In Hanau, the thirteenth of June was a day of festival. The townsfolk made their way to the Lamboy woods to commemorate the deliverance of the city, and every man took care to appear in a decent coat. Peter Kitzler, who had just returned home without money or shoes, had no wish to remain an outcast. On the Frankfurt road, he offered his guidance to a fellow traveller far better clad than he. A few hours later, this young coppersmith lay bleeding upon the sand, battered and slashed; Kitzler walked back alone, carrying the other man’s pack upon his shoulders.
The story begins at the frontier. In 1830, the Baden gendarmes escorted Kitzler to the Hessian border after he had served six months’ imprisonment for petty theft. They turned him loose without travelling money, without fitting attire, and, according to the chronicle, lacking both shoes and stockings. He was a native of Hanau, yet he had been absent from the town for upwards of two years. He harboured the hope that his elder brother, who had prospered and become a master butcher, would take him in. The letters he had dispatched from abroad and from his prison cell had remained unanswered.
His brother turned him away from the threshold. He had learned of Peter’s release, but refused any longer to acknowledge as kin a man whose offences might, he feared, injure his trade. The account dwells upon the desolation and hunger that ensued, attributing to this rejection a measure of the motive for the crime. One must distinguish between the two: the barred door is an episode related by the chronicler; the decision to kill was Kitzler’s own, as he confessed after his arrest.
To explain this descent into habitual crime, the chronicler looks further into the past. An orphan, Peter had been placed in the care of a sexton named Obinger. The author portrays the sexton’s wife as a petty huckster who sent the lad on errands with goods and, by this account, schooled him in filching vegetables from the fields along the way. The *Pitaval* thus seeks in the child’s errands the first strides of the adult thief. At fourteen, Peter scarcely possessed the rudiments required for his confirmation. A house painter in Hanau nevertheless took him on as an unpaid apprentice. For five years, according to the official records cited in the volume, no further wrongdoing was laid to his charge.
His apprenticeship completed, he took to the road as a journeyman. In Mannheim, he fell into petty thievery, and was eventually apprehended after stealing the watch of a young man who shared his lodging. The court sentenced him to merely half a year’s imprisonment and an order of expulsion back to his native region. For reasons that the court files, according to the chronicler, do not make clear, this sentence was served within a house of correction. There Kitzler shared a cell with three former members of the Hölzgerlipp gang of outlaws. The author attributes to him the lingering memory of brigand tales that were said gradually to have blunted his revulsion for bloodshed; this, however, is the chronicler’s interpretation, not a mitigating circumstance that could excuse the choice made upon the road from Hanau.
Having been spurned by his brother, Kitzler cast about for some means of presenting a decent figure at the Lamboy festival. In an inn frequented by journeymen on the tramp, he took notice of a companion of similar build, well appointed and carrying a heavy knapsack. The man hailed from Görlitz in Lusatia; the chronicle names him August Erdmann and gives his trade as that of a coppersmith. He was bound for Frankfurt to join a master craftsman and friends. Kitzler knew the highway and offered himself as a guide. The traveller consented. Kitzler also proposed to carry the knapsack, but Erdmann kept it. The chronicler hesitates between the tight fastening of its straps and an instinctive mistrust to explain this refusal.
They quit Hanau and took the road towards Dörnigheim. As the route wound through a pine wood, Kitzler fell behind his companion along the narrow path. Drawing his knife, he struck him in the neck. The man wheeled around and endeavoured to defend himself with his walking stick, but collapsed. Kitzler then caught up a heavy stone from the wayside and beat him with it, inflicting further wounds upon his neck, head, and chest. He dragged the body into a copse of pines, dug into the sand with his hands and a stick, and buried the man. He took the knapsack and set out once more for Hanau.
He halted at Kesselstadt to wash his hands at the public well. At the inn, no one questioned him regarding the companion who had vanished, nor about the knapsack he now bore. He passed the night there. The author then describes the turn of events that unmade the crime: Erdmann was not dead. He clawed his way out of the sand, crawled to the road following his own trail of blood, and was discovered by travellers whose horses had taken fright. They carried him to Dörnigheim, where the burgomaster was roused from sleep and his conveyance to the Hanau hospital arranged.
Before he expired, Erdmann mustered sufficient strength to describe his assailant. The post-mortem examination established the mortal nature of the wounds. Kitzler was arrested that very night in the inn. He was still wearing the stolen garments; he had not yet had leisure to dispose of his own tattered rags. The account remains circumspect regarding what precisely led the officers to his door: it observes that the description furnished by Erdmann might well have sufficed, yet it also points to the notorious circumstances of his return to Hanau. Under examination, he initially denied the murder, asserting that the knapsack and the clothing had been given to him by a woman in Mannheim. He could supply neither her name nor her dwelling, and was unable even to enumerate the articles contained within the pack.
The narrative states that, after being kept in a straitjacket until the following day, Kitzler finally confessed. He explained that he had wished to obtain decent clothing in order to attend the Lamboyfest and begin an honourable life anew. In his deposition, he also stated that after the first blow, Erdmann had begged for his life, offering all his worldly goods and his money. Kitzler admitted having pursued the attack because a living witness might have denounced him. The *Pitaval* records this explanation alongside the remorse the prisoner claimed to feel.
The proceedings were swift. Kitzler maintained his confession and was condemned to death by the court of first instance; the sentence was affirmed on appeal. His brother and other kinsmen subsequently petitioned for clemency—a belated offering of aid that the chronicler contrasts with the butcher’s earlier refusal. The sovereign rejected the petition. On the twelfth of September, 1831, Kitzler was beheaded on the Leerhöfer Heide, near Hanau, before a multitude assembled from the town. A Catholic priest attended him to the very end.
The ancient chronicle treats the brother’s refusal and the hardships of youth as the prime movers of a tragedy; it also condemns the murderer with a vehemence that leaves little room for debate. The judicial record, however, sets out from a body abandoned in the sand, traces the tracks back to the highway, records the victim’s dying words, and weighs the recovered knapsack against the prisoner’s tale. Kitzler had sought to vanish with the belongings of a man he had singled out as a companion. Erdmann lived long enough to describe his assailant. The man who had buried him in the sand had counted upon his silence; that was his first error.