Holderlin opened his own veins one day to "water a rose tree". Haarman drank the blood of blonde boy loves. Haarman was executed in 1925 for committing nearly thirty murders in Hanover. His victims all died by a severe bite to the throat while they were sleeping. Haarman had disposed of their bodies by chopping them, and throwing them into the Leine River. Wilhelm Grossmann was known as the 'Bluebeard of the Silesian Railway', and was charged in 1921 with the murder and cannibalism of fourteen women. Denke was referred to as 'The Mass Murderer of Munsterburg'. During his brief stay in jail where he hung himself, he was known as 'Vater Denke'. Once a year, for thirty years, he had committed a murder in his home, and brought buckets of blood out to his courtyard where he would water the plants. He was caught after trying to kill a beggar that came to his door. The peasant contacted the police, and when they arrived the authorities found human bones, pickled body parts, fingers, human teeth and human skin suspenders. Last, Peter Kurten. It is believed that he influenced the character of Grenouille in Peter Suskind's 1985 novel, Parfum (Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Morders) which was a complete success on both sides of the Atlantic. Kurten was a married man and respected professional who secretly would go out with cosmetics on and viciously murder vagrant women and children; thirty five in all with the youngest being thirteen years old. He became known as 'das Ratsel Mensch', or in English: 'That Enigma Man'. Newspapers such as Berliner Tageblatt and Frankfurter Zeitung ran frequent articles on the killers. The public fear, ignited by Haarman, had almost been put to rest when the murders of Kurten began to be reported.

Let's take a moment to reflect on our American culture, since it is with some public shock that Tatar has done her critique. At present [time of writing] Hannibal has just been released in the United States. Hannibal, directed by Ridley Scott, is the third in a series of books written by Thomas Harris which began with Red Dragon. The book became the film Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann in the early 1980's. We are not shocked by that, even though many critics did comment on the amount of extreme gore in the new film as opposed to the second in the series, Silence of the Lambs. We accept in our own culture these heinous crimes as art because these films, along with, say, Kiss the Girls and Along Came the Spider do not just glorify murder, the theme is the race to catch the killer. Also in that category are 8MM directed by Joel Schumacher and somewhat in the surreal, In Dreams, directed by Neil Jordon (Interview with a Vampire, the film of the book by Anne Rice). They are all a form of what is now called "Realist Horror", a category many feel was begun in America by Sir Alfred Hitchcock with his mastery of depicting the "criminal sexual psychopath", in such films as Psycho or the much later, Frenzy. Alfred Hitchcock as a child though, was inspired into the genre by Weimar film maker Fritz Lang. Most well known for his 1927 release of Metropolis, Fritz Lang began his cinema career in Weimar. His 1931 film M is a seductive and sinister tale of a pedophilia and murder. We can assume the position of being shocked by the debauch of Weimar, however if we look at our culture it seems that we, too, are fascinated by those that are willing to represent and explore the wicked ways of those who are criminally and morally insane. It seems to be a vicarious thrill. As Brian De Palma has been quoted as saying, "I don't particularly want to chop up women but it seems to work". 

Now, back to Weimar where the term 'Erregung' stems. Erregung =  the term most frequently recruited to describe the anxious population, it implies a highly emotional anxiety, but can also denote sexual arousal. The perfect state to aspire to create for a mass audience.

George Grosz: Painter. Distinguished art historian Kenneth Clark says of Grosz' feminine representations, " [All of the] bodies marked by tough surfaces, undisciplined excesses and crude irregularities". He also painted the ruling class and working class in their daily life (though it is noted even by his son that his depictions show them as ugly and vulgar as possible), Grosz became part of the eternal clique of Weimar's sexual murder culture. Like Dix, he has a painting entitled Lustmord  which was created in 1912/13. Grosz became known for his depictions of women/prostitutes being murdered, and for his depictions of men in political bondage. The second image I've selected to include is another depiction of classic modernist Weimar style entitled Murder on Acker Street (1916). In the forefront a woman is dead on her bed, viciously bludgeoned with a meat hacker. In the background a fat man with the face of a shamed and confused child washes his hands of her blood. The third image is a bit different than the style of his feminine murder art. For the Fatherland - To the Slaughterhouse  (1924) shows in firm and bold charcoal, men being forced off to war. A miniature Hitler sits in the lap of a general like a little doll as blindfolded men are forced to the fight.  Grosz was described as being resistant to "representational practices that construct idealized images of female plentitude or perfection (that and his political parody of masculine roles) seem entirely consonant with his DaDaist irreverence towards artistic ideologies".

Alfred Doblin: Author of the well known Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf  and numerous popular short stories. A short story of his entitled,  The Murder of Buttercup caught my attention. Maybe because I thought of Vater Denke watering his rose tree with the blood streaming from his own veins; a surreal and morbid , yet fascinating act.

