Journal Section On Peter Kurten, 'the Dusseldorf Vampire'

...The novel is Rose Madder. I nearly drove myself into a fit of depression at the thought of abandoning this writing to begin a “proper novel” and write “for real.” My Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown. Here it comes. Thankfully not. So yeah, I’m going to write as is. It keeps me relatively prolific, relaxed. Enough to keep writing indefinitely, whereas the thought of writing “formaly,” stops me in my tracks. But again there’s nothing to stop me from doing short fictional pieces, and I have done it before, as here. One time I wrote something based on the idea I had somehow time-travelled back to Dusseldork at the time of the Peter Kurten murders. Düsseldorf I mean. That was a typo, but I like it. A fitting epithet for the tragic Kurten, perhaps. A crowd of townsfolk are crowding around a poster on the wall of a factory or warehouse perhaps, where the body of one of his victims, a young girl was found. I think I read Kurten liked to obtain a vicarious thrill in his thoroughly warped way at listening to the horror and outrage of the local citizens, so I wanted to imagine myself in the mind of the murderer, as a fictional device as well as to explore and express his thoughts as well as my own reaction or interpretation of them as well as to the situation. It would also be an interesting psychological exercise I thought. Getting a bit too 'close' to the subjectperhaps, but with the benefit, paradoxically, of the awareness that it wasn’t happening in the here and now, but in the past, however real that might seem. It was the potential insight I might gain into his psychological processes and others that was the main motivation for it. That and wanting to come up with a theme I might even develop if possible. I wrote it in longhand in an old journal and it was only a few pages anyhoo, if that. But I do recall a sense of involvement in it. Now, when I think on it, the more central notion of the anger there would be on the crowd’s part comes to mind. That instead of feeling guilty in any way, Kurten would see and use their own homicidal outrage as a means to justify his own sense of being a victim, even to see himself as having been treated worse than the murder of the girl. That at least it had been relatively quick. He hadn’t inflicted any pain on her through a prolonged assault, but had 'simply' slit her throat and stabbed her a number of times. (A lot). Later, as it said on the poster, he had attempted to set her on fire. The body was described as partially burned, but in actuality there were a few scorch marks on her torso. The fact she was partially naked only contributed to the sense of outrage.He’d attempted to immolate her soley to horrify and outrage, as psychologists later surmised, as well as admitted it himself. The real victim, he believed, was himself. There was nothing that would make up for all the years stolen from his life, the eternal hell of solitary, alternating with the living hell of being among other degenerates. The worst and the most dangerous ones were the self-righteous ones who used his crimes, his degeneracy, his living hell of a life, to sanctimoniously cover their own, to make themselves clean and unsullied by comparison. Their negatives could be turned into a positive. The joke was they still had no inkling of the real extent of his crimes, of the extent of his savagery, his murderous and destructive ambitions, his “degeneracy.” But though he had avenged himself on some of those in prison who had stirred up the hatred of the rest of them, nothing would ever satisfy him or extricate him from the vicious circle of hatred he was in, from as long as he could remember, and that only compounded the need for hatred and revenge. None of this was wholly conscious. There was only a dim recognition he was somehow trapped in an 'objectively' real situation beyond his abilities to either fathom or forgive.The world had somehow contrived to steal his life by stealing his time and making him suffer for it into the bargain. Nothing so solid, so final, so

real, as the concrete walls that circumscribed his existence for months on end, then years, as his resentment increased exponentially with each sentence, each lengthy period of stealing another part of his life away. Years and years to fester, to brood, to consider how he might get his own back on these liars, these hypocrites, these murderers. Hadn’t he once been a child himself? Life had destroyed the child in him, from his bastard of a father and mother onwards. Society was dense and stupid and brutal. He would be more brutal. They would pay for how he had been treated through their nearest and dearest. His victims were dear to someone. They would experience the pain he had, in all its merciless incomprehensibility. A solid, as unforgiving, as unmoved and immovable as those four concrete walls that pressed so relentlessly in on his mind until he began to feel he and the walls were of the same substance, the same being, trapped in an eternity of negation, punctuated only by the need to destroy when theimpulse came again. He could try to put it all behind him, but it only needed something to spark it off, like the jumped up little waitress and her stupid boyfriend, and the anger would flare and rage in a torment until he had to act on it, and back he would be behind another four walls. It got so he would paradoxically andmasochistically enjoy his periods of solitary confinement, as it gave him the freedom rom distraction he needed to brood, to plan his future campaign of terror. That he was beyond the point of no return was a given. He knew that. The thought gave him a vicarious thrill. He would fantasise of poisoning the whole population by contaminating the towns water supply. That his life, his dreams, had come to this. He knew he wouldn’t be getting those years back and no amount of riches or sex or murder would ever make up for it. The sex and murder he had already experienced, from his youth onwards. It was a way of life. Brooding on the possibility, the certainty of future mayhem he was again also, dimly aware of the odd paradox involved in the exhilaration he would feel at the thought of the destruction he intended. That consciously he knew he was throwing his life away, but it was the only logical and even rational response to such a situation. Here he was already in the midst of having his life wasted, thrown away in the midst of living it. This was mere existence reduced to its lowest form. He would throw away their lives as they had thrown away his. Society had no interest or concern in his life save to punish him, to make it morethan the misery it had been up until then, only to repeat the offence. Often-times the severity of the punishment had borne little relation to his crime. Was it any surprise he felt aggrieved – that someone had to pay for it, and the fault lay on their own head – the very society that had colluded in it? They were no better than he; they only believed they were, when in fact they were better at disguising the corruption of their own soul. The only difference between them was he refused to play the game. They had burned their boats long ago. There were no boats to burn. They had never offered him any. But when he found any, he would burn them, and anyone in them, as he had when he came across haystacks, setting them alight, hoping some tramp might be sleeping in one.