In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

160 ARRAYS
Theodor Lessing, a philosopher at the Technical University of Hannover
and a part-time journalist who covers the Haarmann case for
several newspapers and magazines, has been repeatedly excluded from
the courtroom for criticizing the tribunal's procedures. With explicit
reference to the work of Sigmund Freud, Lessing urges that Haarmann's
crimes be analyzed on a psychoanalytic basis. He thus joins a growing
number of writers and political activists who draw attention to the
judicial system's loss of authority. Vorwarts, the daily newspaper of the
German Social-Democratic Party, goes so far as to question the moral
legitimacy of the prosecutor's investigations: "Even when the prosecutor
is a man of honor, his whole attitude must be directed against the
accused, and he thus instinctively and automatically turns away from
any possibility of exonerating them" (Vorwarts, July 25). Lessing certainly
has more specific reasons to protest. He is incensed that the
Hannover court, in the trial against Grans, refuses to acknowledge evidence
of Haarmann's psychological subjection to his lover: Haarmann
was eager to please Grans by offering him the clothes of his victims, but
the murders were not instigated by Grans, as the prosecutor seems to
assume (Lessing, 304ff.). Furthermore, Lessing reveals that, until the
time the crimes were discovered, the police used Haarmann as a spy in
Hannover's red-light district. Such relentless criticism and protest make
the police, the court, and the State of Lower Saxony appear, paradoxically,
as agents in the ongoing confusion between crime and the law,
individual and society. But the State takes its revenge on Lessing. After
a boycott of his courses by Fascist student organizations at the University
of Hannover, a boycott triggered by another series of newspaper articles
in which Lessing, a Jew, has dared to lampoon the nation's president,
Paul von Hindenburg, Lessing is relieved of his professorship (Chronik,
111).
The Haarmann case epitomizes the public's fascination with murder
as a phenomenon in which various crises of Western culture are converging.
This is why the Haarmann trial generates such diverse images,
incidents, and stories. And it has additional ramifications for the weakening
of the State's authority: the agitation by Fascist students is part of
a broader tension between the judicial system and far-right groups over
the issue of the so-called vehmic murders (Chronik, 17, 33). Since the
end of the war, the German government has failed to demobilize and
disband the paramilitary Freikorps (volunteer corps), although they re-