# Weimar executes Johanna Höhn after the privy council, including Goethe, retains death for infanticide

Date: 1783

## The fact

On 28 November 1783 Johanna Catharina Höhn was executed in Weimar for infanticide after the Geheimes Consilium, Goethe sitting, had advised Duke Carl August to retain capital punishment for that crime. This Fact stores the dated execution and the recorded council advice. It does not treat Faust’s Gretchen as a trial transcript.

## Context

Infanticide law was already contested in German states. Goethe had written an empathetic infanticide plot. The council vote ran the other way. W. Daniel Wilson published the documentary cluster in 2008.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Klassik Stiftung holds the Weimar institutional record. Wilson’s German Life and Letters article independently reconstructs the vote and the Halsgericht. Different publishers.

Official or archival record: Klassik Stiftung Weimar — Goethe institutions (https://www.klassik-stiftung.de/; Klassik Stiftung Weimar).

## Significance

Judicial-harshness path. High confidence on the execution and on Goethe’s participation in the advice, as later documented from council files.

A councillor’s vote is not a poem. Do not merge Gretchen and Höhn into one Fact.

## What is established and what is not

Established: Höhn was executed on 28 November 1783 after council advice that included Goethe.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is justice-[judicial-independence](/drivers/justice-judicial-independence-erosion)-erosion. The welfare reading used in this dossier is worsening. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: https://factrail.ai/people/johann-wolfgang-von-goethe

## Drivers

- Judicial independence erosion (court capture): https://factrail.ai/drivers/justice-judicial-independence-erosion

## Sources

- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0483.2007.00408.x
- https://www.klassik-stiftung.de/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/go-hoehn-capital-vote-1783