Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

Set in the early seventeenth century in Leonberg, a small town in the Duchy of Württemberg within the Holy Roman Empire, the novel unfolds during a period of failed harvests, rising prices, and the onset of the Thirty Years' War. Drawn from real events, the story is told through the dictated account of Katharina Kepler, an illiterate widow in her seventies, and through the writings of her neighbor and legal guardian, Simon Satler, a reclusive saddler.

Katharina opens by declaring she is not a witch, yet she faces accusations of poisoning, causing lameness, killing livestock, and passing through locked doors. If her defense fails, she will be tortured and burned. In May 1615, she is summoned to the home of the ducal governor, Lukas Einhorn, a vain official she nicknames the False Unicorn. She assumes Einhorn wants her to ask her son Johannes (whom she calls Hans), an astronomer who serves as Imperial Mathematician, to prepare a horoscope. Instead, she finds Ursula Reinbold, a childless woman married to a glazier, and Ursula's brother Urban Kräutlin, the local forest administrator Katharina calls the Cabbage. Einhorn drunkenly tells Katharina she stands accused of using dark powers to poison Ursula with a bitter drink. The Cabbage draws his sword and presses it against Katharina's chest, tearing her dress and demanding she reverse the curse. Einhorn intervenes, gives Katharina three coins for mending, and declares the encounter legally void.

Katharina tells no one at first, visiting her son Christoph, a pewterer, and his wife, Gertie, who reads aloud from a pamphlet about three women recently executed for witchcraft nearby. When the baker Jerg Hundersinger confirms that rumors are circulating, Katharina tells her family. Christoph blames the glazier for orchestrating the accusation out of envy. Gertie insists they file a slander complaint. Katharina's daughter, Greta, who is married to Pastor Binder, urges a gentler approach. Even Christoph and Gertie's six-year-old daughter, Agnes, reports that the butcher's boy called her a witch from a family of witches.

Katharina provides background on her fourth child, Heinrich, a troubled former soldier who returned impoverished and unwell during the winter of 1614. She begged milk from the baker's wife, Rosina Zoft, to feed him. Heinrich died weeks later, and Katharina's enemies claim he called his own mother a witch before dying.

Christoph and Katharina file the slander complaint, but the Reinbolds fail to appear, stalling the case. Christoph lands in prison for a tavern fight defending his mother. Simon Satler then steps in as Katharina's legal guardian. He describes their relationship's unlikely origins: Katharina barged into his home with herbal remedies for his cough and offended his daughter Anna with unsolicited advice about face powder, but after Katharina organized a rescue of his workshop during a flood, a practical fellowship developed.

New accusers emerge: Rosina Zoft tells people Katharina rode a goat backward to death, and a thresher blames Katharina's witchcraft for leg pains suffered years earlier. The court clerk, Sebald Sebelen, warns that a criminal case against Katharina is building and will reach the courts before her own slander complaint. Hans finally writes to the Leonberg court in January 1616, signing as Imperial Mathematician and denouncing the accusations as fantasies. Testimonies pile up: the schoolmaster Hans Benedict Beitelspacher blames Katharina's wine for his lameness and for the death of his friend Margretta Meyer, and a man connects the death of his childhood pet pig to Katharina touching its hoof 20 years earlier.

Katharina resists fleeing to Linz, unwilling to leave her cow Chamomile or appear guilty, but reports of more executions and rising hostility persuade her. In Linz, she falls ill and is nursed by Hans's second wife, Susanna. Katharina recovers and bonds with Hans's young daughter, Maruschl. Hans warns Katharina she faces arrest anywhere in the duchy, but she defies him and returns to Leonberg. The pivotal escalation comes when Wallpurga Haller, who receives alms from Ursula Reinbold, testifies that Katharina struck her daughter, leaving a witch's mark. With two accusers, the legal threshold for ordering torture has been met. In desperation, Katharina brings Einhorn a valuable silver goblet, but realizes he will use it as evidence of a bribe.

After Gertie warns that armed men are coming to arrest her, Katharina flees a second time, hidden in the cart of a Jewish peddler she nicknames Yellow Gill. He entertains her with stories over a three-day journey. She reaches Linz again and dotes on Maruschl, but the child falls ill and dies. Hans and Susanna's new baby, also named Katharina, dies within the month. Devastated and believing herself a burden, Katharina secretly leaves Linz, drawing a crude picture as a farewell since she cannot write.

She settles with Greta in Heumaden, where Pastor Binder asks her not to attend his church. She eats and spins downstairs among the animals. Armed men arrive at dawn and arrest her. She is imprisoned first in Stuttgart's thieves' tower, then transferred to Güglingen, where she is chained by the ankle to the wall. Her two guards are the young and dim Hogg and the older, shrewder Lorenz; both fear her despite her frailty.

Hans writes to Duke Frederick describing his mother as broken in body and spirit. The Reinbolds file a forty-six-point letter to the Duke cataloging every alleged offense. Several witnesses complicate the prosecution: the tailor's wife, Ella Schmidt, insists Katharina meant only to help her dying children; Barbara Meyer, whose mother Beitelspacher had alleged was killed by Katharina's poisoned wine, refuses to blame Katharina for her mother's death; and Helena Frisch, previously tried and acquitted of witchcraft, testifies that a man in a green cape tried to coerce her in prison into naming Katharina as a fellow witch.

When Katharina testifies, she is provocative and unrepentant, offering sharp retorts rather than tears. She experiences visions of the dead, including Maruschl and her parents, and draws strength from them. Asked why she shows no tears, she replies that she has cried so many in her life that none remain. The prosecution urges torture and execution, framing the case as a defense of Leonberg's citizens. The trial papers are sent to the law faculty at the University of Tübingen for deliberation.

In an epilogue set years later, Simon narrates from the Frankfurt Book Fair, where he encounters Susanna, now Hans's widow, selling Hans's early work about a boy whose mother sells magical herb packets and who travels to the moon. Susanna explains that Hans added painstaking footnotes so no one would mistake the fictional mother for a real witch. The Tübingen faculty rules in Katharina's favor, and the Reinbolds are fined nearly a thousand thalers. Katharina endures one final theatrical threat of torture, a man with a knife forbidden from using it, before being freed. She lives with Greta in Heumaden, unable to return to Leonberg due to death threats. Simon visits her one last time, finding her sowing seeds into a garden, calm but altered. She tells him she is fond of him. Gertie later reports that Katharina weeps with joy upon seeing Chamomile, the first tears Gertie has ever seen her cry, and that Katharina dies in her sleep in mid-April. Simon catalogs the devastation of the years of war and plague: Susanna dies; Pastor Binder is beaten to death by soldiers; Christoph becomes a judge but dies of the plague; Gertie and Agnes die within weeks of each other. Only Greta survives, remarried to a poet in what is rumored to be a happy match.