The dispute between Triebtäter and mental illness

The dispute over compulsive sexual offending and mental illness frames a central question raised by the book’s account of Fritz Honka’s case: whether such offenders should be held responsible as criminals or understood as so ill that they require psychiatric treatment. The debate is presented not as an abstract choice alone, but as a conflict over how responsibility, illness, and public safety are to be weighed.

The Question of Criminal Responsibility

The issue had already become prominent through the work of Munich defense lawyer Rolf Bossi, one of Germany’s best-known criminal advocates in the mid-1970s. Five years earlier, during the trial of Jürgen Bartsch, whom Bossi had defended, he had helped provoke a contentious debate about the state of psychiatry and the criminal responsibility of compulsive sexual offenders. The question persisted into Honka’s case: whether the offender was a criminal answerable for his acts or a sick person who belonged in psychiatric treatment.

At Honka’s trial, the prosecution charged him with murder in four cases before the 21st Criminal Chamber of the Hamburg Regional Court, presided over by Reimer Hadenfeld. In his closing argument, Bossi portrayed Honka as profoundly damaged by alcohol misuse and emphasized his unsuccessful efforts to resist his circumstances. He urged the court to consider Honka’s personal development and the alleged insults inflicted by his victims, characterizing the crimes as shaped by situation and milieu. Bossi also argued that Honka had a severe psychological abnormality amounting to illness and sought reduced criminal responsibility under section 21. The argument placed the broader debate directly before the court: how far a psychiatric explanation could affect the legal assessment of responsibility.

Psychiatric Assessment and Continuing Risk

The psychiatric assessment described a severe decline in personality after years of heavy alcohol misuse, including organic consequences and a prolonged deterioration in the conditions of Honka’s life. It also treated his compulsive drives as addictive in character. His ability to continue living in the same home as the victims’ remains was cited as evidence of the extent of his deterioration, rather than as grounds for excusing his conduct.

The assessment found that Honka showed no critical understanding of his crimes and characterized him as a highly abnormal personality with sexual deviance. It forecast that, if released, he would again become dependent on alcohol and resume seeking relationships with older women, as he had for years. The danger assessment remained unchanged, leaving the question of psychiatric illness inseparable from the question of whether he could safely return to freedom.

Proof, Diagnosis, and the Missing Witness

The book places the responsibility debate beside a different legal uncertainty: whether a crime can be attributed to a particular person at all. Fingerprint comparison identified Elisabeth Gertraud Bräuer through a print from her right little finger. She was 42 when she died; after her fiancé’s death, she had led an unsettled life, staying for periods with men who had their own homes and keeping house for them. Yet immediately before the trial of Winfried Schuldig, she could not be found, and the proceedings went ahead in her absence.

Schuldig was acquitted because the prosecution could not prove the act against him. The unresolved question of who had killed Bräuer remains beside the book’s account of psychiatric arguments over Honka: diagnosis and diminished responsibility address a different problem from proof of identity and conduct. The juxtaposition makes the limits of each kind of explanation visible without resolving the unanswered case.

Social Labels and the Limits of Diagnosis

The bar scenes offer a contrasting register for thinking about criminality: where the courtroom and psychiatric assessment seek to classify responsibility and risk, the tavern reduces people to nicknames and reputations. Helmut Berger, known there as “Corpse,” had served thirteen years for murder; when someone asked what kind of murder it was, he answered that it had been treacherous, a reply that drew laughter. The joke turns a grave conviction into a fragment of barroom identity, showing how informal labels can flatten a person just as official categories can frame a case—though they do so for different purposes.

For Fiete Honka, a newly acquired nickname carries the opposite emotional weight: he feels proud of it, treating the name as a small distinction in a place where nicknames function like titles. These scenes do not settle whether illness diminishes responsibility. Instead, they set the legal debate within a social world already organized by labels, where belonging and judgment are communicated through shorthand. The book’s juxtaposition leaves the central question open: explanation may clarify a person’s condition, but neither a diagnosis nor a nickname by itself resolves what responsibility or safety requires.