On the night of September 10–11, 1795, fire broke out at the farmstead of the peasant Häusler in Schärtendorff, near Grüneberg. Despite all efforts to quell it, the house and three neighbouring holdings burned to the ground. Livestock perished, along with a thirteen-year-old boy who had been sleeping in the hayloft. The villagers had scarcely extinguished the embers of this first disaster when another blaze erupted the following night at the opposite end of Schärtendorff, upon the property of the gardener Seiffert. The Pitaval estimates the combined damages at upwards of 1,500 thalers. No suspicious face had been discerned by the light of the flames; no robbery pointed toward a common motive. Then, the inhabitants took note of the absence of a man whom they had hitherto regarded as peaceable and upright.
Christian Krischke had appeared neither during the first conflagration nor after the second. Neighbours scoured the fields and thickets until they discovered him concealed within a tall hemp field. He appeared terrified, yet made no attempt to flee. When accused of having set the fires, the chronicle records, he offered a brief and unreserved confession. The village thus possessed an admission of guilt; it remained to be understood how a man of previously unblemished reputation could have come to such an extremity, and what was to be made of the singular explanation he subsequently gave.
The German chronicle, published in 1860, depicts Krischke as an esteemed day labourer. Aged between forty and fifty, a widower of three years, he lived under the roof of his stepson Häusler while hiring out his labour across various farms. His pastor and several employers, according to the chronicler, praised his industrious conduct and his regular attendance at church. This retrospective portrait is no independent record of service: it serves the narrator chiefly to underscore the stark chasm between the man's rustic reputation and the heinous crime he acknowledged.
Upon the very same farm worked Elisabeth Seiffert, a young servant-maid of the parish. Krischke had grown enamoured of her and had bestowed upon her the customary betrothal tokens of their station. They were to have wed at Midsummer; however, the maiden’s father, the gardener Seiffert, insisted that she serve out her yearly contract, and the nuptials were deferred until Christmas. The Pitaval treats this postponement as the fatal turning point. Krischke harboured suspicions against his stepson Häusler—who was at once his landlord and his master—though he never claimed to have caught him in any illicit intimacy with Elisabeth. The chronicle adduces no proof of any liaison: it records merely the man’s brooding jealousy and the idle village gossip reported to have poisoned his mind.
The mutual dependence of this trio weighed heavily, within the narrative, upon every interpretation of events. Häusler stood as the imagined rival, the master of the farm, and Krischke’s provider; Elisabeth laboured beneath his direct authority. Krischke was reportedly told that marriage would cost him his lodging, or that the girl’s father would ultimately forbid the match. He contemplated departing with one hundred thalers he had laid by to settle elsewhere, only to relent whenever he beheld Elisabeth and heard her speak to him with gentle words, as his reported statements suggest. A few days before the fires, he had even surveyed a plot of land with the estate bailiff, intending to erect a cottage and dwell apart. These schemes are recounted by the chronicler; they do not reflect any direct testimony from Elisabeth herself.
On September 10, Krischke was employed in garden labour at a nearby mill. He returned home around eight in the evening; the mistress of the house and her children were in the common hall, while Elisabeth and the other farmhands were still abroad in the fields. Krischke went out again to a local distiller, where he initially took a small glass of spirits. A conversation with a cattle merchant led to further drinks: the text enumerates three measures, followed by three more drawn from a flask he carried within his coat. He did not return until ten o'clock, by which hour the household had retired.
He passed through the stable adjoining Elisabeth’s bedchamber and knocked against the thin partition. He asked if she were asleep; she answered that it was past the hour for rest and that he ought to leave her in peace. The chronicler ponders what Krischke had hoped to elicit from this encounter, yet confesses his ignorance. He records only that, having flown into a sudden passion, the man turned back toward his own chamber. As he prepared to lie down, he declared that he heard a voice commanding him to set a fire.
The chronicle provides neither the tone nor the precise wording of this voice; it records neither apparition nor unearthly light. Krischke maintained that he had heard a voice, without offering any immediately clear interpretation of its origin. He dressed again, climbed out of his chamber window to avoid the common hall, and latched the outer house door from without. He took up the flint, steel, tinder, and a brimstone-tipped match which he had carried that morning to kindle fires in the fields. Applying the smouldering tinder, he set fire to the low eaves of the thatched roof, and straightway fled toward the woods.
