In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

MURDER 159
it is based on a single visit of the priest to Marie Mesmin's house in
Bordeaux, during which he offered her some gifts from his parishioners.
But what no doubt intrigues readers are hints that the victim sympathizes
with the heterodoxy of his enemies (after all, he has collected and offered
gifts to Marie Mesmin), a strange intensity in the gazes of the priest and
the accused, pictures of the whips that were used, and, finally, a photograph
in which the accused, all in black clothes, try to shield their faces
from the lens of the reporter's camera (Annees-Memoire, 184-185). The
gothic quality of these images calls into question the claim that French
society is based on rational principles.
Meanwhile, an even more bizarre case occupies the public's attention
in Germany. On January 19, a jury in Hannover sentences Hans Grans,
the lover and accomplice of Friedrich Haarmann, to twelve years in
prison (Lessing, 304). Grans has sold the clothes of more than fifty boys
and young men, many of them male prostitutes, whom Haarmann murdered
while having sex with them, and then dismembered. Haarmann
himself "estimates" that he killed "about thirty" people (Lessing, 278).
What most attracts the popular imagination is Haarmann's obsession
with biting his victims at the climax of his sexual excitement and letting
them bleed to death. Since it is impossible to attribute legal responsibility
to defendants whose pathologies are so evident, the public turns its
attention from the perpetrator either to the social environment in which
the crime has occurred or to the horrifying morphology of the victims'
dismembered bodies. Probably inspired by the Haarmann case, Johannes
Becher's poem "Der Wiirger" ("The Strangler") derives its impact from
its gruesome details and images:
Parade of the murdered in
the morgue. The first procession: headless
torsos and skulls speared through with knives
between the thighs, one
jack-o'-lantern like an unearthly fireball. The second
procession: the hanged generations. Twisted-up, bruised
bodies, spiraling; their chewed-through tongues,
torn like rags, between their teeth. Third
procession: buckets full of rotting fruit. Gleaming
eadets, noses, sharpening each other, diapered
in newspaper: printed linen.
(Becher, 35)