Goethe, His Duke and Infanticide: New Documents and Reflections on a Controversial Execution

It has been known since the 1930s that in 1783 Goethe cast his vote as a member of the governing Privy Council (‘Geheimes Consilium’) of Saxe‐Weimar to retain the death penalty for infanticide. This decision, which followed a request by Duke Carl August for his councillors' advice on the matter, has moved to the centre of controversies over the political Goethe, since it meant that Johanna Höhn of Tannroda, who had been convicted of infanticide, was subsequently executed. The issue draws its special poignancy from Goethe's empathetic portrayal of the infanticide committed by Margarete in the earliest known version of Faust. The simultaneous publication in 2004 of two editions documenting the wider issue of infanticide and other crimes relating to sexual morality in Saxe‐Weimar has re‐ignited the controversy. The present article reexamines the issues, presenting new evidence that establishes the discourse on the question of the death penalty for infanticide in books that Duke Carl August and Goethe purchased, and presents the script of the public trial re‐enactment (‘Halsgericht’) on the market square in Weimar directly preceding the execution. It concludes that this discourse ran heavily against the death penalty, and it counters attempts in recent scholarship to draw attention away from the Höhn execution.