Two Women and a Poisoning

by Alfred Doblin

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  What would it take for a woman to poison her husband? Young couple Elli and Link have been married for a year when Elli meets Gretchen, and the two soon become friends. When Elli confides in her friend about the abuse she suffers at her husband’s hands, they hatch a plan for Elli to escape. But when their efforts prove unsuccessful, the pair begin to discuss a more permanent solution to Elli’s problem: poison.

  Based on a famous murder trial which took place in Berlin in 1923, this short novel by the master of German modernism, Alfred Döblin, explores questions of moral culpability and societal expectations which remain as relevant today as in the 1920s.

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  Introduction

  BY IMOGEN TAYLOR

  Two Women and a Poisoning

  Epilogue

  Elli’s Handwriting

  Margarete’s Handwriting

  Diagrams to Show the Psychological Changes in Elli Link, Link and Margarete Bende

  ‘Mrs Nebbe and Mrs Klein’

  BY JOSEPH ROTH

  A Criminal Couple: A Tale of Two Unhappy Marriages

  BY ROBERT MUSIL

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  INTRODUCTION

  Alfred Döblin is a major writer’s major writer. Though renowned as the author of that great feat of literary modernism, Berlin Alexanderplatz, his name rarely makes it to best-of lists, even in his native Germany. But his fan club is impressive: Bertolt Brecht and Günter Grass named him as an important influence; Walter Benjamin compared him to Dickens; W.G. Sebald devoted an entire PhD thesis to his work. ‘We have all learnt from you, or tried to,’ Stefan Zweig said in a letter to Döblin.

  Reading Döblin is an experience. ‘He will unsettle you,’ Grass wrote, ‘he will trouble your dreams, he will stick in your throat…Complacent people should beware of Döblin.’ That is as true of his true-crime story Two Women and a Poisoning as it is of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Though stylistically less adventurous than the later novel, Two Women does not have the ‘neatly ironed creases’ Döblin disparagingly attributed to Thomas Mann’s prose, nor does Döblin iron out the sometimes distressing subject matter—he has no qualms about wrenching us out of our comfort zone. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the film director who made Berlin Alexanderplatz into a cult TV series in 1980, described his own experience of reading Döblin as ‘dangerously often not actually reading at all, but more like living, suffering, despair and fear.’ Döblin’s writing is intense and at times relentless, but it takes us somewhere; it does something to us.

  •

  In March 1923 a trial was held in Berlin that caused a stir in the press and drew crowds of spectators. Parts of the evidence were so disturbing that they had to be heard in camera, but that didn’t stop the Berliners from thronging, and perhaps it encouraged them. Women, in particular, came to look—or, as one reporter put it, ‘the female element prevailed’, presumably fascinated by the all-female cast of defendants: twenty-two-year-old Ella Klein, accused of murdering her husband and plotting to murder her lover’s husband; twenty-five-year-old Margarete Nebbe, her lover, accused of aiding and abetting Ella and plotting to murder her own husband; and eighty-year-old Marie Riemer, Margarete’s mother, accused of neglecting to report the murder plots.

  There is no way of knowing what the ‘female element’ made of the case, but most of the (male) reporters were relentless in their defamation of the ‘husband killers’, labelling them ‘unscrupulous’, ‘unfeeling’, ‘sadistic’, ‘abnormal’ and ‘inhuman’, and deploring their sentences as shockingly lenient. The public prosecutor, for his part, declared them ‘inferior female persons’ with ‘certain defects’. The disturbing evidence that had to be withheld from the public—namely Ella Klein’s horrendous treatment at the hands of her husband—seemed largely forgotten by the end of the trial; what lingered was the image of a couple of man-hating imbeciles, or monsters, or both.

