After his discharge in 1903, Haarmann returned to Hanover once again and became involved in petty crime. He was arrested for burglary, pick pocketing, and small-scale cons. In 1914 he was convicted for a warehouse burglary and sent to prison, enabling him to escape combat as a soldier in World War I. On his release from prison in 1918, he stepped into a Germany that was traumatized by war, and whose people were suffering intense poverty and the breakdown of ordered society. Crime was flourishing as people struggled to make ends meet. This was the ideal environment for a man like Haarmann. He immediately joined a smuggling ring and simultaneously became a police informer, managing to profit from both sides at once.
Preying on the homeless
Another feature of the post-war years was the number of homeless and displaced people milling around the city. Many of the younger ones resorted to prostitution and thus, it became easy for Haarmann to pick up young boys. In particular he liked to frequent the railway station and find likely prospects there. Often he would introduce himself as Detective Haarmann and use that pretext to get the boys to go with him. And where once he had been satisfied with simple sexual abuse, now he needed to kill his victims to fully satisfy his lust.
One of his first victims was named Friedel Rothe. Rothe’s parents found out that their son had gone with ‘Detective Haarmann’ and the police went round to Haarmaan’s apartment but failed to notice the boy’s severed head hidden behind the stove. Shortly afterwards Haarmann received a nine month prison sentence for indecency. On his release he met a young homosexual called Hans Grans. They entered into a sexual relationship and moved in together, next they became business partners, trading on the black market with Fritz continuing to also act a police informer. Over the next couple of years their business began to include a gruesome new sideline: selling the clothes and the cooked flesh of Haarmann’s victims.
Meat inspection
For the most part their victims were not missed. Even when they were, the authorities seemed to make elementary blunders in following up clues: the parents of one victim told the police they suspected Grans of having been the murderer. Grans was temporarily in prison at the time of the accusation, but Haarmann was never investigated, even though he visited the house of the parents pretending to be a criminologist and laughing hysterically as they told him of their fears.
On another occasion, a suspicious customer took some of Haarmann’s meat to the authorities for examination, the police expert, without making any tests, duly pronounced it to be pork. Thus, it seemed to be the case that as long as the murders were confined to a homosexual netherworld, the authorities preferred to turn a blind eye.
Human skulls
All that changed in May 1924 when, first one, and then, over the next few weeks, several more, human skulls were found by the river Leine. The authorities tried to damp down the public’s fear, suggesting that it was all a macabre joke, the skulls having been left there by graverobbers. However when, on 24 July, children playing in the area found a sack full of human bones, there was no stopping the panic. In all, the police found 500 bones belonging to at least 27 different bodies.
The police investigated all the local sex offenders, amongst them Fritz Haarmann, but still found no evidence to connect him to the apparent murders. In the end it was Haarmann’s own over-confidence that led to his downfall. For some reason – conceivably to try and stop himself form committing another murder – he took a 15-year-old boy to the police to report the boy for insolent behaviour. Once under arrest the boy accused Haarmann of making sexual advances. Haarmann was then arrested and his flat was searched. The police found garments belonging to some of the missing children, some of them bloodstained. Haarmann explained them away saying he was a dealer in used clothing and he had no idea where they had come from.
Death by decapitation
However, after a week in custody under heavy questioning, Haarmann finally confessed to the murders. He took the detectives to a number of sites around Hanover where he had buried further bodies. He seemed to take macabre pride in his crimes. His testimony only varied when it came to the role of Hans Grans, whom he alternately blamed and exculpated.
When it came to trial Haarmann was sentenced to death while the jury decided that Grans was no more than an accessory. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Haarmann appeared to thoroughly enjoy his trial, conducting his own defence, smoking cigars and complaining about the presence of women in the courtroom. It was his final act of bravado, however. On 15 April 1925 he was, like many of his victims before him, decapitated.
Chapter 5: Vampires of the Imagination
In 1797 the famous German writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote The Bride of Corinth: A young woman returns from the dead as a vampire to her parents’ house and seduces a young man who is staying with them. Her parents, desperate to see her again, interrupt the pair as they are making love, whereupon the young woman explains that she has been allowed back from the underworld to taste a night of passion with a man, but that now that they have broken the spell, she must return again. She then becomes a corpse once more, before their very eyes.That same year, 1797, the well-known English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge began the first part of a long narrative poem, Christabel. In the poem, the central character, Christabel, meets a mysterious woman, Geraldine, who appears to have magical powers. Although she is very beautiful, and makes a close and trusting friend of the innocent Christabel, as well as Christabel’s father, she later reveals an underlying demonic quality. Although vampires are never mentioned in Coleridge’s poem, the setting and emotional dynamic between the characters, especially between Christabel and Geraldine, have all the characteristic features of a vampire story.
