History on Film: The Devil's Bath Film Screening - Suicide by Proxy in the Eighteenth Century
Free film screening of The Devil's Bath (2024), Friday 7 March, 16.00–18.00 in FAB Cinema room (mezzanine floor)
Pizza and Panel discussion: Suicide by Proxy in the Eighteenth Century 18.00 in FAB 5.03 (Faculty of Arts Building)
The Devil's Bath (2024)
Starring Anja Plaschg in the role of Agnes and produced by Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion in co-production with Hematfilm and Coop99, was selected for the Competition at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, and won a Silver Bear for 'outstanding artistic achievement'. It was the Austrian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2025 Academy Awards. The film had its world premier on February 20, 2024 at the Berlinale.
The characters in The Devil's Bath (Des Teufels Bad) are based on historical trial records of two real-life child-killers, Ewa Lizlfellnerin, beheaded in Upper Austria in 1762, and Agnes Catherina Schickin, tried in Württemberg in 1704. Both women feature in Kathy Stuart’s recent book, Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). In conversation with Dr Claudia Stein and Dr Imogen Knox, Prof. Stuart will explore how historians approach interior mental states in the past and ask whether we can truly understand historical actors feelings or motives for suicide or murder? What sources and material might we be able to use to try and capture past emotions?
Kathy and Claudia will also reflect on their collaboration with the filmmakers as part of the Berlinale 2024 and the challenges and opportunities of working with an International Film business. We'll ask how period film might provide for opening up foreign mental worlds of the past to present-day audiences? How does the cinematic approach offer a different perspective from academic history writing? Does the combination of historical film and history writing provide an ideal pairing to communicate the complex historicity of human emotions?
The panel discussion will be chaired by Naomi Pullin and followed by an audience Q&A. Professor Stuart will be joining virtually from the US.
Please contact Naomi Pullin (naomi.pullin@warwick.ac.uk) for a link to join the panel discussion.
Kathy Stuart is Professor of History at University California Davis. She is a historian of early modern Germany with research interests in the history of criminal justice, deviance and gender. The research underpinning her recent book Suicide by proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) inspired The Devil's Bath, where Kathy worked as a consultant to filmmakers Verokika Franz and Severin Fiala. Suicide by Proxy was awarded the Natalie Zemon Davis 2024 Book Prize.
Claudia Stein is Reader in History of Medicine and Science at Warwick. Her main interests are in early modern medicine and science in German, British and other European contexts. Her current research focuses on the formation of the modern and postmodern subject since the seventeenth century at the intersection of science and medicine, politics and economy, and is interested in how historians access and historicize past experience.
Imogen Knox is an Early Career Researcher at Warwick and a John Rylands Early Career Fellow. Her PhD thesis, 'Self-Destructive Desires and the Supernatural in Early Modern Britain', explored the lived experience of everyday life in the early modern period, focusing on emotions, mental health, and religion, as well as the intersection of these categories with gender.
