Born on 26 May 1883 in the Mülheim district of Köln (Cologne), Peter Kürten spent his poverty-stricken childhood in a one-roomed apartment with thirteen younger brothers and sisters. His alcoholic and sexiopathic father subjected the family to violence and his mother and sisters to rape and attempted rape. The children witnessed their father’s violent sexual assaults and incestuous intercourse with his thirteen-year-old daughter and these events—plus his father’s incarceration for attempted incest—fuelled Peter’s sadistic childhood fantasies. As in many cases of serial murder and necrophilia, Peter began his career of depravity by inflicting violence and sex on animals. These were all mechanisms of defamiliarization.
A dogcatcher lived in the Kürten house, and the man taught Peter how to torture dogs and showed him how to sexually excite them. In this, Peter transferred his father’s sexual violence on to strays that roamed the fortified German city, enlisting the brutal dogcatcher as his father figure. At the age of ten, while boating on the Rhine, Peter drowned another boy and attempted to drown yet another who came to his friend’s aid. As he moved into puberty, the sexual manipulation and torture of dogs and the thrill he felt whilst drowning the boy developed into oricide and hiricide as he repeatedly stabbed sheep and goats while having intercourse with them.
By the turn of the century, Peter had been arrested and imprisoned for theft on a number of occasions and would spend 24 years of his life in prison mostly in Düsseldorf. In 1899, he met a prostitute who allowed him to explore his sadistic side, and he now had a human outlet for his sexual fantasies, her masochism fuelling his violent lust.
Published in the same year that Peter met his masochistic partner, Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices (The Torture Garden) hints at the reasoning Kürten used to justify the escalation of his violent lust to sexual murder. ‘You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretences of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.’[121]
The German industrial revolution had swelled the population of Düsseldorf and increased the alienation of its citizens, after defeat in World War I and the occupation by French and British armies, itinerant workers, beggars, and thieves roamed the cities—perfect for any would-be serial killer. While in prison, Peter had elaborated and perfected his unreal universe, his antihuman philosophy. In the introduction to The Torture Garden, Tom McCarthy writes, ‘For the idealist Hegel, the material world is there to be abstracted by the philosopher or artist into thought, into pure, sublimated concept. Hegel’s most famous commentator, Kojève, describes this sublimating process as a form of murder. It is hard not to hear an echo (or, again, pre-echo) of this description in the conversations of Mirbeau’s philosophers, poets and moralists who talk of “backs on the street which cry out for the knife” or his explorer who envisages a bullet “which will annihilate what it hits, leaving nothing.”’
Kürten’s perversity meant annihilation of the other, the event of murder forming a complete absence of person, a negative humanity; he would transgress prison law in order to be placed in solitary confinement, and his detachment from others meant he could fantasize without the need to socialize. Kürten killed men, women, children, and animals—to Peter, every back cried out for a knife, everything existed to be annihilated, to be completely destroyed. Kürten had no understanding of his Gattungswesen (social-being), his life embodied Marx’s theories of alienation, ‘The class of the proletariat feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.’[122]
It’s interesting to note that Marx and Engels collaborated on this essay in Paris in 1844, a few months before Bertrand’s necrophiliac atrocities escalated.
On the 25th of May 1913, Kürten burgles an inn on the Wolfstrasse in Köln, he searches the ground floor and, finding nothing worth stealing, walks up the stairs to where the family sleeps. He looks in the rooms and in one finds a 10-year-old girl—Christine Klein—sleeping under a feather blanket. He grabs the girl by the throat and strangles her, excited by the girl’s pathetic struggling. The girl passes out and Kürten strips her and pushes his fingers into her vagina. He then takes out a pocketknife, holds the girl’s head back and slashes her throat. He listens to the blood pump out and drip onto the carpet, some of it splashes across his hand in rhythmic arcs. As she dies, he bites her tongue, punctures her throat twice with the knife. It takes three minutes for her to die and he leaves her body on the bed and returns to Düsseldorf. The next day, he goes back to the scene of the crime and drinks beer in a café with a view of the inn, listening to people talk about the crime, the horror of others excited him and the murder of the girl stimulated his pathological sadism.
In the same year, the literary journal Arcadia published Franz Kafka’s ‘Das Urteil’ (‘The Judgement’) in which a son grapples with the legacy and disappointment of his bullying and disapproving father. The old man eventually condemns his son to death by water, proclaiming, ‘So now you know what else there was besides yourself; up till now all you knew was you! You were an innocent child, really, but it would be truer to say you were a veritable fiend!’[123] The son runs through the city streets to the river, leaps over parapets and clings to the rails until he weakens and drops, and ‘At that moment, a quite unending flow of traffic streamed over the bridge.’[124] Kafka admitted to Max Brod that the last line meant a ‘violent ejaculation.’[125]
Kürten’s inaugural murder, the primal escalation of his death lust either re-enacts the sexual onslaughts his father perpetrated on his mother and sisters, or protects the young girl from further harm. Police found a 9cm-long cut on the girl’s throat but no signs of phallic rape. After digitally penetrating her, Kürten had incised a new unpenetrated vagina on the girl’s neck, the blood coursing over the bridge of his hand, as a ‘violent ejaculation,’ the blood as metaphor for his own compulsive masturbation, the site and sight, the feel of his own ejaculative emission while fantasizing about the event now actualized.
In 1920, with Kürten in prison for arson and theft, Düsseldorf was at the forefront of the German General Strike as part of the Ruhr uprising, a left-wing and communist workers’ revolt. Over 300,000 miners and other workers took control of Düsseldorf. The Freikorps—a paramilitary militia—murdered 45 striking miners on the 15th of April 1920. Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 13 July 1934, included the Friekorps in his list of ‘pathological enemies of the state,’ revealing that he had read a diary from 1918 that provided: ‘…an insight into the mentality of people who, without realizing it, have found in nihilism their ultimate creed. Incapable of any real cooperation, determined to take a stand against any kind of order filled by hatred of every authority as they are their uneasiness and their restless this can be quelled only by their permanent mental and conspiratorial preoccupation with the disintegration whatever exists at the given time.’[126]
122
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘The Holy Family,’
123
Franz Kafka,
125
Max Brod,
126
Adolf Hitler,