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| Faust and Gretchen |
For those not familiar with Goethe’s work, Gretchen features in Part One, when Faust falls for her. Faust is a learned man, while she is an innocent girl and of course pure at the age of fourteen. Unhappy at her mother’s strictness, she is led to believe that Faust loves her. With the assistance of Mephistopheles, he seduces her. When she becomes pregnant, her brother challenges Faust to a duel and is killed. Gretchen then kills the Baby at its birth and is sentenced to execution. Faust tries to free her, but she will not leave her cell. To do so would be a sin. At the end of Part One, she is taken up into Heaven, as she never acted with evil intentions.
Gretchen as a character is based on a young Frankfurt woman, Susanna Margaretha Brandt, who was twenty-five and worked as a maid at an inn. She could not read or write, had no education at all, and her income seemed to derive solely from tips received from men lodging at the inn. This is apparently how she became pregnant by a Dutch man who was making a stop in the trade city of Frankfurt on his way to Russia. She was alone in the inn where she worked when she gave birth. She cut the birth cord and then killed the newborn. She was tried for infanticide, found guilty, and executed in 1772, the first woman in Frankfurt to be executed for infanticide since 1758.
Of course, this bio is not that of “Goethe’s Gretchen,” but such is the title of a small book on “The Life and Death of the Child Murderer Susanna Margaretha Brandt” by Siegfried Birkner. It is due to Goethe’s writing of Faust, a major work of Western literature, that we know of Brandt at all. Birkner’s small book (Insel Publishers) of 30 chapters is 149 pages long. There is page after page of passages from the many legal procedures that led to Susanna’s beheading on January 14, 1772. It is fascinating to read the original German accounts describing where the birth took place (the laundry room of the inn where Susanna worked, where blood was found on the floor) and of the many interrogations that took place.
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| Margarete in church |
What emerges is that Susanna seems not to have told anyone she was pregnant, not even her two sisters or her employer. All seemed to have noticed in the final months of her pregnancy that she wasn’t “herself,” but she denied being pregnant. This was a full-scale legal process, and Susanna even had a defense attorney. There were protocols for deciding whether she could be absolved. In the end, she went to the scaffold, one built for the occasion, with soldiers surrounding the area should there be protests. No relatives with her during her final days, only the religious authorities, who advised her to atone for her sins. After her death, she was carried to the cemetery by four boys who stopped now and then to open the coffin to allow people, for a small sum of money, to view the body.
In the first protocols Susanna denied knowing she was pregnant. It strikes me that such denial might have made it easier to kill the baby. She couldn’t accept that she was pregnant. That might be considered psychological grounds for a defense.
Goethe himself may have witnessed the execution: he had finished his legal studies in Strassburg. His grandfather, an important city official, was witness to the legal proceedings. Eleven years later, Goethe at the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach attended discussions of whether the perpetrator of another infanticide should live or die. Some scholars have written that Goethe voted for execution, but a piece in the Times Literary Supplement by Jeremy Adler rejects this view. As Adler writes: “from the earliest version of his magnum opus, the Urfaust of 1772–5, to the perfection of Faust II, completed shortly before his death in 1832, Goethe unequivocally, humanely but also forcefully exonerates the child murderer, Gretchen. Even in our more enlightened times such a view would, I think, be usually regarded as progressive.”
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| Brandt tombstone |
There are many German websites that cover exactly what I have written above, this one with great detail, in German and English. There is even a biking site that gives directions for traveling to view Susanna’s memorial stone. Click on image.
“Progressive” brings me back to Lindsay Clancy. It seems that most attention to the current trial focuses on her mental state and less on the brutal deaths of the children, thus undermining a case for first-degree murder, which would seem to call for the death penalty. Far from me to take a position, but I am surprised that Clancy opted for a trial with the intention of being absolved of of first-degree murder charge. Whatever her guilt, she will suffer the rest of her life from her actions.
