Perhaps all books have something magical about them, she thought. Just letters on a page that turn into images, scenes, and conversations in our minds.
“Did you hear the latest from Oberammergau?” Simon asked loudly, breaking Magdalena’s train of thought.
He wiped his greasy mouth and began his account. “The messenger who brought me the books told me that the mine on the Kofel has been closed and the bodies of the two children given a decent burial in the cemetery.” He smiled. “And now that Lechner has been put in charge of the Ammergau district as well, the workers should be better off. Little Joseffa and poor Martin from the meadow above the Laber have recovered, as has Konrad Faistenmantel. After what the Oberammergauers did to him, he intends to move to Nürnberg. I’m sure the greedy old man will get even richer selling the carved figurines there.”
“But what about the Passion play?” Magdalena asked.
“Well, the Oberammergauers intend to perform it again in four years, in accordance with tradition, and this time they’ll earn their money honestly. It will be their grandest production yet.” Simon laughed. “These stubborn mountain folk really seem to believe that someday people will come to their dumpy little town from all over the world. You’ve got to credit the Oberammergauers with one thing, at least—they have as much drive as they do imagination.”
“Did they ever find that accursed Würmseer?” Jakob wanted to know as he picked little pieces of meat from between his teeth.
Simon shook his head. “Only his coat, near the Falcon’s Cliff. He must have taken it off in order to make faster progress through the mountains. In the days since the late-winter weather, warm weather finally set in again up in the mountains and there were a number of avalanches. Many Oberammergauers think Würmseer lies buried beneath one of them. In a few years, though, the Kofel will spit him up again.”
“The Kofel is always seeking new victims,” Jakob mumbled under his breath.
“What did you say?” asked Magdalena. But at that moment there was a whinnying of horses outside in the street, and soon thereafter the squeaking sound of coach wheels. Magdalena listened in surprise. “I know only one person who could come and visit us in a coach,” she said with a frown. “But he hardly ever sets foot in our Tanners’ Quarter.”
There was a knock, then without waiting for a reply, a soldier with a gleaming cuirass entered. It was one of the new young recruits placed under Lechner’s command by Munich authorities because he was now responsible for the Ammergau district as well.
“His Excellency the secretary wishes to speak to the hangman and his family!” the soldier announced, clicking his heels together. “At once.”
“Well, if this is the new era you were talking about before, I’d rather be back in the old one,” Jakob said, turning to his eldest daughter. Nevertheless, he got up and went outside. Magdalena and Simon followed him.
Outside, Johann Lechner sat upright in his coach. He made no move to get out, but held his silk handkerchief in front of his mouth and fanned himself.
“The stench here in this quarter,” he said in a muffled voice through the handkerchief. “Perhaps we should do something about that—a ditch underground for the sewage, perhaps, but there I go, dreaming again.” He sighed, put the handkerchief back in his pocket, and turned to the Kuisls.
“I won’t disturb your gathering for long, but there are a few things I wanted to discuss with you as soon as possible. First of all, my compliments on the executions.” The secretary nodded his appreciation. “It seems you still are very accomplished in your work and I’d thus like to ask for a small favor. What do you think of the idea of not burying the four corpses, but preserving them in brine and hanging them from the frame of the scaffold? They should last at least a year that way and leave a lasting impression on anyone thinking of undermining the salt monopoly of our esteemed Bavarian elector.”
Jakob nodded hesitantly. “That’s a bit unusual, but it could be done. It will cost a few guilders extra.” He scratched his huge nose. “But surely you have not come to our stinking section of town just to tell me that.”
Johann Lechner smiled. “Of course not. There are two other reasons requiring my presence here. The first concerns the investigations of your daughter Barbara . . .”
Magdalena was shocked. She thought that after all the horrible events, Barbara would now be found innocent, though of course there was still the accusation that she’d possessed books of magic.
