‘Richter die ihr richtet im Verborgenen’: Literary Representations of the Vehmic Court in the Age of Goethe

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs and contextualizes the development of the Vehmic Court motif in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature by examining both canonical texts, such as Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen and Kleist’s Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, and works commonly classified as Trivialliteratur. As a popular subset of Ritter- and Geheimbundliteratur, Secret Tribunal fiction from the Age of Goethe has generally been considered by critics as a merely entertaining genre. A more probing inquiry, however, reveals that the historical material was used to add to historical and political knowledge, to sensitize readers to questions of law and legal process, and to reflect on the problematic nature of human justice.