Two Women and a Poisoning

by Alfred Doblin

  To the first question put to her by the presiding judge—did she admit that she had given her husband arsenic?—Elli Link answered yes. She said that she had wanted to free herself from her husband. He had regularly come home drunk, she explained, had transferred onto her his ill-treatment of his mother, and often threatened her with a knife or rubber truncheon. He had beaten her, soiled their flat, made the most repulsive demands on her as his wife. ‘Did you mean to poison your husband?’—‘No. All I could think of was that he beat me, that his heart was no longer mine. Night and day, my only thought was freedom. Just to be free. I was too muddled for anything else.’ When the judge expressed doubt at this—she had put a whole teaspoon of arsenic in Link’s food, making him so ill that he was taken to hospital and died there; what was she thinking of when she did that?—Mrs Link replied: ‘I was thinking of the maltreatment. He’d beaten me so silly I didn’t know what I was doing.’ When the judge pointed out that she had made no mention of the appalling things done to her in her petition for divorce, and nor were they apparent in her correspondence with Mrs Bende, Mrs Link said: ‘I didn’t say anything because I was so embarrassed, but I did make various statements to my lawyer.’ She was encouraged by her lawyer Dr B. to speak at greater length about her husband’s maltreatment of her, and the hearing was brought to a close.

  The presiding judge turned to Mrs Bende. She was charged, he said, with attempting the same as Mrs Link on her own husband; she had procured a (fortunately innocuous) white powder from the clairvoyant. Mrs Bende, Margarete, replied: ‘I paid several visits to Madame Feist to have the cards read, because I believed in them. At first I loved my husband because I thought he loved me in return. I married him as he was, with only the one set of clothes on his back. But our marriage turned out unhappily, because he was mixed up with criminals, and mocked and derided me for the patriotism and trust in God to which I was brought up. In the end, he threatened to stab or beat me to death and when I said: I’ll barely know about it, but you will, he said: No one’ll get me, I’ll act the madman.’ Like Elli, Margarete claimed that she was too ashamed to speak of such things in her correspondence. When confronted with compromising remarks in the letters, she tried to construe them as harmless. She was adamant that she had no bad intentions towards her husband. She had, to be sure, had her suspicions about Mrs Link, but she hadn’t known that she meant to murder her husband. There in the dock, at the trial, they saw each other for the first time in months. Not knowing how they stood to one another, they exchanged searching glances, quietly pleased. Neither incriminated the other.

  The third defendant, Mrs Bende’s mother, wept. ‘I knew nothing of all this. Old I may be, but I’d have seen to it that disaster was averted if I’d known what was afoot.’

  The six hundred letters were read aloud, with breaks to question the witnesses. Chief among these was Mr Bende, a hale, burly man. He had noticed no sign of poisoning in himself. An interesting statement was made by the chemical analyst, who said he had found traces of arsenic in Bende’s head hair in March. Arsenic, he explained, can be traced in the body, especially the hair and skin, even after two years. The evidence did not allow him to draw conclusions about the amount of arsenic administered. It was objected that the man had taken arsenic medicine as part of a cure; Mrs Bende and her mother insisted they had seen a prescription for it among his things. This he denied. When pressed, he admitted to certain sexual peculiarities. At the end of the second day of the trial, a number of highly compromising letters were read out in court, and the defendants, taken back to those terrible times, had a kind of breakdown. Mrs Bende fell into her mother’s arms, crying, ‘Dear Mother, think of your only daughter. God won’t forsake us.’

  Before the last letters were read, Elli’s father was questioned. Much of the matter had been in his hands, though he hadn’t been aware of it, and wasn’t aware of it now. He was a simple, straightforward man. Elli loved him; even now, she found no fault with the decisions he had made. He stated that his daughter had complained repeatedly of her husband and his maltreatment of her. A very important witness, a colleague of the deceased, asserted with great conviction that Mr Link had been a brutal man when drunk, with a tendency to sexual excesses and a habit of boasting about them. This had obliged him—the witness—to put an end to their friendship.

