numbers. William Ewart in the British parliament in 1840 stated that of 168 condemned prepared by Roberts 164 had been present at executions.858 Later, the most distributed figures was that he had prepared 167 of which 164 or 161 had attended executions.859 Although it seems impossible to verify, the abolitionists probably give us a point here. Regardless of the presence at executions the occurrence of executions would for the reasonable mind make the possibility to be executed more vivid. We can therefore imagine that the practice in Bremen, where several decades could go without executions, would damp the longing for being executed by the city of Bremen. That is, for the reasonable mind – but to what extent are we dealing with such minds? In modern and contemporary research the understanding, with roots in the Enlightenment, of these murders as suicides has been revived. The idea is that these murders regardless of the specific motives in the individual case should be linked to suicide and be seen as a form of suicide. We find this idea in texts by enlightened thinkers such as Karl Ferdinand Hommel who in his commentary to an important book of the Enlightenment, Dei delitte e delle pene by Cesare Beccaria, made the distinction between direct and indirect, ”mittelbaren und unmittelbaren”, suicides, where the first group were composed of cases of killing somebody else to be executed. Despite the often high motive of reaching heaven it was ”ein wahres Verbrechen” rather than ”blos Sünde”.860 Hommel is also himself known as an Enlightenment thinker on the subject of criminal justice.861 The connection was also made by Johann David Michaëlis. According to him the main motive for the crimes was the teaching of the church that suicide was a mortal sin and led to eternal damnation.862 ErnstFerSuicide the explanations of the acts 858 Cooper 1974 p 45. 859 See e g Rippon 1853 p 161, Mittermaier 1857 p 181. 860 Hommel 1778 p 179 sq ’indirect and direct’, ’a true crime’, ’only sin’. 861 Fischl 1913 p 88 sqq. 862 Michaëlis 1792 p 44. 242
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