L.I.S.A.: At the centre of your work are the so-called devil’s children, Fürstenberg families that were repeatedly accused of witchcraft and had to answer to the courts, generation after generation. You therefore talk about a social stigmatisation to which the “witch families” were exposed. How did these families deal with the accusations?
Dr Masiak: Roughly speaking, two developments come to light: Whether consciously or unconsciously, the “witch families” made a virtue out of a necessity. The “devil’s children” were firmly integrated into the community from a legal, political, and economic perspective, but they did not allow themselves to be marginalised in social terms either: They cultivated an intensive network of marriages and thus kinship among themselves, and in crisis situations formed a community of solidarity and assistance. In times of witch hunts, they sometimes made a “pact” among themselves not to denounce each other and together resolved to disempower the local justice system by not making a confession despite the use of torture. Interestingly, their solution strategies did lead to some success. This point is particularly worth noting, since the accused were by no means helpless in the hands of the judicial staff – they participated actively in the course of the trial and even enjoyed a certain degree of legal protection. Even if the authorities were convinced the defendants were guilty, they would let the “devil’s children” go if there was a “lack of evidence” in accordance with the Carolina criminal code.
An exciting question, therefore, was at which point did a “devil’s child” no longer make use of this repertoire of defensive strategies? With some of the vilified persons, it seems, the stigma of being a “devil’s child” weighed so heavily that at a certain point they were themselves convinced they were “different”. Some used their image as a “witch” to intimidate the village community by threatening and cursing. Others, meanwhile, were burdened by their family history and supposed “otherness” to such an extent that they denounced themselves as witches. Here, the case of Margaretha Stroeth (1701) is the most upsetting: A “devil’s child” of the fifth generation, she wanted to set alight her house and commit suicide.