“I have had another look at these . . . uh . . . magic books belonging to your ancestor,” Lechner said, turning to Magdalena, “and I share your opinion that they are not instructions for witchcraft but simply records of interrogations. Therefore, they should have long ago been consigned to the town archives, but in view of the statute of limitations with regard to these cases, we can temper justice with mercy. As far as the second matter is concerned, I must be more severe . . .”
Magdalena’s lips tightened. What could that be? What offense had they committed without even realizing it?
Johann Lechner looked disapprovingly at the hangman’s crooked house and again fanned himself with his handkerchief. “A house like this is certainly not worthy of a doctor, and I insist that at least you and your husband move up into town. Your father can stay down here in the Tanners’ Quarter, if he wishes.”
Magdalena looked at the secretary, perplexed, and for a while Simon didn’t know what to make of it, either.
“Not . . . worthy of a doctor?” he stuttered. “What doctor? I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”
“Well, after the death of Melchior Ransmayer, once again we do not have a doctor in Schongau.” Lechner rubbed his temples, as if the caustic stench down here was giving him a headache. “I have read in the town statutes that the council may appoint a bathhouse medicus as the town doctor, if necessary, and I find this is now the case. Schongau needs a doctor, and why shouldn’t that be you? People in town say you don’t make such a bad impression.”
“Do you mean . . .” Simon stuttered, still unable to fathom what he was hearing.
“Are you stupid or just deaf?” Jakob growled. “Lechner is appointing you town doctor even though I still think you’re a total quack.”
“Oh, Father!” Magdalena said with a laugh. “Just be quiet so the Herr Secretary doesn’t change his mind.”
Johann Lechner looked at Simon, waiting for an answer. “So, what is it? Do you want to be our new town physician and take over the heritage of your deceased father?”
“I . . . I do!” Simon stood up straight like a soldier, overwhelmed by the news. “And I will be a good doctor in this town, with the grace of God, with new methods, that are so—”
Lechner waved him off. “Spare me your explanations. A simple yes would have sufficed. As of tomorrow you can take over the office and house of your accursed predecessor. We’ll talk later about the lease.” Carefully, the secretary folded his silk handkerchief and put it back in the pocket of his waistcoat. “It will be adjusted according to your new income, which will of course be somewhat higher than that of a bathhouse keeper. Doctor Ransmayer had many well-to-do patients, as you know, myself included. And now farewell.”
He waved to the coachman, who cracked his whip, and the coach rumbled away, soon disappearing behind the houses of the Tanners’ Quarter, leaving the Kuisls standing in the muddy street—Jakob, Magdalena, and Simon, who still couldn’t fathom his incredible good fortune.
“I am Schongau’s new town physician,” he said. “If only my father were here to see this. A doctor of medicine.”
“Now don’t puff yourself up like that,” Jakob snapped at his son-in-law. “What will you do that you didn’t do before? You’ll cure people, but with glib, high-sounding Latin words.”
With his not-yet-completely healed leg Jakob hobbled back to the hangman’s house, where his grandsons eagerly awaited him. It was apparent that there had been a fight again. Paul’s wooden sword was broken, Peter’s precious book of drawin
gs bore a few dark juice stains, and both boys were bawling at the top of their lungs. Their grandfather, the hangman, grabbed them both by the scruff of the neck and took them down to the Lech to build a little millwheel out of oak bark.
Longingly, Simon looked on as his sons left. “Those two can sometimes make your life miserable, especially Paul.” He sighed. “But it’s almost impossible now to imagine life without them.”
“That’s what you call family,” Magdalena replied with a smile. She winked at him, rubbing her bulging belly that until now had been well concealed under flowing skirts. “Now that we’re talking about it . . . it’s good we’ll soon be moving into a larger house.”
“Do you mean . . . ?”
Magdalena pursed her lips facetiously. “Apparently the new Schongau city physician, this distinguished doctor of medicine, has failed to recognize all the signs of his own wife’s pregnancy.” She started counting them on her fingers. “A rounding in certain places, nausea, tiredness, dizziness, hunger . . .”
