Professor, Vanderbilt University Joel Harrington, a well — known specialist in the history of the European middle Ages, but its released in 2013 “the Righteous executioner” — the book is popular, sometimes almost fictional. Her hero, Meister Franz Schmidt, who served as the executioner of Nuremberg for over 40 years in the late XVI — early XVII century, Harrington stumbled upon by accident: reprint of Schmidt’s diary caught him in one of the secondhand shops.This text was not unknown to historians. Notes was first published in the early nineteenth century, was an important testimony to the savagery domodemovo justice for the German lawyers, was favored by the romantics, inspired a different sort of literature of horror and then published several times (albeit in a slightly revised form). However, Harrington has never occurred to me to wonder what was he Franz Schmidt, how did this, in essence, a paradoxical figure — the executioner-an intellectual, a professional assassin, and a thoughtful chronicler with a strong ethical attitude to life?Diary of a Schmidt — not in the least a confession. Mainly a chronicle of his professional activity, that is, torture and executions beheadings, hangings, on the wheel, Petrosani etc with various technical details and sometimes brief biographies of the condemned. Harrington carefully sistematizirovat all these horrors, but he also tries to read between the lines — bit by bit to reconstruct from quite impersonal narrative details of the life and beliefs of his hero. In addition, it attracts the archives of Nuremberg and Hof (hometown Schmidt), and where the documents are powerless, resorting to guesses and imagination. The result is a true biography.Franz Schmidt really is a very interesting figure. His life had a disturbing transitional era: shook the Holy Roman Empire civil war, the plague, the little ice age, prolonged witch-hunt side by side with the spread of culture and the gradual emergence of the modern state with a clear set of laws and an orderly bureaucracy (Nuremberg, where he served as Franz, was one of the centers of this upgrade). Schmidt was a man that embodied the transience, the clash of epochs, the attempt to break with the classic image of a medieval executioner.In fact, the executioner he became an unhappy coincidence. His father, Henry Schmidt, was in the crowd when, however, the Hof Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades decided to execute three gunsmiths guilty. In the absence of the executioner, he called for the execution of the crowd the first available person. According to tradition, once assumed the duties of the executioner were not able to do another job. He and all his descendants with��have anavilis pariahs, deprived of civil dignity, and doomed to despise all the bloody work.Young Franz had inherited the profession from his father, became one of the best craftsmen in the whole of Germany, but it bore little resemblance to their counterparts. Most of the executioners are not too much different from those with whom they had to deal with. They usually were drunkards, Libertines, semi-criminal individuals, and are often themselves ended his life on the scaffold. The execution and maim dozens of people a year, Schmidt was a devout Protestant, a young man never touched alcohol, Vela emphasized the chaste and solitary life. He built an impressive career for the executioner, but his main goal was to escape from the hated bars, get selected by his father the title of an honest man and save his children from a reputational stain. Oddly enough, he did it. His rise in the hangman hierarchy, overcoming numerous social boundaries (Schmidt, the first executioner got the title of citizen of Nuremberg) was a way unimaginable before the jump — lift the curse.This story of self-formation is the focus of Harrington. Everything else, including a different kind of Guignol with executions, atrocities and black magic, is the background. It’s hard not to think that “Righteous executioner” is a very American book about a typical self-made man, well on the road to one goal. In this sense, Franz Schmidt — the antithesis of the classical character of the early New time, the hero of the picaresque novel. The basis of his biography — not the happy and unhappy accident, and they focused coping. For this purpose Schmidt makes Harrington special sympathy. In addition to scientific and educational purposes in his book there is one — to pay tribute to his hero, one more time to justify it by clearing from which arose in the nineteenth century the reputation of mindless bloodsuckers, this time to distant descendants.Publisher: Alpina non-fiction Translation: Timothy Rakovitch next
