The Burgermeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town

Steven Ozment (1939-2019), author of The Bürgermeister’s Daughter, was a Mississippi-born historian raised in Arkansas. Ozment completed a doctorate at Harvard, where he later returned to teach; he also taught at Yale, Stanford, and the University of Tübingen in Germany. He published extensively on Germany history and the Protestant Reformation, received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete research in Renaissance history, and won the Philip Schaff Prize for history in 1981. Ozment’s research and other published work complements the story he tells in The Bürgermeister’s Daughter: The backdrop of Anna Büschler’s family drama is a 16th-century Germany in the throes of religious upheaval during the Reformation.

Anna Büschler (1496/98-1552) was the strong-willed daughter of Hermann Büschler, local hero and long-time bürgermeister of Hall. Her difficult relationship with her father, her sexual liaisons, and her legal battles with her family and with the city of Hall made her infamous in the city. Defenders of Anna and her behavior will point to the various injustices she faced (including being imprisoned in her father’s home for six months before escaping), her vivacious personality, and the misogyny of the 16th century when assessing her legacy.