“I thought you were sick,” Simon protested.
“Well, the good doctor clearly still has things to learn from a simple midwife and bathhouse keeper.” She laughed and took him in her arms. “Now let’s go inside again and drink to the new Schongau doctor—and the new life in my body. I have a clear feeling that fate has great plans for this little girl.”
Simon frowned and carefully stroked the slight curvature of her abdomen. “It will be a girl? How do you know?”
“As I said, you still have a few things to learn from me.” She gently pulled away from him and returned to the main room, where the sound of cheerful people well provided with food and beer could be heard. “Even if I am just a dishonorable hangman’s daughter,” she said with a smile and a feeling of profound happiness. She was back home.
AFTERWORD
(WARNING TO CURIOUS READERS! AS ALWAYS, READ THIS PART ONLY AFTER FINISHING THE BOOK! OR AS THEY WOULD SAY IN GOOD OBERAMMERGAU GERMAN: KONNSTNEDLESNPRATZNWEGSAUPREISSDAMISCHER—FREELY TRANSLATED: CAN’TYOUKEEPYOURPAWSOFFYOUSTUPIDIDIOT?)
AFTER READING THIS NOVEL, THERE may be some who think of the Oberammergauers as stubborn, quick-tempered, and hostile to everything strange and new—in short, what Munich people call “petty, angry mountain people.” That is, of course, nonsense. The Oberammergauers are a most delightful people—creative, sensitive, worldly, democratic, friendly, open to any discussion, and only at times a bit, well, let’s say reserved.
The result is that inquiries from curious, know-it-all, upstart writers from Munich are sometimes put off indefinitely. Telephone calls aren’t answered, the right people are hard to find. This region is so divinely beautiful that people there simply don’t take the time to deal with such mundane matters, but eventually, one can get together with them, on a long hike through the mountains or to the top of the Kofel. Those who take the time to get to know Oberammergauers will learn that they . . . but you know this already.
I had planned to write a Hangman’s Daughter novel about the Ammer Valley for a long time. The region is one of my favorite hiking areas. Even as a small child, like many other kids from Munich, I hiked up the Laber, climbed the rocky Ettal Mandl with the horrified shouts of my mother ringing in my ears, hiked tearfully and under protest over the three summits of the Hörndl, went cross-country skiing through the Graswangtal, and after that splashed about in the Oberammergau swimming pool (my reward for all the strenuous trips through the mountains that even four-year-old Bavarians have to take).
Still, as with every novel, it took a key moment to release my imagination, and in this case it was before a concert with my soul band, Jamasunited, in Oberammergau. I arrived a few hours early. The sun shone from the bluish-white Bavarian sky, and I felt bored, and so I started hiking the same paths I’d known as a child. Down below, in the green, flowering meadows, was the famous Passion Theatre, and behind it the towering Ammergau Alps—and at that moment I knew that the setting for my next Hangman’s Daughter novel would have to be here. After all, the history of this place is the perfect backdrop for a historical novel.
In the year 1633, the Plague came to the Alpine foothills, claiming more than eighty victims just in little Oberammergau, and the people there swore they would put on a Passion play every ten years if they were spared after that. They have kept that vow up to the present, though twice the play had to be canceled. The author of the oldest text of the Passion play, by the way, was the Oberammergau schoolmaster Georg Kaiser. I have taken many other proper names from the old chronicles—the Faistenmantels, Eyrls, Göbls, and so forth. Any further details about these historical figures are of course purely fictional. I’m sure Georg Kaiser, like all the inhabitants of Oberammergau, was a respectable man. And the Schongau secretary Johann Lechner never sought to seize control of the beautiful Ammergau. The judicial administration was situated in Ettal and Murnau.
