Was Eugen Jänicke a madman, a criminal or both? The story of an unfathomable murderer
By Bettina Müller
Night at Teufelssee, to the north of which the residential city of Potsdam lies asleep. The people who sleep towards the day don’t know exactly what’s going on at the lake, but rumor has it that strange things happen there, the place is scary, it’s dangerous.
Then the day breaks and the ghosts are gone.
Nobody sees the three people who gather on the shore of the lake in the early morning of March 21, 1900. Eugen Jänicke, his ten-year-old foster son Bruno Misch and the seamstress Luise Bergner traveled out of Berlin on the Wannsee Railway and headed to the Potsdam Forest. It’s still bitterly cold. We pass the observatory and the Ravensberg. There the trio takes a short break and prepares themselves for the following ceremony with an initial invocation.
There will later be no doubt that Luise Bergner believed in the effectiveness of magic. Whether this also applies to Eugen Jänicke will concern courts, doctors and the Berlin population for years to come. The question would hang over him throughout his life: Is this man a madman or a cool criminal, or is he both?