To the rest of the world, Switzerland is
a land of placid tranquillity and order nestling amid picture-postcard
scenery. Yet of late it has been the scene of doings that would make
the ministrants of Rosemary's Baby blush. For the past four weeks, the
gruesome evidence has poured forth in a Zurich courtroom. On trial are
six people, including Joseph Stocker, 61, a defrocked and
excommunicated South German priest, and his fanatically religious mistress,
Magdalena Kohler, 54. The charge:that they beat to death a pretty teen age girl while trying to exorcise
the devil from her body.”I would like to have a friend of my age,” 17-year-old Bernadette
Hasler wrote shortly before she died, “and if I cannot have a friend, I
would like at least to have a cat or a parakeet to whom I could talk.”
At the time, not even her family would talk to her any more because
they believed her guilty of “Teufelsbuhlschaft,” or
coupling-with-the-devil. Her tormentors considered this an act so evil
that excorcism by prayer was useless. The devil had to be flailed out
of her.A Final Yes. From 1958, the entire Hasler family had been under the
influence of the Stocker-Kohler “holy family.” The ex-priest and his
mistress believed that they had been chosen by God to lead the
survivors of a coming apocalypse. Minutely detailed instructions for
the group came from a Carmelite nun, known as “the Little Star,” over
her “direct telephone to heaven.”On these orders, the sect established a home for girls in Singen,
Germany where Bernadette lived after 1962, and a Swiss mountain
retreat, where she lived her last days as a virtual prisoner. Under the
pressure of “Mother” Kohler's morbid sexual curiosity, justified as
“looking into souls,” the girl wrote hundreds of pages of grotesque
“confessions”: the devil visited her several times a day; he had walked
beside her, his black fur glistening, at Holy Communion and often made
love to her; he had promised her she could have ten sexually diverse
husbands and rule the world with Satan. After months of piecemeal
punishment, Bernadette's Calvary finally came on May 14, 1966. During a
four-hour exorcism session, interrupted only for rest and prayer, the
couple and four other men beat and tormented the girl with walking
sticks, a riding crop and a rubber truncheon. She was made to eat her
own excrement, then sent out on all fours to wash her clothes. Finally
Stocker asked her whether she repented. After she mumbled a final yes,
he left her alone, and alone she died.Hangman Without Pay. Dr. Carl Jung, the late Swiss psychiatrist, once
observed that mountains are not only geographical barriers; they can
also limit the horizons of the human spirit. In many of the country's
remote Alpine valleys and gorges, medieval habit and thought persist so
strongly that Stocker and Kohler's defense counsel found it worthwhile
to call for theological testimony to justify the defendants' religious
zeal.
