Helga Matura

Helga Sofie Matura (born August 19, 1933 in Bottrop , † January 27, 1966 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German prostitute and a murder victim . The crime has not yet been solved.

Life

Matura's father was a waiter and later ran a tobacco store, the mother was a housewife . The family was Roman Catholic . Matura graduated from elementary school and then learned the trade of hat maker .

In 1952 she married Horst Wanders, a businessman from Düsseldorf . One common child died at the age of five months at a pneumonia , after which remained married childless. The marriage was divorced on January 27, 1955.

From 1953 Matura had taken part in bizarre elections and received orders as a mannequin . In 1957 she moved to Luxembourg , where she worked as a dancer and barmaid, among other things. In 1961 she appeared in Karlsruhe and wanted to open a judo school there. Although she had already applied for the necessary permit, she moved to Frankfurt in 1962. She lived there in a four-room apartment at Gutleutstrasse 85 and drove a white Mercedes-Benz 220 SE Cabriolet .

Helga Matura was found murdered by neighbors in her apartment on January 27, 1966 . She died of stabbing from behind with a stiletto in the uppermost cervical vertebra.

Media coverage

The murder case is similar to that of Rosemarie Nitribitt , who was murdered in 1957, also in Frankfurt am Main. Both were regarded as “noble prostitutes” who looked for customers with their Mercedes convertibles . The media coverage in the German tabloids and magazines of the post-war period on the Matura case was similarly broad, but not as intense and long-lived as in the Nitribitt case.

As part of his atlas , which he began in 1962 and in which he kept newspaper clippings and photographs, among other things, Gerhard Richter also dealt with Helga Matura and collected material from contemporary sensational reports in the tabloids, such as the Quick . In 1966, the year she was murdered, he made two oil paintings with which he drew on these models: Helga Matura with her fiancé , which is in the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, and Helga Matura in the Art Gallery of Ontario . In 1997 Richter's atlas was shown at Documenta X in Kassel and documented in an illustrated book.

As early as 1966, the case served as a template for the film In Frankfurt the nights are hot .

Gerhard Zwerenz processed the material in his novel Farewell to the Girl , which was published in 1982.

The case was brought up again when the writer Jan Seghers processed it in a detective novel in 2010.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Unsolved murder: "Death of the beautiful sinner"
2. ↑ Blofeld's Crime World: The Case of Rosemarie Nitribitt. Part 2
3. ^ Epilogue to the Matura case. In: The time. 18th February 1966.
4. ↑ Whores: Human sounds . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1966, pp. 90 ( online ).
5. ^ Rogert Storr: Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of painting. Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 2002, ISBN 0-87070-357-9 , pp. 132/133.
6. ↑ Roman Schliesser: The super nose. Karl Spiehs and his films . Verlag Carl Ueberreuter, Vienna 2006, p. 25.
7. ^ Gerhard Zwerenz: Farewell to the girl. Moewig, 1982, ISBN 3-8118-2238-1 .
8. ↑ Jan Seghers: The Rose Heart Files. Wunderlich, Reinbek near Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-499-24672-2 .
9. ↑ Commissioner Marthaler on the fourth. In: FAZ Rhein-Main. March 2, 2010.

literature

• Horst Henrichs, Karl Stephan: A Century of Frankfurt Justice: Courthouse A: 1899–1989. Waldemar Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-7829-0380-3 .