  How different Döblin’s account of the case. In Two Women and a Poisoning, he blends true crime and fiction, changing names and piecing the details of the trial into a story. But he doesn’t use his novelist’s freedom as an excuse to embellish. On the contrary: compared with many of the supposedly factual reports in the press, his slim text is a model of unexcitability and restraint. Take the opening sentences in which we are introduced to Elli:

  Pretty, blond Elli Link came to Berlin in 1918, aged nineteen years. Before that, she had apprenticed as a hairdresser in Braunschweig where her father was a carpenter. A childish impulse got the better of her: she took five marks from a customer’s purse. She was sent to work in an ammunition factory for a few weeks and finished her apprenticeship in Wriezen. Elli was light-hearted and vivacious; it is said that her life in Wriezen was not ascetic and that she had a taste for carousing.

  The language is pared down—no convoluted Germanic syntax, no high-handed narrator, little description. The sentences follow one another paratactically, with none of the paraphernalia of cause and effect; it is up to the reader to work out what goes on between them. Döblin gives us hardly more than the bare facts, the bones of a novel’s opening lines, and it is a ‘novel’ that has neither heroine nor villain at its centre, but a pretty, skittish girl who likes a night out, an ordinary girl, a girl we have no reason not to like. Later in the book, when Döblin quotes an expert witness report that refers to Elli’s ‘infantilism’, it comes as a shock. His Elli is often childish or childlike, but not pathologically so; we may not identify with her, but she is someone we feel we can almost understand. The clinical term puts a sudden distance between us and her that Döblin had been careful to eliminate. He treats the figures he writes about as people, not cases.

  With the same care and respect, he slips a crime into this first paragraph so quietly that it barely registers—the faintest premonition of the murder to come. Elli is only just responsible. ‘A childish impulse got the better of her.’ The petty theft is something that comes over her, not something that she does, and the act is described not as stealing, but as taking. It is and is not theft, just as the murder that she goes on to commit both is and is not murder.

  Döblin guides us discreetly through the intricacies of the case, offering limpid descriptions of the characters’ confused states of mind and the subtle changes in their relationships to one another. He has a sharp eye for the quirks and contradictions of human nature, observing the fine line between sexual excitement and aversion in Elli, the strange mix of desire and inferiority complex in her husband Link, the compulsion that drives Elli and Margarete/Grete to exchange several letters a day, although they live in the same street, close enough to send curtain signals to tell each other whether their husbands are in or out. The book resists drama; the words ‘tragedy’ and ‘tragic’ appear only in quotation marks, spoken by others. And although Döblin mentions his forays into the places frequented by the two women—places very close to where he himself lived and worked—he does not stop to describe them, wary of resorting to ‘tawdry social sketches’. The Links’ flat is equipped only with a few select props, most of which we don’t see until they go flying through the air during one of Link’s tantrums: baskets of washing, plates of food, wicker chairs.

  The text is altogether free of clutter. Döblin has a deep mistrust of language; vague and cumbersome, fraught with assumed meaning, it falls short of his scientific standards. Unlike the graphomaniac lovers, Elli and Grete, he prefers not to use too much of it, but to set things out as simply as possible; this approach is taken to its limits in the diagrams at the end of the book where the relationships between Elli
, Grete and Link are presented in graphic form. Throughout his account of the case, he avoids explaining, interpreting, providing answers. He rarely judges. Only the chemist who sells Elli the rat biscuits and arsenic with which she will poison Link is described as acting ‘very carelessly’—and the conventions of the trial are criticised as ‘unreasonable’ for demanding, almost Alice-in-Wonderland-like, that the jury ignore the bulk of the evidence that is put before them:

  The court asked no questions about the part played or ‘blame’ incurred by Link, Elli’s father or Link’s mother; it singled out one fact—the murder. Wrongdoing was permitted within certain limits; if they were transgressed, it was necessary to intervene. The jurors were urged to look away from what had happened inside the circle, within the limits; they were to ignore the wider gamut of circumstances. Really, it was unreasonable to show them the whole gamut and then expect them to ignore it. But a faint echo was all they were allowed to retain—enough to go on once the facts had been established and the time had come to ask: And, are there mitigating circumstances?

