Two Women and a Poisoning Read online

  In the press, the verdict was the object of a dispute governed by political and religious colour. One newspaper, the organ of a confessional party, printed the following comment: ‘Once again, the jurors in Moabit Court have pronounced an astonishingly lenient verdict. The motives identified were sexual aberrations and the ensuing marital conflicts, and they were quite sufficient to explain the deed. But in their attempts to clear themselves, the woman criminals made the court listen to all kinds of stories about their maltreatment and the monstrous demands of their victim; and the jurors, to cap all their lenience, ended by filing a plea for clemency for the murderesses. In these times of general moral degeneracy, one may pity the individual criminal all one likes, but what is to become of society if crimes are so leniently judged? Would judge and jury—and even the defence—be so sure of the goodness of their hearts if they were the mourners in such cases? And is it not one purpose of punishment to deter; or have our present representatives of justice gone over in a body to the opponents of the deterrent theory?’

  Expert witness Dr H., that experienced authority on homosexual love, published his own observations on the sentence—‘so mild as to be unique in criminal history’—under the journal heading ‘A Dangerous Verdict’. Sexual inversion did not, he said, stem from criminal intent, but from an infelicitous combination of genes. On no account did homosexual proclivities give people the right to remove obstacles by force, let alone sweep away anyone who stood in the way of their union. But this was what had happened. The jurors’ verdict allowed the two young women to carry out their intention of entering into a second marriage with one another in only a few years’ time. Dr H. was adamant in his refusal to see the slightest excuse for such criminal murder in the women’s homosexual inclination. It was, he said, tragic that Mrs Link’s father had twice led her back to Link, though she was unfit for marriage and motherhood: a woman belongs to her husband. But neither woman’s want of intelligence—Mrs Link suffered from infantilism, a form of arrested development, and Mrs Bende from a feeble-mindedness that bordered on imbecility—was pronounced enough to preclude free will. It remained a moot point whether or not their accounts of their brutal treatment at the hands of their husbands corresponded with the facts. It seemed certain that the severely neuropathic Link loved his wife to the point of humiliation; her blankness and coldness seemed to have driven him berserk; his anger heightened her fear; her obstinacy sent him into a fury. Dr H. knew, from ample experience, to what extent woman friends of this kind were capable of poisoning their husbands’ lives. One such person had once written to him: ‘God help the man who buys us on the marriage market; we will cheat him of his very happiness without even meaning to.’ In the case in hand, however, Elli Link took the criminal step from a metaphorical poisoning to a literal one; and our expert felt obliged to remark on the dangerous conclusions that might be drawn from her mild sentence—and, indeed, on the possible harm to the common good. He argued for the necessity of sexual education and for the reintroduction of insuperable aversion as a ground for divorce: ‘A state that treats marriage as a private matter acts inconsequentially if it takes the contrary position when it comes to the dissolution of such marriage.’

  In a short study of the case, K.B., a pupil of the expert witness just cited, asked whether the women’s hatred was merely the result of their husbands’ brutality and their homosexual love no more than a consequence of their acquired aversion to the opposite sex—or whether their homosexual emotion was innate and thus the true reason for their marital disharmony. Mrs Link claimed, credibly enough, to have had no intercourse with men before her marriage; she said she had enjoyed leading them on and then dropping them. A photograph showed her posing as a soldier; her gait and stature had some of the characteristics of the male type common to homosexual women. Mrs Bende was a less straightforward proposition. And yet certainly her features and character displayed a great many male traits, which, taken together with the homosexual friendship, made innate homosexuality extremely likely.

  •

  The sentences of both women were carried out. Margarete Bende’s marriage was dissolved due to culpability on both sides: criminal offence on her part, adultery on his.

  EPILOGUE

  When I look back on the whole affair it’s like in the story: ‘Along came the wind and tore up the tree.’ I don’t know what kind of a wind it was or where it came from. The whole is a carpet made up of odds and ends—cloth and silk, scraps of metal, lumps of clay. It has been darned with straw, wire and thread. In some places the pieces lie next to each other, unconnected. Others are held together with glue or glass. And yet there are no gaps, and everything bears the stamp of truth. It is cast in the mould of our thoughts and feelings. This is how it happened; those involved would agree. But at the same time, it isn’t.

  We know nothing of psychological continuity or causality, nothing of the substance of our psyche or its structures. We have to accept the facts of the case—the letters written, the acts done—and make a point of failing to interpret them in any real sense. Even if we had delved deeper here and there, we would have been none the wiser.

  First of all, there are the frightfully unclear words we use to speak about such processes and relations. Wishy-washiness wherever we turn, sometimes downright childishness. The stupid, summary words to describe what goes on inside people: fondness, aversion, repugnance, love, vengefulness. A mishmash, a muddle, designed only for simple, everyday communication. It is as if we had labelled bottles without checking the contents. Link develops a fondness for blithe, childlike Elli—but what changes take place in him when that happens, what brings the changes about, what course do they take, how do they end? There is a whole bundle of facts which the lazy word ‘fondness’ does not so much denote as overlook. The danger of such words is always that we hear them and think we understand; this prevents us from getting at the facts. No chemist would work with such impure materials. Newspaper reports and novels which tell of such lives have, by dint of repetition, done much to encourage us to content ourselves with these empty words. Most interpretations of the psyche are nothing but novelistic invention.

