Peter Kircher

Keystone of the coat of arms of the entrance gate of the Jesuit College Speyer

Peter Kircher (* 1592 in Speyer ; † September 27, 1629 in Zeil am Main ) was a German Jesuit , preacher and witch chaplain .

Live and act

In 1610 he entered the Jesuit college in Speyer and in 1625 became the governor of the Bamberg seminary, which was run by his order . There he also taught moral theology and was the first permanent preacher at the Jesuit Church in Bamberg .

As a prison chaplain , he also had to look after those who were often accused of being witches here at that time . He took on this task with great devotion and stood up for the humane treatment of the innocent victims. Between 1626 and 1629 he prepared about 400 convicted witches for death and accompanied them to their execution. Until the day before his own death, he had looked after the convicts for three days in Zeil am Main , where the witch craze was particularly raging at the time . He died there in 1629, about which the historian Patrizius Wittmann writes: "... in the prime of his life, a victim of his difficult and one may say equally terrible as a meritorious profession."

In the historical novel "The Souls in Fire" (S. Fischer Verlag, 2009, ISBN 3104000794 ) by Sabine Weigand , about the witch hunt in the Bamberg area, Father Kircher is one of the positive main characters. The novel was filmed as a television production in 2014 . Here the Jesuit is played by the actor Michael A. Grimm .

literature

• Joachim Heinrich Jäck : Pantheon of the writers and artists Bamberg. Volume 7. Bamberg 1815, columns 2124 and 2125 ( digital scan ).
• Bernhard Duhr : The position of the Jesuits in the German witch trials. Bachem, Cologne 1900, p. 74 ( digital scan ).
• Renate Baumgärtel-Fleischmann : 300 years of the Jesuit Church St. Martin Bamberg, 1693-1993. Bayerische Verlagsanstalt, Bamberg 1993, ISBN 3-87052-402-2 , p. 53.
• Leonhard Clemens Schmitt: History of the Ernestine clerical seminar in Bamberg. In: Report on the work and the status of the Historical Society in Bamberg. Volume 20, 1857, p. 166 ( digital scan ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Britta Gehm: The persecution of witches in the Bamberg monastery and the intervention of the Reichshofrat to end it , 2000, p. 172, ISBN 3487111446 ; (Detail scan)
2. ↑ How to find the book
3. ↑ Photo: Michael A. Grimm as Father Peter Kircher ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ^ Review of the film, with mention of the role of Father Kircher