Unknowingly, Kürten had reinforced and foreseen Freud’s theories in Totem and Taboo (1913) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)—the horror of incest, sexuality and violence, society’s laws against the individual’s narcissistic and erotic desires. Freud, like Marx before him, saw man as increasingly alienated. Kürten embodied Freud’s theories and enacted civilization’s ultimate discontents. ‘The bit of truth behind all this—one so eagerly denied—is that men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment. The result is that their neighbour is to them not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus.’ [128] The Werewolf of Düsseldorf.
Engineers built a specially designed guillotine in the yard of Köln’s Klingelputz prison. On the final walk to his death, Kürten asked his doctor, ‘After my head has been chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.’
Although never confessing to necrophilia, Kürten’s crimes indicate that he almost certainly used death as a sexual stimulant and as a means to orgasm. Whereas Bertrand felt disgust at the sight of the body of a dead male, Kürten killed regardless of age, sex, and even species. Both men lived in the solipsistic world of the sexual psychopath in which they were the prime being—nothing and nobody mattered when it came to satiating their lust. Both were sadistic narcissists who could not establish relationships with other human beings. Where Bertrand had headaches until he had satisfied his obsession, Kürten felt a building tension until the conclusion of the violent sex event. Both men enjoyed the danger of their crimes, Bertrand evading guards, fording icy ditches, while Kürten returned to the scene of his crimes or stayed to watch the bodies burn and listen to the screams. Could both men have been abused as children? Could they have fostered their lust for death as revenge fantasies? Both men lived outward lives of respectability, so what germinated their perversions?
Is there a socio-historic cause? Carl Grossmann (1863–1922), a sadistic sexual predator and child molester, killed and cannibalized up to 50 women, the court found the Bluebeard of the Silesian Railways guilty of 14 sex-killings and sentenced him to death. Grossmann hanged himself before the execution. Karl Denke (1870–1924) the Münsterberg Mass Murderer, a quiet recluse, respected in his neighbourhood, murdered and cannibalized 30 people over a 20-year period. When police searched his house they found curing jars containing human flesh, amputated fingers, teeth, and items made from human skin. Denke also hanged himself before trial. Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Haarmann (1879 –1925) sexually murdered 27 young men and boys between 1918 and 1924. He considered his execution for 24 of these killings as the ultimate means of orgasm. Haarmann killed his victims by ripping out their throats with his teeth and strangling them in the act of sodomy, he threw what remained of the dismembered corpses in the Leine river—the media called him the Vampire of Hanover and the Butcher of Hanover.
Robert Musil (November 6, 1880–April 15, 1942), Peter Kürten (26 May 1883–2 July 1931), Franz Kafka (3 July 1883–3 June 1924), Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889–30 April 1945), Ludwig Wittgenstein (26 April 1889–29 April 1951), Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889–May 26, 1976), John Heartfield (19 June 1891–26 April 1968), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), George Grosz (26 July 1893–6 July 1959), The social and economic privations after the First World War, the German Revolution of 1918, and the Weimar Republic (1918–33) caused an explosion of avant-garde art, literature, and film, and a commensurate increase in sex killing and cannibalism. Of the four lust murderers who stalked Germany in the 1920s, four practised necrosadism, three necrophagy, and suspicion must fall on all of them for being necrophiles.
The exploits of these murderers found their way into literature in the character of the psychopathic Moosbrugger in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–42), Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair (1934)—written while Nabokov was living in Berlin, D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), and Patrick Süskind’s Perfume (1985). A late German Expressionist film—and forerunner of film noir—premiered on 11 May 1931 while Peter Kürten awaited execution. Set in Berlin, the crimes of the paedophiliac sex killer Hans Beckert, played by Peter Lorre, are similar to those of Grossmann, Denke, Haarmann, and Kürten, the film portraying a city (Berlin) terrorized—as Paris, Hanover, and Düsseldorf had been—by a necrosadist.
Throughout the film, the sex-killer whistles the refrain ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, the lyrics of which could have been sung in disharmony by the barbarous quartet of Kürten, Grossmann, Haarmann and Denke:
Cut to: Patch of scrub bordered by trees (Berlin’s Grunewald forest standing in for Düsseldorf’s Grafenberger Woods), a small ball rolls out of the undergrowth and rocks to a stop. Cut to: Child’s balloon, anthropomorphic, all torso and head, spastically dancing against overhead electric wires—a young girl is murdered, maybe raped, and a city searches for her killer—Fritz Lang’s M.
29 years later, a basement (abasement), a young woman touches the shoulder of an old lady and the chair she is sitting on swivels around in a rocking chair to reveal a mummified (mummyfied) corpse, skin shrivelled to the skull, teeth revealed to their roots, a dark void where once were eyes. The young woman screams, turns to run, a lightbulb swings giving the room a German-Expressionist chiaroscuro. As she screams, another old woman lunges through the door wielding a knife, a man follows and grapples with her, in the struggle, the woman’s wig falls off revealing a young man dressed as his dead mother—Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.