ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on female sex murders and literary case writing during the interwar period of the Weimar Republic. Especially striking about this public interest in female perpetrators was the symbiotic relationship that developed between real cases and fictional cases. The crime fiction stories that were printed in magazines and serialized in daily newspapers, or packaged in popular crime fiction series, were borrowed unashamedly from real crime cases. More specifically, the instance of a literary case study can assist people with delineating the value added by a literary treatment of the topic of sexually motivated crime. This complexity presents one of the greatest challenges to modernist literature, and to the artists and writers of the New Objectivity movement in particular. Alfred Doblin's case study most closely resembles legal and medical-forensic case reporting of the time. The experimental spirit of modernism is in evidence in the remarkable epilogue, in which Doblin comments on the poetological implications of his own case writing.