Coleridge’s friend Robert Southey, another of the Romantic poets, as they were known, also penned a ballad concerning a vampire, The Old Woman of Berkeley. In this story, a seemingly respectable old woman, among whose children are a monk and a nun, summons her offspring to her side before she dies. To their surprise, she reveals that she has lived a life of terrible sin, and asks them to bolt and chain her coffin so that the devil cannot come for her. She explains:
‘All kind of sin have I rioted in,
And the judgement now must be,
But I secured my children’s souls,
Oh! pray, my children, for me!
‘I have ‘nointed myself with infant’s fat,
The fiends have been my slaves,
From sleeping babes I have suck’d the breath,
And breaking by charms the sleep of death,
I have call’d the dead from their graves.
‘And the Devil will fetch me now in fire,
My witchcrafts to atone;
And I who have troubled the dead man’s grave
Shall never have rest in my own.
The children do their best for their mother, but their efforts to spare her from the Devil are in vain, and he duly arrives in a mighty blast of fire and wind, to take her off to hell.
‘Wake Not the Dead!’
At the height of the Gothic craze for ghost stories and tales of the supernatural, a Northern English poet called John Stagg, known as the Blind Bard of Cumberland, wrote a poem called The Vampire. In the preface, he explained that the story was:
‘founded on an opinion or report which prevailed in Hungary, and several parts of Germany, towards the beginning of the last century. It was then asserted, that, in several places, dead persons had been known to leave their graves, and, by night, to revisit the habitations of their friends whom, by suckosity, they drained of their blood as they slept. The person thus phlebotomized was sure to become a Vampyre in their turn; and if it had not been for a lucky thought of the clergy, who ingeniously recommended staking them in their graves, we should by this time have had a greater swarm of blood-suckers than we have at present, numerous as they are.’
Another Romantic poet to write about vampires was Johann Ludwig von Tiecke, in his poem, The Bride of the Grave, and
in his story, Wake Not the Dead!. The story was part of a collection of folk tales on the model of the Brothers Grimm, and was published in English in 1823. It tells of Walter, a lord, and his wife, Brunhilda. Although they share a passionate erotic love, Brunhilda has a dreadful temper, and terrorizes the household. When Brunhilda dies suddenly, Walter takes a new wife, Swanhilda and they have two children. But Walter begins to miss his lustful nights with Brunhilda, and compels a sorcerer to wake her from the dead by giving her corpse blood to drink. Brunhilda returns to life, more beautiful than ever, but with a worse temper, and a pair of razor-sharp fangs to boot. She feasts on the blood of the household staff and the family until all are dead. Finally, she turns on Walter himself. Walter kills her, and then takes another woman, but while in his new love’s embrace, she turns in to a snake. The castle catches fire, the walls fall in, and as he is crushed to death, he hears a voice command, ‘Wake Not the Dead!’.
‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know’
The theme of the seductive enchantress as harbinger of death was a very popular one among the Romantic poets, including John Keats, whose poems The Lamia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci both evoke the idea of a fabulously beautiful woman who turns out to be a supernatural being. In these stories, the woman typically charms a mortal man into spiritual slavery, leaving his life in ruins.
Lord Byron, one of the leading Romantic poets, famously described by his married lover Lady Caroline Lamb as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’, also reprised this theme in his poem, The Giaour, which actually mentions vampires by name. The story concerns a Turkish girl, Leila, who falls in love with an infidel (‘the giaour’ of the title). The infidel kills Leila’s husband, and is punished by becoming a vampire. It is thought that Lord Byron first heard of vampires on his ‘grand tour’ of Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Tales of the Dead
Lord Byron also served as a model for the first real vampire story, John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, published in 1819. Polidori was Byron’s personal physician, and in the summer of 1816, he stayed with Byron in Switzerland at the Villa Diodati beside Lake Geneva. There, he and Byron spent time with Byron’s friends Percy Shelley, Shelley’s fiancé Mary Godwin, and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Claire had had an affair with Byron in London, and was pregnant with his child, but Byron refused to be in her company unless Shelley and her sister were present.
The little circle of friends were kept indoors for several days that summer as it rained incessantly. To while away the time, they read tales from Fantasmagoriana, a collection of horror fiction later translated into English as Tales of the Dead. They then proposed a ‘ghost writing’ contest, and took to writing their own stories. Mary Godwin, who later became Mary Shelley, came up with the idea for her novel Frankenstein, perhaps the most famous horror story of all time.
Lord Byron, for his part, began a story concerning a narrator who embarks on a ‘grand tour’ with an old man, Augustus Darvell. As the journey progresses, Darvell becomes weaker and weaker, until, when they reach a cemetery, his face turns black and his body begins to decompose. Byron had intended to have Darvell come to life again as a vampire, but never finished the story, and it was left to his friend Polidori to revive it.
The debauched aristocrat
Not long after this sojourn in Switzerland, John Polidori and Lord Byron fell out, and Polidori went travelling, eventually returning to London. However, Polidori had been inspired by Lord Byron’s fragment to write a short story of his own, The Vampyre. Its hero, Lord Ruthven, a bored and spoiled aristocrat, was based on the personality of Lord Byron himself. ‘Lord Ruthven’ was a name originally used in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon, a thinly disguised portrait of her former lover.
