Fritz Honka

Fritz Honka is a poor, physically damaged man whose yearning for love and recognition takes shape in the bars of St. Pauli and, with devastating consequences, in the control he exercises over women. Known among bar regulars as Fiete and called the Crooked One, he moves between elaborate fantasies of tenderness and brutal acts of domination. His murder of four women leads to a conviction and a 15-year prison sentence, followed by psychiatric confinement and, eventually, a transfer to a care home under a new name.

Identity and Life on St. Pauli

In February 1974, at three in the morning, Honka has already spent twelve hours at his usual place along the short side of the L-shaped counter in Zum Goldenen Handschuh. He is small and crooked, with a sunken face and enormous hands. At the bar he speaks at length to the man beside him, Helmut Berger, known as Leiche, a former prisoner convicted of murder who is often barely awake. Honka’s story of a woman he loved, her perfume, and the distinctive mole on her belly emerges in this setting as a memory he cannot let go of.

The nickname Fiete is a rare source of pride. He cannot remember who gave it to him or why, but, having never had a nickname before, he treats it as a distinction: even a second-class nickname feels almost like a title of nobility in the bar’s social order. His crooked face makes a full smile difficult, yet the name gives him a brief sense that he might be someone special. That desire for recognition recurs in his private conviction that he is special without yet knowing it, and that life contains more than it appears to.

Honka’s social world is also shaped by drink, isolation, and physical decline. The story describes him as battered and worn down, and as having little chance with women his own age. He has long sought older women, some old enough to be grandmothers, and says he no longer cares about their appearance. The bars provide company and possible encounters, but they do not bridge his loneliness; his favorite song, Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen, plays on a Wednesday when he feels wretched and alone.

Fantasy, Longing, and Control

Honka’s imagination offers escape from a life he experiences as barren. One afternoon, waking shortly before three, he discovers a woman lying beside him and initially imagines that she is young, healthy, and beautiful. In his imagined alternative life, he is young and healthy too, his breath pleasant, and he gives a woman with clear skin and perfect teeth a heavenly experience. The longing overwhelms him; he hopes for a miracle, as he says he is always doing. When the woman makes a rattling, congested sound and he recognizes her age and frailty, the imagined scene breaks against the body beside him.

The contrast between fantasy and circumstance does not lead him toward tenderness. After the woman has got up and later returns, Honka decides that this time he will go further: he will enslave her. He imagines her working, handing over her money, keeping the flat in order, and anticipating his every wish. He tells her she can stay for a few days. The episode turns the language of rescue and companionship into a plan for exploitation: the woman’s presence becomes, in his conception, a means of service and control.

He then makes that control explicit in a written declaration presented to Gerda Voss. The document claims that she has never had it so good, that Honka knows better than she does what is good for her, and that she agrees to whatever he does. It also requires her to renounce having or expressing an opinion and to bring him her daughter, Rosi, at the first opportunity. The declaration is framed as freely made and signed by Gerda, but its contents record the terms of Honka’s domination rather than an independent choice. He folds the paper several times and locks it in a cupboard, treating the written statement as proof that her freedom has been curtailed.

Murders and Conviction

On 17 July 1975, during firefighting at Zeißstraße 74, firefighters discover human remains in a storage space in the attic. The remains indicate a homicide. Suspicion quickly falls on the 40-year-old night watchman Honka. After several days of silence, he confesses to detectives Peter Seeler and Hans-Peter Untermann on 29 July.

The judgment records four killings in Honka’s flat in Hamburg: Gertraud Bräuer, a hairdresser, was strangled at the end of 1970; Anna Beuschel, a housewife, was beaten and strangled, and her throat was cut, in October 1974; Frida Roblick, a prostitute, was strangled in early December 1974; and Ruth Schuld, also a prostitute, was strangled in January 1975. The court states that Honka was convicted and had confessed to killing the women, probably to satisfy his sexual desires. These were not acts confined to the bar’s degrading talk or his fantasies of command: they culminated in the destruction of four lives in his own home.

At the trial before Landgericht Hamburg, the prosecution charged Honka with four murders. His lawyer, Rolf Bossi, argued for diminished criminal responsibility, pointing to years of severe alcohol abuse, Honka’s personal deterioration, and what he described as serious mental abnormality. The court ultimately found him guilty of murder in one case and manslaughter in three, each committed with diminished responsibility. It imposed an aggregate prison sentence of 15 years and ordered his placement in a psychiatric hospital.

Confinement and Life as Peter Jensen

In May 1993, after officials considered moving Honka under a different name to another federal state, he agreed to become Peter Jensen. He was transferred to a care home in Scharbeutz on the Baltic Sea. Alcohol remained prohibited. During the two-month trial period he adapted well to the home, and his condition visibly improved; his pronounced withdrawal and regression lessened. At first, however, he remained within the locality, and unaccompanied public-transport journeys to neighboring towns were beyond him. At a personal hearing, he spoke positively about his stay.

In the following years, Peter Jensen lived quietly in a single room, leaving it mainly for meals and, in good weather, to go outside. His physical vitality continued to decline. He often complained of breathing difficulties, and doctors considered him markedly prematurely aged, with limited life expectancy and almost no remaining sexual interest. Organ illnesses and his greatly weakened general condition required medical care. In 1997 he became convinced that staff were trying to poison him, alleging that toxic fumes were entering his room at night through the drain and lampshade. Patient listening could calm him for a time, but eventually it no longer did. The available account ends with that worsening suspicion, not with a report of his death or release.

Narrative Significance

Honka’s characterization is built around a recurring collision: the imagined woman who promises renewal gives way to the actual person whom he seeks to possess. His remembered lover’s perfume and the later fantasy of a young, beautiful companion show how intensely he longs for an idealized encounter; the plan to enslave Gerda and the written declaration reveal the violence with which he converts that longing into authority over another person. The contrast does not excuse his actions. It makes visible the distance between his dream of being loved and the coercion through which he tries to secure obedience.

The nickname Fiete briefly offers the belonging he lacks, while the bars’ culture of nicknames and judgments reduces people to easily circulated labels. Against that setting, Honka’s hope of being special and his imagined miracles remain fragile forms of self-consolation. His later identity as Peter Jensen changes his name and surroundings, but the account of his secluded life and renewed persecution fears supplies no evidence of a simple resolution. His trajectory instead connects loneliness and self-invention to domination, murder, and an institutional existence that continues after the courtroom has assigned legal responsibility.