The Murder of Buttercup was published in 1910, prior to the war. It is, superficially, not the about the murder of a person, but an innocent flower. The protagonist in the tale, Mr. Michael Fisher, is a dull man with a dull life. One day while out walking with his cane he vents his frustration of being stuck in the rut of a gentleman on a flower he passes during his walk. He takes his walking stick and beheads the flower. As "white blood and yellow foam" flow from the stem of the now beheaded flower, it turns into a cadaver that must be removed from sight. Papers announced that a grown buttercup had been murdered on the path from Immental to St. Otilllie between seven and nine in the evening. "Neither a hardened criminal, nor a crazed psychotic, Mr. Fischer is a 'quintessential German businessman, punctilious in his outer habits, but benighted about his inner life'. Like Franz Biberkopf (protagonist in Berlin Alexanderplatz) he never reflects on the degree to which his violence is motivated by a profound need to punish women, to strike out at "nature", and to reveal secretly at the sight of its vulnerability his destructive force".

Ms. Tatar at this point in her book notes that the connection between modernism and extreme sexual violence is not easy to explain or understand, but it is a reality of the works popular in the 1920s.  It is also something we are, though in slightly different ways, experiencing in our own culture today.

Charles Bernheimer explains that the theme of prostitution "simultaneously activates fears of decomposition and decay and stimulates the creation of new artistic strategies, which display that very disintegration and proclaim their modernity". Still, as Ms. Tatar notes, that does not explain the conjunction of such extreme hostility towards women, who seem synonymous throughout the era with being of whoredom.  Painting and literature paved the path for cinema, which brings us now Fritz Lang and his film of pedophilia and murder, M. 

It is known that Fritz Lang heavily influenced Alfred Hitchcock, but after reading about M, it seems he also was a pioneer influence for such ground breaking moments in cinema such as J. Lee Thomson's, Cape Fear (1962), released in England with much observation and involvement of the English censor board, and also Stanley Kubrick's, Lolita.  

Cape Fear is the controversial story of a small town attorney and the ex.convict he sent to jail. Once released the convict returns to haunt the life of the attorney. The ominous threat he ensues by watching the lawyers young child in a manner that evades the due process of the law. The film was designed to have audiences imagine the worst by not showing or verbalizing direct assault, but by alluding to the fact that the young child was to be the target of the ex.convicts revenge.

Lolita portrays the love obsession that a middle aged man holds for a twelve year old girl. In Weimar, the love obsession in Lolita also had a specific name; similar to 'Lustmord' (sexual murder), 'Liebstod' (love-death) is defined as "the assertion of transcendent desire and the spiritualization of egos", or by love that is a death,  a depletion in actuality, of the soul or spirit.

At the time M was being contemplated, the newspapers were running continuous articles on the murderers Haarman, Grossmann, Kurten and Denke, forcing to the attention of Fritz Lang the question as to what led these people to commit such acts, and the same question is probably what appealed to audiences when they paid to see the film. Though it added to the thought put into the film, the film was actually inspired by a conversation Lang and his wife Thea Von Harbou had one evening. They were casually discussing what the most horrible crime to do could be in order to make the plot thick for an interesting film. Ideas were passed back and forth, and they mutually decided on anonymous poisoned letters. They began to collaborate on a film with that theme when Lang thought of the murder of a child, and decided that was the most horrible crime possible. The thought of "a man forced by some urge, by some perverted urge... a sick man ... to kill!" So began the tale of a child murderer who's identity is revealed from the beginning of the film, who's deeds are known by the audience. What is not known is what will happen to the children he meets, to him if / when he is caught, to the families if / when they find out what has happened to their lost children - the origin, maybe, of films such as Silence of the Lambs or 8MM.

It is as though the public yearns for an excuse to release hostility and hatred towards an acceptable icon which can only be found possible in situations such as serial killings. When Elsie Beckmann, the little girl victimized in M, is murdered, the public all turns on each other, and finds scapegoats in those that are "different" or simply disliked in day to day life, yet the killer is as much beyond all of them, as he is directly in front of them.

One of the conflicts that Ms. Tatar has with the film is how, with the above mentioned in mind, by the end of the film the audience is manipulated into feeling sorry for the murderer, Mr. Beckert played by Peter Lorre. He is, we are led to believe, as much a victim of his "pain" and his "urges", as his victims are to his torment. It is an perfect example of how the subtle differences in the portrayal of heinous crime in cinema stand slightly apart between the beginning of the genre and now.

Despite whatever shock we may exhibit in studying the past of sex and murder in art and culture, we as a society now are still as fascinated and intrigued. There is something about that primordial taboo that cannot be denied. That fascination sells stocks of books and theater tickets, audiences can't get enough of that which they are not supposed to have at all. In the American mainstream we see it this very day with Hannibal, and with independent features such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. We still yearn for insight and enlightenment into those secret sins.

Erregung for Lustmord and Leibstod are as much in demand today as the day the terms were first coined back in Weimar! Shock Cinema thrives on that which scares us all worse than monsters - real life horror that could be waiting around any corner on any given day!