Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany

"With this excellent study, research on suicide by proxy is taken a step further to constitute a field of research on its own. The cross-confessional approach between Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna, enables the author to show that this largely forgotten historical phenomenon was a fluid and malleable practice adopted by perpetrators according to their local cultural and confessional context."
--Jonas Liliequist, Umeå University, Sweden

Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna.

Kathy Stuart is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, USA.