  In a sense, Two Women and a Poisoning serves as a corrective to the failing of the judiciary; Döblin asks precisely those questions that were not put to the jury, and rather than home in on the murder, he turns his attention to that ‘wider gamut’—the circumstances surrounding the crime, the subsidiary characters, the victim’s role in his own death. He makes jurors of his readers and confronts them with questions that are murkier and more uncomfortable than the simple did-she-didn’t-she of the court. This idea of leaving it to the reader to provide the answers is important to Döblin who, a decade earlier, in his ‘Berlin Manifesto’ of 1913, To Novelists and Their Critics, had demanded ‘full autonomy’ for the reader: ‘he is to judge, not the author’.

  The author, in Döblin, is not so much to blend into the background as to be the background, to be the series of events that make up a story, to pursue the process of self-denial with such fanaticism that he can say, ‘I am not I, but the road, the streetlamp, such and such an incident, nothing more.’ Döblin’s term for this extreme form of authorial self-effacement is ‘stone style’. His theories on literature are all about stripping things away, getting ‘back to the concrete’, casting off cliché, affectation, pointless flourish. ‘Nothing superficial,’ he writes in his open letter to Marinetti, ‘no wrapping paper.’ Figures of speech are put down as lazy and dangerous; the author, when he isn’t a streetlamp, is a builder, dispassionately laying brick on brick.

  In particular, Döblin is fiercely critical of any form of psychologising, railing against it as ‘sheer abstract phantasmagoria…poetic gloss…dilettantish speculation, scholastic babble, whimsical bombast and flawed, fake lyricism.’ Writers, he suggests, would do better to aim for ‘factual imagination’ and to learn from the more objective science of psychiatry which, rather than come up with contrived motives to explain a character’s actions, only ‘shrugs and shakes its head’ at the hows and whys of a story. This is advice he himself will follow in Two Women and a Poisoning, never straying far from the facts, never falling into the trap of presuming he understands. The closest he comes to psychologising is in his interpretations of Elli’s nightmares, though even here he is careful not to impose a single, unequivocal meaning on them, but to offer a reading that reflects the ambivalence and confusion of the dreams. It is here, too, that Freud’s influence makes itself most clearly felt, and yet Döblin’s interpretations have nothing of Freud’s virtuoso but often far-fetched associations, with their heavy reliance on word play. He never forgets that he is trying to understand Elli; his readings of the dreams repeat the same simple words she has used in telling them.

  If Döblin’s account of Elli’s poisoning of Link is what he calls ‘factual imagination’, his kind of imagination is closer to empathy than fancy; he even betrays a certain affection for ‘cheeky little’ Elli. Döblin the doctor is clearly present in the book alongside Döblin the author, but not just in the medical expertise he brings to the case. That is very much in evidence—in the detailed summaries of the doctors’ reports, for example, and in the long list of symptoms suffered by Link when he begins to succumb to the arsenic. But the pastoral side of the job also makes itself felt—Döblin’s concern for his characters, his capacity for listening.

  Döblin always put a huge amount of research into his books, mugging up on Taoism and eighteenth-century Chinese history for The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1915), machines and motors for Wadzek’s Battle with the Steam Turbine, the Thirty Years’ War for Wallenstein (1920), and everything from hydrography to seismology for Mountains Oceans and Giants (1924), a vast experimental sci-fi novel in which things spin out of control when Iceland is destroyed to melt Greenland’s icecap.

  Although a fraction the length of any of those novels, Two Women and a Poisoning was no exception: we don’t know whether Döblin attended the trial, but he clearly had extensive knowledge of the various statements and documents read out in court. At the same time, though, the subject matter of Two Women was, quite literally, closer to home. Wagner Strasse, where Elli and Grete were both living when they met, was familiar territory to Döblin—and Elli and Grete themselves not only provided fascinating material for a doctor who specialised in ‘nervous and mental conditions’; they were also from the same social milieu as most of his patients. (‘It is rare that anyone from the upper classes strays into my surgery.’) Five years later, working-class Berlin would reappear as the setting for Döblin’s next and most famous novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Like all his previous and subsequent books, Two Women has been somewhat eclipsed by that magnum opus, but there can be little doubt that it fed into it. As well as being set in the same social milieu, both works blend fact and fiction and make liberal use of newspaper articles to tell their stories; both are about a murder; both touch on the subject of female homosexuality.

