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print records. Thirty-three-year-old “street girl” Frieda Schubert, born in Dresden, “was not particularly well liked in her neighborhood because of her impudent behavior [frechen Auftretens].” On the day of her disappearance , the story continued, Schubert had approached several men on the street until one unidenti‹ed man (supposedly the murderer) ‹nally accepted her services.46 Crime professionals observing the Grossmann case attributed to the women of Grossmann’s milieu low-level criminality and social and mental inferiority.47 According to Peter Becker, as criminal science became medicalized in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the prostitute in German criminological discourse was both a victim and a vehicle of social degeneration ; her mental and physical development were supposedly hindered by inherent physiological conditions or by the environment. Under this paradigm, according to Becker, prostitutes were seen as psychologically and physically weak, unable to protect themselves from moral depravity or to live in respectable society. A psychiatrist commenting on the Grossmann trial spoke of Grossmann’s victims in the social-Darwinian terms of being “not ‹t for the struggle for survival.”48 Another forensic psychiatrist involved in the cases warned prosecutors that “the girls whom he [Grossmann] took in came mostly from completely depraved and evil social circles and certainly also many exaggerate and lie.”49 Once the identity of Berlin’s serial sexual murderer was discovered, the treatment of the murder victims in the pages of the press masked the social identities and experiences of Grossmann’s victims in a variety of ways. The somewhat conservative Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger was much more interested in the criminal than in his victims. Grossmann was a “degenerate ” (Wüstling), a “homely, ugly man” (unscheinbarer, häßlicher Mensch), who preyed on women who “suffered from need and hunger.”50 But the newspaper was only interested in the identity of the victims insofar as they could prove the number of women Grossmann had killed. “The homicide squad has conclusive evidence that Grossmann’s victims number at least 15 to 20,” the newspaper reported on September 4, “who were murdered not just in Berlin but also outside.”51 In the pages of the republican Ullstein newspapers, the portrayals of Grossmann as a morally aberrant sexual predator were emphasized by the portrayals of his victims as weak and vulnerable. Despite the fact that female witnesses in the case provided much of what was known about Grossmann ’s sexual exploits, the descriptions of the unidenti‹ed murder victims were very different from the identities and experiences of the female wit96 Murder Scenes nesses. The Morgenpost characterized Grossmann’s murder victims as young, single migrants from the countryside. The women were made out to be, as Grossmann’s defense attorney later described them, “poor girls from the provinces.”52 In a report on the case a day after Grossmann’s capture, the Berliner Morgenpost dramatized for its readers what a meeting between the murderer and his victim may have been like. [He] goes searching the streets. There stands a girl looking greedily into a grocery store. “Well, little one, do you want to eat?” inquires Grossmann. “Yes, but I have no money!” is the unhappy answer. That is his cup of tea. He seeks out the hungry. They are the most submissive . “Would you like to be my housekeeper?” he asks and pulls from his coat pocket his wallet with numerous hundreds. Overjoyed the suffering one seizes the opportunity. [She] goes with the old one. Fearless. What can this weak fellow do to her? He stands there, says a witness later, before his deathbed. [She] receives of course not one penny in wages. Only plenty to eat. And that is the most important thing.53 The vignette, written in the style of crime ‹ction, contrasts the street-smart and calculating urban male predator against the naive, weak, and trusting female victim, whose sexual exploitation is made possible by her material destitution. The young woman is apparently oblivious to the sexual intentions of her host, who dupes her with the promise of legitimate employment . The reader already knows how the scenario ends: the young woman’s desperation ends in her violent death. The BZ am Mittag similarly reconstructed for its readers how one missing person and alleged murder victim, Melanie Sommer, might have met Grossmann in a restaurant one day in December 1920. “She shuddered with disgust as she saw this old, unclean, and repulsive man before her, but after a long resistance followed him despite this...

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