Walter Benjamin - Radio Benjamin

“Hexenprozesse,” GS, 7.1, 145–52. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, July 16, 1930. The Funkstunde announced for July 16, 1930, from 5:30–6:00 pm, “Youth Hour, ‘Witch Trials.’ Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin.”

1The Hexenhammer, or Malleus Maleficarum, by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, first published, as Benjamin mentions below, in 1487.

2The Witches’ Dance Floor [ Hexenplatz ], the Walpurgis Hall, and Blocksberg, situated in the Harz mountains, are legendary sites associated with witchcraft.

3Written in Latin and first published in 1631, Friedrich Spee’s Cautio Criminalis, or a Book on Witch Trials, was a critique of contemporary legal proceedings against witches, including the use of torture.

If robbers had nothing else over other criminals, they would still be the most distinguished of them all because they alone have a history. The story of the robber bands is an integral part of the cultural history of Germany, and indeed of Europe as a whole. Not only do they have a history, but for a long time at least they also possessed the pride and self-assurance of a profession with ancient traditions. A history of ordinary thieves or crooks or murderers cannot be written; they are just individuals, from families where the art of thievery has been passed down only once, if at all, from father to son. With these robbers it is altogether different. Not only were there great robber families that propagated over several generations and great stretches of land, and, like royal families, forged ties between lineages; not only were there individual bands that remained intact for up to fifty years, oftentimes with more than 100 members, but they also had old customs and traditions, their own language, Rotwelsch, and their own notions of honor and rank, all of which persisted as legacies among their kind. 1

I was thinking of telling you today about some of the thoughts, customs, and convictions of the robbers. After all, it’s hard to form a clear picture of such bands from story after thrilling story about figures with names like Schinderhannes, Lips Tullian, or Damian Hessel. 2However, more interesting and more important than knowing the life stories of a few robber captains is understanding how the bands arose, which principles they upheld among themselves, how they waged their battles against kaisers, princes, and commoners, and later against the police and law courts. In this vein I must reveal one of the best and most important of the robbers’ secrets, which we’ll talk about later, namely the language of the robbers and their robber script, their so-called Zinken, or secret signs. This Rotwelsch language alone tells us a quite a lot about the origin of the robbers. Next to German, Rotwelsch contains more Hebrew than anything else, evidence of the close ties the robbers had with the Jews from early on. Later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some Jews themselves became feared leaders. At first their involvement with the bands had been mainly as fences, or buyers of stolen loot. Since they had been barred from most honest trades in the Middle Ages, it’s not hard to see how this came about. After the Jews, it was the Gypsies who played the greatest role in the emergence of robber bands. It was from the Gypsies that these crooks learned their peculiar brand of artistry and cunning, along with how to commit a myriad of brash and daring misdeeds. From them they learned to turn crime into a profession, and eventually absorbed a number of their artful expressions into Rotwelsch. From both Jews and Gypsies the rogues and robbers also adopted quite a few unusual superstitions as well as hundreds of magic spells and recipes of the Black Arts.

Early in the Middle Ages, the robber bands’ main business was highway robbery. Because the princes were unable to keep the roads safe for travel, banditry, under certain conditions, became almost a proper occupation. This is indeed rather the way we view the robber bands, with whom the great merchant caravans often had to negotiate a certain sum to secure free passage through an otherwise perilous region. So it’s no wonder that very early on the robber bands developed a sort of gallant or martial disposition. I will read to you now a genuine robber oath from the seventeenth century, which goes like this:

On the head and soul of our robber captain, I swear: 1. that I will obey all of his commands; 2. that I will remain faithful to my comrades in all their undertakings and ventures; 3. that I will attend any such gathering that the captain may appoint, here or at any other location; my absence must otherwise be authorized; 4. that I will be on call and eagerly awaiting orders at all hours of the day or night; 5. that I will never leave my comrades in danger, but will stand with them until the last drop of blood; 6. that I will never flee before an equal number of adversaries, but will fight bravely to the death; 7. that we will readily offer a helping hand to anyone who may be captive or sick, or who has suffered some other misfortune; 8. that I will never leave one of my comrades, be he wounded or dead, in enemy hands if I can do otherwise; 9. that, should I be captured, I will confess nothing and, most importantly, will not reveal or betray the location or dwellings of my confederates, even should it cost me my life. And were I to break this oath, may I be beset by and succumb to the greatest of plagues, the most horrible punishments in this world or the next. 3

Such chivalrous oaths are consistent with the information we have about other bands, namely, that they had their own administration of justice, the so-called Plattenrecht, or gang law — in Vienna today crooks are still called Plattenbrüder, or gang brothers. We even know of several bands that had elaborate hierarchies. There were privy councilors, senior magistrates, governing councils; some robber captains were even given titles of nobility. The leaders of one famous Dutch gang carried crowbars in their hands as a sign of prestige. The strong loyalty within a single band was in proportion to the low cunning of the tricks sometimes played by one band against another. One of the strangest was the trick the robbers Fetzer and Simon played on Langleiser and his associates, when he wouldn’t let them take part in the planned heist of a banker in Münsterland. In revenge, Fetzer and Simon and their companions committed a string of daring robberies in that area just before Langleiser’s, so that everyone was on the lookout for trouble and the planned hold-up could not be risked.

Betrayal was the worst crime of which a robber could be found guilty. The power of the robber captains was often so great that captured comrades who had only just informed against them retracted the accusations before the captains had even been confronted. In my interrogations, said a famous policeman, I witnessed the incredible power that a robber’s mere presence, his mere intake of breath exerted over others tempted to confess. Nevertheless, there were always some gang members who would betray their comrades in order to be treated more mercifully. The strangest such offer came from a famous robber, the Bohemian Hans, who promised, in exchange for his freedom, to write a compilation of crime lore that could be used to prevent crime in the future. This friendly proposal was not accepted; in those days there were already many similar books. The most famous was the Liber Vagatorum , or the Book of Vagabonds and Beggars, which was first published in 1509 and included a preface written by Luther, 4part of which I will read to you now.

This little book on the villainy of beggars was initially published by someone who, without giving his name, referred to himself simply as a man experienced in the art of deceit. He needn’t have told us so; the booklet bears it out. It’s a good thing that such a book should be not only printed but widely read, so that people can see and grasp how mightily the devil rules over this world, and perhaps will become wiser and learn, once and for all, to tread warily. However, the Rotwelsch language that appears in the book comes from the Jews, as it’s filled with Hebrew words; anyone who knows Hebrew will notice this.