Fantasy of Facts

This chapter addresses Alfred Döblin's program of a “fantasy of facts.” It looks at his literary case history: The Two Girlfriends and Their Murder by Poisoning. Döblin's adaptation of the case of Elli Klein, who was accused together with her girlfriend, Grete Nebbe, of having poisoned her husband, appeared only a few months after the sensational trial of the women had been concluded. The literary case history was published in 1924 as the first volume of a series that the communist and poet Rudolf Leonhard initiated under the title Outsiders of Society: The Crimes of Today. Scholarship has emphasized the Outsider series' critical stance toward criminology and medical-forensic approaches to crime. As the opening case of the Outsider series, Döblin's short book can be seen as a precedent, doing justice to both positions that either emphasize the series' critical or rather reactionary character. With his double identity as a trained, practicing medical doctor with a pronounced interest in psychiatry and psychoanalysis and as a literary author, Döblin embodies the connection at stake in the series and seems an ideal representative of its program.

Conclusion

This chapter explains that while literary texts in the nineteenth century continued the convention of referencing historical cases, they did so in order to question institutional authority and to criticize the epistemological foundations and the legitimacy of legal judgments informed by psychological narrative. A scene from Hoffmann's “The Story of Serapion” in The Serapion Brethren may exemplify this new status of literary fiction in the nineteenth century. Hoffmann's rigorous rejection of medical authority in the analysis of states of mind for the purpose of legal decision making shows his deep concern about the predictability of the law and the dangers of compromising legal authority with knowledge based on philosophical speculation. Literary fiction, according to Hoffmann's rendering of romantic authorship, develops in opposition to psychological rationality and its claim to objectivity: poetical talent is based on methodological madness. This model of authorship, on the one hand, assigns to literary authors a special ability to depict questionable states of mind, and on the other hand locates this ability in authors' own special psychological intuition.

The Drama of the Case

This chapter focuses on Georg Büchner's Woyzeck (1837), which, based on an early case of legal responsibility, expounds the problem of judgment in the medical-legal context by staging the case as a dramatic ensemble of scenes of observation. The procedures leading up to the confirmation of the murderer Johann Christian Woyzeck's death sentence shape what was to be known as the Woyzeck case. By commissioning Dr. Clarus as a medical expert, the legal case, which was about the societal sanction of a criminal act, became a case of quite a different nature. The question that Dr. Clarus attempts to answer is not about the deed and its particular circumstances, but about the personality of the perpetrator and his motives. The document to which Büchner's Woyzeck refers verbatim is the second report that Dr. Clarus provided and that he published twice within only one year. The chapter argues that the canonical drama Woyzeck, based on the Woyzeck of the Clarus report, is essentially about the making of the case.

Conclusion

This chapter explains that, without any doubt, Goethe's and Moritz's novels as well as Schiller's and Kleist's novellas are part of today's German literary canon. But just as certainly, this literary canon did not yet exist around 1800. It cannot even be assumed that the writers of these texts considered themselves literary authors. Werther and Anton Reiser conceal Goethe's and Moritz's authorship, and instead frame their novels by means of a fictitious editorship. In Schiller's and Kleist's novellas, the reference to the truthfulness of the story and the historically documented origin of the material have a similar function. What might have been the premises of and motivations for writing about cases for Goethe, Moritz, Schiller, and Kleist when we assume that they did not write as literary authors? The reading of their cases as literary fiction obscures the fact that these novels and novellas might just as well be understood as vehicles for lawyers, medical doctors, pedagogues, and philanthropists to inform each other about the legal and mental status of the individual and, thus, to continue the medical and legal traditions of thinking, arguing, and writing in cases. And yet the close reading of these texts shows that in them the representation of cases began to change.