On April 11, 1855, a neighbor approached the Berlin police with a suspicion rather than a certainty: Joséphine Staudinger was believed to have given birth two days prior, yet no child was anywhere to be seen. Constables and a district physician immediately went to the garret where the upholsterer Staudinger lived with his children and his eldest daughter. Joséphine had just carried a pregnancy to term, which she had endeavored to conceal. Unable to deny the delivery, she initially claimed the newborn had fallen into the privy pit. A search yielded neither a body nor any trace of preparation. In the chronicle of the Pitaval, the investigation promptly narrowed to a family dwelling far too cramped to afford many hiding places—and to a bed beneath which the corpse had remained concealed.
Yet this nineteenth-century judicial chronicle opens with a moral verdict already fully formed. Its authors depict Joséphine as the absolute antithesis of any mother worthy of compassion, passing judgment upon her demeanor, her bearing at trial, and even her appetite. Such assessments belong strictly to the chronicler, not to neutral observation. To reconstruct the affair, one must sever the facts which the book attributes to official records, physicians, and witnesses from this overarching voice that turns the accused into a literary archetype.
In the spring of 1854, the upholsterer Staudinger vacated a lodging where he had rented furnished rooms, moving his family into a garret on a Berlin side street. His wife had long been dead; Joséphine, nineteen years of age at the time of the trial according to the text, took charge of much of the household and looked after her younger siblings. The entire family shared a single room, which served as both parlor and dormitory. The father spent the greater part of his days away at work. The Pitaval describes an impoverished, tightly confined home beneath the watchful gaze of attentive neighbors; yet its portraiture of the family’s character—a stern father, a proud or frivolous daughter—must remain attributed to its authors.
The origin of the pregnancy, according to the chronicle, dated back to the period when the family still let out lodgings. An unmarried merchant, a tenant in one of the rooms, was said to have begun a liaison with Joséphine when she was roughly eighteen years old. Following the removal to the garret, she continued to attend to his domestic needs at his new address, unbeknownst to her father. The narrative asserts that from May 1854 onward he paid her two thalers a month, without any promise of marriage. In early June, she noted the cessation of her monthly courses; a few months later, neighbor women began to suspect a pregnancy. Joséphine occasionally hinted that she was the betrothed of their new landlord, yet implored others not to speak a word of it to her father.
When the merchant learned she believed herself with child, the Pitaval attributes to him a craven evasion: he allegedly urged her never to utter his name, to find another father for the infant, and promised money for the rest. This version of events is not corroborated by an independent source, but merely represents what the chronicle records of Joséphine’s statements and the investigation. The accused did not name him in court. She reportedly stated that he had threatened to deny paternity altogether should she denounce him. The chronicle adds that he had given her eight thalers in total and a mantle valued between six and eight thalers; it notes further that he vanished entirely from the judicial inquiry. The identity of this man remains in the text a nameless phantom, untouched by any judicial accounting.
Joséphine appears to have sought an escape on her own. Between the autumn and Christmas of 1854, she asked a neighbor to procure castor oil for her, intending to employ it to terminate the pregnancy. The neighbor, divining her intent, dissuaded her, warning that she risked destroying her health. Joséphine abandoned the scheme. The chapter dates the onset of labor to the morning of February 9, 1855, marked by violent pains in the back. Her neighbor, a Mrs. Birnschein, came to attend to her, offering to summon a physician should her condition worsen. In the household, however, no one seemed to comprehend what was taking place. By the afternoon, the father was away at work; the two youngest children were at school.
Toward eight o’clock in the evening, seized by sudden labor pains, Joséphine managed to send the remaining children out of the room. She seated herself upon a chamber pot. The chronicle relates that the child was born alive, fell to the bottom of the vessel, and stirred. Terrified that its cries might betray her, she forced a finger into its throat; fearful that it might yet live, she seized a table knife left close at hand and slashed its neck. The examining physicians later discovered two wounds and concluded that the infant, viable and born alive, had perished of hemorrhage resulting from these cuts. These particulars stem from the Pitaval’s summary of the post-mortem examination; they do not warrant repeating its graphic flourishes or its rhetorical metaphors.
