http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Iss...An explorer (der Forschungsreisende)is made the reluctant witness of an execution carried out in the penal colony. The condemned man is a soldier sentenced for 'disobedience and insulting behaviour to a superior' (Beleidigung des Vorgesetzten), and he is accompanied to his death only by a guard and an officer. The instrument of his execution is an elaborate apparatus invented by the former Commandant of the colony, of whose regime the officer is a fanatical but isolated partisan, and the officer explains the workings of the apparatus to the explorer in some detail. The machine has three parts: a bed, covered in cotton wool, to which the naked condemned man is strapped; the designer, which, like the bed, looks like a dark wooden chest; and the harrow which shuttles on a steel ribbon between the bed and the designer. The apparatus is thus a sort of cross between a jacquard loom and an ink-jet printer; its central component, the harrow, made of glass so that an onlooker can see through it the inscription taking place on the body, contains two sets of needles, the longer ones for writing and the shorter ones for spraying jets of water to wash away the blood. What it writes on the body is the sentence (Urteil)that the court has handed down; but because the script is so complicated, so full of flourishes, so much like an illegible scrawl (this indeed is all that the explorer can make of it), it is only after the sixth hour that the radiance of
Enlightenment comes to the condemned man, who begins to decipher the script 'with his wounds' until the moment of his death.
