The day is heavy with storm when Friederike Pott sits down at the edge of a wood, between Dortmund and Huckarde. She is returning on foot towards the district of Bochum, carrying her infant. She has little money, she is hungry, and she has procured only a little milk for the child. The babe weeps without cease. She lays the infant in the hollow left by an uprooted tree, removes the neckerchief he wears, and covers the little body with sods of turf. She walks away, then conceals herself in a field of rye. A few hours later, workmen hear a sound which they take at first for the piping of a bird. Beneath the earth, the child is still moaning. They draw him out and warm him; his life is preserved.
This history was recorded in 1870, nearly two decades after the event. Its author punctuates the narrative with moral inquiries and religious reflections: he attributes certain occurrences to chance, others to Providence, and wonders what the mother might have thought. Such commentary does not permit us to know Pott’s true thoughts. The firmest elements in the chapter are those he attaches to the inquest, to the declarations of the accused, and to the Assize trial of 1853; even these are known here only through this compilation, not from the original minutes.
Pott hailed from Linne, a village she quitted to work as a servant in the Bochum region. At a fair, she met a man who introduced himself as a fellow countryman, saying he came from Riemsdorf, an hour’s march away. He asserted that he would soon set himself up as a master craftsman in his village and asked for her hand. She consented. According to the chronicle, they met again a fortnight later on the Bochum road; he renewed his promise of marriage, then vanished. No one in the neighbourhood knew the name he had given her. The chapter does not establish his true identity.
On 6 June 1852, Friederike gave birth to a boy. Her employers summoned a midwife and a physician, then offered to keep her for six weeks during her lying-in. She refused. She believed, the narrative states, that her child could escape the ignominy attached to a birth out of wedlock only if his father acknowledged him publicly at the baptism. A fortnight after the birth, she set out with him towards her native district. A great portion of the journey was made by rail.
At home, she found her father, a shoemaker of sixty-four years who earned a precarious livelihood from mending shoes. Her mother was dead, and her brothers and sisters were out in service elsewhere. The father did not reproach her for her condition, but remained silent and sorrowful, according to the chronicler. Pott then repaired to Riemsdorf, where her alleged suitor was supposed to establish himself. She sought him from house to house. No one knew the man, nor the name he had given her. She returned to her father’s roof, then took to the road again after a few days, being unable to find employment in the vicinity.
Hitherto, the boy had been in good health. The mother hoped to find a place once more with her former masters, but possessed only eight or nine silbergroschen. She was obliged to traverse on foot the long distance to the Bochum region. She bought virtually no food for herself, for fear of lacking money to feed the babe. She had a few broths prepared for him, and along the way she occasionally begged for a little nourishment. Near Camen, several houses turned her away; only one gave her milk. At Dortmund, she bought a small roll for two pfennigs, then continued on her way, exhausted.
The child wept ever more loudly. The account asserts that he suffered from a rupture; Pott attempted to quiet him with an improvised pacifier, a morsel of sugar dipped in milk and wrapped in a rag. In the environs of Dortmund, she let him fall several times, though the chronicle does not specify whether this was intentional. Between the town and Huckarde, the road traversed a wood. At midday, under squalls of rain, she sat down to recover her strength. No one passed near her. The chapter then describes a deliberate act: she carried the infant deeper into the woods, laid him in a hollow left by the roots of an uprooted tree, took off the neckerchief he wore, and covered his body with sods of turf.
The chronicle does not gloss over the gravity of the deed, yet it pauses to imagine a “maternal solicitude” in the manner in which Pott was said to have arranged the head within a cavity that allowed a little air to enter. This interpretation belongs solely to the author. The account reports that the child was covered, whereafter his mother departed and hid herself in a rye field near the village. It provides no statement from Pott at that juncture to explain what she intended or believed possible. The infant was alive when the turf was laid over him; this point lay at the very heart of the charge of attempted infanticide.
The discovery was owed to a sequence of ordinary circumstances which the chronicler terms providential. A farmhand was labouring near the skirts of the wood; two workmen were, by way of exception, repairing a parish road close by. At the dinner hour, they asked the farmhand to fetch water from a little-used spring. While filling his vessel, he heard sounds which he took at first for the whines of young dogs, and then for the cries of birds. He entered the wood, searched among the trees, and at length perceived that the moaning seemed to issue from the earth. He kicked aside the turf with his foot and saw the arm of a child.
The three men pulled away the sods of grass and found the infant still alive, but frozen and covered in soil. They carried him to the village, where he was washed, warmed, and tended; the chapter states that this care preserved his life. It does not record the remainder of his days, nor his subsequent state of health. Pott, still concealed in the rye, heard the labourers speaking of the child found and saved. The chronicle does not relate what she thought at that instant; it notes only that she overheard their converse.
That evening, a woman drenched with rain presented herself at a house in the village and declared: “I am the woman.” She said she was the mother who had abandoned the child, that she acknowledged her guilt and deserved death; she begged to see him once more. It was Friederike Pott. She was conducted before the magistrate, who happened to be in the village at the time. In these initial declarations, she admitted having covered the child’s face with a cloth, and then placed the turf upon him. She explained that she had been “distracted” and that the devil had held her in his power, according to the phrase reported by the Pitaval.
In the course of the preliminary examination, her version altered. Pott maintained that after seating herself in the wood, she had lost consciousness and had no memory of having placed the child in the pit. When confronted with the place, she is said to have wandered round the hollow before it was pointed out to her. The chronicler suggests that someone had advised her to adopt this line of defence; he adduces no proof for the supposition. Pott maintained that she had been deprived of her senses during the interval between her resting in the wood and the moment she found herself wet in the rye field.
On 19 January 1853, she appeared before the Court of Assizes. Two physicians were called to examine the plea of temporary insanity. According to the summary of their testimony in the Pitaval, they considered that, in light of the established facts, she had not acted in a state that extinguished her criminal responsibility. The jury found her guilty of having attempted to take her child’s life. The text does not recount the proceedings at length, nor does it record all the questions put to the jury; it does not therefore permit a deeper reconstruction of the grounds for their verdict.
The sentence pronounced was twelve years of hard labour in a house of correction. The chronicler relates that Pott smiled upon hearing it, because she believed she would be condemned to death and was relieved to remain alive. This interpretation of the smile is ascribed to the source; we possess no independent account of her reaction. The same volume contrasts her penalty with that of another prisoner to lament the scale of punishments—a comparison that belongs to moral and editorial commentary, not to the judicial decree itself.
The affair does not permit us to reduce Pott merely to the scene in the woods, nor to transform poverty into an automatic excuse. The unkept promise of marriage, her isolation, her lack of resources, the journey with a sick and famished infant, and the initial confession appear in the narrative as so many elements of context; none of them abolishes the act described. Likewise, the chronicler’s pious phrases regarding chance and Providence prove nothing as to the manner in which the child was saved. What remains verifiable within the limits of the chapter is more precise: an infant was buried alive, found by labourers drawn by his cries, and saved; his mother gave herself up that very evening; a jury affirmed the charge of attempted murder, and the court pronounced a sentence of twelve years’ imprisonment.