  How are we to imagine psychological connections—or, indeed, causality? We dress up the principle of causality. We take what we know and then we apply some psychology. In such cases, disorder is a knowledge superior to order.

  Who is so conceited as to fancy that he knows the true driving forces behind such a crime? When I was reflecting on the three or four people involved in this affair, I felt the urge to walk the streets that they were wont to walk. I sat in the public house where the two women had met, visited the flat of one of the women, talked to her, talked to and studied others who were involved. I wasn’t out for tawdry social sketches. But it was plain to me that no part of a person’s life can be understood in isolation. People live in symbiosis with other people and other things. Their lives touch; they come together, grow close. That is something real and important: people’s symbiosis with others and with the flats, houses, streets and squares where they live. It is, I think, a sure though obscure truth. If I single out any one person, it is as if I were to observe a leaf or the joint of a finger and then try to describe its nature and development. It can’t be done: the branch and the tree, or the hand and the animal have also to be described.

  What a lot is at work, what a lot goes on beyond the individual. The statistics are astonishing. The wave of suicides ebbs and flows steadily each year. There are overarching rules. From within these rules, a force emerges, an essence. The individual notices neither force nor rule, but obeys both.

  How strange the simple fact: a person is young and has certain impulses; he grows older and finds his impulses changed. This happens to us all. And each of us regards his youth and love as his private affair and believes he is fulfilling his own nature. But if one person were not like another—if there weren’t others like us—we wouldn’t be able to understand anyone. In this truth we see a universal motor of our actions
: our age in life; mankind itself. In one way or another, that motor determines the form our lives take. It is the force that drives us—nothing more.

  When grim Link looks at Elli and feels fondness for her, what specific reactions take place? What brings two people together and why them rather than others? If I disregard the general course of the world, what is it in people’s make-up, in their particular substances or in their organisms as a whole, that drives their urge for another person—and what is achieved by their bond and how far does it go? Chemistry has clear notions of the form and degree of interaction between substances. There is the law of mass action, the theory of affinity, and specific affinity coefficients. Reactions occur at different, precisely measured rates; substances become active under particular conditions; painstakingly studied equilibria are established. Chemical substances and their patterns of interaction are meticulously examined; all factors are determined. This is a good method. And the findings are not without relevance to the workings of the organic world. If we want to examine closely the way we act, we would do well to turn our attention to unorganised matter and the general forces of nature. For we, too, are subject to those forces—we are the forces that we see at work in nature, in flasks and test tubes, in us.

  Zoology can help us to reveal the real motors of our actions. The large bulk of our psyche is governed by instincts. By exposing those instincts and examining them, we bring to light the driving forces behind our actions.

  Then there are distant, indiscernible motors. Some human organs can be cut into without our noticing; these organs are insensible. Large tumours grow undetected in the human body. A child is bad-tempered because he hasn’t had enough sleep, but he explains his temper by saying that another child hit him. In the same way, bullets can come out of the blue and hit us and change us, and we notice only the change, not the motor itself, the active force, the bullet. After that, things run their course within us. Because we react to the blow in our own way, we think we are at one with ‘ourselves’.

  These are the distant and indiscernible motors of our actions. They are just as they appear in Elli, who plays with men and doesn’t know why she only plays. Now it is the shape of her ovary that moves her to act the way she does, now an obscure parapsychic force or set of forces, now the weave of the world. And sometimes it is not an individual, standing there before us, changing and growing, but a part of the world itself.

  I have tried to demonstrate the difficulties of the case, to obliterate the impression that we understand all, or even most, of such a sizable piece of life. We understand it, on a certain level.

  Elli’s Handwriting

  (December 1922, in custody awaiting trial.) Immediate circumstances: Elli is distracted (writing ‘daß’ [that] rather than ‘doch’ [though] in line 4, leaving letters incomplete); her downstrokes curve despondently to the right. In general, her handwriting is unintellectual, austere, functional; the lines scant and meagre. The direction of the lines is sustained, despite her preoccupation, as is the left margin; the letters are squeezed together; the writing is small: a thrifty, orderly petty bourgeois, unremarkable, with no real sense of self, though possibly obstinate and defiant (see the upper loop in ‘Termin’, line 3).

  A reserved nature (see the formation of arcades when the letters ‘n’ and ‘m’ are joined, and in ‘ich’ and ‘auch’ [line 1]; the firm closure of the vowels ‘a’ and ‘o’; the upside-down arch of the ‘u’). The angle of writing ranges from a moderate to a pronounced leftwards slant, indicating inner coolness and a preponderance of reason over emotion, but also impulsiveness, a love of sensation and a propensity for pleasure quite without psychological equilibrium (the writing’s want of clarity, its doughiness). To sum up: unrestrainedly impulsive and inflammable behind a cool, austere, reserved exterior; the whole permeated by a petty-bourgeois outlook.

