Cannibal

It hadn’t been a big wrench for them to leave Essen. They didn’t have many friends or any family to miss, and Armin was glad to move permanently into the old farmhouse. There he could withdraw into dark, abandoned rooms where nobody could disturb him. It was easier for his fantasies of corpses and their flesh to take shape in the seventeenth-century house; easier to imagine he could eat someone to be at “one with him.”

Waltraud, meanwhile, reveled in the idea of finally living full-time on “her estate.” She had always wanted a majestic home, with planted grounds and a driveway; the thirty or so furnished rooms (most of which were never used) of the rather dilapidated farmhouse suited her ideas of grandeur. Once they moved in permanently, the divorcée sat in the house with a superior air, but her bank balance contradicted her aspirations. She didn’t work, and money was tight. She had managed to secure some from her divorcée after fighting in court; in addition to that sum, there was the rent that trickled in each month from her property in Essen. There was nothing more.

Waltraud labeled each of the farmhouse rooms with a poetic name. She called her bedroom Sonnenglanz or “Sunlight.” Her dressing room was christened Frühtau or “Morning dew.” Upstairs in the twenty-five-square-meter attic, she built a model railway with grandiose estates, castles and farms. The attic was named “Country View.” On the door of Armin’s bedroom, she posted a floral-decorated sign that read “Kinderzimmer” or “Child’s room.” Even at sixteen years of age, Armin was still a child to Waltraud and she treated him like one, making his decisions and answering for him before he had a chance to speak. Her teenage son never removed this sign.

As he had on childhood vacations spent on the farm, Armin again spent time looking after and riding his pony, Polly, and taking his Alsation for walks. He rarely met up with teenage boys his own age, who spent their afternoons listening to music or comparing notes about favorite pop stars and actresses, and the girls they had crushes on at school. Only one idol was allowed in Armin’s household, and that was his mother. At weekends, the two went for walks along the lane by the farmhouse, pulled along in an old cart by the pony. Armin’s bourgeois mother cast haughty glances and relayed her strict principles of living, ones that were born in the 1920s or 1930s. Armin listened obediently to what she had to say and lived according to her out-of-date rules. Back at the house, he had his daily chores. “Minchen, clean the windows,” she ordered. “Minchen, make the beds,” she said. “Then you can polish the silverware.”

She wanted to extend her control beyond the walls of the house, and this desire was often demonstrated when the village of Wüstefeld had a party. The villagers held regular barbecues as well as Christmas and New Year parties at one another’s house. They always invited Armin and his mother along, even though the Meiweses never reciprocated. “They’re a bit odd but you can’t leave them out, not in a small place like this,” the neighbors said to each other.

At 10 p.m. she stood in the middle of the barn where the gathering was being held and screamed, “This music’s too loud. You have to stop the party now. It’s late enough. I hate loud music. Stop it now.”

Armin was sent home to bed; he always had to be home punctually by 10 p.m. The neighbors felt sorry for him and wondered why he didn’t go out and spend time with boys his own age or chase girls.

At another village party, Karl-Friedrich Schnaar, who lived with his family about a hundred meters behind the Meiweses’ house and kept approximately six thousand hens and a bakery, watched Waltraud bully her sixteen-year-old son. “Armin, don’t hold your cutlery like that,” she chided. “Make sure you’re holding your knife and fork with your fingers in the correct position. You naughty boy.” Karl-Friedrich intervened to spare Armin. “Frau Meiwes, would you like to come and join me in a glass of wine?” he asked. “I’m sure Armin is behaving himself.”

At this gathering, he sat down at a table with a group of twelve-year-old boys. With his hands folded neatly in his lap, he grinned inanely as he listened to their jokes. “Don’t be such a drip, Armin,” said Manfred, his neighbor’s son. “Why are you sitting there with all the kids? Come and have a beer with us.”

Waltraud continued to dominate her son, bossing him in front of the few guests who went round to their house for afternoon coffee, though visitors were few, as Waltraud didn’t have any close friends.

Ulla von Bernus, a self-avowed witch and satanist who published occult tracts and gave interviews to German print and broadcast media about her prowess at “casting death spells with reliability,” moved into the house next door and lived there for seventeen years, between 1968 and 1985. The witch, who chose to be called by the more glamorous von Bernus rather than her real name Dannenberge, became Waltraud’s best friend; soon the two were in and out of each other’s house all the time.

