Kerstin Brückweh's Mordlust is essentially a reception history of the cases of four famous serial killers, drawn from four different regimes of Germany's twentieth century: Fritz Haarmann from the Weimar Republic, Adolf Seefeld from the Third Reich, Erwin Hagedorn from the DDR, and Jürgen Bartsch from the Federal Republic. All four sought their victims among boys and young men and mixed various kinds of sexual assaults with their killings. Organized in three main sections, Mordlust follows a plan of moving steadily away from the act of violence at the center of these stories. Part I, “Physische Gewalt—konkrete Opfererfahrungen und imaginierte Täterbilder,” focuses on the experiences of the victims, largely derived from an examination of transcripts of preliminary investigations. Part II, “Rechtsprechende Gewalt—Wiederherstellung der Ordnung durch Justiz und Experten,” amounts essentially to an analysis of expert reports and written judgments. Part III, “Medial vermittelte Gewalt—emotionelle Aneignungen im öffentlichen Raum,” looks at the popular and media echoes of these cases, such as letters that angry citizens wrote about Bartsch and the efforts of the Nazi press to style Seefeld as a “Jewish Ritual Murderer.”

The study takes as its starting point the undeniable contradiction between the “criminological relevance” and the public impact of serial killers. In the three main sections of the book, then, Brückweh investigates how Germans in the twentieth century “appropriated” the phenomenon of the serial killer (p. 11). Many of Brückweh's conclusions are matters of detail, too many to be reported here; typical is her finding that in all four cases there was a tension between the medical experts' desire to “pathologize” the culprit, and the fear, especially on the part of the justice system, that doing so would deprive the system of its ability to inflict just retribution. Brückweh is rather tentative about announcing broader conclusions, but what emerges from the book is that “emotions make history” (p. 495)—a contention that really underlies all of the book's nuanced examinations of (emotionally inflected) legal, medical, and journalistic texts.

Brückweh's book breaks new ground in several ways. Research based on a small selection of cases raises inevitable methodological challenges, and Brückweh deals with them intelligently and persuasively. The “fascination,” she writes, that certain extraordinary criminal cases hold for large groups of people shows that such cases allow “deep insights” into “daily normality,” in other words into the “perceptual world, structures of norms, and relationship networks” (p. 13), as good an argument as there is for the utility of the case study. Brückweh shows a similar sensitivity to the interconnections of the three dimensions of her story—the victims, the justice system, and the media. Each level influences the other: she bases her work on the contention that there is a “thorough media penetration of daily life” (p. 28). It is very rare in this kind of work for criminal justice issues to be considered across four such different regimes, and especially rare to find serious work on criminal justice in the DDR, another important element of Brückweh's contribution. At all points she highlights the ways in which high politics shaped the handling of these cases—how Nazi authorities sought to use Seefeld to exemplify the vices of Weimar, or the panic of DDR officials in the face of a serial killer such as Hagedorn, born and raised in their socialist society, which was not supposed to generate such aberrations.

Of course one can always raise quibbles, even about a good book. Brückweh makes some puzzling choices about what to cover and what not to cover. Part II, dealing with the justice system, includes in each case detailed analyses of the expert reports, the written judgments, and what happened to each man after his conviction (execution in the cases of Haarmann, Seefeld, and Hagedorn, death by mislaid surgery in the case of Bartsch). But there is relatively little about the conduct of the trials themselves. This might reflect the absence, or gross inadequacy, of sources—especially for trials conducted in the Third Reich or the DDR, in which one can hardly rely on official documents or the operations of a free press, or, indeed, have any confidence that the courtroom saw an effective airing of challenges to the state's evidence—but then, curiously, it is for the Seefeld case that Brückweh does spend some time investigating press coverage of the trial, albeit in Part III where the focus is on the presentation of violence in the media. Her take on “Rechtsprechende Gewalt,” then, reads rather as if she were discussing the document-based trials of the old regime rather than the very contested and public spectacles of Haarmann or Bartsch's cases. This approach to legal conflicts misses the ways in which legal procedures (the oral examination of witnesses, lawyers' arguments, the composition of a court, the laws of evidence) really become matters of legal substance, and shape the outcomes as much as or more than the documents do. The placement and selection of some material on the media resonance of these cases is also puzzling. Brückweh discusses the tremendous contemporary press interest in Haarmann only indirectly, through her discussion of the role of Theodor Lessing in the case; the discussion of Haarmann in the third section of the book deals only with media treatment from the 1970s to the 1990s, in particular the famous “Haarmann Frieze” by the Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka, a controversial 1992 purchase of the city of Hannover.

But what Brückweh does, she does well. The sensitive analyses of the “fascination” these killers exerted on psychiatric experts; judges; reporters; and angry, letter-writing citizens makes Mordlust a valuable addition to a growing literature on crime and criminal justice in Germany's twentieth century.