Krantz’s double murder and flight to the Hartz Mountains is the decisive origin event in the family’s later history. It joins sexual betrayal, retaliatory violence, social inequality, and exile in a single catastrophe: a serf who has risen to wealth and stewardship remains legally powerless, and his attempt to answer a private wrong becomes a flight from an entire political order.

Social and Family Background

Krantz recounts the event as part of his family history, while carefully distinguishing what he personally witnessed from what he learned afterward. His father was not originally from the Hartz Mountains. He had been a serf belonging to a wealthy Hungarian nobleman in Transylvania, yet he was neither poor nor illiterate. His intelligence, respectability, and material success had earned him promotion to the position of steward. The promotion changed his duties and standing but not his legal identity: however wealthy a person born into serfdom might become, he remained a serf.

That unresolved contradiction determines the family’s fate. Krantz’s father possessed the resources and competence of a respected household officer, but he could not expect the authorities to treat him as the social equal of the nobleman who held power over him. The later murder is therefore not presented as an isolated domestic crime. It occurs within a hierarchy in which the injured husband knows in advance that his status will deprive him of a fair defense.

At the time, Krantz’s father had been married for approximately five years. The marriage had produced three children: the eldest son, Cæsar, Krantz himself, and a daughter named Marcella. Their Latin-derived names reflect the cultural setting in which Latin was still spoken. The household’s apparent stability was destroyed when Krantz’s mother attracted the attention of the lord of the estate.

Discovery and Double Murder

Krantz’s father was sent away on a mission, leaving his wife exposed to the nobleman’s persistent attentions. She was flattered by his interest and eventually yielded to his wishes. The decisive fact was not rumor or suspicion. His father returned unexpectedly and found her in the company of her seducer, giving him direct and positive evidence of the affair.

The discovery produces the event’s immediate reversal. A husband who had occupied a trusted position within the nobleman’s household becomes an avenger against that same ruling class. Overcome by the force of his feelings, he waited for an opportunity when the two could meet and then murdered both his wife and her seducer. The double killing thus answers one betrayal with another rupture of the social order: the nobleman’s abuse of privilege and the wife’s infidelity are met by violence that the law will not excuse.

Krantz does not present the murder as legally defensible. His father understood that, as a serf, even the provocation he had suffered would not be accepted as a justification. That awareness gives the scene its grim precision. The act is driven by personal outrage, but its aftermath is calculated under the pressure of class law. The father knows that the same deed might be judged differently in a different social position; for him, discovery means not only grief and rage but certain pursuit.

Flight from Transylvania

Immediately after the killings, Krantz’s father gathered whatever money he could seize, harnessed his horses to a sleigh, and took his children with him. It was the depth of winter, and the family departed in the middle of the night. The timing and method of escape show that flight was not a later decision but the continuation of the murder itself: the father had to convert a household into a moving refuge before the authorities learned what had happened.

He understood that he would be pursued and that no part of his native country offered a genuine chance of escape. Within Transylvania, the authorities could still seize him. He therefore continued without interruption, moving away from the jurisdiction that defined him as a serf and into the secluded intricacies of the Hartz Mountains. The mountains become both geographical destination and social counter-space: a place where a hunted family can disappear after the law has made ordinary residence impossible.

Krantz’s own knowledge of this portion of the story is retrospective. He states that he learned the details afterward, so the murder and flight reach the reader through family testimony rather than direct eyewitness narration. His earliest memories begin only after the escape, in a rough but comfortable cottage on the edge of the vast forests covering northern Germany.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The flight relocates the children from Transylvania to an isolated German household. Their father purchases the cottage and surrounding land from a forester who earns a living by hunting and by burning charcoal to smelt ore from neighboring mines. The property lies about two miles from any other habitation. A few acres provide a doubtful but sufficient summer harvest, while winter confines the family indoors; because their father follows the chase, the children are sometimes left alone as wolves prowl continually outside.

This settlement is therefore not a clean escape from danger. It preserves the family, but it also places them in a landscape of isolation, hunting, wolves, and uncertain subsistence. The domestic refuge created by the flight carries the atmosphere of the original crime forward into a new environment. Transylvania is left behind geographically, yet the consequences of the murder remain present in the family’s separation from society and in the precarious life that follows.

The event also establishes the inherited structure of Krantz’s story. A father’s violent response to betrayal saves his children from immediate capture but exposes them to exile and embeds their future in a history of pursuit, concealment, and moral judgment. The double murder is consequently more than a backstory incident: it is the family’s founding wound, the cause of its removal to the Hartz Mountains, and the first link in the chain by which violence and displacement pass into the next generation.