She was the daughter of a gravedigger and she had married a man who cleaned latrines.
That is where she began. At the bottom of the social order, in the occupation that the period reserved for the people it could not find another use for, the man who cleared the waste from the pits, who went where no one else would go, who was paid in the small coins that bought the right not to think about what he did. Paulus Pappenheimer had worked that trade across Bavaria for decades, moving from town to town with his wife Anna and their sons, sleeping in barns and hedgerows, living at the margin of every community they passed through without belonging to any of them.
They were vagrants. They were poor. They were exactly nobody. In 1600 that was enough.
Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria was twenty-seven years old and newly in power and in the business of demonstrating what his power meant. He required a spectacle. The spectacle required subjects who could be made to confess to anything the occasion demanded and who had no one positioned to object to what was done to them in the process of obtaining the confession. He required, in other words, a family with no name, no land, no allies, no voice, and no one in any court or council who would ask uncomfortable questions about the evidence.
He found the Pappenheimers on the road somewhere in Bavaria, including Paulus, Anna, their three sons Gumprecht, Michel, and Hansel, and Gumprecht's pregnant wife, and had them arrested in the summer of 1600 on charges of robbery and murder.
The witchcraft charges came after the arrest. They came under torture. They came in the specific form that torture always produces: the accused describing whatever the questioner's language suggested, filling the silences with the imagery the court had brought into the room, confessing to the devil and the sabbath and the murdered children and the magical powder made from human hands because the alternative to confessing was the continuation of what was being done to her body on the rack.
Anna was fifty-nine years old.
She confessed to everything they asked her.
The execution was held in Munich on the twenty-ninth of July 1600. It was a public event of calculated scale, a half-mile procession through the city, the entire population invited to attend, the route and the stops and the order of proceedings arranged in advance with the attention to choreography that the Duke's court brought to occasions of state.
Paulus was tortured with red-hot pincers along the procession route. His flesh was torn in strips. He was impaled alive on a pole.
Anna's breasts were cut from her body. They were forced into the mouths of her two adult sons.
The men who designed the execution had thought about what Anna Pappenheimer was, a mother, a woman whose body had fed the sons who were now convicted alongside her, and they had designed a punishment that turned the fact of her motherhood into its own instrument of degradation. She had given her sons life with her body. The execution used her body against the sons who were about to lose theirs.
Then she was burned alive.
Paulus and the two adult sons died the same day by the same fire.
Gumprecht's pregnant wife was held in custody. Her child was born in prison and taken from her immediately. She was executed after the birth.
Hansel Pappenheimer was ten years old.
He was brought to the execution on horseback, riding with the sheriff assigned to observe him, so that the sheriff could watch his face and record his reactions throughout the proceedings. What Hansel said during the execution is preserved in that record. When his father was broken on the wheel he called out look how they're thumping my father's arms. When his mother burned he cried my mother is squirming.
Those words are in the document. A court official wrote them down.
He was held in custody for three months after the execution. The argument for keeping him alive had been that he was too young to have participated knowingly in the crimes his family had confessed to under torture. The argument for executing him was that he was a Pappenheimer and the Pappenheimers were gone and the work was unfinished while one of them breathed.
The second argument won.
Hansel Pappenheimer was burned at the stake on the twenty-sixth of November 1600. He was ten years old. He died four months after watching his family burn.
His name is the last thing in the record.
