The Hangman's Daughter

I DON’T KNOW WHEN I HEARD OF THE KUISLS FOR the first time. I must have been about five or six years old when, for the first time, my grandmother gave me a questioning look. It was the same thoughtful look she has to this day when she is busy classifying her entire family, by now consisting of more than twenty descendants, into Kuisls and non-Kuisls. At the time I wasn’t quite sure whether or not Kuisl was something good or bad. It sounded like a quality, an unusual hair color, or an adjective that I did not yet understand.

Extrinsic characteristics such as an arched nose, strong dark eyebrows, an athletic body, or abundant growth of hair have been regarded for a long time as Kuisl-like in our family, as have our musical and artistic talents and a sensitive, almost nervous disposition. The latter includes an introverted nature, a tendency toward alcoholism, and a certain dark melancholy. In the Kuisl description left to us by my grandmother’s cousin, a passionate amateur genealogist, we can read among other observations: “Bent fingernails (claws)” and “tear-jerking sentimentality and sometimes brutality.” Altogether not exactly a sympathetic picture, but then you can’t choose your family…

It was this same cousin who introduced me, much later, to the subject of what an executioner actually did. I was in my early twenties when one day I found a pile of yellowing papers on the table in our house—tattered pages, covered with typewritten text, in which Fritz Kuisl had collected everything about our ancestors. Along with them were black-and-white photos of instruments of torture and the Kuisl executioner’s sword (stolen in the 1970s from the Schongau town museum and never recovered), a two-hundred-year-old master craftman’s diploma belonging to my ancestor Johann Michael Kuisl, the last of Schongau’s hangmen, typed copies of newspaper articles, and a handwritten family tree several feet long. I heard about Jörg Abriel, a remote ancestor, and his grimoires, or books of spells, which are still supposed to be kept in the Bavarian State Library, and learned that the Kuisl executioner dynasty had been one of the most famous of such dynasties in Bavaria. Supposedly more than sixty executions were carried out by my bloodstained ancestor during the Schongau witch trials of 1589 alone.

Since then the history of my family has never ceased to intrigue me. When Fritz Kuisl died some years ago, his wife, Rita, allowed me to enter his holy of holies, a small study filled to the ceiling with dusty files and old books about what an executioner is and does. In the tiny room were piles of chests full of family trees and copies of church registers, some from the sixteenth century. On the walls hung faded photographs and paintings of long-dead ancestors. Fritz Kuisl had recorded them on thousands of index cards—names, professions, dates of birth and death…

On one of those index cards my name was written, on another that of my son, who had been born just one year previously. Rita Kuisl had written in the name after the death of her husband.

The end of the line.

A shudder came over me at seeing these things, but also a feeling of belonging, as if a large community had taken me under its wing. In the past few years, genealogical research has become increasingly popular. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that we are trying, in a world of increasing complexity, to create a simpler and more understandable place for ourselves. No longer do we grow up in large families. We feel increasingly estranged, replaceable, and ephemeral. Genealogy gives us a feeling of immortality. The individual dies; the family lives on.

In the meantime I tell my seven-year-old son about his remarkable forefathers. I leave out the bloody details. (For him these people are like knights, which sounds better than hangmen or executioners.) In his bedroom hangs a collage made up of photos of long-dead family members—great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, their aunts, their uncles, their nephews and nieces…

Sometimes at night he wants to hear stories about these people, and I tell him what I know about them. Happy stories, sad stories, frightening stories. For him the family is a safe refuge, a link binding him to many people whom he loves and who love him. I once heard that everyone on this earth is at least distantly related to everyone else. Somehow this is a comforting idea.

This book is a novel and not a scholarly thesis. I have attempted to stick to the facts as much as possible. Nevertheless for dramaturgical reasons I have often had to simplify. Even in those cruel times, torturing of a prisoner would have required a few more official documents, and the town of Schongau would probably not have tolerated such a dominating court clerk as Johann Lechner. In municipal matters it was the aldermen and the burgomaster who actually ruled, and not the Elector’s representative.