Introduction: Questions Regarding Thieves, Reformers, Jurists, and Others

Summary

In May 1854, Maria Scherrer filed charges against a day laborer by the name of Anton Zimmermann for having allegedly stolen bread and a cap from her thirteen-year-old son and his eight-year-old friend. The two boys, for their part, had obtained the bread, a loaf and a half in all, by begging.

In 1857 two children, eight and fifteen years old, were accused in Gelnhausen of having first sought to beg from a ten-year-old boy who was walking home through the forest completely laden with purchases, and then having threatened him. One of the children supposedly approached the boy and said, “I want the bread.” At the same time the child, a girl, “stepped right up close to him. He declared that he hadn't any bread. In response, she allegedly said, ‘Then we'll take the rolls.’”

A few years later, more precisely in 1859, the servant Johannes Bernstein was accused of having stolen, or taken with him, an ownerless hat that lay in the village wood yard. Of course the hat was not ownerless, but had been forgotten there by a certain Brandeis, a day laborer by trade.

At first glance we appear to be looking here at three harmless offenses. After all, the objects in question had little material worth; the cases involved conflicts between neighbors, and sometimes it is not even certain whether oversights, absentmindedness, or simply misunderstandings may have been the cause. And yet, these are stories that were recounted in court and in each case resulted in charges of theft, leading to legally binding convictions. For in the eyes of the men and women of those times, theft was by no means a trivial or even harmless matter. Instead, it was an offense that drew serious attention from victims, jurists, literati, and journalists alike.

THE INTEREST OF JURISTS, CRIMINOLOGISTS, LITERATI, AND JOURNALISTS

Jurists devoted considerable energy to such offenses, conducted research with unrelenting meticulousness, and exhibited extraordinary persistence in pursuing every little bit of evidence. Never before had the need to describe thoroughly what constitutes a theft and who plays what role in it appeared so great. This enormous interest in property offenses is all the more remarkable because, as a rule, relatively worthless objects were involved. Neither the cap nor the bread, obtained by begging no less, was valuable.