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Court proceedings and advocates instead for modern forms of codified justice that are meant to gradually displace outdated judicial systems.

摘要

Vehmic Court（中世纪的“秘密法庭”）的主题在 18 世纪末和 19 世纪初的德国文学中享有盛誉。本文分析了当时两部经典戏剧中秘密法庭场景的结构和功能：约翰·沃尔夫冈·歌德（Johann Wolfgang Goethe）的《Götz von Berlichingen 》 （1773 年），它是主题发展的模板，也是其最突出的文学回响之一，海因里希·冯·克莱斯特 (Heinrich von Kleist) 的《海尔布隆的凯斯琴》(1810)。通过定义两种文本如何处理、阐述和转变历史主题，本文考察了歌德和克莱斯特在多大程度上将 Vehmic 审判场景功能化，以评论当代法律辩论。在这两部戏剧中，这些场景都嵌入了关于法律实践的多层次话语中，尽管从不同的角度来看，这些话语都特别关注习惯法和实在法之间的鸿沟：而年轻的歌德则提供了基于罗马法，并称赞日耳曼习惯法是一种平衡专制统治者对人民的权力的正义形式，克莱斯特提供了对 Vehmic 法院程序的模仿，并提倡旨在逐渐取代过时的司法制度的现代形式的成文正义.