Juliana Blasius

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Juliana Blasius and her son Franz Wilhelm, painting by Karl Matthias Ernst (1803)

Juliana Blasius (also: Bläsius; Julchen; French Julie Blaesius) (born August 22, 1781 in Weierbach (today in Idar-Oberstein), †  July 3, 1851 there ) was the last robber bride of Johannes Bückler , who became known as Schinderhannes whom she lived together for three years and from whom she had a child.

Life

Leaflet with portrait of Juliana Blasius (1803)

Juliana Blasius was the daughter of the musician and day laborer Johann Nikolaus Blasius (* 1751). As a child, she could be seen together with her father and sister Margarethe (* 1779) in markets and at church fairs as a banter and violin player .

The years of death of her father and her sister can no longer be determined, as Weierbach's church records from the period from 1798 to 1830 are only available in fragments. From this, however - according to the former Weierbach pastor Erich Henn - the spelling of the family name Blasius emerges. Juliane is sometimes given as a first name in the literature, and Bläsius as a family name.

Even if she later stated at the trial that she was kidnapped at the age of 15, Blasius may have met Johannes Bückler , known as Schinderhannes, at a performance at the Wickenhof near Kirn at Easter 1800 . The statement must have been a white lie, because "Julchen" could have escaped later, if it was on the road as a "trader Ofenloch" in the absence of "Schinderhannes".

After a meeting initiated two weeks later in the forest near Weierbach, Blasius seems to have stayed with the already fugitive robber. Her sister Margarete became the lover of Peter Dallheimer from Bückler's gang.

After the secret meeting in the forest near Weierbach, the "Julchen" from then on moved through the country with the "Schinderhannes", who had eight other lovers before her. Four of the lovers are known by name: Elise Werner, Buzliese-Amie, Katharina Pfeiffer and Margarethe Blasius.

At the height of his power around 1800, Bückler stayed with Blasius and his gang on the half-ruined Schmidtburg in the Hahnenbachtal above Kirn. The castle had been abandoned by its owners since the French annexation in 1795. In the nearby village of Griebelschied , the gang even celebrated a public “robber ball” in an inn.

Together with Johannes Bückler, Blasius participated several times - sometimes in men's clothing - in brutal attacks, in which the victims - like the Jew Wolff Wiener in Hottenbach - were sometimes tortured.

In Bruchsal , Juliana Blasius gave birth to a daughter who died a little later. After the gang was imprisoned, she gave birth to a son on October 1, 1802 in the Mainz wooden tower, who was baptized Franz Wilhelm and later adopted by the Mainz customs guard Johannes Weiß. All that is known about the son's later fate is that he became a non-commissioned officer in the Austrian army.

In the same year, her sister Margarethe had to answer for theft and loitering and was serving a prison sentence in Kaiserslautern.

Juliane Blasius was sentenced to two years in prison in the trial against Schinderhannes and his cronies and served her sentence in the correctional house in Ghent, Flanders . The relatively mild sentence was based on the fact that her lover tried to exonerate her again and again during the trial. He said: "I seduced her, she is innocent."

After she was released from the correctional facility, Blasius worked as a maid for her son's foster father in Mainz, but then returned to Weierbach after being sexually harassed by Weiß or one of his servants, where she became the wife of a gendarme named Uebel, who during the Wars of Liberation died. On July 2, 1814, she married her widowed cousin, Weierbach's local police officer Johann Blasius. She bore him seven more children, but only two of them reached adulthood.

In later years Juliana Blasius was curiously admired by strangers passing through Weierbach. She is said to have liked to talk about her time as a robber bride "over a schnapps", which she thought was the most beautiful of her life. When a public prosecutor from Saarbrücken then visited the old woman who was boasting as “Schinderhannes' wife” in 1844, he found her “neatly dressed” and “still in good condition”.

Juliana Blasius survived the Schinderhannes by 47 years and died on July 3, 1851 at the age of 69 in her hometown of Weierbach from the effects of dropsy .

Impact history

The "Julchen vom Schinderhannes" became part of the legend surrounding Johannes Bückler during his lifetime and was later processed several times in literary terms. The writer Clara Viebig made her the main character in her novel Under the Tree of Freedom (1922) and portrayed her as brave, unscrupulous, spirited and attractive. But Viebig also strayed relatively far from the established facts by relocating many episodes about "Julchen" to her own place of birth Trier and the Moselle valley.

Carl Zuckmayer stuck to the facts more closely in his play “Schinderhannes”; here Julchen is more of a marginal figure.

During the 1990s, the play "Julchen or the Second Life" by Armin Peter Faust from Weierbach was frequently performed in the near region . At that time, at least eight of their descendants were still living in Weierbach.

In 2010, the musical "Julchen" penned by Michel Becker and Carsten Braun was premiered at the Simmern Schinderhannes Festival , in which their time together with Schinderhannes and the question of their complicity or complicity are discussed. The stage work, which is rather untypical for this genre, adheres closely to historical reality and is essentially based on the trial files.

literature

  • Armin Peter Faust: The most famous Weierbacherin. Dedicated to all of Julchen's still living descendants. In: Local calendar of the Birkenfeld district. 1992, pp. 131-139, ISSN  0174-4631 .
  • Peter Bayerlein : Schinderhannes Chronicle: from Miehlen to Mainz. Probst, Mainz-Kostheim, 2003, ISBN 3-936326-31-2 .
  • Peter Bayerlein: Schinderhannes local dictionary: from adventure to Züsch. Probst, Mainz-Kostheim, 2003, ISBN 3-936326-32-0 .
  • Ernst Probst : Julchen Blasius - The robber bride of the Schinderhannes. GRIN, Munich, 2010, ISBN 978-3-640-64773-6 .
  • Mark Scheibe: Schinderhannes: useless, horse thief, robber captain? Foundation Historical Commission for the Rhineland 1789–1815, Kelkheim, 6th edition 2015, ISBN 978-3-9813188-7-6 (publication based on legal history research at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz).

Web links

Commons : Schinderhannes  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michel Becker: Theater re-performance: play & music. In: Schinderhannes Festival Simmern. Retrieved October 2, 2012 .
personal data
SURNAME Blaise, Juliana
SHORT DESCRIPTION Robber Bride of Johannes Bückler
DATE OF BIRTH August 22, 1781
PLACE OF BIRTH Weierbach
DATE OF DEATH July 3, 1851
PLACE OF DEATH Weierbach