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This is the story of one of the most spectacular and so far unsolved murder cases in the history of German jurisprudence of the last century: In May 1901 while on vacation in Ajaccio, Corsica, Karl Hau, an ambitious 19-year-old law student, makes the acquaintance of Mrs. Molitor, a well-to-do widow from Baden-Baden and her two unmarried daughters, Olga and Lina (nineteen and twenty-five, respectively). Like her mother, the effusive Olga immediately falls for Karl and records this and other feelings in sentimental verses, which she also likes to read aloud. Yet in spite of a certain attraction, it isn’t the extroverted, pretty Olga who arouses Karl’s interest, but her more serious older sister. She too instantly succumbs to the young con man’s charm.
Karl, who hails from a quite unpretentious background, constantly invents the most fabulous stories about his family and his professional future, and thanks to his urbane and self-confident manner he brings it off. When he visits the three ladies at their home in Baden-Baden, he and Lina grow closer and she allows him to persuade her, against all reason, to run away with him. When Karl’s true circumstances become known, the mother agrees to a legalization of the relationship to avoid an even greater scandal.
The young couple leave for the U.S. where, thanks to generous support provided by his mother-in-law, Karl is able to complete his law studies and embark on a promising academic career as an assistant professor. Yet he, who has meanwhile become the proud father of a daughter, aspires to greater heights; and so he tries his luck with some international speculative deals. In the process he not only runs through his wife’s dowry but also the money of several fellow citizens.
Financially ruined but still keeping up appearances, he returns to Europe in 1906 with his wife and daughter. There, his never quite resolved relationship with the beautiful Olga is rekindled. In disguise, he journeys from London to Baden-Baden to secretly meet with her. While Karl is still in Baden-Baden, the widow Molitor is killed on the street by a pistol shot. Witnesses believe they recognize Karl as the man in dark clothes they saw at the crime scene, and he is arrested the next day. In 1907, after a sensational trial, he is sentenced to death for murder motivated by greed. However, there is no conclusive evidence to prove his guilt.
The death sentence is subsequently reduced to life in prison. In 1925 Hau is released on probation. He writes two books about the trial and the time he spent in prison; both quickly become bestsellers. When the authorities try to put him back in prison on the basis of revelations in the books, he escapes. In 1926 a shepherd discovers the dying man among the ruins of the Villa Adriana in Tivoli. The story of Karl Hau, a fascinating as well as disturbing figure who stage-managed his entire life right up to his death, ends with his suicide.
Bernd Schroeder fully and expertly exploits the literary potential of this story of love, passion, and ruin. He turns the historical scandal into a suspenseful and artfully orchestrated documentary novel. Actual documents such as case files, newspaper stories, letters, and trial testimony are skillfully interwoven with fictional passages that might very well have occurred just that way, and thus he creates a scintillating and morally highly ambivalent picture of his protagonist. In Schroeder’s novel this unluckily thwarted, demonic version of Felix Krull is highly talented but unscrupulous, loving and yet sexually dissipated, passionate and also coldly calculating.
What is so unusual about this novel is that at no point does it present a solution to the question of guilt and thus no partiality on the part of the author is displayed. Rather Schroeder avoids all value judgments about the characters and events portrayed and raises the rejection of chronology and causality to a principle of storytelling: Repeatedly he has the three narrative strands – past history, trial, and imprisonment – interrupt and interpenetrate each other until at the end the perspectives and judgments of the various characters are presented side by side in all their contradictoriness, and given equal weight.
The episodic and fragmentary nature of the narrative reflects the story and allows the reader to experience it: the futile effort to explain a monstrous act, which depends on diverse sources, the search for a reliable reality that can be synthesized – if at all – only from the various versions of what occurred. In this way the accused – who remains passive and silent throughout long passages – becomes the empty and unmoving core at the center of a vortex of stories. He alone is in possession of the truth sought by all those around him. And he doesn’t give away a single word.
Schroeder makes his hero the focal point of the novel, which is critical of both contemporary issues and society. His vivid portrait of the talented Mr. Hau shows how German society at the beginning of the last century finds him guilty primarily because of his immoral life. For in their eyes someone like Hau who fritters away his money, betrays his wife, and loses the money of others through speculation can easily be capable of murder as well. Thus Hau is eventually convicted because of his deviation from the social norms, not on the basis of any convincing evidence – of which, after all, none was ever available.
By turning this sensational case into literature, Schroeder has managed not merely to reconstruct an authentic event but, more important, he has laid bare the workings of prejudice, exclusion, and incrimination on the one side, and a reckless striving for enjoyment and the pursuit of individualism on the other. The really exciting, even stirring aspect of Schroeder’s polyphonic half-documentary, half-fictional transmutation of this scandal from the annals of crime is the recognition that a conflict between a rigid value system and a libertine lifestyle can apparently be resolved only when the system asserts itself, with all the official power available to it, against that which is threatening and different.
Anne-Bitt Gerecke
March 2007
[Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo]
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