No medicine for melancholy

Imagine you were a God-fearing woman living the hard life in an 18th century village somewhere in central Europe. You were married off to a man you had only just met. Your husband is neglectful. Your mother-in-law is meddlesome. You feel the weight of societal expectations pressing down. Your marriage has become a prison whose walls close in tighter with each passing day. The shroud of depression settles in, wrapping around you and suffocating the essence of who you are. You start to believe only death could take away the pain. But your religion says suicide is an unpardonable sin. To take your own life is to reject God’s mercy and doom your soul to an eternity of hellfire and damnation. So, how do you escape a life of despair without tempting the wrath of your merciful God?

Well, the devout but depressed Christians of Europe in those less enlightened times found a loophole. Take your own life and it’s straight to hell. But take someone else’s life, surrender to the authorities, confess to a priest, receive absolution before execution, and you could enter the kingdom of heaven as a soul free of sin. And if you took the life of an innocent child, the default purity of a child’s soul would also grant your victim a fast-track entry through the Pearly Gates. Or so people believed. The outcome? A plague of ritualistic child killings swept across Germany and Austria.

The chilling logic shocks us today. Suicide by way of infanticide was a drastic choice to say the least. But it seemed reasonable to some women, in particular, who found welcome relief from the despair of daily oppression through the loophole. In 1704, 30-year-old Agnes Catherina Schickin, from the small German town of Schorndorf, slit the throat of seven-year-old Hans Michael Furch after luring him into a forest with the promise of a reward. In 1755, Engel Sellenschloen, a young woman suffering from postpartum depression, slit her own baby boy’s throat. In 1761, 25-year-old Eva Lizlfelnerin kidnapped baby Matthias and threw him into a river. Schickin, Sellenschloen and Lizlfelnerin all turned themselves in and were beheaded not long after.

These are just three among dozens of cases documented in Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation, historian Kathy Stuart’s book about a ghastly and mostly forgotten phenomenon. While paging through interrogation records, court protocols, newspaper reports, execution registers and sermons, Stuart found that more women than men turned to this last resort because women “bore the brunt of social disciplining initiatives of the early modern state.” Their lives were circumscribed, their emotions invalidated and their pain demonised. Denied a straight path to the hereafter, suicidal women took the roundabout way. In a 2008 article that sowed the seeds for her book, Stuart termed suicide by proxy as one of “the unintended consequences of public executions in 18th-century Germany.” As the child killings rose in numbers, the state responded by making the executions more painful. Death by impalement was introduced rather than a quick beheading. Stricter laws however didn’t deter the desperate. Nor did removing the death penalty. In fact, both had the opposite effect. It incentivised copycat killers. Their crimes were monstrous enough to merit the harshest penalty. Their motives were so coldly rational as to discourage any insanity pleas on their behalf.

Between 1668 and 1783, Stuart found 95 cases of suicide by proxy just in the Catholic stronghold of Vienna. When Viennese filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala heard Stuart talk about the practice on a 2012 episode of the podcast, This American Life, they were intrigued by this little-known chapter in their country’s history. Drawing on Stuart’s book and years of their own research into the stories of Schickin and Lizlfelnerin, the duo wrote and directed the 2024 feature, The Devil’s Bath, putting us in the deeply troubled headspace of a sensitive young woman trying to survive 18th-century rural Austria. Agnes (Anja Plaschg) is a newly-wed locked in a loveless marriage to Wolf (David Scheid), a closeted gay fisherman. Any attempt to make their house a home of her own is thwarted by an overbearing mother-in-law (Maria Hofstätter). Between spending her mornings carp fishing and the rest of the day cooking and cleaning, her dreams and her desire for life fade little by little. The broad responsibilities and rigid gender roles start to wear Agnes down. And with no one to confide in, she withdraws within herself.

