty, but it is a poverty caused by vice, a decline both economic and moral from the status of one’s parents. Pauli places blame on the young miscreant who belatedly demands the discipline he once scorned. Other authors, however, stressed negligent parenting as Family Murders 112 crime and culture in early modern germany the central problem. The scene appears in several printed school plays of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, sometimes with the parental figure changed to a mother. One condemned thief declares after biting off his mother’s nose, “Yes, I did it for an example, so that tender mommies will punish with a strict rod and not so often ignore their dear little sons’ gambling.”2 The literal defacement of destroying the nose, as Valentin Groebner has recently pointed out, was among the most shaming of mutilations . People actually did sometimes attack others—normally with knives rather than teeth—to impose this disfigurement.3 Cutting of the nose, in Germany and elsewhere, most commonly appeared as retribution against women who engaged in illicit sexual behavior. It could be doubly dishonoring when applied to a man: he not only “loses face” but is emasculated, both by a punishment normally applied to women and by the loss of a body part frequently associated with the phallus. In the gallows story, this humiliation is compounded by the grotesque cannibalistic feature of a bite by one’s own son. In fact, its very excess helps make it possible ground for wry comedy, with the ironic reversal of the bite replacing the expected kiss. The story is play, but play with some dangerous materials. Crime here is linked to violation not only of law but of flesh, blood relations, bodily wholeness, gender integrity, honor, and social being. This little story is a distant relative of a larger literature on the theme of the prodigal son, one of the most frequently dramatized subjects of the sixteenth century. Appearing also in other works, including early novels, the prodigal son reached his peak of popularity around the turn of the seventeenth century—in the same years that crime, and particularly family crime, reached its own high point in printed discourse.4 Early modern authors adapted the subject to comment on their own world, in ways that sometimes connected it with crime. In the process, the prodigal could become a potential threat to the parents, as in Pauli’s example. Or, in an even greater departure from the story’s original trajectory , the parents could become dangerous themselves. Instead of...