During 1894, 30 women charged with killing their newborn, illegitimate babies appeared before the assize courts in Munich. With the aid of fragments from the “criminal” biographies of such women, contained in a total of only 60 public prosecutors’ records, from 1878 to 1910, in the state archives in Munich, I shall attempt to shed some light on the social and psychological conditions that made infanticide possible. In criminal law, the act of infanticide was and is an offense under section 217 of the Penal Code, which is based on a “natural” conception of the mother-child relationship and thus takes material and psychological conditions into account only insofar as they constitute mitigating or aggravating circumstances. Infanticide emerges as an individual psychiatric aberration or as a deviation from nature, which itself is intrinsically immutable.

In contrast to the interpretations of the courts, I shall attempt to describe infanticide as an event with its roots in everyday life and work. Using the findings and observations of the police and the criminal justice system, as preserved in the records of the Munich assize courts, I set out to reconstruct the subjective, emotional, and material significance of love affairs, motherhood, and maternal love in the context of the social network and labor. As a consequence of this way of regarding the issue, the criminal or legal aspect of infanticide almost completely disappears from the analysis. But it remains there, nevertheless, detached from the social biographies of these women, becoming a reality only when they are brought before the court and sent to prison.