Today, the tragic fate of Theresia Kaiser, who was executed in 1701 as Munich’s “last witch,” would clearly be described as a “metoo” case: She worked as a maid for a high-ranking electoral official. He pursued the 17-year-old – and the young woman refused him. “The official then denounced her as a witch; she was imprisoned in the Falkenturm tower at the intersection of Falkenturmstrasse and Maximilianstrasse. And after she was convicted as a witch, she was burned at the stake at the execution site where the bus station is today,” says Markus Laymann. The 53-year-old Schwabing resident is a lawyer by profession, but is also a magician with a penchant for magic stories.
Together with his colleague Janis von dem Borne, he will be presenting seven magical fates from six centuries of Munich’s city history from June 6 to 9. For each story, they will show a special trick – in the case of the unfortunate maid, it is based on the legend according to which a giant bat visited her in her dungeon and the condemned woman was transformed.
The Venetian charlatan Marco Bragadino, who claimed to be able to produce gold as an alchemist, is also mentioned. “He found a financier in the Duke of Bavaria, Wilhelm V, at whose expense he set up an alchemical laboratory at the Bavarian court,” says Laymann. At the instigation of the alarmed councils and estates, the self-proclaimed goldmaker was finally convicted of fraud and beheaded in the Munich wine market in 1591. “We must not forget that such nonsense as gold production ultimately led to the discovery of ‘white gold’, porcelain, over 300 years ago.” The Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich also demonstrates a sense of humor and chemical tricks with the so-called “Marco Bragadino Carnival Lecture.”
At the end, the audience experiences a séance like those held a hundred years ago in the Palais Schrenck-Notzing on Karolinenplatz. “The idea of being able to contact the deceased was very en vogue in Germany in the 1920s. This certainly met the needs of many people who had lost their loved ones to the Spanish flu or the First World War during this time. Perhaps it was also a form of mourning when they received the message from their deceased in the afterlife that everything was OK,” says Laymann.
The séances of the parapsychologist and hypnosis researcher Baron von Schrenck-Notzing were certainly popular social events, and Thomas Mann also attended them in 1922. “He came as a skeptic, but was so impressed that he attended two more sessions,” says Laymann. “It’s no different: I fell into the hands of the occultists,” was Thomas Mann’s ironic admission, which marks the beginning of the description of these three séances with the Munich ghost baron. “The séance that we reenact for the audience in our show is based on these protocols,” says Laymann. Each performance is limited to twenty people so that you can get very close to the magical wonders.
Munich’s Magical Panopticon, Thursday, 6 to Sunday, 9 June, various starting times between 7 and 9 p.m., Pathos TheatreDachauer Strasse 110d