The Unresolved Dispute over Whether Alberte Was a Virgin

The unresolved dispute over whether Alberte Goldschmid was a virgin exposes a limit in the investigation of her death: the available evidence does not settle what Habersaat claimed about her sexual history. Carl Mørck and Assad find no indication that her body had been sexually assaulted, but that fact cannot answer the separate question of virginity. As they question Alberte’s parents, the inquiry becomes a collision between uncertain evidence, a dead policeman’s intrusive conclusions, and a family that refuses to regard its daughter as having done anything shameful.

The question and its limits

The distinction begins with Carl’s private exchange with Assad. Carl takes Assad’s notebook, writes “virgin?” and passes it back. The gesture turns an uncertainty into the explicit subject of their investigation, but Assad’s response is only a shake of the head; the scene provides no resolution. In particular, the absence of sexual assault is not presented as proof one way or the other about Alberte’s virginity.

Carl then offers another possibility: Alberte may have had an affair. He points out that she was nineteen and says that investigators know she was seeing someone. His reasoning is deliberately modest: such a relationship would not have been unusual, even at the time. It does not establish the identity of a partner or confirm the nature of the relationship. Instead, it separates what the police believe they know—that Alberte was seeing someone—from the larger conclusion Habersaat had drawn about her.

Her parents’ account

Eli Goldschmid acknowledges that Alberte had suitors, and his voice falters as he does so. The parents’ recognition that a beautiful young woman attracted attention does not make them accept Habersaat’s claim. The mother describes the family as normal and Jewish and Alberte as a good daughter in their faith. She insists that they cannot and will not think badly of her. Their response is not an evidentiary finding about Alberte’s private life; it is a declaration of what they believe they owe their daughter and what they will not concede to the investigation’s most intimate speculation.

The mother also challenges the basis on which Habersaat claimed to know Alberte was not a virgin. She says that no one could know from the evidence he invoked, because Alberte had done a great deal of gymnastics and that might account for what he thought he had established. As she tries to explain, she cannot get the word “hymen” past her lips. The hesitation makes the conversation’s awkwardness visible: an intimate bodily claim has entered a police inquiry, but even naming the body part around which the claim turns proves difficult.

Habersaat’s methods and the family rupture

The parents’ objections concern not only what Habersaat believed but how he pursued it. The mother says he went further than suggesting that Alberte had been in relationships: he maintained that she was not a virgin. She recalls that the family stopped talking to him because, in their view, he said many horrible things and became vulgar. She acknowledges that examining such matters was part of his work as a policeman, but draws a boundary between an investigation and the manner in which he conducted it.

That boundary had also been crossed, in the parents’ view, when Habersaat questioned Alberte’s friends and family behind their backs. The inquiries brought him nowhere, according to the mother, yet their failure did not undo the harm of making those inquiries. The family’s refusal to continue speaking with him therefore marks a rupture between the investigator and the people whose cooperation might have helped him understand Alberte. His certainty about her sexual history is set against both the lack of a conclusive answer and the parents’ account of the methods that made them distrust him.

What remains unresolved

The interview keeps several propositions apart rather than allowing one to stand in for another. Alberte had suitors; Carl says the police know she was seeing someone; her body had not been subjected to sexual assault; Habersaat claimed she was not a virgin; and her parents rejected that claim as both unfounded and degrading. None of these facts, as presented, settles the question. The parents’ conviction that Alberte was a good daughter is meaningful to them, but it is not offered as forensic proof; equally, Habersaat’s status as a policeman does not make his assertion conclusive.

The dispute therefore records more than a disagreement over a single biographical detail. It shows how Alberte’s sexuality becomes something others—her parents and a male investigator—try to define, while the evidence presented here supplies no decisive answer in her own voice. The scene preserves that uncertainty rather than resolving it: the question written in Assad’s notebook remains a question, and the family’s anger at Habersaat explains why the investigation’s pursuit of an answer could itself become a source of injury.