The Murderer Had Found the Guard
Franz Laubler crossed the market square, turned into Schlossstraße, and presented himself before the Life Guards. He had just slain a pastor. Those who received him had once been his comrades; they placed him under arrest, doubled the watch, and awaited orders for his transfer. In the streets, however, the crime outstripped justice. Before any tribunal had so much as pronounced a sentence, a faction of Dresden had already set about appointing other culprits.
It was the twenty-first of May, 1726. Hermann Joachim Hahn, preacher of the Kreuzkirche, had been murdered in his own home at midday. The tidings carried with them a perilous circumstance: his assassin was a former Catholic who had embraced Lutheranism, only to return, so it was rumored, to his mother Church. In a city where religious allegiances fractured common trust, little time was needed to transmute the deed of a single man into an indictment against all who shared his creed.
He Who Had Opened a Door
Hahn knew Laubler. He had instructed him in the Lutheran confession and recommended him for enlistment among the mounted guards. His intervention had thus touched both the conscience and the temporal condition of his future assassin: a faith, a livelihood, an established place within the city. The broadsheet published scant days after the crime recounts these benevolences with the indignation of men who perceive in the assassination the most monstrous of ingratitudes.
Laubler had quitted the guard some time prior, at his own request. The author of the contemporary broadsheet affirms that he still carried upon his person his certificate of discharge. This scrap of paper bears greater weight than it might appear: here stood a man capable of proving he had belonged to an honorable corps, yet who had just committed an act rendering that very affiliation well-nigh incomprehensible to his former companions.
As for his spiritual vacillations, the same publication maintains a reserve that must be preserved. It records that he had recently drawn near to Catholicism once more. Around this conversion, covert influences and sinister designs would soon be debated with swelling assurance. Yet the account of the twenty-fifth of May adduces no command to kill issued by any Church. The inner turmoil of a man and the machinations imputed to a community are by no means the selfsame affair.
A Visit at the Dinner Hour
On Tuesday, near the hour of one, Laubler repaired to the pastor’s lodgings. Hahn was at table. The visitor asked to speak with him and drew him from the room where he took his meal. The manner of his entry was that of a private visit: a man well-known presented himself at the dwelling of one who had formerly succored him. There was no need, in approaching his victim, to force a portal to which past trust had already granted passage.
After a few brief words, Laubler set upon him. He attempted first to overpower him with a cord, then drew a knife. The pamphlet counts six wounds; later relations occasionally alter the tally. Such arithmetic alters not the denouement. Hahn expired beneath the assault, in his own house, upon a day that had commenced amid the ordinary duties of a minister of the Gospel.
The fugitive then made for the palace. The guards detained him as soon as the murder became known. By evening, it became necessary to muster a formidable escort to conduct him first to the guardhouse of the town hall, and thence to the prison. The printed sheet speaks of upward of two hundred men. Such a deployment bore witness to more than the mere necessity of securing an accused man: it measured the fever of a city wherein his passage might easily precipitate a second disaster.
Shattered Windows in Answer to a Blade
Through the thoroughfares, Catholics were reviled, menaced, and beaten. The multitude demanded they answer for a crime with which their bare confession was held to associate them. Whispers ran abroad concerning other pastors allegedly marked for slaughter. Fear thus added prospective victims to the certain dead, and this grim addition rendered every passerby all the more prompt to deem himself in a state of lawful self-defense.
Governor Wackerbarth caused the streets to be occupied and the patrols redoubled. Beleaguered citizens had to be conveyed to safety under military escort, into the guardhouses. To them, the soldier did not figure on that day as an alien power indifferent to their plight; he was the man whose presence alone could deter neighbors from turning suspicion into blows.
On the morrow, the ferment penetrated the Kreuzkirche itself. During the sermon, certain congregants fancied they recognized Catholics by their gestures. The contemporary chronicle observes that this identification rested upon the flimsiest of grounds. An uproar nonetheless erupted, and the preacher was compelled to break off his discourse. Men had gathered to hear the divine word; the nave had dissolved into a hunt for enemies.
Bands of men subsequently turned toward the dwellings of the Catholics. Windows were dashed to pieces, and attempts were made to drag the inhabitants from their hearths. Hahn’s death served henceforth to license outrages whose perpetrators he could never have named, and whose victims he would never have recognized. The city laid claim to avenging a pastor by converting each man's private faith into a domestic peril.
Returning the Crime to Its Author
The governor and the municipal magistrates intervened once more. Wackerbarth showed himself in the streets; the patrols dispersed the gatherings. Additional regiments arrived and encamped about the perimeter of the town. The account of the twenty-fifth of May maintains that several persons of both confessions were wounded, but that no further death was as yet to be deplored. This final detail marks the most substantial fruit of the suppression: a murderous rumor had failed to reap all the lives it threatened to claim.
Hahn’s obsequies were solemnized on the twenty-fourth of May, quietly, escorted by armed burghers. Even the conveyance of the dead demanded armed vigilance. The broadsheet limns his likeness as a martyr, recalls his father and brother, both ministers of the church, and exhorts the inhabitants to return to peace. Its voice is that of a champion of the murdered pastor; yet it censures no less firmly the blind fury that had endangered the innocent.
Laubler remained in ward. The inquiry and the sentence pursued their course, while public rumor persisted in attributing to him masters, instigations, and a clandestine mission. The printed testimonies assembled here afford no warrant for converting such suspicions into a proven conspiracy. The slayer had an unstable religious history; the city harbored ancient rivalries. Their convergence accounts for the contagion of the panic, without rendering every Catholic an accomplice.
On the eighteenth of July, 1726, Laubler was publicly executed upon the Altmarkt. Another contemporary pamphlet, its title proclaiming the impending doom, immediately fixed this end in print. Justice had reclaimed the man from military custody, condemned him, and delivered him over to the breaking-wheel. The very square through which he had fled after the slaughter became the theater of his execution.
It would be easy enough to close the ledger upon this grim symmetry. Yet between Laubler’s two passages across that square, innocent families had barricaded their doors for a transgression they had never committed. Hahn was slain because a man had crossed his threshold; others had very nearly perished because the mob sought to cross theirs. The annals of Dresden preserve the memory of these two thresholds, and it is the second that forbids vengeance from masquerading as justice.