On the 26th of June 1821, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Ludwig Steiner crossed the market-place of Ratisbon, carrying a piece of leather beneath his arm. A master shoemaker of fifty-three years, he had just procured the material on credit. Magistrate Elsperger was emerging from the town hall. The two men met and engaged in angry words; bystanders saw Elsperger raise his walking-stick, and several believed that a blow was struck. Steiner drew a pistol, and then a second after the first failed to discharge. Elsperger collapsed. Steiner thrust the weapon back into his pocket, walked several paces before the onlookers, and then hastened toward his workshop.
Finding his apprentices there, he announced to them that he had just shot the magistrate. Setting down the leather, he declared his intention to deliver himself up to justice and left the room. A mason stopped him before he reached the street. Two police sergeants took the shoemaker into custody; he informed them that he had accomplished his purpose and that his conscience was entirely at peace. At the police station, he himself cautioned the officers that one of the two pistols found upon his person remained loaded, lest anyone come to harm. Elsperger, borne to the neighbouring guardhouse, expired less than ten minutes after the shot. From his very first interrogation, Steiner acknowledged the act. The question of premeditation, however, would prove far less easily settled.
Feuerbach’s judicial chronicle, translated by Lady Duff Gordon, portrays a man whom his fellow townsmen had thitherto regarded as a skilful, peaceable craftsman, jealously attentive to his reputation. His trade had fallen into decline; yet he retained several apprentices and had earned an established standing in the town. In 1817, a dissension fractured the shoemakers’ guild concerning the election of an elder. Steiner publicly accused his opponent of theft. The latter instituted an action for defamation. On the 30th of September 1818, Steiner was sentenced to make formal apology, to undergo twenty-four hours’ imprisonment, and to bear the costs of suit. His appeal proved unavailing. On the 25th of November, Elsperger confirmed the sentence; in December, he ordered its execution without awaiting the further recourse Steiner declared he meant to lay before the central court in Munich.
What for others might have remained a penalty limited to a single day’s confinement and an apology became for him an obsession from which he never parted. Steiner insisted that the original documents had been suppressed in favour of forged records. This was no fact established by the proceedings, but an unshakeable conviction of his own, which each successive rebuff appeared only to entrench. He petitioned to return home prior to his incarceration to put his affairs in order and set out work for his apprentices; Elsperger denied the request. Upon his release, Steiner asserted that the heat and foul air of the prison had made him ill. Next came the formal apology he was bound to deliver to his adversary: he deemed it an utter falsehood, remaining persuaded that he had seen the man commit the theft with his own eyes.
His resistance did not exhaust itself in a single measure. Summonses, warnings, and fines multiplied; Steiner journeyed to Munich to seek the revision of that part of the judgment requiring his apology, but returned empty-handed. When the threat of a six-thaler fine finally compelled him to submit a text drafted by his advocate, Elsperger was made its recipient. In Steiner’s mind, this submission did not conclude the dispute. On the contrary, it fixed the magistrate at the very centre of every loss he ascribed to the litigation: his honour, his money, and the subsequent ruin of his trade.
In March 1819, he dispatched a petition to a kinsman in Munich; in May 1820, he waited in person upon the Privy Council. He returned persuaded that justice must ultimately vindicate him, announcing to a friend that his cause would soon take a different turn, failing which he would do something that would astonish the world. The friend was already privy to a more explicit threat: should the sentence not be revoked, Elsperger must die. The council rejected the petition on the 8th of September 1820.
From that juncture, tokens of preparation were not wanting. Steiner professed to dread being confined in a madhouse, describing himself as a man denied all legal protection. He was accustomed to carrying two loaded pistols, he said, both for his own defence and to shoot Elsperger. He displayed them; he tested them in the open fields. To a tailor, some two weeks prior to the murder, he recounted his lawsuit, produced a firearm from his pocket, and declared that if his affairs turned out badly, he would shoot someone. Others heard similar menaces. The magistrates were informed of these utterances, but the very notoriety of such language seemed, perhaps, to warrant that it would not be carried into effect.
On the fatal day, a scene in the workshop lent this gathering wrath its most ordinary setting. The maidservant Elizabeth Fischer saw him cutting out a pair of boots and heard him lament that he possessed neither leather enough nor the money to purchase it. He had been forced to obtain the hide on credit. Two acquaintances passed him upon the Danube bridge; he walked by without returning their greeting, appearing so agitated that they set him down as mad. He was impoverished, estranged from his former associates, separated from his wife, and convinced that his creditors and the magistrates were pursuing one and the same persecution. These details describe the crisis as recorded by the witnesses and Feuerbach; they do not convert Steiner’s explanation into a legal justification.
In the market-place, according to his confession, he accosted Elsperger regarding the redress he expected. The magistrate answered him curtly and raised his cane. Witness accounts varied as to the precise gesture: several saw the cane brandished; a few asserted that it struck him. Steiner drew a pistol, but the weapon misfired. Elsperger parried the arm with his walking-stick. Steiner returned it to his pocket, drew another, and fired. A passer-by overheard the exclamation: “Hold, villain!” The investigation thus possessed an act witnessed by numerous bystanders, yet also an encounter whose immediate violence could not be reconstructed identically by all.
The judicial examinations brought to light not a constant version, but a succession of revisions. Steiner first alleged that the insult and the blow with the cane had overpowered his reason, and that he had intended neither to kill nor to wound; the second pistol, he contended, had been drawn merely to ward off Elsperger’s assault and had discharged by accident. He subsequently claimed to have aimed only at the leg, attributing the fatal wound to the trembling of his hand. Questioned regarding his prior menaces, he dismissed them as falsehoods or conceded that he might have spoken without recollecting his exact words. Then, upon his fifth examination, he acknowledged having long contemplated Elsperger’s death out of revenge should his appeals fail, while maintaining that the altercation of the 26th of June had impelled him to act sooner than he had designed.
A further series of hearings eventually elicited a more comprehensive confession. Therein Steiner linked his resentment to the execution of the sentence, the compulsion to tender an apology, and the refusal of the authorities to redress what he viewed as an injustice. He admitted having carried the weapons with the intent of reaching Elsperger, and related that, on the day of the deed, he had still wished to ask him for aid; had the magistrate refused, he meant to kill him. Yet even this admission retained its defensive design: Steiner placed the final determination in the hands of the very man he had already resolved to confront while armed.
The proceedings did not end with the confession. Two physicians offered divergent interpretations of his condition. The family physician depicted him as nervous and consumed by his lawsuit, yet without being able to identify a distinct mental disease. The court physician, on the other hand, held that his monomania regarding the litigation rendered him legally irresponsible. Appellate medical colleges divided in their turn: certain authorities concluded upon melancholic insanity, others upon a diminished freedom of will falling short of absolute irresponsibility. Feuerbach vigorously defends the legal judgment against what he treats as an unwarranted extension of medical testimony—a commentary reflecting historical jurisprudence rather than modern clinical doctrine.
The first court of appeal found Steiner guilty of murder on the 9th of July 1822 and condemned him to death by the sword. His counsel pursued the case before a second appellate tribunal. Following a fresh scrutiny of the record and additional medical opinions, this court confirmed the conviction for murder, but commuted the capital sentence to imprisonment for life on the 31st of August 1824. The prosecution that had begun in an accusation of slander thus came to an end, six years after the initial sentence, in a decree whereof the disputed point was no longer guilt, but the precise measure of responsibility and punishment.