Much like the butterflies she collects, Agnes is a delicate soul — until shackled by the norms of society. The shackles provoke a descent into deep melancholy, a darkness that seeds itself firmly in the soil of her being, consuming her from within. Her descent complicates a rigid moral universe. The loophole she exploits betrays the flaws of a belief system too keen to link depression to morality instead of malady. It was a system more concerned about the state of souls in the hereafter than the state of mind in the here and now. Not only were victims of suicide treated as criminals, many were even subjected to posthumous trials, convictions and penalties. About halfway into the film, Agnes comes across the corpse of a suicide victim dumped in the open fields like garbage and denied a proper burial, a sight that makes her rethink her own final act. The resulting crime speaks to the harsh conditions women had to navigate, so much so that they had to find loopholes within the system for their ends. Disturbing though it may be, suicide by proxy emerged as a radical expression of freedom at a time when everyday life was marked by unfreedom.

The Devil’s Bath is charged with the dread of an unforeseeable tragedy in the making. Unforeseeable because the film contextualises the suicide-by-proxy phenomenon in the postscript instead of the preface so as to examine the conditions that drove Agnes to premeditate a child’s murder. Though Agnes may be a composite character, Franz and Fiala refuse to frame her tragedy simply as one among many. It is a choice meant to remind us each woman’s story was unique, each suffered their own battles, each were failed by the system before they decided to turn the system against itself. It isn’t a choice meant to exonerate them or justify their crimes. For such tragedies were a consequence of believers being unable to live up to the rigorous standards that their faith expected of them.

Religion, more than anything, informed cultural perception of mental illness by deciding what made a person’s behaviour atypical or amoral. Ritual infanticide was but one disastrous knock-on effect of Christian dogmatism. Although the sacrament of penance is a Catholic tradition, suicide by proxy wasn’t endemic to any one denomination. The practice was just as common among Lutherans. Both believed baptism cleaned children of the original sin. As far as those contemplating suicide by proxy were concerned, their chosen victims hadn’t reached an age where they could start racking up sins of their own. As Schickin cut young Furch’s throat, she prayed, “May God protect you, you sweet angel, you are an angel before God.”

Belief in sin bringing about an eternity of pain exerted an oppressive hold on the dark corners of the Christian psyche. For centuries, mental illness was conflated with the supernatural. The manifestation of symptoms, especially in women, was seen as a sign of demonic communion. Depressed women were branded as witches or victims of witchcraft, a view codified by Malleus Maleficarum, a 1487 treatise from German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer. According to Kramer, women were more susceptible to diabolical possession because “a woman is an imperfect animal, inferior to men.” The uterus, he claimed, was the source of all evil. The book called for severe penalties against the mentally ill. If women behaved in any way that ruffled men, faith was misused to explain away any mental illness as a moral deficiency. What was witch-hunting if not a violent mechanism for behavioural control? At the peak of the Renaissance, 16th-century doctors began to argue that many of the women accused of witchcraft were merely suffering from mental illness. This re-diagnosis however led to gendering madness as female. From anxiety to postpartum depression, doctors were quick to lump all mental illnesses into a single category: hysteria. Patients went from having holes drilled in their skulls to being locked up in asylums, deliberately put in insulin comas, and subjected to amputations, lobotomies and shock therapy. Well into the 19th and 20th centuries, malaria was induced to treat psychosis. One Nazi-sympathising Austrian physicist even won a Nobel Prize for it.

“Being in the devil’s bath” is what psychiatrists now diagnose as “clinically depressed.” As patients lacked the language to explain their mental illness in scientific terms, they resorted to contextualising their experiences within the available framework of their faith. Melancholy as a condition of diabolical origin emerged as a common theme in medical literature from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras. While Robert Burton proposed “melancholy” as “an inbred malady in every one of us” in his 1621 tome The Anatomy of Melancholy, even he listed the influence of devils among possible causes. Going back as far as the 1750s, people invoked the “blue devil” to describe their depression. Holly Golightly, in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, didn’t think the “blues” captured the severity of depression, preferring the “mean reds” instead. Even today, we speak of depression and trauma as inner demons to battle. Only the idea is far less literal.