  When the public prosecutor called on Mr Bende again, asking him to comment on the allegedly poisoned food, there was a heated scene. Until this moment, Mrs Schnürer had kept fairly calm; now she leapt to her feet. ‘You fed my daughter more poison than anyone could give you,’ she flung at her son-in-law, red in the face. ‘That man there poisoned my daughter, so I’m grateful to this woman [Mrs Link] for what she did. If it wasn’t for her, my daughter would be dead and buried.’

  The first expert witness to be called, after the chemical analyst and the two pathologists, was medical counsellor Dr Juliusberger, a dignified, widely educated man and a doctor well-versed in psychology and psychiatry. His report was extensive. The case, he said, was particularly unusual and difficult. There was no way of knowing where nature’s work left off and pathology began. Mrs Link was remarkably indifferent to the ebb and flow of her emotions. Her extreme superficiality was striking. An earnest and healthy emotional reaction was not discernible in her. She was effusive in her love for her friend and in her hatred of her husband. No hint of perversion was to be found in the letters, for women would rather suffer maltreatment than reveal anything of their marital experiences to a doctor. The correspondence demonstrated a compulsion to write that could hardly be more pronounced. The letters—six hundred within five months, and often several a day—bore testimony to the pathologically heightened passion of the women’s love for one another. The content of the letters combined cruelty with undisguised lust. Genuine compassion was not in evidence. There was a delirious frenzy running through the letters that was decidedly pathological in nature. ‘We can almost feel the delirium of love and hate raging in the women, especially in Mrs Link.’ She had the more easily influenced nature and a childlike disposition. She was dependent on Margarete, submissive, eager to prove that her love was genuine. She did not destroy the letters, in spite of the danger they posed. This could be interpreted as the famous desire to be found out. Or one could attempt to explain it by pointing to Elli Link’s feeble-mindedness. But the delirium suggested that the letters were precious to her, a kind of fetish. When did her behaviour become pathological? Mrs Link did not lack awareness; she showed no sign of delusions or hallucinations. Hers, said this prudent, sensitive and philanthropic man, was a borderline case. She could be said to be in the grip of obsessive emotions. She had a morbidly heightened temperament. It was, therefore, impossible to say that Section 51 (exemption from punishment by reason of unsoundness of mind) did not apply, but it was equally impossible to say that it did. Mrs Bende, he thought, was the stronger, more active of the two. When one examined her character and the chain of letters, there did not seem to be such extreme or abnormal tension as in Mrs Link, but there were signs of marked inferiority. Here, in his opinion, was another borderline case.

  The second expert witness was medical counsellor Dr H., a broad, stout man with a thick droopy moustache. He was matter-of-fact and precise, a scientist, but a fighter too, and the man with the most practical experience in cases of this particular kind concerning relations between persons of the same sex. He arrived at the conclusion that the slow murder by poison was the result of a deep-seated hatred. The defendant Mrs Link suffered from arrested physical and mental development; Mrs Bende from hereditary imbecility. Dr H. pointed out that a writing compulsion like theirs was often accompanied by a tendency to exaggerate, so that not everything in the letters could be given credence. He saw the deep-seated hatred as caused, above all, by the women’s homosexual proclivities, which made their husbands’ demands particularly hard to bear, and meant that there was only one thought guiding them as they reached for one another—the fixed idea expressed by Mrs Li
nk when she said: Just to be free. Such fanatic hatred, said Dr H., certainly diminished the women’s responsibility, but in his view, neither their hatred nor their homosexual proclivities could prevent the exercise of free will as defined in Section 51. When questioned by the presiding judge, however, Dr H. conceded that Dr Juliusberger might be correct in his opinion, though for his part he did not consider the requirements for Section 51 fulfilled.