Following the act, according to her confessions as recorded in the volume, she wrapped the corpse in two old shirts and a towel, then concealed it beneath the family bedding. She wiped the knife and returned it to its place. When the household returned, she attributed the bloodstains to an unexpected hemorrhage. The days passed. On several occasions, she slept in the very bed resting directly over the bundle. The stark proximity of the body to the bustling routine of domestic life lends the affair its oppressive, confined atmosphere; yet that proximity alone does not permit one to divine her inward state. The Pitaval professes to discern in this conduct a cold and hardened calculation, sneering at her composure. Such pronouncements on her character are literary editorializing, not judicial facts.
On April 11, Birnschein reported to the police her belief that Joséphine had been delivered of a child “the day before yesterday.” This reckoning conflicts sharply with the date of February 9 given later in the chapter for the birth. The chronicle does not resolve this discrepancy: it appears to set an initial neighborhood supposition side by side with the chronological framework derived from subsequent statements and the official inquiry. One must therefore clearly distinguish the April report, which initiated the police search, from the date of birth the narrative ultimately attributes to the accused. Following her initial falsehood regarding the privy pit, Joséphine remained under guard. For the rest of that day and part of the next, she disclosed nothing. Another occupant of the house eventually persuaded her to reveal the child’s whereabouts. According to the Pitaval, it lay beneath the bedding in the common room, wrapped in blood-stained linen.
The post-mortem examination confirmed the live birth and the wounds to the neck. Joséphine soon admitted the essential facts: the illicit pregnancy, the unattended delivery, the killing with a knife, and the concealment. She refused to name the father. She also maintained that she had not premeditated the death, but that terror of her father and public shame had overwhelmed her in the moment of birth. The forensic physicians, according to the chronicle, concluded that the infant had not died of suffocation from the finger, but from the incised wounds to the neck and the resulting blood loss. The narrative record thus links her confession with the medical findings; it does not, however, erase the boundary between her subjective intent and the objective cause of death.
On Monday, February 12, the narrative attributes to her two farewell notes addressed to her father: one hinting at what lay beneath her pillow, the other begging forgiveness for the sorrow she had caused. She was said to have hidden a knife in her bed, but was prevented from taking her own life because she was under close surveillance. She was subsequently transferred to the Charité hospital. Throughout the preliminary inquiry, she stood by her admission of the acts, while steadfastly denying any intention to kill the child prior to its birth. This distinction, noted in the chronicle, did not constitute a retraction of the deeds she had admitted. The chapter adds that she took food shortly after the birth, a detail seized upon to pass moral condemnation; yet it alters neither the medical findings nor the judicial outcome.
On November 19, the courtroom in Berlin was crowded long before the proceedings commenced. The Pitaval dwells at length upon the audience, composed largely, it remarks, of women and young girls, before describing the appearance and cool bearing of the accused. It claims she answered “guilty” to the presiding judge’s question and related the facts in a steady, unfaltering voice. This portrait of the courtroom remains that of the chronicler, not a verified stenographic transcript. The prosecution considered the confession complete and moved that the case be tried without a jury. The defense objected, wishing precisely to place the question of responsibility and intent before the jurymen. The court ruled that the confession was sufficiently comprehensive to proceed without them; the defense counsel thereupon declined to present an argument, considering his line of defense entirely subverted.
The court pronounced a sentence of ten years in the Zuchthaus—a term of penal servitude with hard labor, as noted by the text—and Joséphine preserved her composure upon hearing the judgment, according to the Pitaval. The chapter provides no record of an appeal, a pardon, or reliable information regarding her life following her release. Above all, it leaves open a fundamental question of jurisprudence: when a confession appears complete and aligns with medical findings, may a court dispense with a jury despite a question of criminal responsibility raised by the defense? The volume answers this through its narrative, yet its moralizing tone obscures the evidentiary boundaries of what it documents. By separating the chronology, the confession, the medical expertise, and the editorial commentary, one reconstructs the affair without reducing a young woman to a caricature or mistaking a retrospective chronicle for the original case file.