Two ordinary young women, Ella Klein and Margarete Nebbe, were charged with conspiring to poison their husbands. Only Ella had succeeded. She pleaded guilty, naïvely expecting understanding: her husband had abused her sexually, threatened to kill her; she had fled twice, had even begun divorce proceedings, but her father insisted she return, saying ‘a woman belongs to her husband’. Press reports were initially sympathetic. But then letters were published, revealing that the women were lesbians who looked forward to being ‘the merry widows of Berlin’. They had even seen the murder as a test of their love. This was diabolical! A furore broke out when the sentences were handed down. Ella could be free after four years; Margarete, her accomplice, after eighteen months. Many considered the sentences ‘dangerously lenient’.

Public outrage focused on the women’s ‘perverse’ sexuality. Anything could be expected from degenerate homosexuals. But a deeper cause for the alarm was identified by Joseph Roth in comments shortly after the trial: ‘In this great cruel city, a thousand marital tragedies are played out daily … and the horror takes its toll in silence’ – a silence enforced by social shame, which was particularly acute in the petit bourgeois class to which the women belonged. The case was disturbing because it revealed that shocking violence was as likely to be found in the nation’s bedrooms as it was in its seedy bars and brawling streets. Middle-class marriage was as much on trial as the two women poisoners.

This was no surprise to Döblin, author of the 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (I reviewed the new translation for the June–July 2018 issue of ABR). Violence against women had reached epidemic proportions in postwar Germany, affecting not only prostitutes but also the wives of the workers, artisans, and shopkeepers Döblin saw in his private psychiatric practice. When he agreed to open a series of books for the avant-garde Berlin publisher Die Schmiede called Outsiders of Society: Crimes of the Present with a fictionalised version of the case – renaming the women Elli Link and Grete Bende – he knew he was dealing with insiders, not outsiders. The men were war veterans, working to support wives and widowed mothers, establishing ostensibly stable households. Herr Bende was a womanising bully – nothing unusual about that – but Herr Link was seriously disturbed, addicted to sadistic sex acts.

Döblin suspected war trauma, but focused on the woman living with the symptoms of her husband’s illness: the screaming rages, beatings, and rape. It was clear why Elli felt compelled to kill. Few women suffering violent sexual abuse – then or now – take that fatal step, however. He asked how Elli actually brought herself to do it? What was she thinking and feeling as she moved into this terrible, unknown territory? Hatred certainly, arousing her own latent sadism. Playing the devoted wife, she enjoyed ‘obliging him to his face while tipping poison into his food behind his back’. But there was so much more to it.

Elli’s dreams while awaiting trial are revealing. Some read like fairy tales: Link throws her into a lion’s pit, but she tames the beasts, climbs out and pushes him in; he is torn to pieces. Other dreams express anguish at separation from her family and her former life, her former self: she is the victim – how can she have become a perpetrator? In the dreams, Elli kills her abuser in self-defence; he is dead but lives on in her psyche, so she must keep on killing him. Her nightmares suggest she is suffering from what psychiatrists today call post-traumatic stress disorder. Döblin anticipates the current view that living with domestic terror is like living in a war zone.

His diagnosis is disturbingly relevant in present-day Australia, where a woman is killed on average every week by an intimate partner. There is no catastrophic war in the immediate background to explain these horrifying statistics, as there was for Weimar Germany. But even then, war was not the whole story. Before 1914, there was talk of a ‘crisis of masculinity’, by which Döblin’s contemporaries meant a weakening of patriarchal social values, caused by modernisation. He identifies postwar determination to reinforce these values as part of the problem.

Elli believed implicitly in the superior wisdom of her father, this ‘epitome of bourgeois respectability … who led her back to her husband’. Link was supposed to be like him. But he failed to measure up – in Elli’s eyes and more importantly in his own. Link is suffering from underlying depression; perhaps his war experiences have left him emotionally shell-shocked; but what pushes him into a pitiless power struggle with his wife looks more like pathologically wounded male pride. Link worked, drank, worked, came home, and there was his wife. ‘She had to submit to him – with or without beatings.’ A man must be master in his own house.

Was this the predominant pressure? Elli was indicted. Why not also her father? ‘An indictment on him would have been an indictment of society.’ The intervening years disappear as we read this case history, analysed with such compassion and quiet authority. Two Women and a Poisoning – in Imogen Taylor’s sensitive translation – has much to contribute to the current search for answers to the terrible question of what brings men – and occasionally women – to kill their intimate partners.