The Pitaval does not reconstruct what passed through his mind during the hours that followed. It notes merely that he spent twenty-four hours alone amidst the fields and thickets, sustained only by the spirits remaining in his flask. The following night, according to the words attributed to Krischke by the book, he reinterpreted the command he had received: the voice had not specified which roof to burn; perhaps it had pointed toward Elisabeth’s father, who had delayed their union. Toward three o'clock in the morning, he returned to the village and set fire to the cottage of the gardener Seiffert by the selfsame method. On this occasion, help arrived more swiftly, and the flames did not spread to the adjoining farmsteads.
Following this second outrage, Krischke waded into a pond with the intent of drowning himself; failing to keep his head beneath the water, he clambered out and wandered once more across the countryside. It was there, amidst the tall hemp, that he was apprehended. The narrative lays great stress upon the reawakening of his conscience after the deed and his yearning to suffer the retribution of the law, yet we possess only the version presented by the compiler. What remains documented in the chapter is the recorded sequence of events: the first fire, a day of solitary vagrancy, the second blaze, the abortive suicide, and the subsequent capture and confession.
The judicial inquiry, according to the Pitaval, presented no great difficulty, Krischke readily acknowledging the arson. Sentence was handed down on March 25, 1796: death by fire. The book transcribes neither the formal indictment nor the minutes of the trial; it weaves its procedural account together with pastoral visits in prison. Krischke had initially hoped to be decapitated prior to the burning of his body. After several visits, his pastor reportedly informed him that, for a crime of such magnitude, the law demanded he be burnt alive. The contrast between this expectation and the penalty ascribed to the tribunal lends the passage its solemn gravity, though we are unable to consult the original decree.
The mysterious voice resurfaced during these spiritual colloquies. The pastor sought to persuade Krischke that he had merely heard his own inner voice, distorted by spirits and fury, sounding as though it emanated from another. Krischke maintained that he had not recognized the voice at the moment of firing the thatch. Only in retrospect, through brooding reflection, had he come to view it as the voice of God, intent on chastising Häusler and then Seiffert. He invoked neither the Devil nor any human accomplice. This belated interpretation, preserved by the pastor and the Pitaval, proves neither divine intervention nor medical delirium; it reveals only how the prisoner, the clergyman, and the compiler each assigned differing meanings to the selfsame utterance.
On April 2, the sentence was solemnly pronounced. Krischke petitioned for an appeal, yet voluntarily withdrew his plea a few days later, accepting the judgment in writing. The chronicle records visits from two clergymen and noted signs of genuine contrition. On June 4, he was notified that his execution was appointed for June 10. The townspeople had mounted guard over him without remuneration; according to the author, Krischke requested that four of the burghers who had watched over him be permitted to accompany him to the scaffold.
On the morning of June 9, he was conducted back to Schärtendorff, where he begged forgiveness of Häusler and Seiffert; Elisabeth likewise appeared at his request, the compiler notes. On the following day, June 10, the criminal tribunal convened in the open air behind the village. The chronicle describes two concentric circles—one for the court, the other for the multitude—and an imposing armed escort: two hundred burghers of Grüneberg, fifty men from the village, and two hundred dragoons. The judge put brief questions regarding the material circumstances. Krischke replied with a nod of the head and in a faint voice. When asked whether he had set the fires willfully out of vengeance, he reportedly shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyes in penitence. The sentence was read aloud, the white staff broken, and the court dissolved.
The execution took place near at hand. Toward half-past eight, Krischke was delivered into the hands of the executioner and bound to the stake upon the pyre; the account records that the body was consumed to ashes before midday. The chronicler then advances, without citing evidence, the hypothesis of a pouch of gunpowder concealed upon the body to shorten his agony—a speculation, not an established fact. Lastly, he makes mention of a wave of incendiarism said to have gripped Silesia at that time, a broad reflection of the Pitaval rather than a verified historical statistic.
The two nights of Schärtendorff thus conclude as an edifying tale in which the compiler intertwines jealousy, drunkenness, confession, and exemplary retribution. The chapter does not preserve the original judicial minutes, nor does it permit us to verify every reported speech. Yet it illustrates how several narratives overlap: the village discovers the ruins, Krischke acknowledges the hand that lit the torch, the pastor debates the origin of the voice, and the narrator arranges these disparate elements into a moral lesson. The voice remains at the core of the affair, though the text leaves its true nature forever unresolved.