The thief would occasionally return to the house of the man he had robbed to offer him a bargain. He knew, he claimed, where the missing horse was to be found; for a reasonable sum, he might assist in its recovery. The peasant paid, the beast was returned to its stall, and Johannes Bückler pocketed a fee for undoing the mischief of which he was the sole author. The biography published in 1890 recounts this trade with a precision ill-suited to the generous hero of popular legend. Before becoming Schinderhannes, the king of brigands, Bückler had learned how to sell the very same fear twice over.
His sobriquet derived from the flayer’s trade—a knackering profession practiced both by his family and by his own hands. He took little pleasure in the name. At other times, he preferred to pass himself off as a traveling merchant, or to sign his threatening missives with a more sweeping flourish: “Johannes Through-the-Forest.” He had grown up in an unsettled household, tossed between military enlistments, abrupt departures, returns, and precarious employment. His first larcenies involved what was familiar to him: hides, livestock, and chattels easily turned to cash. Arrests followed, and escapes swiftly upon them. Prison seemed to be nothing more than an inconvenient halt along a road he unfailingly found again.
Chance encounters furnished him with associates. They did not dwell together in some subterranean cavern, awaiting the commands of a chieftain. Some followed an honest calling; others moved continually between wayside inns, watermills, and isolated farms. They banded together for a stroke, then parted company once the spoils were divided. It was the fences, the lodging-house keepers, and the buyers who lent longevity to their theft. A horse stolen from a courtyard turned to coin only if someone agreed to purchase it elsewhere. The gang stood in far less need of an encampment than of reliable addresses. The neighbors who lent a barn or bought a head of cattle sustained this traffic, extending far beyond the handful of men actually present during the raids.
Bückler knew where to find them. He might join forces with one companion for an enterprise, then take another for the next. Good fellowship did not always spare those who gave him shelter: the old biography depicts him carrying off a sheep from a host’s fold after sharing his table. The brigand’s largesse, so fondly remembered in popular lore, came entirely from goods that had belonged to other owners. Contented table companions undoubtedly existed; yet they did not account for the entire company.
Violence soon outstripped mere cattle-lifting. Bückler became entangled in bloodshed, notably the killings of Niklas Rauschenberger and Simon Seligmann. His exact share in the deeds of his confederates would long be disputed; his involvement in the underworld that made them possible admitted of no doubt. Merchants and Jewish communities were targeted with particular frequency. This calculated selection bolstered his popularity among certain country folk whose prejudices rendered such victims less worthy of protection. It strips the self-styled champion of justice of much of his convenient innocence.
Arrested in 1798 and conveyed to Saarbrücken, he escaped almost immediately. In 1799, the authorities believed they had taken sufficient precautions by confining him in the tower of Simmern. He broke out once more, though at the cost of a severe injury. Each escape bore a double consequence: it restored his liberty and diminished, in the eyes of those who aided or feared him, the authority of his pursuers. A fugitive seen walking abroad once again often appears more formidable than the magistrates who proclaimed his capture.
From theft, he graduated to extortion. Persons under threat paid sums of money to be spared, receiving in return a written promise of protection. Such a paper signified, in truth, that danger had now been assigned an established tariff. One yielded out of sympathy, out of calculation, or simply because one had no desire to see one’s house reduced to ashes. The adversaries of the French administration, moreover, found some satisfaction in its discomfiture. From there, it was but a short step to transform the outlaw into a patriotic hero—a step the legend took with alacrity.
Juliane Bläsius entered his life in 1800. Born into a family of itinerant musicians, she followed him, shared his wandering existence, and was ultimately imprisoned at his side. Their devotion later introduced an intimate domestic scene into the trial, set amidst a catalogue of atrocities: a man could well have terrorized entire families while remaining tender toward his own. Spectators were not always inclined to reconcile both truths. They preferred the countenance they beheld in the dock to the one described by less alluring witnesses.
Police pressure intensified following the murder of the merchant Mendel Löw at Sötern in September 1801. The French authorities coordinated their pursuit with greater resolve. Bückler crossed from one bank of the Rhine to the other, assumed false names, and gave himself the airs of a trader. Yet the borders that had once shielded him were no longer sufficient. Arrested as a suspect on the right bank, he sought to enlist in the military to evade judicial inquiry. Recognized and conveyed to Frankfurt, he finally confessed his true identity. In June 1802, he was surrendered to the court at Mainz.
The preliminary investigation lasted for months. Judge Wilhelm Wernher subjected him to exhaustive interrogations; Bückler furnished details that led to further arrests. The prospect of clemency had been dangled before him, according to early accounts. He was now obliged to recount everything, to distinguish each participant, and to assign every raid and every stolen item to its proper place. The man who had thrived on the patchwork of rival jurisdictions now saw his wanderings bound together within a single dossier.
The public trial commenced on October 24, 1803, before a special tribunal. Sixty-eight accused stood in the dock; hundreds of witnesses were heard. Bückler admitted to numerous charges, exhorted his comrades to speak, and displayed visible distress for his father and for Juliane. This demeanor won him public sympathy. It eradicated neither the threats, nor the robberies, nor the deaths for which the tribunal demanded an account. The magistrates had not merely to judge a man who now knew how to plead for mercy; they had before them the long years during which others had begged him for the very same grace in vain.
On November 20, twenty death sentences were pronounced, his own among them. Juliane received two years’ imprisonment. On the following day, Bückler and the nineteen other condemned men were guillotined at Mainz before an immense concourse of people. A collective execution closed the legal file; it could not prevent the tale from beginning anew elsewhere.
Schinderhannes passed into songs, books, and theatrical plays. His youth, his escapes, his romance, and his quick-witted replies offered easy purchase to the popular imagination. The names of the ransomed peasants and murdered merchants were less easily remembered. The brigand had lost his last freedom, but gained a name that would travel the world in his stead. For those who had paid merely to be left in peace, such posthumous glory had all the bitterness of a fresh extortion.