THE CASE OF ANGERSTEIN
The sense of security contained in the concept of the persona disintegrates in the image of the creature. In the persona there remains an ego made autonomous by consciousness of what (through the mask) appears from the outside, while the creature makes its appearance only once the artificial devices of the persona crumble into pieces. The judicial trial seems to be the preferred setting for this spectacle of destruction, because the contest pits the individual's moral responsibility, which in bourgeois society enjoys such a secure status, against the creature's juridical incompetence. In the 19205 such cases capture the attention of psychoanalysis, which attempts to rescue the accused from the grip of the guilt culture, as institutionalized in the form of the tribunal. The effort is successful in that it undoes the fiction of the competent subject. But, by simultaneously consigning the subject to the figuration of childhood, it occasions the return of the core family that the new objectivity generation had so vehemently rejected.
Under the title “Tat ohne Tater,” in July 1925 Siegfried Kracauer reported on the trial of the multiple murderer Fritz Angerstein. The case became for him the symbol of the risk entailed in a world of “objectivity,” in which relationships among people are guided by the functional play of social roles.
For the more relationships among people become objectified, with emancipated things gaining power over people rather than people seizing hold of the things and humanizing them, the more easily it can and will happen that the disfigured humanity that has been repressed into the deepest recesses of unconsciousness will reappear in hideous form in the world of things.[19]
What psychoanalysis represents as the id finds its mask in the creature. The persona, in the form of the “authorized agent,” conjures up one last time the bourgeois illusion of the accountable subject; it remains the purview of such social categories as petit bourgeois or manager. The Anger-stein trial exposes the irreparable discrepancy between the person and the treatment of the person:
A deed without a doer-that is the provocative, the incomprehensible aspect of the Angerstein case. The deed is inconceivable: an orgy of ax blows and arson. Intimidating in its mere magnitude, the crime bursts the bounds of customary statutes as only an elemental event can. It is impossible to do more
― 207 ―than stare at it; it is not to be subsumed within existing categories. Nevertheless, there it is, an undeniable fact that, for well or ill, must be registered.But where is the doer that belongs to the deed? Angerstein? The little, subordinate fellow with modest manners, a feeble voice, and a stunted imagination? In [Arthur] Schnitzler's play Der griine Kakadu, a real murderer seeks to hire himself out as a criminal impersonator to a bar for the Parisian demimonde. But he is dismissed by the proprietor with the remark that the impression he makes is not bloodthirsty enough. The pseudo-perpetrator from Haiger resembles that man. At bottom a mere petit bourgeois, Anger-stein can be outfitted with a vicious appearance only in retrospect by overheated journalists. Had one encountered him prior to the crime on the street, one would have asked him for a light and quickly forgotten his features.
Even today, or today once again, he remains stubbornly at home in the narrow confines of inborn mediocrity. His behavior during the trial has been minimal in every respect. There have been no sudden eruptions to help us chart a connection between the man and what he did, no outbursts to suggest a subterranean fiendishness, nor the kind of silence that would correspond to what happened. Instead, he has withdrawn into trivialities, into a dull state of shock wholly incommensurate with its cause, a confused acceptance of what he himself does not understand.
Angerstein, in Professor Herbertz's depiction of the events, did not commit the deed; the deed happened to him. Having transpired, it detached itself from him and now exists as a purely isolated fact for which there is no proper cause. It rose up out of nothing for the while of the murders, a dreadful “it” out there in space, unconnected with him. If the soup had not been burned—a triviality become a link in a chain of external causation-Angerstein's victims would have gone on living and no one but his fellow citizens of Haiger would ever have heard his name. The crime looms gigantically over him; he disappears in its shadow.
Interrogations and depositions have produced what information there was to produce. Unknown details have become superfluous; a crude whole has been constructed of a thousand statements. The picture is not false, but it is not right. It recalls to the light of day what has descended irrevocably into the darkness, offering it, in a form as inadequate as it is liberating, to judicial measurement.
A petit bourgeois like a thousand others plunged clumsily into atrocity. He married young, worked his way up, even became a manager. Trivial and respectable, not worth wasting a word. The signs of distress are serious, if not extraordinary: leftover adolescent anxieties, localized tuberculosis, a family in financial need, life with an ailing wife. He loved the frail, easily agitated woman-neighbors and visitors praise the marriage. She suffered one miscarriage after the other; she subordinated their erotic life together to the principles of Methodist piety. A life of churchly devotion, which was not easy for him. But, aside from a single sexual dalliance, he was faithful, on the whole anticipating the oversensitive creature's needs. She complained and suffered, her pietistic spirit tormented by morbid premonitions.