Ulla von Bernus coated the walls of her farmhouse in thick black paint. A skull’s head, out of which popped a tongue, served as a doorbell on the black-painted front door. She decorated her walls with pictures of Lucifer and erected an altar to Satan, complete with a black mirror, a dagger and candles. The farm was dubbed the “witch’s house” by the locals, who still called Armin’s house the “haunted house.” Ulla would stand on her doorstep, with a Dunhill cigarette hanging between her deep red lips, and invite Armin and his mother into her home. She cast deep stares at them from beneath a wig of curls and waved her hands, heavy with rings, when she spoke.

Ulla preferred to be known as a “satanic priestess” rather than a witch. The divorcée held satanic masses in her black-painted room with its homemade altar. Her power, she claimed, gave her the ability to send people to their death. “I kill whenever Satan orders,” she said. And according to Ulla, she nearly always succeeded. “I have a ninety percent success rate.”

The satanic priestess charged between 300 and 1,000 marks to conveniently get rid of people via fatal car crashes or accidents down stairs, or so Ulla claimed. Her client base was comprised mainly of desperate women who wanted to sentence errant husbands to death. She also attracted women who wanted to kill husbands who “weren’t nice to them anymore” and who were reluctant to get a divorce “for financial reasons.”

Von Bernus was inundated with calls from women and men from throughout Germany who were eager to reap revenge on unfaithful spouses. She was fussy about whom she selected as a client, though. And as far as she was concerned, those she banished into eternal damnation were those who deserved it, such as sexual criminals. “I’m categorically in favor of the death penalty,” she said. “I have sent twenty men to eternal damnation via a ritual distance killing,” she further stated. “I bewitched them to death. And each time I made it look like an accident.”

“My hexes and spell casting are superior to all others,” von Bernus claimed. “I can help you achieve anything you want; just tell me what you need done and through my extremely powerful spell work it will be done immediately. I get the job done using my own method of black magic. Come to me with any problem and be rid of it tomorrow.”

Her reputation gained strength after the three judges heading a court case suffered from heart attacks, and the prosecutor in the case was fatally injured. The accused, a child murderer, had once been a neighbor of Ulla’s and rumor spread that she had used her powers to help. She made the headlines in the early 1980s when she was taken to court by a disgruntled woman who said she had paid Ulla 3,000 marks to put a death curse on her husband, who then did not die. The court ruled that Frau von Bernus was guilty of an “illusory crime exempt from punishment” and ordered her to repay the money. The court in Kassel judged that the whole business “had been objectively impossible from the start.”

When not summoning people to an early grave, von Bernus spent her time at the roulette table at the casino in Bad Harzburg. Satan didn’t tell her the winning numbers, though. “He has more important things to do.”

Armin quickly fell under his new neighbor’s spell. She told the teenager how she was in contact with extraterrestrial beings. She sparked his imagination with tales of anthropomorphic beings with cloven hooves, a barbed tail and horns. “Atlantis is going to reappear,” she said. But “the world will soon disappear into chaos.” She also told him her dreams. “I would like to appear on a talk show with the pope to discuss it all,” she said.

As far as von Bernus was concerned, humans were animals; nature was uncaring and part of its natural process was death. She saw Satan as the dark force in nature and she wanted him to replace God. She worshipped this “dark force” and Satan’s qualities. Whenever Armin popped next door for a coffee and a chat, he was instructed in the religion of a world ruled by Satan, of the flesh, the carnal, and of death.

And so he was exposed to a role model apart from his domineering mother. Armin had found a real-life witch to bring alive his beloved tale of Hansel and Gretel. His witch didn’t live in a house with a gingerbread roof, or marzipan windows, but she was just as good.

Eventually, money difficulties forced Ulla to sell her house in Rotenburg to Guenther Hoepfner and move to an apartment in Bad Harzburg, south of Hanover, to spend more time playing roulette in the casino.

Since meeting her, his dreams had been dipped in tinges of black magic. The occult exercised its influence over his weak personality and encouraged him to pursue his dark desires. He started to act out his savage fantasies. He dismembered Barbie dolls as if they were real victims. He cooked their severed limbs on the barbecue in the garden. The dolls’ smiling faces disintegrated between the metal bars; their bright, cheerful colors melted into a black charcoal mess. Legs and arms dissolved under the heat of the barbecue and dripped through to the grill pan below.

Armin created more dolls to play with after he barbecued the Barbies. He made these dolls himself, out of marzipan from his mother’s supplies, and spent hours modeling them into lifelike forms. It was more fun than modeling houses, he thought. Particularly when he ripped the sweet dolls to shreds. His sexuality started to influence his games. He molded the shape of his penis in marzipan and stared at it in fascination. His artistry also included human-shaped marzipan hearts, livers and stomachs. They all tasted good to him.

At night he made bizarre arrangements out of pork and ketchup, trying to simulate scenes of torn flesh covered in blood. He took photos and videos of his work and carefully locked them away.