The Rotenburg cannibalism case, discovered in Germany in the fall of 2003, involved a man who killed and consumed a partner who had volunteered to be killed and eaten. The book treats the case not only as an instance of cannibalism but as a disturbing point of comparison with the Eucharist, where the consumption of Christ’s body is associated with participation in eternal life.

Circumstances and Consent

The account emphasizes that the arrangement was consensual, distinguishing it from a concealed abduction: the man placed announcements on the web seeking someone willing to be killed and eaten, and found a volunteer. Consent is therefore central to the case as the book presents it, though the account does not elaborate on the participants’ motives or on the legal proceedings.

Course of the Event

The two men first ate together; afterward, the volunteer was killed, divided into pieces, and consumed gradually. This sequence moves from a shared meal to the killing and consumption that define the case. The book supplies no further details about the participants’ identities, the discovery, or what followed.

Eucharistic Interpretation

The author places the case beside the Eucharist’s central question of what is consumed when communicants eat the body of Christ. In the theological account presented here, that body is a partial object and an undead substance through which the living participate in eternal divine life. The cannibalism case turns that promise into a disturbing material analogy: consumption is linked not just to nourishment but to death and a form of life imagined to exceed mortality. The comparison does not make the two acts equivalent; it exposes the unsettling bodily dimension that the religious promise can otherwise leave abstract.