'Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten Gegen Die Schinderhannes-Bande

H-German Crosby on , 'Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten gegen die Schinderhannes-Bande' and Fleck, 'Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten gegen die Schinderhannes-Bande: Elektronisches Buch auf CD-ROM'

Review published on Friday, September 1, 2006

Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten gegen die Schinderhannes-Bande. Udo Fleck, ed. . Udo Fleck. Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten gegen die Schinderhannes-Bande: Elektronisches Buch auf CD- ROM. Trier: Kliomedia, 2004. . ISBN 978-3-89890-072-0.

Reviewed by Eileen Crosby Published on H-German (September, 2006)

From the Fruits of his Robberies

It is not often that the author of a dissertation publishes his or her archival source material prior to the publication of the dissertation itself. With this CD-ROM, Udo Fleck has done just that. The sources are the documents assembled in preparation for the trial of Johannes Bueckler--better known as Schinderhannes--and sixty-seven other men and women on charges of theft, armed robbery, extortion, and murder. In November 1803, Bueckler and nineteen others were guillotined for their crimes in Mainz, the capital of the recently created French Department of Donnersberg. Bueckler and his associates worked in small groups, at first stealing horses and livestock from pens and barns, later accosting merchants and other travelers on the roads of the Rhine-Mosel region. On many occasions, the robber band broke into homes and intimidated the occupants until the latter turned over their stores of coinage and other wealth. Aside from some administrative and legal correspondence, the 2792 documents on the CD (3722 pages of text) are made up largely of prosecutorial summaries of the criminal charges, interrogation records of the sixty-eight accused parties, and records of witness testimony. Fleck's chief goal in publishing them is to ask readers to question the myths, legends, and treatments (literary and scholarly) that multiplied after Bueckler's execution by examining the person for whom we have historical evidence. Was Schinderhannes really a German "Robin Hood," as he has sometimes been portrayed? Why were his victims disproportionately Jewish? Is there any evidence that the bandits were allowed to operate as long as they did because the authorities, the criminals, and the Christian inhabitants of the region shared anti-Jewish sentiments? These are some of the questions Fleck anticipates users of this collection will ask.[1]

Those likely to raise such questions are serious scholars of the Schinderhannes band, and they are probably the intended audience for this collection. But the CD also provides primary source material of a sort usually found only in archives to graduate students exploring topics in social history or the history of crime and to those interested in law, government, and society in the French Rhineland. For advanced undergraduates with German language skills, it could supply the ideal primary source on which to base a senior thesis. It is also priced so as not to be out of reach of the individual scholar or graduate student.

The records of Bueckler's interrogation do not support the notion that he was a German "Robin Hood." In his detailed responses to the charges against him recorded just prior to his 1803 trial, he did not claim to have been generous toward or concerned about the poor of the towns and villages in which he circulated. Although there is little to suggest

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Crosby on , 'Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten gegen die Schinderhannes-Bande' and Fleck, 'Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten gegen die Schinderhannes-Bande: Elektronisches Buch auf CD-ROM'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45579/crosby-die-mainzer-voruntersuchungsakten-gegen-die-schinderhannes-bande Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German that Bueckler was a friend of the poor, there is much evidence that the poor had little to fear from him or his associates. By its members' own confessions, the band's intimidation tactics were directed at people known to have cash and other portable wealth. In addition, the robbers sometimes targeted individuals known to be despised in their own communities, assuming that local authorities and bystanders would be less likely to come to the aid of such victims (p. 126). It is in details like these that the perpetrators' presentation of events contradicts those of the prosecutors, who described the criminals as terrorizing the population at large on both sides of the Rhine (p. 84). Such discrepancies seem to offer a window onto tensions between government and governed in the period and, specifically, onto tensions between the population of the Rhineland and its new French government.

In his introduction to the collection, Fleck is sharply critical of scholarly treatments that portray the bandits and their activities as a fundamentally antisemitic phenomenon, carried out with the collusion of the non-Jewish populace (pp. 9-11). The band chose its targets for their assumed possession of portable wealth alone, suggests Fleck, and the bandits' statements--on how they identified targets and timed their attacks--supports his view. Bueckler was also as capable of colluding with some Jewish businessmen--to fence his stolen goods--as he was of relieving others of their money. Nonetheless, readers of these documents will probably find that the issue is thornier than Fleck's presentation of it in his introduction implies: they will be struck by the disproportionate number of Jewish victims of attack, by the violence to persons those victims reported, and by the perpetrators' consciousness of each potential target's Jewish or non-Jewish identity. By allowing each of us to read the surviving written evidence, the CD-ROM has the potential to prepare a wider group of scholars to discuss what may have motivated the attackers or enabled their activities.

