Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany

It is a testament to Maria Tatar's interesting and important new book that - even if a social historian might fault her for failure to note and incorporate the medicalization of criminality and twentieth-century debates on justice into her thinking - she is able to place Fritz Lang's film into the context of a much broader discourse on sexual murder throughout the Weimar period, from the actual murders of criminals like Fritz Haarmann and Peter Kurten; through the figurative murders of artists like Otto Dix and Georg Grosz, who frequently depicted the killing and dismemberment of women in their art; to the disturbingly nonchalant literary violence against women in Alfred Doblin's modernist masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz. In a sense Tatar rediscovers the obvious: the fact that violence against and murder of women was a central part of Weimar discourse. And yet this seemingly obvious fact has been consistently ignored and undertheorized in several decades of Weimar scholarship, including scholarship on Dix, Grosz, and Doblin. Hence Tatar deserves great credit for refocusing our attention on something that was always there for us to see, but which, like Poe's purloined letter, was perhaps for that very reason all too cleverly hidden. Although Tatar owes an obvious debt to scholars who have previously sought to address similar issues - notably Beth Irwin Lewis, Patrice Petro, Elisabeth Bronfen, Andreas Huyssen, and Tania Modleski - her book is the first attempt to give a coherent account of Weimar's fascination with sexual murder. As such, it is also a contribution to the growing body of work on the strong misogynist tendencies of modernism itself.

The book contains a number of relatively minor mistakes and inaccuracies. It will, for instance, come as a surprise to students of Expressionism that the play Citizens of Calais was written by Ernst Barlach, not Georg Kaiser. (p. 182) My major reservations about the book, however, involve larger issues. Tatar's interpretation of M is based on the assumption that viewers "find ourselves rooting for the villain" (p. 166) and against the mothers of the murdered girls. I have never once met a viewer who responded in this way. Quite the contrary: in my experience, most viewers are disappointed when Beckert is "saved" by the police. The very fact that the Nazis subsequently used Beckert's impassioned self-defense in their anti-Semitic propaganda film The Eternal Jew, acknowledged but not sufficiently theorized by Tatar, militates against her conclusion that the speech draws audiences to the murderer's side. Moreover, it is a stretch to argue that, because of a brief postscript in which mothers are urged to watch over their children carefully, the film positions "mothers as guilty." (p. 164) Such interpretive leaps seem to come from a determination to fit all of Weimar cultural production into the straitjacket of a rigidly misogynist schema. The reality, I suspect, is somewhat more complex. If indeed Weimar culture was as completely misogynist as Tatar maintains, then it is no surprise that so many women supported the National Socialists and their call for a new traditionalism. The author does not address this issue. Moreover, Tatar does not sufficiently distinguish Weimar cultural production from production in other times and other places. Therefore it becomes difficult to judge whether the preoccupation with sexual murder is specific to Weimar or part of a larger modern or even Western phenomenon. Such reservations do not, however, dampen enthusiasm for a fascinating and important book.

Stephen Brockman Carnegie Mellon University

COPYRIGHT 1996 Journal of Social History
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