Witchy Woman

For months the execution was a local affair, until two German journalists came snooping. Hauser says that a court clerk who opposed the death penalty leaked trial documents to one of them. Heinrich Ludewig Lehmann was forced to flee as far as Genoa for criticizing the trial in print, but he still managed to have the secret documents published in the German press and spark outrage abroad.

"For this period she was the most famous woman in the Canton of Glarus, maybe even in Switzerland. And we think she was the second-most famous woman in Europe after [Joan of Arc]," says Urs Nef, who helps run the Mollis museum as a volunteer on weekends with his wife Marianne, the museum's president. The exhibit is as much an illustration of Göldi's modern-day popularity as it is of her life and death. New newspaper clippings about Göldi are housed in the same room that holds her cell, in a glass case before an artist's rendition of a ragged-looking Göldi. Hauser's book is on display alongside Göldi-inspired novels, including one from 1945, and even term papers on Göldi from the local high school. There are Göldi-based radio scripts from the 1970s. And props, photos and video from the 1991 Gertrud Pinkus film "Anna Göldin, Letzte Hexe." (Annemiggeli Tschudi's spit-up nails are under glass too, but they're the ones from the film set.)

A family affair, the museum is open only six hours a week, Tuesday afternoons and weekends. The new Anna Göldi permanent exhibit takes up the ground floor of the mansion, sharing the museum space with an exhibit on the local airport. Outside sits a piece of modern art, iron-colored stone-topped stakes rendering Anna Göldi's name in Braille, offered to the museum by a Liechtenstein artist.

Indeed, for all the efforts to silence Göldi 225 years ago, her very name has become a byword for injustice and martyrdom. A new Anna Göldi Foundation has been mounted to fight for due process, minority rights and press freedom. This summer a convicted Swiss pedophile even tried to liken his plight to Anna Göldi's. At the museum in Mollis the visitors' book is pasted with a flyer promoting her pardon. The exhibit's Sept. 22 grand opening saw a big crowd (for Mollis) of 250 to 300 people, says Nef, and was attended not only by descendants of all involved--of the Tschudis, the Zwickys, even of the German journalist Lehmann--but also by her namesakes. "We had people here named Anna Göldi. They were very proud to announce that they were Anna Göldis," says Nef at the museum, which stands in the shadow of the Zwicky house, where Göldi lived.

Now, for her supporters all that remains is to strike her name from the canton's books. "Something really went wrong in a terrible way," says Fritz Schiesser, a popular local politician who has taken up Hauser's challenge in the canton parliament. "In Glarus there were a lot of enlightened people, many educated people, and nobody said, 'Let's stop this'." Schiesser isn't the first lawmaker to attempt to have Göldi rehabilitated; efforts go back 130 years, he says. In September Glarus's government recommended that parliament reject the motion to have Göldi pardoned ahead of a final decision due on or after Oct. 24.

Schiesser jokes that he's "not intelligent enough" to understand why it is so difficult to have the verdict changed. "It's impossible that generations can feel guilty for what those before have done. The young Germans are not responsible for what Germans of the 1930s and 1940s did. That's clear," he says. "But we can recognize what happened and annul the decision." But even Schiesser isn't convinced he'll succeed this time. "Maybe in 50 years there will be somebody else asking the same questions." For all the toil and trouble …

© 2007