From Customary Law to Codification: Secret Tribunal Scenes in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen and Kleist’s Käthchen of Heilbronn

Abstract

The motif of the Vehmic Court—a medieval “secret tribunal”—enjoyed remarkable popularity in German literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper analyzes the structure and function of Secret Tribunal scenes in two canonical plays of the time: Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773), which served as a template for the development of the motif, and one of its most prominent literary echoes, Heinrich von Kleist’s Käthchen of Heilbronn (1810). By defining how both texts handle, elaborate and transform the historical subject, the paper examines to what degree Goethe and Kleist functionalized Vehmic trial scenes in order to comment on contemporary legal debates. In both dramas, such scenes are embedded in a multi-layered discourse on legal practices, which places a particular focus on the divide between customary and positive law, though from different angles: whereas the young Goethe offers a negative picture of instituted justice based on Roman law, and praises Germanic customary law as a form of justice that balances the power of absolutist rulers over the people, Kleist offers a parody of Vehmic Court proceedings and advocates instead for modern forms of codified justice that are meant to gradually displace outdated judicial systems.