Abstract
In early modern Germany, the prosecution of serious crime entailed extensive interrogation of the accused. Past research on these procedures has emphasized their irrational elements, contending that paranoid interrogators seeking to exorcise their fears invented imaginary crimes and criminal associations through the relentless application of torture. These characterizations retain considerable plausibility given the preoccupation of most past research with extraordinary crimes like witchcraft, but they are harder to sustain when applied to crimes like theft and interpersonal violence, which made up the vast majority of felony prosecutions. This paper examines case files for these more mundane offences, and argues that their prosecution served a series of entirely rational, but for that reason no less disturbing, purposes.
German magistrates were especially concerned about the kind of personality they believed stood before them. They sought to distinguish occasional offenders, who (even if guilty of serious infractions like homicide) might still be saved from habitual criminals who (though guilty only of property crime) were regarded as irredeemable. Criminal trials therefore sought to reconstruct a life story of the accused, including the circumstances and motivations of past illicit acts. Given the conditions of their generation, these ‘criminal autobiographies’ cannot be regarded as entirely accurate, but past research has been too quick to dismiss them as utter inventions. More importantly for comparative purposes, these interrogations reflected a determination by sovereign power to effect a coerced intimacy with the inner person of the accused, a determination not found in the contemporary Islamic or South Asian worlds.