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I long for the critic of language who would be young and strong enough to sweep, in a great reformation of language, the abstract substantives out of language with an iron broom.
-Fritz Mauthner
The Contingency of the Senses
When Rudolf Leonhard invited Alfred Döblin to contribute the inaugural volume of a new reportage series, Outsiders of Society, Döblin agreed to write an account of one of the most sensational homicides of recent Berlin history, the poisoning of the cabinetmaker Karl Link at the hands of his abused wife, Elli, and her lover, Margarethe Bende. The case was replete with all of the fantastic elements of a stranger- than-life story-a domestic melodrama, a homosexual affair, a murderous intrigue, and a courtroom spectacle-that had earlier made the trial of the two women a gigantic media event in March 1923 and that seemed to guarantee the commercial success of this first installment of Die Schmiede's new "Pitaval" crime series.
Döblin found no shortage of source material for the resulting book, Two Friends and Their Poisoning. In addition to the testimonies of twenty-one witnesses during the trial, there were the expert opinions of "a little flock of schooled men," enlightened scientists and psychiatrists brought in to collect and anatomize the dreams that Elli had while in prison, to scrutinize the motivations and mental dispositions of the two outsiders, and ultimately to determine, through state-of-the-art scientific instrumentation, whether one of the lovers or Link himself bore the burden of guilt for his death. The problem, however, was that the distinctions between victim and aggressor were so inscrutable in this case that guilt could not be ascertained with any certainty. Perhaps all of the characters in this story, including the deceased, were guilty. Or none of them. "One was hardly in the realm of 'innocent' or 'guilty' anymore."1
The most remarkable documentary source that Döblin used in his investigation was the six hundred letters that Elli and Grethe exchanged in the five months that preceded and followed the poisoning. A correspondence that had begun modestly soon became an "instrument of autointoxication," Döblin noted: "At first they didn't write to each other much. And then they discovered the stimulations of writing" (TF, 20-21). Even on the days when they saw...