And now, in the winter of 1924, the event comes out of nowhere. Minor
― 208 ―illegalities preceded it, a confusing swindle, no one knows how or why. Running amok, it seems that a physician's attentions merely added to the burdens. His previously neatly bounded world was slipping through his fingers. The woman of his obsession draws him with her toward a longing for death, for an end to it all. He may have been thinking of suicide as he stabbed her—but why the frenzy with the hunting knife and the ax, why the senseless bashing of the skulls of uninvolved others? What sucked him, the minor administrator, for a night and a day into the cyclone of devastating violence?The psychiatric reports have neither sought nor found connections between the doer and the otherwise alien deed. They follow the clinical findings; it is not their job to do more. Only Professor Herbertz, the depth psychologist and a judicial outsider, identifies the paths leading upward and outward from the deeper layers of the unconscious.
What happened according to him? Well, petit-bourgeois Angerstein with the apparently easy-going nature must have had to repress mountains of dissatisfactions and worries. It is easy to imagine: the hysterical wife, who wants to be protected and cared for, with her dark biblical fantasies and complexes of her own; the need to keep them secret. Psychic dynamite piles up, while the container holding it looks fine. One day the story explodes-with a bang, impulses break through inhibitions. The bestial instincts, dark desires that have been nourished since childhood, unconscious hatred: all the explosive material in the nether reaches of the soul hurtles toward the surface to discharge like a volcano. It must be right, what Professor Herbertz argues: that during the catastrophe Angerstein was completely out of his mind. Certainly, he wanted to hide the outrage from the eyes of other people; but can it be called normal and customary when he undertakes the most intricate means to that end? Does it testify to sanity that he smashed five human skulls solely so that they would not register incriminating information? This logic is illogical; nor does it have anything to do with Angerstein the sober businessman.
Many details confirm the assumption that the quiet manager was caught unawares by some unknown something inside him. He admits that he himself cannot understand, cannot conceive, that the gigantic fact came out of him. His early attempts to deny it are ridiculously petit bourgeois. Now that he has acknowledged being the perpetrator, he gazes fixedly at what others designate his crime. His evasions from now on have to do with incidentals, his excuses with mere details. The actual misdeeds weigh on him like a block of lead he cannot cast off.
If he is conscious he flees into sleep, sleeping double the usual amount, because his memory wants to disappear. The fact outside there, which is undeniably related to him, is completely overwhelming; he does not like to taste or feel it. Suicide is also beyond the bounds of his horizon, now narrowed to a point. His reading is the Bible, which perhaps brings him by way of detours into contact with his wife.
A deed without a doer that has nothing, but nothing, in common with those great crimes committed by people whose names live on in popular memory. Those crimes were manifestations of a will, however misguided;
― 209 ―they were eruptions of unbridled natures, twisted minds, the expression of outsized drives and passions. They stemmed from a place in the guilty person, were not just there alongside him, existing inadequately in space.The deeds that now go by the name of Angerstein lack a personal point of reference, without, however, that meaning that they were born of mental illness. That there is no sufficient reason for them in the consciousness of the doer is what turns them into a tormenting puzzle, what lends them the uncanny remove of mere facts. It may be that depth psychology is correct in claiming that they emerge to the light of day out of the craters of unconscious psychic life; it has not, however, solved the puzzle of how such a thing is possible.
Suddenness and isolation, the characteristics of disgrace, direct the court proceedings from Kracauer's perspective. The “perpetrator,” overwhelmed in the public gaze, represents himself as creature. In doing so, he opens himself to all manner of dishonor, but that approach is also the only one with any prospect of protecting his life. Creature is the mask that must be relied upon to avert the threat of death. At the same time, Kracauer is required, in order to credibly convey the creatural image, to strip Angerstein of any talent for strategic self-enactment; for the accused must not possess the ability to reflect upon his role if there is to be any chance of avoiding execution. To accomplish this effect, Kracauer's report continuously rehearses the fall of Angerstein's persona into a realm so elemental that a masked performance is no longer a possibility. The defendant's psychological topography, as Kracauer sketches it, takes over elements of Freud's early description of the apparatus of the psyche but is in no way committed to the overall analysis. On the one hand, Kracauer's metaphors demand a thoroughgoing separation between the two spheres of the civilized and the elemental: “psychic dynamite” has piled up in the soul's “nether reaches”; the seeming composure of civilization itself becomes explosive, “volcanic,” its outer shell burst asunder by “elemental events.” On the other hand, Kracauer acknowledges that the natural force that turns Angerstein into a perpetrator is not so elemental but instead falls hostage to the unconscious, which, in turn, struggles in the inauthenticity of the social context—whereby the “hysteria” of the murdered spouse is taken as a given.
In the final passage of the report, Kracauer withdraws from the “demonic” aspect of the case, in which the contents of the “craters of unconscious psychic life” reach the light of day. With no transition, he reaches back to a motif from vitalist philosophy, which blames the deformations of the creature on the reification of the world of civilization. The claim with which he closes his article on the Angerstein case is