  Court medical officer Dr Th. supplied his opinion: the defendant Mrs Link had acted deliberately and intentionally. Since, however, she was physically and mentally below par, her deed must be judged otherwise than if she had been perfectly sane and healthy.

  The fourth expert witness, medical counsellor Dr L., rejected all mitigation. He observed that the defendant Mrs Link had never shown any want of independence in the life she led. She could not be regarded as grossly inferior; every murderer, after all, was an inferior person inasmuch as he lacked the usual inhibitions. Excess and impetuosity were typical of every passion; some were capable of a weaker, others of a stronger passion, without its being possible to speak of illness.

  The senior prosecutor now asked the jurors on their benches to find Mrs Link guilty of murder and Mrs Bende of attempted murder and of being an accessory to murder. It was clear, he said, from the drawn-out nature of the killing, and the correspondence between the two women, that Mrs Link had acted deliberately. The coldness and ruthlessness evident in the letters were reason not to approve mitigating circumstances. The path of divorce had been open to the women.

  It was the turn of the defence. Mrs Link’s lawyer, Dr A.B., spoke first: the woman, he said, had entered marriage with high expectations, and then been maltreated by her husband in the most repugnant ways. The man’s brutality eventually drove her to take up with a female. Her emotions swelled to the point of madness and she resolved to take action. Lacking all judgment and clarity of mind, she acted with imagined purpose, like a madman in his madness. The repulsive crudeness of the correspondence, the manic compulsion to write, the stashing away of the letters—all this was evidence of the strength of her delirium. Given the opinion of the first expert witness—that it was impossible to determine whether Section 51 was applicable—and the assertion of the second expert witness—that this first opinion was possibly correct—it was necessary to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt.

  Mrs Bende’s lawyer, Dr G., objected that the charges brought against his client were based solely on the content of the letters, which were not a reliable source of evidence. The victim of the attempted hydrochloric acid poisoning couldn’t even recall the alleged attack on his life. Equally untenable was the charge of complicity brought against Mrs Schnürer, which was likewise based solely on the letters.

  The jurors on the benches had listened to everything. Now twenty different verdicts were put to them. Was Mrs Link guilty of murder or manslaughter, of supplying poison, of aiding and abetting the attempted murder of Mr Bende? Was Mrs Bende guilty of aiding and abetting Mrs Link’s crime, of attempted murder or manslaughter, of supplying poison? Was Mrs Schnürer guilty of failing to report the planned crime?

  Inside their locked room, the jurors contemplated the strange questions that had been put to them. They were quiet and earnest men and not a few of them grew even quieter as they pondered the task before them. This was not a gathering of emotional, irascible, vengeful men; these were no warriors with swords and pelts, no medieval inquisitors. A whole apparatus had been laid out before them. The preliminary hearings had gone on for almost a year. Evidence had been produced that reached far back into the defendants’ pasts. A small troop of skilled men had examined the physical and psychological state of the women, and tried to form conclusions based on their broad experience. Light had been shed on the case by the public prosecutor’s speech and the statement for the defence. At the centre of all this, however, was not the crime itself, the bare murder, but almost the opposite of a crime—namely how what happened came to pass, how it was possible. There was even (this was the burden of the expert testimonies) an attempt to prove that what happened was inevitable.

  The trial had left the terrain of guilt and innocence and moved onto the horribly uncertain terrain of connections, perception, insight.

  Link, the deceased, had attached himself to Elli, who wasn’t really fond of him. Should he be found guilty because of that? Properly speaking, he should; it was the cause and thus also the fault of what followed. Twice he had detained Elli, clearly against her will; he had tormented and maltreated her.

  Elli for her part had let herself be beguiled into marriage with him. She was by nature not fully developed—frigid or sexually peculiar. Her female organs were not formed in the usual way. She rejected her husband. This excited him; it excited her. There was hatred; things ran their course.

