Tales from the German, Comprising specimens from the most celebrated authors

by Unknown

Kohlhaas asked him, smiling from the cart, whether he thought his person would not be safe in the house of a friend, who had invited him to his table for a day. The officer answered pleasantly and cheerfully enough, that the danger was certainly not great, and added that he would find the men by no means burdensome. Kohlhaas replied, seriously, that when he first came to Dresden, the Prince of Misnia had left it quite free to him whether he would avail himself of the guard or not, and when the officer expressed his surprise at this circumstance, and referred to the custom which had prevailed during the whole of Kohlhaas’s residence at Dresden, the horse-dealer told him of the occurrence which had led to the appointment of a guard in his house. The officer assured him that the order of the Baron von Wenk, governor of the castle, who was at present head of the police, made the constant guard of his person an imperative duty, and begged him, if it was unpleasant to be so attended, to go to the seat of government himself, and rectify the error which seemed to prevail there. Kohlhaas, darting an expressive look at the officer, and determined either to bend or to break the matter, said that he would do this, descended with a beating heart from the cart, had his children carried into the passage by the servant, and repaired with the officer and his guard to the seat of government, leaving the man with the vehicle in front of the house. It chanced that Baron von Wenk was engaged in the examination of a band of Nagelschmidt’s men, which had been captured in the neighbourhood of Leipzig, and had been brought in the evening before, and that these fellows were being questioned on many matters which would willingly have been heard by the knights who were with the baron when the horse-dealer and those who attended him entered the room. The baron no sooner saw him, than he went up to him, while the knights became suddenly silent, and ceased their examination, and asked him what he wanted.

The horse-dealer respectively stating his project of dining with the farmer in Lockewitz, and his wish to leave behind the soldiers, whom he did not require, the baron changed colour, and seeming as if he suppressed another speech, said that his best plan would be to stop quietly at home, and put off the dinner with the Lockewitz farmer. Then cutting short the conversation, and turning to the officer he told him, that the command which he had given him with respect to Kohlhaas, was to remain as before, and that he was not to leave the city, except under the guard of six horsemen. Kohlhaas asked whether he was a prisoner, and whether he was to believe that the amnesty solemnly granted him in the eyes of the whole world was broken; whereupon the baron, suddenly becoming as red as fire, turned to him, and walking close up to him, looked full in his eyes, and answered, “Yes, yes, yes!” He then turned his back upon him, left him standing, and again went to Nagelschmidt’s men.

Kohlhaas then quitted the room, and although he saw that the only course left for him, namely, flight, was rendered difficult by the steps which he had taken, he nevertheless concluded he had acted rightly, as he now saw he was free from all obligation to conform to the articles of the amnesty. When he reached home, he ordered the horses to be taken from the cart, and accompanied by the officer entered his chamber very much dispirited. This officer, in a manner which greatly disgusted him, assured him that all turned on a misunderstanding which would soon be cleared up, while his men, at a sign which he gave them, fastened up all the outlets that led into the yard. The front entrance, as the officer assured Kohlhaas, was open to his use as before.

