Hamburg State Archive

The Hamburg State Archive is identified as a crucial documentary source for the book’s account of the Fritz Honka case: the author thanks it for making previously sealed case files accessible. Its significance lies in enabling a narrative that brings the language of official records into proximity with the lives and events those records classify.

Access to the Honka Files

The acknowledgment specifies that the Archive opened files concerning the Honka case that had until then remained under seal. It does not describe the Archive as an investigator or as a participant in the events; its documented role is to provide access to records. That distinction matters: the institution makes evidence available, while the book shapes that material into a narrative.

Records and Narrative Form

The account moves among different kinds of documentary language. A police description records the discovery of human remains near an abandoned chocolate factory on 2 November 1971, including the condition and identification of the remains. Elsewhere, a witness recounts her relationship with Winfried Schuldig in courtroom testimony; the narrative also presents the judgment in the Fritz Honka case and a later clinical assessment of Honka. These passages give the book an evidentiary register distinct from its scenes of imagined experience. The Archive’s documented provision of case files helps explain the presence of that register, although the acknowledgment does not identify the provenance of each individual passage.

Documentary Significance and Limits

The Archive’s contribution is therefore both practical and narratively consequential: access to records allows the book to place descriptions, testimony, legal findings, and clinical judgments beside one another without making them interchangeable. Each form establishes a different kind of knowledge, and none by itself supplies a complete account of the people involved. The acknowledgment confirms the importance of archival access to the project, while leaving the precise contents and selection history of the opened files unspecified.