  Two Women started life as the opening book in a German series entitled Outsiders of Society: The Crimes of Today. Modelled on the French eighteenth-century true-crime collections of Pitaval, Outsiders of Society comprised literary responses to contemporary criminal cases; an ambitious thirty-two titles were planned altogether, including contributions by Thomas Mann and Joseph Roth. These would never be written. The series, perhaps a victim of the after-effects of hyperinflation, folded after just two years and fourteen publications. But Roth wrote an essay on the Klein-Nebbe case, which is included here, along with an essay by Robert Musil. Like Döblin, Roth and Musil rebel against the sensationalism surrounding the trial, and offer subtler, more sensitive readings of the case, shifting the blame from individual to society and, in the case of Roth, pointing up the absurdities of a social order where a woman ‘would rather confess to murder than to a lesbian relationship’.

  Times have changed. But Döblin’s slim book remains compelling, and not just because of its subject matter. Other books have dated, become unreadable. Erich Wulffen’s Psychology of Poisoning, a popular book from 1917 that perhaps contributed to contemporary interest in the trial, now reads as what it is—a heap of misogynist prejudices:

  Violent murder with its sharp and blunt weapons and its guns is not woman’s way. She lacks the force, the personal courage, the determination, the skill. It is, you might say, the soundlessness of poison, its discretion, that is suited to woman, its independence of physical strength. She sees no blood flow; what she does see—vomiting and pain—she is accustomed to seeing as the nurse of the family. [The] poison murderess assumes the duplicitous role of nurse to her victim and thus remains within the bounds of her sex’s competence. The secrecy and cunning required to poison are often properties of female weakness; the female is also more capable of pretence than man.

  Compare this with a passage from Two Women. So much is the same—the ‘poison murderess’ cum nurse, the duplicity, the feminine wiles. But where Wulffen’s treatment of the subject is condescending and clichéd, Döblin’s is nuanced and understanding:

  Elli was confronted with the awfu
l sight of her sick husband pacing feverishly up and down the sitting room, almost crawling up the walls with pain. She suffered cruelly. She took refuge in her letters, spurring herself on: I won’t give up, I’ll make him pay—even if I end up biting the dust myself. Sometimes an animal indifference came over her. Things reached such a pitch that all tension suddenly gave way. When this happened, she would resignedly take him his invalid’s gruel and ‘finish him’ while she was at it. She took a positive pleasure in obliging him to his face and tipping poison into his food behind his back. ‘If only the swine would die soon…’

  Unlike the cardboard cut-out that Wulffen calls ‘woman’, Elli is not only fiercely determined; she also shows signs of an almost sadistic schadenfreude that ‘woman’ presumably wouldn’t be up to. At the same time, though, we see Elli suffer in her role as murderous nurse; we see her hinting at the possibility of her own death; we see her render sexual services to her victim with a cynical indifference that we know conceals deeper, more painful emotions. She is full of contradictions. She is real, human. We sympathise with her, in spite of ourselves. Döblin makes us see the black humour of the situation. And he shocks us into feeling and thinking.

  TWO WOMEN AND A POISONING

  Pretty, blond Elli Link came to Berlin in 1918, aged nineteen years. Before that, she had apprenticed as a hairdresser in Braunschweig where her father was a carpenter. A childish impulse got the better of her: she took five marks from a customer’s purse. She was sent to work in an ammunition factory for a few weeks and finished her apprenticeship in Wriezen. Elli was light-hearted and vivacious; it is said that her life in Wriezen was not ascetic and that she had a taste for carousing.

  She came to the Berlin borough of Friedrichsfelde. The hairdresser who employed her found her hardworking, honest, a woman of good character. He kept her on until she married, a year and a quarter later. He did not fail to notice her vivacity. It was on her nights out with a customer in November 1919 that she met Link, a young carpenter.