In the meanwhile, Nagelschmidt was so hampered on all sides by soldiers and officers of the law in the woods of the Erzgebirge, that being utterly destitute of means to carry out the part he had chosen, he hit upon the thought of really drawing Kohlhaas into his interest. He had learned with tolerable accuracy, through a traveller who passed on the road, the state of the suit at Dresden, and was of opinion, that in spite of the open hostility which existed between them, it would be possible to induce the horse-dealer to enter into a new alliance with him. He therefore sent a man to him, with a scarcely legible letter, to the effect, that if he would come to the Altenburg territory, and resume the conduct of the band, who had assembled there, out of the relics of the one that had been dismissed, he would furnish him with horses, men, and money, to assist him in flying from his prison at Dresden. At the same time, he promised to be better and more obedient in future than he had been; and to prove his fidelity and devotion, he offered to come to Dresden himself and effect Kohlhaas’s liberation. Now the fellow to whom this letter was entrusted had the misfortune to fall into convulsions of a dangerous sort, such as he had been subject to from his youth, close to Dresden, and the consequence was, that the letter which he carried in his doublet, was discovered by people who came to assist him, and that he himself, as soon as he had recovered, was arrested, and removed to the seat of government, attended by a numerous guard. The Governor von Wenk had no sooner read the letter than he hastened to the elector, in whose castle he found the two von Tronkas (the chamberlain having recovered of his wounds) and Count Kallheim, president of the chancery. These gentlemen were of opinion, that Kohlhaas should be arrested without delay, and prosecuted on the ground of a secret understanding with Nagelschmidt, since, as they attempted to prove, such a letter could not have been written, had not others been previously sent by the horse-dealer, and had not some criminal compact been formed, for the perpetration of new atrocities. The elector firmly refused to violate the free conduct which he had granted to Kohlhaas, on the mere ground of this letter. Nay, according to his opinion, it rather showed, that no previous communication had existed between Kohlhaas and Nagelschmidt, and all that he would resolve upon, and that after much delay, was that, according to the suggestion of the president, the letter should be sent to Kohlhaas by Nagelschmidt’s man, just as if the fellow was perfectly at liberty, and that then it should be seen whether Kohlhaas would answer it. The man, who had been put in prison, was accordingly brought to the seat of government on the following morning, when the governor of the castle restored him his letter, and, promising that he should be free, and exempt from the punishment he had incurred, told him to give it to the horse-dealer as if nothing had happened. Without more ado, the fellow lent himself to the mean stratagem, and as if by stealth, entered Kohlhaas’s room on the pretext of selling some crabs, with which the officer had provided him in the market-place. Kohlhaas, who read the letter while the children played with the crabs, would certainly, under the circumstances, have taken the fellow by the collar, and delivered him up to the soldiers, who stood at his door, but as, in the present disposition of people towards him, such a step might be interpreted in more than one way, and he was fully convinced that nothing in the world could help him out of the difficulty in which he was placed, he looked mournfully at the fellow’s well-known face, asked him where he lived, and ordered him to come again in an hour or two, when he would communicate the resolution he had taken with respect to his master. He told Sternbald, who chanced to enter the room, to buy some crabs of the fellow he found there, and this having been done, and the two men having parted without recognition, he sat down and wrote a letter to Nagelschmidt to the following effect: In the first place he accepted his offer of the command of the band in Altenburg, and in the next told him to send him a waggon with two horses to the Neustadt by Dresden, to free him from the temporary prison in which he was placed with his children. Two horses more, he said, for the sake of speed would be wanted on the road to Wittenberg, by which circuitous route, for certain reasons, too long to specify, he could alone come to him. He represented the soldiers who guarded him as open to bribery, but nevertheless, in case force should be necessary, he desired the presence of a few, stout, active, well-armed fellows in the Neustadt. To defray the expenses of all these preparations he would send by the man a rouleau containing twenty gold crowns, about the expenditure of which he would come to an account with him when the affair was settled. His presence in Dresden on the occasion of his liberation he prohibited as unnecessary, nay, he gave the express order that he should remain in the territory of Altenburg, as the temporary leader of the band, which could not well do without a captain. When the messenger came towards the evening he gave him this letter, and rewarding him liberally, exhorted him to take the greatest care of it. His design was to proceed to Hamburg with his five children, and there to embark for the Levant or the East Indies, or as far as the sky might cover other men than those he knew, for his soul, which was now bowed down with grief, had given up the notion of getting the horses, to say nothing of his repugnance to make a common cause with Nagelschmidt.

Scarcely had the fellow delivered this answer to the castellan than the high chancellor was removed, the president, Count Kallheim, was appointed chief of the tribunal in his stead, and Kohlhaas, being arrested by a cabinet order of the elector, was thrown into the city prison, heavily laden with chains. Proceedings were commenced against him on the ground of the letter, which was posted up at all the corners of the town; and when, before the bar of the tribunal, to the question of the counsel, who presented him this letter, whether he recognised the handwriting, he answered “Yes,” but to the question whether he had any thing to say in his defence, he with downcast eyes answered “No.” He was condemned to have his flesh torn with red-hot pincers, and his body quartered and burned between the wheel and the gallows.