Nowadays, the Passion play is an enormous spectacle, attracting hundreds of thousands of guests every year from all over the world, and incidentally filling the town’s coffers with millions (although only once every ten years). More than two thousand Oberammergauers take part in the play, among them four hundred and fifty children. The male actors, according to the traditional “hair and beard decree,” must not cut their hair or beards for more than a year. The whole village functions in a state of emergency: those not appearing on the stage sing, make costumes, or construct the sets.
During the early decades, however, the Passion play must have been similar to the way it is depicted in my novel—a minor event, not widely known, that took place in the cemetery, where the gravestones were turned over to allow room for the participants.
Many other scenes in my novel have a factual basis. The mysterious little men from Venice (the Walen, derived from Welsch, the earlier word for Roman or foreigner) are not my invention. They really existed, though they weren’t dwarfs but ore and mineral prospectors from Italy who came to the Alps mostly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Often they dug for alum and cobalt, two materials necessary in the production of the extremely valuable blue glass. Local people usually thought of foreigners as gold diggers, and because of their unfamiliar language, strange pointed hats, and usually small size, legends about them circulated all over Europe. In their so-called Walen books and use of strange signs, the little Venetians were thought to be pointing the way to hidden treasure. Many of our fairy tales and legends about dwarfs originate with them.
Strange signs and symbols, and even a small mine in the area around Oberammergau, and that mysterious ancient sacrificial site on the Döttenbichl are said to originate with the little Venetian men.
For much of the background information for this novel, I am indebted to the excellent chronicle of Father Joseph Alois Daisenberger, who lived in Oberammergau in the nineteenth century. Daisenberger describes, among other things, mining ventures in the Ammer Valley, that were, however, already suspended by the sixteenth century. It is likely that prospectors at that time were searching for silver and gold. Some minor earthquakes are also mentioned in that chronicle, two of them in the eighteenth century. There was a major earthquake in 1670 in the not-far-distant town of Hall in Tyrol, just a few months after the events in the novel. Most of the town towers were destroyed in that quake, and additional quakes followed. At that time, the people must have viewed such a quake as a punishment from God, and it’s easy to see how the hysteria surrounding the event could have further intensified the panic.
It’s quite likely that salt was smuggled via the Graswang Valley and Oberammergau in the direction of Schongau. Since the Bavarian dukes and later the electors had a monopoly on the salt trade, they dictated the prices and demanded outrageous tariffs, making the smuggling of salt by the wagon drivers an extremely attractive source of extra income, presumably in the Ammer Valley as well. The so-called black riders also really existed, and even today smugglers communicate with secret signs.
If the Oberammergau region in my novel seems
too cold and dark for the month of May, remember this was the time of the so-called Little Ice Age. On average, Germany was two to four degrees colder than it is now. Winters were cold and long, summers were rainy, and many of the things we think of as idyllic now were just hard work for the people at that time. Nature was viewed mostly as the enemy—for example the gently flowing Laine, which can turn into a raging torrent in the springtime even nowadays and bring floods to the valley. In addition, no person in his or her right mind would ever think of climbing a mountain just for fun or hiking through the valley in the summer’s heat unless it was absolutely necessary.
Times change . . .
A historical novel also doesn’t exist in a political vacuum. This book was written at a time of controlled right-wing demonstrations everywhere in Germany, and later the conflict over the increasing number of refugees arriving before our very doors here in Europe. I’ve seen some dreadful comments on Facebook by people who have been indoctrinated by right-wing hate groups. From time to time I’ve tried to respond, and sometimes I’ve become so angry it was difficult to continue writing.
During my research for this novel, one of my lasting impressions was of a seventeenth-century report in the Daisenberger chronicle. At that time, the abbot of Ettal denounced what he called the overpopulation of the valley. The homes of the poorest residents were demolished, their stoves smashed, and those who wouldn’t leave on their own were put in chains by thugs, tossed onto carts, and driven down to the Loisach, where rafts were waiting to take the outcasts. True to the motto “The valley is full,” some people today want to deal in the same way with the so-called immigrant rabble.