  Margarete’s Handwriting

  (Date unknown, in custody awaiting trial.) Effect of prison less marked. The handwriting altogether very different from Elli’s: large, wide, leftward slanting, irregular, spilling into and generally filling the left margin. A woman with a temperament, passionate, keyed-up. Strong sense of self, fond of the limelight. No talent for making plans; so ruled by emotions that she is unable to size up or make sense of a situation. And yet no real compassion either, no tenderness (see double hooks in her ‘n’ and ‘m’), only egoism (prevalence of clockwise loops). More open than Elli, but not significantly. Little energy or purpose; slight flagging and recovery (concavity of line 3). Greater inner unity than Elli: a flowing, connected hand; coherence, continuity, and even adherence contrast here with Elli’s volatility. Taken together with the slight flagging and want of practical ability, the large, vigorous handwriting with its air of self-assurance suggests that Margarete overcompensates, gilds the lily: she acts strong and confident but is feeble.

  Elli’s handwriting more troubling, more dangerous, in spite of her clean, bourgeois outlook. Margarete gregarious and weak despite her brusque, impulsive manner.

  Diagrams to Show the Psychological Changes

  in Elli Link, Link and Margarete Bende

  November 1919 to May 1922

  Mrs Nebbe and Mrs Klein

  by Joseph Roth

  Mrs Nebbe and Mrs Klein are up before the court for murder by poisoning. Mrs Klein killed her husband; Mrs Nebbe did not succeed. Mrs Nebbe was the active party and, possibly unawares, the goader; Mrs Klein was the goaded, the weaker, the ‘bondwoman’. The stronger failed in her attempt; the weaker successfully poisoned her husband. She was armed with more zeal, more fire, more obsession.

  The force of Mrs Nebbe was at work within her, raised to a higher power by her ‘bondwoman’s’ passion.

  Yet however strange this ‘sensational trial’ and however odd the two women, their marriages and lives are typical of the petty-bourgeois circles from which they hail. This gives the trial particular social and psychological significance. In the great, cruel city, a thousand marital tragedies are played out daily; only coincidence prevents crimes from being committed or conceals those that are—and the horror takes its toll in silence and the law knows nothing of what goes on.

  From a psychological point of view, the murderesses are interesting because they offer proof of the highly complex processes at work in these primitive women we think we know so well when we encounter them on trains and in shops and on the street. Perversity and cunning, mystery and entanglement are not necessarily the result of highbrow decadence or the nervous sensitivity that comes from continued breeding; rather, they are the result of innate unnatural emotional storms, the conditions for which are everywhere, in all of us—in the ‘simple’ peasant soul and the ‘sophisticated’ organism of the intellectual. Those at the trial who were mature enough to shut out the thrilling and lascivious side of things and draw a lesson from what happened will have arrived at the conclusion that the angels and devils in us have equal powers and equal chances of victory; and that the unnatural leanings that were present in the women from the start—and are perhaps present in us all—were bred by their observance of the social rule.

  Thousands of women suffer in marriage as Mrs Klein unquestionably did. They suffer at the hands of sadistic males whose weak brutality so often conceals itself in the gargantuan bulk of a berserker. It is a cruel trick of nature to house weaklings in colossal bodies to which they are not equal. Their minds are too feeble for their excessive muscular power, and nature’s useless gift finds its release only in brutality, which is the heroism of cowards.

  Thousands of women suffer and say nothing. In the cases of Nebbe and Klein, however, the cruelty of man awakened an inclination for the opposite of the male—for the female. This inclination grew into a passion—yet it was not this alone that led to the crime, but the women’s knowledge of the unlawful and forbidden nature of their love. It was not with an act of passion, but with an act of taboo, a ‘sin’, that they began their descent into murder.

  Their particular species of m
urder, moreover—murder by poison—seems by common consent to be regarded as especially morally objectionable. The newspapers repeat the banal, unoriginal and shabby opinion that poison is an insidious weapon, a woman’s weapon, a weapon of ‘stealthy revenge’. Such indignation at the method of murder recalls the protests so often heard during the war against enemy acts that were in violation of international law, though they are a necessary consequence of war. People were appalled at the use of dumdum bullets, but gladly forgave hand grenades. It says something for the keenness of the human conscience, but hardly speaks for the logic of human reason that even atrocities are expected to be humane. Poisoning someone is, in the end, no more or less cowardly than jumping out at him and striking him dead with an axe. There is no humane method of murder; even the ‘electric execution’ in America is not humane. Mrs Klein and Mrs Nebbe turned to murder out of love for one another; their hatred of their husbands was only a secondary motive. Doing away with the men was merely a means to an end, the end itself being to fulfil their desire. They had to kill cleverly so as to be free to exercise their love. They had to use poison because it was the least likely to betray them.

  This method, of course, resulted in protracted deceit and a constant comedy. But there is no truth in the prevailing opinion that long dissimulation weighs heavy on a murderer. The human soul knows enduring lust, abiding passion, chronic desire—and they are neither better nor worse than the acute varieties. Hatred feeds off its own strength; the longer it lasts, the fiercer it becomes, and each act it spawns is committed ‘in the heat of the moment’, even the long and carefully prepared. For preparation itself is an integral part of the ‘crime passionnel’.