The Pappenheimer Family

views updated

The Pappenheimer Family

Flourished 1600

Bavarian beggars

Marginal People. There are few records of the people living on the bottom margins of society because most could not read or write, and they were too unimportant for anyone to want to read or write about them. The only time the lives of such marginal people were recorded was when they got in trouble and were jailed and brought to trial. Under sad circumstances the hard lives of the Gamperl family, known as the Pappenheimers, were brought to light.

Background. At the time of their trial in 1600 in Munich, in the duchy of Bavaria, the family consisted of Paulus, aged 57, Anna, aged 59, and their three sons, Gumprecht (22), Michel (20), and Hansel (10). Anna was the daughter of a gravedigger in the Franconian town of Ansbach, an occupation which, though necessary, was deemed dishonorable. More respectable resi-dents spoke to her father only when his services were needed, and Anna could not associate with other girls in the town, even marginal ones such as servants. Without a dowry or connections, she had difficulty finding a hus-band until she met Paulus, a day laborer in the town brickyard. He was from Swabia and had had an even worse childhood than Anna because he was illegitimate and had been constantly teased and abused at home. He ran away many times before the age of fourteen, when he finally left for good, earning his living by going from one village to another doing any odd jobs he could find. It is possible he did some stealing during this time, though he was never caught. He was eighteen when he married Anna, and the marriage gave them their first prospect of future security, for Paulus became assistant gravedigger with the likelihood that he could take over his father-in-law’s job in time.

“Deserving Poor.” In fact, that did not happen, though it is not known why. When Anna’s father died some eighteen years after their marriage, the family left Ansbach to seek their fortune in Nuremberg. It is not clear what work they intended to find, but they ended up, like many others, as beggars. Begging was carefully regulated in most towns in Germany: generally permits to beg were given to the town’s own indigent population who fit the category of “deserving poor.” In the 1580s, Nuremberg had about seven hundred registered beggars. The Gamperl family, like the many other “outsiders” from the countryside, were unlicensed and therefore illegal. That fact did not stop them begging for a month or so, until the city authorities caught up with them and evicted them. The same situation was repeated several times, until Paulus and Anna purchased counterfeit “begging letters” written by a traveling schoolteacher and purporting to certify that they were beggars duly licensed by the authorities. After about a year of traveling from town to town as beggars, though, Paulus learned of another opportunity. He met a man who, though also a wanderer, had steady employment as an emptier of privies. This profession was another necessary though dishonorable one. Privies, with cesspits, were a relatively recent innovation in personal hygiene in the sixteenth century, a great improvement on the practice of using chamber pots and throwing the contents out of the window. Paulus became the privy-emptier’s assistant, then his successor. Since “Pappenheimer” was the local name for his profession, Paulus and his family became known as the Pappenheimers.

Odd Jobs. The family continued to travel from place to place in search of work, which, however, was always forthcoming. Paulus and his sons used buckets on ropes to remove the contents of the cesspit, which were either spread on fields as a form of manure or, where possible, dumped into running water. They generally worked in cold weather, and at night, to minimize the offensiveness of the activity. In the summer, when the water table was low and emptying cesspits was both more offensive and unhygienic, the Pappenheimers would take on other odd jobs, mending windows, pots, and other implements. Anna occasionally worked as a maid, and Paulus carried a portable gambling table and set up a game to earn some money. In bad times the family might turn to begging again, but in good times they might earn enough to be able to pay for meat and beer. Over the course of the twenty years at this kind of work, they established a regular “beat,” staying with friends or at illegal but cheap lodging houses (legal lodging houses had to be registered and cost more to maintain).

Show Trial. After twenty years of scraping by on the margins of legality without attracting much attention from government authorities, the Pappenheimers were arrested, having been denounced as “murderers of seven pregnant women” by a thief with whom Paulus may have quarreled. There was no evidence to support this accusation, but the Pappenheimers were clearly a family of vagrants, and the normal juridical procedure would have been to evict them from the territory after a fairly uncomfortable period in jail. Unfortunately for them, the accusation came at a moment when official and popular fear of witchcraft was reaching a peak, so instead of receiving the rough, but predictable, treatment of the vagabond, they became caught up in a show trial. The Pappenheimers, bewildered, were brought to Munich, accused of witchcraft and murder, and tortured until they confessed to unspeakable, and completely unsubstantiated, crimes. Their confessions led to the arrest of some of their friends and associates, who were also arrested, accused, and tortured until they confessed. At a public execution attended by thousands, Paulus was tortured with red-hot pincers, broken on the wheel, then impaled; Michel and Gumprecht also were broken on the wheel. Since breaking on the wheel was proscribed for women, Anna simply had her breasts cut off. All four were then burned alive. Hansel, horrified, was required to watch it all before being executed by burning with other accused witches at a second public execution several months later. There might have been more executions, but the remaining accused were more-respectable residents with influential friends. The government hurriedly issued a spate of pamphlets allegedly proving their case against the Pappenheimers, and then dropped the matter. All that remained was the transcript of the trial, with its detailed account of the lives, and deaths, of those on the margins in early modern Europe.