Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) 1-1-2011 Lustmord and Loving the Other: A History of Sexual Murder in Modern Germany and Austria (1873-1932) Amber Aragon-Yoshida Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Aragon-Yoshida, Amber, "Lustmord and Loving the Other: A History of Sexual Murder in Modern Germany and Austria (1873-1932)" (2011). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 551. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/551 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of History Dissertation Examination Committee: Hillel Kieval, Chair Andrea Friedman Gerald N. Izenberg Paul Michael Lützeler Lynne Tatlock Corinna Treitel LUSTMORD AND LOVING THE OTHER: A HISTORY OF SEXUAL MURDER IN MODERN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA (1873-1932) by Amber Marie Aragon-Yoshida A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2011 Saint Louis, Missouri copyright by Amber Marie Aragon-Yoshida December 2011 Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without the generous institutional support from the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis. I also wish to thank the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University for making possible my year abroad as an exchange student in 2006-2007 at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. Funding through the R.W. Davis Travel Grant also helped make possible short-term research trips to Berlin, Vienna, and North Rhine-Westphalia. Special thanks to the staff at the Kreisarchiv Warendorf, the Landesarchiv Berlin, the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen Abteilung Westfalen, the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Zeitungsabteilung, the Universitätsbibliothek München, Stadtarchiv – Bochumer Zentrum für Stadtgeschichte, Stadtarchiv Münster, the Universitätsbibliothek Wien, Bernard Becker Medical Library, and Olin Library for their help in locating primary source materials. Special thanks to: Jonathan Petropoulos, for introducing me to Maria Tatar’s inspiring work Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (1995) when I was an undergraduate at Pomona College; Andreas Wirsching, for investing in my project in the very initial stages; Richard Wetzell, for kindly introducing me to relevant works on related topics; Karl Corino, for the groundwork he did years ago and for directing me to pertinent source materials; Eva Bischoff and Mitchell Ash, for helpful conversations in the beginning stages of my research; Keely Stauter-Halstead and Nancy Wingfield, for allowing me to present and receive feedback of an early draft of a chapter at the conference, “Sex in the Cities: Prostitution, White Slaving, and Sexual Minorities in Eastern and Central Europe.” I would like to thank to all of my committee members who provided me with the valuable and insightful feedback that I needed to complete this project: Hillel Kieval (chair), Andrea Friedman, Gerald N. Izenberg, Paul Michael Lützeler, Lynne Tatlock, and Corinna Treitel. I wish to thank my advisor Hillel for helping me learn a valuable lesson through this process—that is, detours in writing are sometimes necessary to arrive at where I want to go. I wish to thank the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers at Phillips Academy for giving me the necessary support to successfully enter and complete a Ph.D. program. I would like to thank the faithful friends that I have had in St. Louis over the years—who became like family to me and enabled me to call St. Louis home during my graduate career including: Meg, Carol, Emmanuelle, Wendy, Laura, Steve, Paul, Paul, and Helen. I also would like to thank my parents and siblings for all of their love, support, and encouragement in my personal and professional pursuits over the years. To my husband Koji Yoshida, my “impossible possibility,” thank you for all of your acceptance, patience, and love and for sharing this project with me. To the One who promised that He would give me something to write, thank you for giving me the strength to finish and the ability to continue this project as a Washington University / Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte under Director Prof. Dr. Andreas Wirsching. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii List of Tables iv Introduction 2 Chapter One: ‘Lustmord’ Coined: Newspaper Reports of Serial Sex Murder in Bochum 24 (1878-1885) Chapter Two: The Development of ‘ Lustmord ’ as a Scientific Concept (1886-1910) 50 Chapter Three: The Case of Christian Voigt in Musil’s Vienna (1902/1910-1913): The Moral 79 Universe of an Intelligent Sex Murderer Chapter Four: The Case of Carl Grossman in Post-War Berlin (1921-1922) 170 Chapter Five: Sexual Murder and Love as the Problem and Solution to Identity, Morality, 206 and Gender Relations in The Man without Qualities (1930/1932) Conclusion 235 Bibliography 245 iii List of Tables Figure 1.1: Map of present day Bochum, Germany and surrounding communities. ------------------------- 30 Figure 1.2: Announcement of a large reward for the discovery of the murderer of the midwife Becker ---34 Figure 1.3: A drawing of the way the body of Friederike Ostermann was found by the investigating authorities from April 11, 1882. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------40 Figure 1.4: Front cover of an 1882 publication from Hanover announcing the latest news about the investigation in Bochum -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------44 Figure 1.5: Folk song about the need to catch the perpetrator in Bochum --------------------------------------45 Figure 3.1: Drawing by court physicians Prof. Dr. Reuter and Dr. Meixner of wounds Peer sustained on her lower body. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------80 Figure 3.2: Front cover of the IKZ , showing the murder victim, suspected murderer, and crime scene. ---81 Figure 3.3: Voigt sitting calmly near a guard, in front of his defense lawyer, Dr. Schönbrunn. -----------117 Figure 3.4: Newspaper illustration depicting Voigt’s poise and wit during the court examination. -------119 Figure 3.5: One of several postcards Voigt addressed to his girlfriend Fraulein Philomena (a.k.a. Mina) Lichtenegger. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------133 Figure 3.6: This one reads: “I have remained true to you, my heart belongs to you!” -----------------------134 Figure 3.7: Illustration of a female witness recognizing Voigt as the man “who chokes girls” during the interrogation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------143 Figure 3.8: Sketch from the investigation on August 15, 1910 showing the proximity between where Voigt raped and choked Kustor at the lumberyard and where Voigt sexually murdered Peer ----------------------144 iv “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Isaiah 43:18-19 1 Introduction Historian Pablo Piccato has written about the meanings of sexual violence in turn- of-the-century Mexico City in the case of “El Chalequero” or the Mexican Jack the Ripper. After Francisco Guerrero’s arrest in 1888, the Mexican press compared his long series of violent crimes with those of Jack the Ripper in London, who had become internationally known that same year. When a Mexican criminologist and journalist Carlos Roumagnac later compared Guerrero with Jack the Ripper and other European criminals, Piccato writes, “There was a certain pride in this comparison: for Mexican elites, it conveyed the progress of the capital, which brought not only the technology, architecture, and fashion of the most advanced European countries, but also their new forms of crime.” 1 Because of the widespread notoriety of Jack the Ripper, this new category of serial sexual violence had become a visible symbol of modernity across the world by the turn of the century. What is now recognized as a common type of violence was once viewed as a new form of behavior that required a name; the concept of sexual murder emerged as a specifically modern phenomenon in the late 1870s and early 1880s as sex became increasingly discussed in psychiatry, sexology, and criminology. 2 In fact, 1Pablo Piccato, “’El Chalequero’ or the Mexican Jack the Ripper: The Meanings of Sexual Violence in Turn-of-the-Century Mexico City,” Hispanic American Historical Review 81: 3-4 (August- November 2001), 625. 2Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1987), 19, 21-22. By attempting to explain the appearance of sexual murder in the late nineteenth century, Jane Caputi agreed with Cameron and Frazer