Having the document collection also allows one to consider how the accused altered or embellished their narratives over the course of time. When Bueckler's female companion and mother of his children, Julia Blasius, was interrogated in 1802, for example, she related that she and her sister encountered Bueckler two years before near a wood as they were out walking (p. 449). They were threatened with bodily harm if they refused to accompany the man, whom she later learned was Schinderhannes. During an interrogation almost a year later she stated that she and her sister were coaxed out of the tavern and into the wood on the pretence that someone there wanted to meet them (pp. 453-459). Blasius then elaborates: they followed the man they met in the tavern into the wood where she saw a handsome young man. He began talking to her and tried to persuade her to run away with him. When she refused, he threatened to kill her. "[U]nd auf diese Art," she continues, "wurde ich mit Gewalt dazu gebracht, diesem unbekannten zu folgen" (p. 454). After a while, realizing how far she was from her parents' home by that point, she decided to stay with him. Her interrogators quizzed her thoroughly: Why did she go to the woods? Why didn't she and her sister resist? She was young, she says; they were afraid; she was naive. This fascinating set of exchanges brings us tantalizingly close-- but never close enough--to a Julia Blasius who was probably neither as innocent or naive as she claimed nor as culpable as her interrogators imputed. (Blasius was later sentenced to two years in the Zuchthaus).[2]

Scholars interested in the art of self-presentation will also find food for thought in Bueckler's lengthy statements under interrogation. Fleck himself raises the question in his introduction of how to consider these interrogations in light of discussions about how to define and how to learn from "Ego-Dokumenten" (pp. 16-17). Bueckler's statements in his defense appear to support an interpretation that aligns him politically with the poor and propertyless. Although he acknowledged a role in each of the fifty-three charges described in these documents, he repeatedly pointed out that he was admitting only to this or that robbery; he consistently denied accompanying acts of violence or attributed them to accomplices whom he tried but was unable to

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Crosby on , 'Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten gegen die Schinderhannes-Bande' and Fleck, 'Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten gegen die Schinderhannes-Bande: Elektronisches Buch auf CD-ROM'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45579/crosby-die-mainzer-voruntersuchungsakten-gegen-die-schinderhannes-bande Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German restrain. One overall effect is that Bueckler seems disdainful toward the authorities' excessive concern about mere (albeit substantial) property crimes. His stance hints that they should be paying more attention to people who actually do harm and, in taking that stance, Bueckler seems to claim the higher moral ground in spite of his admissions. In addition, the matter-of-factness with which Bueckler appears to have described his methodical, well-planned robberies and many of the mundanities surrounding them suggests that he was a careful, articulate speaker, fully in control of his emotions. He comes astonishingly close to persuading us, on occasion, that his activities were merely those of a day's work by a professional who knew his job. Whether Bueckler, who was only about twenty-four years old at the time of his final arrest, was in fact this cool or whether that impression is the result of the notarial record is a question readers will have to confront. By placing all these documents in an easily accessible format, Fleck has provided readers and researchers with countless opportunities to reflect on such questions while they compare the accounts of accused, accusers, prosecutors, and witnesses.

The CD-ROM is formatted as one, long PDF document, making searching for names and terms quite easy. Even researchers who have or who plan to have access to the archival documents will appreciate this feature. Although Fleck supplied the German version of each document where possible, French documents appear where a German version is not extant. This makes searching for some words and concepts more difficult. Although the CD case states that a user needs only Adobe Acrobat Reader version 5.0 or higher, the navigation features on my CD were not fully functional until I downloaded Acrobat Reader 7.0 (available as a free download).

In spite of the powerful search feature, the CD-ROM format of this edition does seem under-exploited. Aside from a brief introduction, its contents consist of text transcriptions accompanied by a fairly simple table of contents and a few illustrations. For more elaborate background and supplementary material, one can turn to the website of the 2003 exhibit "Schinderhannes: Prozess und Urteil," the link for which is buried, regrettably, at the end of Fleck's introduction (p. 19).[3] The website supplies an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary literature on the topic as well as a guide to the trial. Any newcomer to the topic would do well to access both the website and the printed exhibition catalogue.[4] The latter (to which Fleck made significant contributions) contains not only the aforementioned bibliography (minus some recent publications), but also good introductions to the history and structure of French government and law in the Rhineland along with maps and charts of the robber-band's activities. Additional short articles supply useful context. Although it is clearly part of Fleck's goal to have readers approach the evidence without predetermined ideas about what they will find, anyone trying to tackle this voluminous set of documents for the first time will find it useful to have a copy of the catalogue to hand.

Notes

[1]. The title of the review, "From the Fruits of His Robberies" comes from the confession of Johannes Bueckler (Schinderhannes), recorded on September 24, 1803: "er habe whrend seines unstten Lebens sich von nichts andern, als von dem Produkte seiner Rubereien erhalten" (p. 123).

[2]. Udo Fleck, "Das Ende der Schinderhannesbande in Mainz 1803," in Schinderhannes: Prozess und Urteil 1803, ed. Wolfgang Dobras (Mainz: Stadt Mainz, 2003), p. 41.

[3].http://www.schinderhannes-quellen.de . Accessed May 30, 2005. At this writing, this site could be accessed directly, but not through the publisher's home page.

[4]. Dobras, ed., Schinderhannes: Prozess und Urteil 1803.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=15475

Citation: Eileen Crosby. Review of , Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten gegen die Schinderhannes- Bande and Fleck, Udo, Die Mainzer Voruntersuchungsakten gegen die Schinderhannes-Bande:

Elektronisches Buch auf CD-ROM. H-German, H-Net Reviews. September, 2006.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15475

Copyright © 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected].