Body

When does a single body become more than the sum of its parts, representing the power of hundreds of bodies? When does a single person come to mean not an individual but a single member of an invading hoard? In baroque-era Germany, this question was answered in the arrest, investigation, and sentencing of accused witches. In a post-Bubonic Plague Europe, fear of anything that threatened fertility (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 790) drove dozens of communities to investigate accusations of witchcraft. The systematic use of isolation, torture, and execution ultimately resulted in thousands (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 470) of deaths. This campaign was driven by a fear of much more than the damage an individual with a single body could accomplish; instead, individuals were dehumanized and decontextualized until they instead represented a threatening, large metaphorical body of witches. The great irony of this period lies in the fact that those fighting this perceived threat often caused the same harm they were ostensibly trying to prevent. This narrative of the baroque witch craze in Germany has many modern analogs, including one prominent “witch-hunt” from recent years: the detention of migrant populations along the southern U.S. border.

The first theme that can explain the baroque witch hunts in Germany is the physical, individual body versus the representative body. The extreme actions taken in these witch hunts can be understood as actions by individuals who represented groups, acting against individuals who they perceived as being a part of a group, as saving the souls and existence of both individuals and groups. The justification for this witch hunt was to protect Germany’s remaining population after the Black Plague had significantly reduced the population. Because fertility was paramount to rebuilding the people, young, fertile women and children were viewed as particularly vulnerable and needed protection. Witches were seen as an existential threat to these vulnerable individuals, who witches would go after personally. If enough witches existed in a community, this group could cause an existential threat to the community as a whole. If enough communities were overrun with witches, this could be a threat to the entirety of Germany. And if the entirety of Germany was overrun, then witchcraft could spread further, and the whole of Christendom could be at risk. This compounded reasoning explains how the accusation against individuals, in which individual bodies were tortured to elicit a confession, was able to turn into widespread torture of thousands of bodies quickly. One individual body has a limit to the pain they can inflict, but as a part of a whole group, imbued with Satanic power, the individual body of an accused witch can represent the possible extinction of not just your own body but the entire society you hold dear. It was this logic that fueled the interrogators, jailers, executioners, and community members in towns where people were accused of being witches and led to extreme and violent actions in order to protect the vulnerable.

However, it is worth noting that many of the accused were people whose bodies were already vulnerable in society. The majority of the accused were women, and, though rarer, there were instances of children being accused of witchcraft as well. This presents an intriguing paradox, in which those who became victims of physical violence come from the population of those who this movement is seeking to protect. Women as a whole were seen as vulnerable, with bodies susceptible to sickness and corruption, and whose fertility needed to be protected. Children’s bodies were also seen as vulnerable and weak due to age, especially at a time with high childhood mortality rates. It was this perceived vulnerability that was then used against the accused. Though normally weak, it was believed that Satan could harden a witch’s body to make them able to withstand more torture (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 1079). When a witch’s soul was perceived to be owned and used by Satan, the physical body they still existed within was tangible and could be maltreated, manipulated, and mangled. The bodily punishment of torture did not always end after a confession was secured and verified; some executions included additional physical methods of increasing the pain the accused’s body had to endure. Roper notes one case in Augsburg in which a woman accused of killing young children was burned to death with additional, glowing tongs on her breasts (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 1447). This symbolism again connects the individual to the whole group, from a single witch and her alleged victims to the organ that connects parenthood not just for all humans but all mammals.

The mind of an accused individual, itself still housed in the physical brain of the body, was also vulnerable to pain from the methodology of witch-hunting. In one notable example from 1595, Gertrauta Conrad, who had been left to hang on the rack for five hours, was found claiming to be able to fly. This torture device lifts and ties an accused to posts with their arms are held up and behind their bodies until their feet are unable to touch the ground, in a position that physically mimics flight. Roper concludes, then, that this claim to flight represents her mind’s interpretation of this ordeal and explores the metaphorical significance of this imagery:

Flying is a physical experience in which the normal limits on what human bodies can do no longer apply…The suspension, both mental and physical, involved in flight might well express what it felt like to endure this kind of torture, literally unable to touch the ground. (Roper, 2004, Kindle Locations 1023–1025)

This session resulted in Conrad’s immediate attempt to confess to witchcraft; however, practice dictated that each witch’s confession had to be unique in order to prove its veracity. Her mind unable to articulate an original-enough story after this extended suspension, Conrad asked if she could confess to exactly what a previously accused witch had confessed to. This was an unacceptable request, and so she likely had to endure further torture sessions.

These psychological effects from torture were not just acknowledged and understood by the interrogators; they were also desired in order to create psychological profiles. Over time, these confessions set a precedent for what kind of narratives to look for in future interrogations. In this, we can see yet another connection from the individual body to the symbolic whole. One individual’s testimony had to be unique enough in order to prove its distinction from the whole, but it also had to fit enough into the established pattern that the interrogator could identify it as part of the broader narrative of Satanic control over the population. Interrogators saw themselves as redeeming the individual witch back to Christ and weakening the hold Satan had on humans in order to weaken the whole body of Satan-worshippers and Satan themselves. There is an irony in this dimension as well, between the victims of the movement and those the movement are ostensibly trying to protect; though these witch hunts were undertaken to protect Christendom, the people they were accusing were often very devout believers themselves, who were often reported to either lean on their faith in order to endure the physical and psychological torture or interpreted their punishment from man as a physical embodiment of a spiritual punishment coming from God (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 1270).

The ultimate way in which the physical body and the psychological mind come together for both the investigators and the accused can be seen in the sexual nature of the accusations and the trials. Confessions to witchcraft often included describing having sex with the Devil, codified in the psychological profiles developed over time. Because of this, a belief formed that one of the diabolical physical marks that could be seen on the body were markings around the genitals, which would then have to be investigated by jailers, executioners, and interrogators (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 1223). The control in which these carriers of justice had over the bodies of the accused sometimes resulted in sexual trauma. There are several documented cases where accused women were raped by prison warders, and it is possible that the practice is more widespread than what is already documented (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 1348). In instances where an accused witch was found masturbating, this was seen as evidence of Satan trying to reach their lover again, though, as Roper notes, this could merely be a way in which the accused is trying to ground themselves in their own body and find some comfort in it (Roper, 2004, Kindle Location 1337). This illustrates the tragic irony where those suspected of committing sexual sins with Satan then become sexual victims of the accusers and are ultimately stripped of both their bodily autonomy and sexual agency. Whether the accusations against them are accurate or not, these women’s bodies may be ultimately forced to undergo the trauma to their physical well-being, spiritual self, and sexual health that the movement was seeking to protect.

There are several parallels of the baroque witch hunt in Germany to the modern detention of migrant people along the U.S. southern border. This practice can also be seen as a part of the interplay between an individual and their connection to a group’s whole. In this broader system, an individual’s attempted or successful migration into the United States by extralegal methods is divorced from its motivations and moral justifications and is instead tied only to the broader narrative of those in charge. During the Trump administration, the narrative was one of invasion; President Trump and those in his administration supported the framing that migration rates were at historical highs and were leading to economic devastation, scarcity of economic and industrial resources, and an increase in crime. To combat this, they enacted stricter enforcement of anti-migration law. One method was expanding the detention center infrastructure, including building 40 new detention centers to house migrants, resulting in over 80,000 detainees at a time. They justified this as not only a punitive action against those people who had already attempted migration but as a deterrent to further migration. News coverage showed overcrowded facilities with scarce resources, with hundreds of people crammed into tight spaces with no beds, no soap, and very little legal resources if any. Like the witch hunts, many of these people are women and children. The detained children, in particular, have been shown to have significant psychological consequences from this detention. Beyond the enhanced vulnerability of a still-developing brain and body, this detention places psychological damage on children who are already vulnerable and often victims of previous trauma that led their families to attempt migration in the first place. This can lead to lifetime physical and mental illnesses for those who survive detention. These individual cases of a person or families seeking migration have been literally, physically transformed into tightly packed bodies in small spaces until they become both physical and metaphorical masses of people.

This practice, like the witch hunts, has results that are counterintuitive. Though President Trump cited economic concerns as one of the driving factors of increasing this enforcement, the practice has resulted in very large expenses. The expansion of the physical facilities and the housing of tens of thousands of people along the border, processing them through immigration courts that are severely backlogged, has resulted in billions of dollars in expenses. Likewise, this has not shown much efficacy in acting as a deterrent; migration rates have continued to decrease over the past several decades, and there has been no significant effect on the rates after this system was expanded. And, finally, it should be noted that there is an irony in the cited desire that migrants “go back to where they came from” and yet physically detaining tens of thousands of bodies inside of the United States in this backlogged system. Regardless of intent, this system has not produced the intended results.

Examining the interplay between the personal and the group identity offers an interesting framework to analyze complicated narratives like this. It can also highlight the meta status of studying this time period in general; we now study this time period as a long-lasting pattern in European history and also the broader history of the world. Where once these were individual cases, now the body of each individual accused of and executed for witchcraft from the entire symbolic body of victims in this era. People may one day study the migration detention centers and see similar patterns of counter-intuitive results as well.