Two Women and a Poisoning Read online

  Perhaps the murder would never have come about if the women had found help and counsel close at hand. The true misfortune of the classes which we are in the unconscionable habit of referring to as ‘lower’ is not so much their ignorance or lack of humaneness as their total dependence on society and custom. Mrs Klein’s old father clung to the traditional prejudice that a daughter, once happily married off, no longer belongs in her father’s house, but to her husband. He was beguiled by the prevailing notion that a husband is lord over his wife, even when his power is undeserved. And Mrs Klein, who is so staunch in her belief in moral principles that even now she spurns her only means of rescue and would rather confess to murder than to a lesbian relationship—Mrs Klein feared and suffered and hated until the hatred filled her soul and bubbled over, rousing unnatural desire and murderous cravings, cruelty, dissimulation, destruction and self-destruction.

  Berliner Börsen-Courier, 17 March 1923

  Originally published in Joseph Roth, Werke, ed. Klaus Westermann, Cologne, 1989, vol. 1, pp. 952–954

  A Criminal Couple: A Tale of Two Unhappy Marriages

  by Robert Musil

  These last days in Berlin have seen the end of a trial that rightly attracted a good deal of attention and revealed conflicts which one would wish had received attention before they came to court. A Mrs Elli K. was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for the murder of her husband; her friend, Mrs N., who was acquitted of attempting the same on her own husband, was sentenced to eighteen months’ penal servitude for aiding and abetting her. The sentencing is in itself noteworthy: aiding and abetting was punished with a shorter term but a more severe penalty than murder. We cannot know which weighs heavier on the psyche—the length of punishment or the type—but this uncertainty reflects the psychological nature of the crime.

  Elli K., the daughter of simple people, married at a young age a master craftsman, and fled back to her parents after the first weeks of marriage, horror-stricken for reasons that remain unknown because shame prevented her from talking about them, even in the most critical situations. Compelled to rely on vague conjecture, we can only assume one of two causes: either brutal and probably perverse sexual behaviour on the part of the man, or exceptional sensitivity due to inverted feeling in the young woman. One would have thought that in a civilised society—and given the importance we continue to attach to the family in our social order—the woman’s parents could have stepped in with some sound advice and help. But no. Outraged father orders immediate return to husband. Parental authority, as so often, perverted in its course!

  Elli K. returns, only to flee again a few months later, this time to friends; a petition for divorce is filed, but has to be withdrawn, because the harried woman is in no state to confide to a lawyer the horrors she has been through, or perhaps only imagined—for under the intimidating pressure suffered in her parents’ house, even minor injuries may have developed into major psychological trauma. So the marriage goes on, in all its horror, hatefulness and violence.

  Now comes the second twist which, like all that follows, is so typical that it might have been taken from a scientific treatise. Elli K. meets Mrs N., who is likewise unhappily wed to a brute of a man whom she married, evidently somewhat rashly, after the war. A liaison develops between the women; this would seem to suggest a strong lesbian element to Elli’s marital aversion, but it is also possible that it takes her friendship with Mrs N. to arouse in her those slight homosexual leanings that are present in almost all of us. As so often in such cases, the swelling emotion is not satisfied by daily contact, and an exchange of passionate letters begins, of which six hundred alone will be submitted to the court. The women decide to free themselves from their husbands by killing the monsters. Their chosen method is poison, administered in imperceptibly small daily doses. It is plain that Mrs N. has the leading role in this criminal liaison; after all, it is not she who commits the crime, but Elli K.!

  For experience has taught us that in such relationships, the stronger never does the deed himself, but talks the weaker into doing it—often with some initial resistance. He does not act in cold blood; it is not that he intends to let his friend do the deed alone. It is simply that the more susceptible of the two is the one more easily swayed by mutual suggestion. Thus Elli K. is the victim of her friend Mrs N., although she commits the more severe crime. The sentencing always poses difficulties in such cases, and the legal studies that struggle to reconcile the inviolability of the law with the fragility of psychological distinctions are not without their comic side. It is, moreover, probably fair to assume that both women suffered from a degree of psychopathic inferiority—though this need not mean that they were socially inferior!

  There is a book by the Italian sociologist Scipio Sighele, entitled Le crime à deux in the French translation from 1910, which contains hundreds of such cases, all of which follow an almost identical pattern. I quote, by way of example, two extracts from letters written by a woman to a younger man she was trying to inveigle into murdering her husband: ‘Tuesday is the anniversary of the first month of our love; I send you a flower to mark the day; I will do everything in my power to belong to you alone [she mixed poison into her husband’s food!]. Oh! how I long to be free! I suppose the stuff [dynamite, which he was to put in her husband’s shotgun!] is very hard to get hold of?’ Another extract: ‘He was sick yesterday; I think God must be beginning His work.’ The emotional language of these passages reveals to us not only how the noble feeling of love is transformed into a crime, but also how a thought that is outwardly criminal can feel inwardly indistinguishable from a noble feeling of love. In cases of this kind we should ask with particular urgency what portion of blame society bears for letting things come to this pass. J. St. Mill says that an energetic criminal may harbour more evil than a weak, good man, but that he also harbours more seeds of good.

  20 March 1923

  Originally published in Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Adolf Frisé, Hamburg, 1978, vol. 7, pp. 669–671

  ALFRED DÖBLIN (1878–1957) was a German novelist, essayist and short-story writer. He was also a doctor, practising psychiatry in working-class Berlin, the setting of both his most famous novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and his true-crime tale Two Women and a Poisoning. In 1933 Döblin was forced to flee Germany because of his Jewish origins, and he lived in France and the USA for the duration of the war.

  IMOGEN TAYLOR is a translator who has lived in Berlin since 2001. Her translations include Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself by Florian Huber, Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit and The Truth and Other Lies by Sascha Arango.

  PRAISE FOR

  BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

  ‘A raging cataract of a novel, one that

  threatens to engulf the reader in a tumult of

  sensation. It has long been considered the

  behemoth of German literary modernism,

  the counterpart to Ulysses.’

  NEW YORKER

  ‘[An] immense and splendidly gritty novel…

  funny, shockingly violent, absurd, strangely

  tender and memorably peopled.’

  PARIS REVIEW

  ‘Döblin is never sentimental, or hysterical.

  He just gets us to listen to the drumbeat of

  violence throbbing in this city of the mind…

  One of the great anti-war novels of our time.’

  AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

  ‘I learned more about the essence of the

  epic from Döblin than from anyone else. His

  epic writing and even his theory about the epic

  strongly influenced my own dramatic art.’

  BERTOLT BRECHT

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House, 22 William Street, Melbourne Victoria 3000, Australia

  The Text Publishing Company (UK) Ltd

  130 Wood Street, London EC2V 6DL, United Kingdom

  Copyright © 1924 Die Schmiede, Berlin. 1992 Pat
mos Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Walter Verlag, Düsseldorf. All rights reserved by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.

  Translation copyright © Imogen Taylor, 2021

  Introduction © Imogen Taylor, 2021

  The moral rights of Alfred Döblin to be identified as the author and Imogen Taylor as the translator of this work have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Originally published in German as Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord © 1924 Die Schmiede, Berlin. 1992 Patmos Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Walter Verlag, Düsseldorf. All rights reserved by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.

  Published in English by The Text Publishing Company, 2021

  Cover design by Chong W.H.

  Page design by Rachel Aitken

  Typeset in Sabon 11.5/17.5 by J&M Typesetting

  ISBN: 9781922330383 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925923803 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.