  It was the same with her friend. It was difficult—impossible—to speak of guilt as such, even of greater or lesser guilt. The jurors, shut away in their room, were faced with the necessity of finding a womb guilty, or an ovary, because it had grown this way rather than that. Really, they ought also to have had jurisdiction over Elli’s father, who had led his daughter back to her husband—a man who was the epitome of bourgeois respectability. An indictment on him would have been an indictment of society.

  But there was another important consideration. Something had happened—what could be done to prevent it from happening again? Intervention was called for. 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?

  After conferring for two hours, the jurors returned and pronounced their verdict: Mrs Link, they said, was guilty of deliberate but not premeditated murder with mitigating circumstances. Mrs Bende was not guilty of attempted murder, but she was guilty of aiding and abetting murder—without mitigating circumstances. The third defendant Mrs Schnürer was not guilty of complicity.

  Back in his seat, the Civil Code on the bench before him, the public prosecutor proposed the maximum legal sentences for such verdicts: five years’ gaol for Mrs Link and a first, erroneous sentence of eighteen months’ imprisonment for Mrs Bende, which was revised to five years’ penal servitude when he realised that he had overlooked the jury’s refusal to grant mitigating circumstances. Mrs Bende’s lawyer rose to his feet in disbelief, and pointed to the paradox of sentencing the murderess to imprisonment and her accessory to penal servitude. It was clear, he said, that the jury wouldn’t have denied Mrs Bende mitigating circumstances if they’d had any notion of the severity of the punishment. The jury nodded, similarly appalled.

  Mrs Bende and her mother let out screams at the public prosecutor’s proposal. Their lawyer asked the court to reduce Mrs Bende’s sentence to the minimum.

  Elli Link was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, her friend to eighteen month’s penal servitude. In both cases, the women’s brutal treatment was regarded as mitigating; the cruel nature of the deed as aggravating. For this latter reason, Mrs Link was deprived of her civil rights for six years and Mrs Bende for three years. The time spent in custody was credited towards their sentences. Mrs Bende’s mother was acquitted.

  The jurors, shocked by Mrs Bende’s sentence and still uneasy in their minds, met after the close of the trial and filed a plea for clemency, asking for her sentence of penal servitude to be converted to a prison sentence.

  The two women, who together had killed the thirty-year-old Link, were thrown into gaol and kept there year after year. They sat
and counted the days and holidays, looking out for spring and autumn, and waiting. Waiting—that was their punishment. Boredom, no activity, no fulfilment. It was a true punishment. No one took their lives as they had taken Link’s, but a part of their lives was taken from them. The undeniable and weighty power of society, of the state, impressed itself on them. They grew bitterer, duller, weaker. Link wasn’t dead; here was the executor to his will, retaliating with loneliness and waiting and, in Elli’s case, with dreams.

  By punishing them in this way, the state protected itself only feebly. It drew on none of the evidence that had been touched on during the hearing, and rather than counter the deep sense of unworthiness that had led Link to his death, it let it go on growing. There was no attempt to warn parents, teachers and priests to be vigilant and not to join together what God has put asunder. This was the work of a gardener who pulls up clumps of weeds to right and left, but can’t stop the seeds from flying. When he comes to the end, he has to turn back again; behind him, everything is starting over.

  Newspaper reports. In a Berlin newspaper, Dr M. wrote: ‘A sex murder, a man killed out of that species of passion that drives one woman to another—those were our expectations. We were mistaken. There has been murder, wilfully committed—and yet, when one sees this plain-looking creature with her innocently blond, birdlike head, when one follows her cool, grey-blue eyes and hears her tender but quite ridiculous letters, one can only shake one’s head. A childlike being who needs only tenderness, not love, encounters a man who doesn’t know how to caress, who cannot love her without tormenting and maltreating her. The afflicted creature meets another woman her own age who is suffering something similar. She takes refuge in her devotion to this companion, finds a prop in her stronger character. Friendship and suppressed eros develop into sexual attachment. What more natural than that the women should form the plan of freeing themselves from such brutal men?’