The horrors of The Devil’s Bath emerge not from some central fiend, but from slowly sinking into the emotional morass of living in a gloomy 18th century village. The film gains a hushed intensity through the accumulation of period details, painstakingly recreated to pull the viewer neck-deep into the same morass. For a newlywed looking to build a home and forge a life, the conditions aren’t the most inviting. The fields lie fallow. The sun just about never shines. Grey clouds hang over the village, enveloping its inhabitants with a general but indescribable sense of an ever-gathering storm. Wolf has built Agnes a stone hut on the edge of the woods, a setting ripe for dark fairy tales, here as much a state of mind. The surrounding trees conjure the feeling of something evil rustling. The monster here is invisible but carves its shape deeply into its victim.

Just as essential to the grim ambience of this historical mood piece is a wicked score from Plaschg herself (performing as Soap&Skin). The shrieks of strings go from plangent to premonitory in tandem with the anguished battle of mind, body and soul in which Agnes is trapped. Plaschg entered the project as the composer. But Agnes’s story resonated with her so much Franz and Fiala decided to cast her as the lead. The Austrian musician and actor renders an emotionally raw performance, free from affectation. Her face is dependably open, whether she’s freely roaming in the forest or morosely confined to the bed. Her eyes unlatch a window to a soul being pulled into the depths of despair by a dark undertow.

Within the first five minutes of The Devil’s Bath, we witness an infanticide. A woman tosses a baby over the edge of a waterfall before going straight to the authorities to confess. She is sentenced and beheaded. Her headless corpse is seated upright on a chair in the woods as a warning to women nursing similar ideas. Her severed head, wearing the same weary expression as in life, is locked in a metal cage to ward off hungry birds and souvenir scavengers. It doesn’t stop someone from chopping off one of her fingers as a possible good luck charm. The chopped finger makes a reappearance at Agnes and Wolf’s wedding as a gift from her brother. Agnes hides it under their bed, revealing its purpose as a fertility talisman. Only the marriage is never consummated. When Wolf is seen eying up handsome neighbour Lenz, it becomes clear why he fends off her nightly attempts to initiate sex. Agnes takes it as a failure on her part. Wolf does little to make her feel otherwise. To make matters worse, her mother-in-law seems intent on turning her into another version of herself. She tells her where to keep the pots and pans, who she should and shouldn’t be friends with, and how much bread she can hand out to the workers (one piece only even if pregnant, old or sickly). With each day, she feels more and more like a pariah, struggling to fit in to the world she has been married into.

With escape on her mind, Agnes runs home to her mother and brother, only to be forcibly carried back. Next, she is sent to the best mental health professional gulden can buy. In her fishing community, the best is a ‘barber’ with his own take on equine therapy, a treatment that entails more bloodletting than horse-riding. The barber sews a piece of horse hair through the back of her neck and asks her to pull it back and forth to let the poison of melancholia (black bile) seep out. When the treatment unsurprisingly fails, she consumes rat poison in small doses, hoping she can confess to a priest before succumbing. When that doesn’t work either, she contemplates a grave measure. The more desperate she grows, so does her death wish. For “to be gone from this world” is her only desire.

All of Agnes’s sorrows and troubles come to a head in a disquieting act of infanticide. After confessing to the crime and receiving absolution, she is brought to the village square to be executed. The whole community, she wished to be welcomed into, is assembled. Death, to Agnes, isn’t a tragedy. It’s freedom. It’s the ultimate prayer answered. To the crowd assembled, her death is a spectacle, a cathartic one. When the executioner puts a hood on her head, Agnes begins to sing a song. At once elegiac and triumphant, the song signals a woman at peace with her fate. A little girl in the crowd joins in. Until the executioner cuts the duet short with a single deathly blow. The mood shifts from funereal to cheerful. The community celebrates, cup in hand, clamouring for her blood as if it were the absolute cure-all — echoing the earlier revelry at her wedding when everyone drank wine instead. We are left to wonder if the little girl will grow up to suffer the same trials as Agnes or if she will be able to break the cycle.

According to Stuart, suicide by proxy cases began to decline only when executions were stopped from being ritualised. There is every likelihood of cases that may never have been documented and untold stories of women who had to survive the storm of depression without treatment. All their experiences, struggles and recourses may forever remain unheard. While providing them a voice, The Devil’s Bath also presents a chilling account of how women’s mental health has long been misunderstood, downplayed and neglected.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.