Thus stood matters with poor Kohlhaas in Dresden, when the Elector of Brandenburg appeared to rescue him from the hands of arbitrary power and claimed him as a Brandenburg subject in the electoral chancery, through a note sent for that purpose. For the brave Captain Heinrich von Geusau had told him, during a walk on the banks of the Spree, the history of this strange and not utterly abandoned man. On this occasion, urged by the questions of the astonished elector, he could not avoid mentioning the wrong which had been done to his own person, through the improper acts of the high chancellor, Count Siegfried von Kallheim. The elector, being highly indignant at this, demanded an explanation of the high chancellor, and finding that his relationship to the house of Tronka had been the cause of all the mischief, dismissed him at once with many signs of displeasure, and appointed Heinrich von Geusau chancellor in his place.

Now it happened that the kingdom of Poland, while for some cause or other it was in a hostile position against Saxony, made repeated and pressing demands to the Elector of Brandenburg to unite against Saxony in one common cause. This led the High Chancellor Geusau, who was no novice in such matters, to hope that he could fulfil his sovereign’s wish of doing justice to Kohlhaas at any price, without placing the general peace in a more critical position than the consideration due to an individual would justify. Hence the high chancellor, alleging that the proceedings had been arbitrary, and alike displeasing to God and man, not only demanded the immediate and unconditional delivery of Kohlhaas, that in case he was guilty he might be tried according to Brandenburg laws, on a complaint which the court of Dresden might make through an attorney at Berlin, but also required passports for an attorney whom the elector wished to send to Dresden, to obtain justice for Kohlhaas against Squire Wenzel von Tronka, on account of the wrong which had been done the former, on Saxon soil, by the detention of his horses and other acts of violence which cried aloud to Heaven. The chamberlain, Herr Conrad, who on the change of office in Saxony had been nominated president of the state chancery, and who for many reasons did not wish to offend the court of Berlin, in the difficulty in which he now found himself, answered in the name of his sovereign, who was much dejected at the note he had received, that the unfriendly and unfair spirit in which the right of the court of Dresden to try Kohlhaas, according to law, for offences committed in the country, had been questioned, had created great astonishment, especially when it was well known that he held a large piece of ground in the Saxon metropolis, and did not deny that he was a Saxon citizen. Nevertheless, as Poland to enforce her claims had already collected an army of 5000 men on the borders of Saxony, and the high chancellor, Heinrich von Geusau, declared that Kohlhaasenbrück, the place from which the horse-dealer took his name, lay in the Brandenburg territory, and that the execution of the sentence of death that had been declared would be considered a violation of the law of nations, the elector, by the advice of the chamberlain, Herr Conrad himself, who wished to retreat out of the affair, called Prince Christian of Misnia from his estates, and was induced by a few words from this intelligent man to deliver Kohlhaas to the court of Berlin, in compliance with the request that had been made.

The prince, who, although he was little pleased with the late unseemly proceedings, was obliged to undertake the prosecution of the Kohlhaas affair, in compliance with the wish of his embarrassed sovereign, asked him on what ground he meant to prosecute the horse-dealer, in the chamber council at Berlin. To the fatal letter to Nagelschmidt reference could not be made, so doubtful and obscure were the circumstances under which it was written, neither could the early plunderings and incendiarisms be mentioned on account of the placards in which they had been pardoned.

The elector, therefore, resolved to lay before the Emperor of Vienna a statement of the armed attack of Kohlhaas upon Saxony, to complain of the breach of the public peace, which he had established, and to request those who were bound by no amnesty to prosecute Kohlhaas in the Berlin court through an imperial prosecutor.

In eight days the horse-dealer, chained as he was, was placed in a cart and transported to Berlin with his five children (who had been got together again out of the orphan and foundling asylums) by the night Friedrich von Malzahn, whom the Elector of Brandenburg had sent to Dresden with six troopers.