Compulsive sexual behavior

Compulsive sexual behavior is presented both as a social pattern of male entitlement and, in the case of Fritz Honka, as an addiction-like drive invoked to explain his murders and assess the danger he might pose if released. The book places these accounts beside one another without making them equivalent: vulgar talk and harassment belong to the surrounding bar culture, while Honka’s sexual deviance becomes the subject of legal judgment and psychiatric observation.

Everyday Entitlement and Public Harassment

At the Zum Goldenen Handschuh, sexualized conduct is not confined to private life. Soldaten-Norbert, a regular threatened with being barred from the bar, has been shut out by sex workers after he beat one of them. He responds by seeking out crowded pedestrian areas, department stores, and stations, where he presses against women. He has cut a circular hole in his bright yellow raincoat and wears no underwear; the brief encounters end in ejaculation. His fantasy continues after the contact, as he imagines the women being questioned at home or work about semen on their clothes. When a woman arrives at the bar with a companion, he throws a coin on the floor and uses it to humiliate her. The sequence makes his sexual behavior an exercise in non-consensual contact and degradation, not simply private fantasy.

Male Talk, Status, and Sexual Entitlement

At a meal with Fiete Honka and Gerda Voss, Siggi turns drinking into a framework for talking about women. He names forgetting trouble, celebrating happiness, and making something happen when nothing is happening as reasons to drink; after more schnapps and beer, his talk settles on women as a source of endless variety. He dwells on gestures such as crossing the legs, fastening a blouse, or arranging the hair, then insists on the paradox that there are both too many women and too few. Gerda is present while he speaks, and she and Fiete nod along. The scene makes sexualized appraisal part of convivial male conversation, with women treated as a succession of possibilities rather than as participants whose own desires shape the discussion.

Fanta-Rolf embodies a different performance of masculine power. He has deliberately refined a soft, muted, casual manner of speaking, but aggression runs beneath it, and the narrative presents the contrast as a practiced advantage: when he speaks in that tone, violence may follow. His nerve is described as exceptionally steady, almost pulse-free. Against the impulsiveness and public harassment associated with other men around the bar, his self-command shows how dominance can also be staged through composure and controlled threat.

Fiete’s interest in Helga is shaped by a possessive fantasy rather than by any confirmed invitation. After Erich’s birthday gathering, he takes Erich’s admission that he is temporarily out of work and his history of breaking his legs three times as evidence that he is inferior and does not deserve Helga. Fiete interprets the looks she gives him during games as signs that she is moving toward him, imagining that a change in their relationship is only a matter of time. Yet when Helga later confides that she once dreamed of a different life and fears that her wages and Erich’s unemployment benefit will not cover the house payments, her disclosure concerns economic strain, not a declared romantic choice. The gap between her stated worries and Fiete’s confident reading exposes how male desire can turn a woman’s presence and vulnerability into imagined confirmation.

Honka's Compulsion in Court and Clinical Assessment

The legal proceedings turned sexual compulsion from a surrounding social pattern into an explicit question of criminal responsibility. Before the trial, defense lawyer Rolf Bossi had argued in another notorious case that a sexually driven offender might be ill rather than criminal. He took on Fritz Honka’s defense only three weeks before proceedings began. The State charged Honka with four murders; the judgment identified him as a 40-year-old security guard who had confessed to killing four women in his third-floor apartment at Zeißstraße 74, Hamburg, probably to satisfy his sexual urges.

In his closing argument, Bossi portrayed Honka as a person ruined by alcohol abuse and emphasized his desperate efforts to resist his fate. He urged the court to consider that fate before guilt, characterized the killings as situational or milieu-related acts, and argued that the victims had seriously insulted Honka. He also invoked a severe mental abnormality with disease value, describing the dismemberment as the product of a necrophilic-sadistic frenzy, and pleaded diminished responsibility under section 21. The court did not accept that account as a complete exculpation: it convicted Honka of murder in one case and manslaughter in three, each committed with diminished responsibility, imposed an aggregate sentence of fifteen years, and ordered his placement in a psychiatric hospital.

The judgment connected Honka’s compulsive drive to years of heavy alcohol abuse, organic consequences, and a prolonged deterioration of personality and living conditions. It treated his ability to remain in the apartment among the decomposing bodies, their persistent odor, and the beetles and maggots that had settled in them as evidence of how completely he had become enslaved to the drive. After transfer to the secure psychiatric unit at Allgemeines Krankenhaus Ochsenzoll, he worked as a trained-by-practice shoemaker but showed no critical engagement with his crimes. A 1981 assessment found no therapeutic relationship possible, described him as sexually deviant, and judged that, if free, he would again succumb to alcohol and approach older women in the manner he had practiced for years; the prognosis of danger remained unchanged.

Later Assessment and Continued Restriction

By 1984, a decline in Honka’s vitality had led clinicians to judge that there were no longer concrete signs of danger to people around him. That change did not result in greater freedom: the authorities still considered relaxation of restrictions unjustified and release inadmissible, in significant part because Honka and his crimes were so widely known that he would face difficulties outside. The assessment shifted the stated concern from an immediate threat to the consequences of his notoriety, while leaving the restrictions in place.

A transfer under a new name was therefore considered. Honka agreed to become Peter Jensen, and in May 1993 he was moved to an old-age and nursing home in Scharbeutz on the Baltic Sea. Alcohol remained strictly prohibited, preserving the central safeguard against a relapse that the earlier psychiatric assessment had anticipated. During a two-month trial period he integrated well into the home’s routine, and his condition visibly improved; pronounced tendencies toward withdrawal and regression largely receded. His activity initially remained local: unaccompanied public-transport trips to nearby places were still too demanding. At a personal hearing, he spoke positively about his stay. The improvement marked a change in his daily condition, but the account records it within a controlled placement, not as a release or a resolution of the earlier clinical concerns.