Polidori’s story was published in the New Monthly Magazine as ‘A Tale by Lord Byron’ in 1819. Both Polidori and Byron protested that Byron was not the author, but to no avail. At this period, Lord Byron was so famous that the public – particularly his armies of female admirers – were clamouring for his work. Byron had not only made a name for himself as a writer, but his outrageous behaviour had scandalized English society, and he had been forced to leave the country, accused of incest and sodomy. Yet although he was reviled in many quarters, like many of today’s celebrities, his bad behaviour and many shocking sexual liaisons only made him more attractive to his female fans.
The story became an immediate sensation, partly because Byron was believed to have written it, but also because it met the public’s growing enthusiasm for gothic horror stories. Moreover, it was highly original, since it transformed the ugly, brutish vampire of Slavic folklore into the suave, charismatic, upper-class villain that we are so familiar with today.
The Victorian Vampire Craze
As mentioned earlier, the idea of the revenant, a spirit returning from the dead to visit a family member or lover, is a very ancient one that crosses many cultures, and was a strong theme in much European folklore. In the nineteenth century, this theme found its way into English literature, not just in poems, but in stories as well. The first of these stories was written by a woman, Elizabeth Grey, whose ghostly tale The Skeleton Count, or The Vampire Mistress was published in 1828 in the weekly paper The Casket. Grey was a well-known and very prolific popular novelist of the period. Most of her work remains obscure today, but this story was to assure her a place in literary history.
Varney the Vampire
Many of Grey’s stories appeared in the so-called ‘penny dreadfuls’, serial stories that appeared in cheap editions over a period of weeks. Each of the editions cost a penny, and was printed on pulp paper, usually with a lurid illustration on the front to match the contents. The ‘penny dreadfuls’ were bought, much as comics used to be, mainly by children, teenagers and young adults. One of the most popular of all these series was a story called Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Rymer. (Some attribute the series to another gothic horror writer, Thomas Preskett Prest, creator of another famous character in the horror genre, Sweeney Todd.) So popular was Varney that in 1847, the series was published in book form, in a mammoth edition running to over 800 pages, with 220 chapters, and illustrated by an unknown artist who nevertheless vividly captured the horrific exploits of this gruesome hero.
The series featured a vampire, Sir Francis Varney, and his attacks on a family called the Bannerworths. Varney’s motivation for troubling the Bannerworths was never entirely clear; nor was the cause of his death, or the circumstances of his revival, allowing the author to engage in various speculative tales about how his corpse was reanimated. As the stories progress, we find out that Varney has been cursed with vampirism after betraying a royalist to Oliver Cromwell and accidentally killing his son in a fit of rage, and over the course of the series, Varney becomes a more and more sympathetic character: at the end, desperately unhappy about his condition, he finally throws himself into a volcano, and disappears into the fiery depths for ever.
The ‘sympathetic’ vampire
Varney introduced several important features to vampire stories, and some of these have become staples of horror fiction up to the present day. He has supernatural powers, is able to hypnotize people, and has prominent fangs, which, when he feeds off a victim’s blood, leave two puncture marks on the skin. He does not fear garlic or crosses, can withstand daylight, and is able to act as an ordinary human being – for example, he can eat normal food and drink, although it does not give him sustenance. It is only when he is hungry that he exhibits the characteristics of a vampire. Most significant of all, we are able to feel sympathy for him as an individual suffering from a horrible condition; through the story of the mythical vampire, we come to empathize with the feelings of an outsider, forever doomed as an outcast from human society because of a past sin, or because of his nature, or both. In this sense, Varney is a precursor of the contemporary ‘sympathetic’ vampire, which today excites so much interest in romantic horror fiction.
Car
milla: the lesbian vampire?
The next milestone in the history of vampire fiction was a gothic novella entitled Carmilla, which was published in 1872 in the magazine The Dark Blue. The author was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a famous writer of ghost stories, who came from a well-known literary family that included a number of playwrights and novelists. Two illustrators were employed to work on his book, resulting in some confusion as to the appearance of certain characters, but in essence, the story concerns an innocent young woman, Laura, and her close friend, Carmilla, who turns out to be a vampire.
In true gothic style, the story begins with a remote castle in a forest in Austria, where a young woman, Laura, and her widowed father live in solitary splendour. Laura tells of a dream she had as a young girl in which a beautiful stranger came to her room and bit her on the chest. As a teenager, she longs for a companion, and is disappointed when her father receives a message to say that the young lady he has sent for, Bertha Rheinfeldt, has died suddenly. However, by chance, a carriage accident takes place outside the castle, and a young woman, Carmilla, emerges from it, injured. Laura and Carmilla immediately recognize each other from the dream they had as children. Meanwhile, Carmilla’s mother explains to Laura’s father that she must journey on, and it is decided that Carmilla will be left at the castle.
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