Steglitz school tragedy

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The Steglitz school tragedy is an incident that took place on June 28, 1927 in the Berlin district of Steglitz .

The high school students Paul Krantz (18) and Günther Scheller (19) had signed a suicide pact under the influence of alcohol in their parents' summer house in Mahlow near Berlin : Scheller was supposed to shoot his friend Hans Stephan (18). Krantz would then kill Günther Scheller and his sister Hildegard (16) and finally himself. The trigger was on the one hand Hildegard Scheller's intimate relationships with Paul Krantz and Hans Stephan and on the other hand Günther Scheller's unhappy love for Hans Stephan.

Photo of the trial, Hilde Scheller (center) on the witness bench in the district court room in Berlin (Feb. 1928)

Günther Scheller later fulfilled his part of the appointment by shooting Hans Stephan in his parents' apartment at 72 C Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. Shortly afterwards he took his own life with a head shot . Paul Krantz did not carry out the planned act.

However, he was charged with violating the gun regulations and community manslaughter . Paul Krantz's defense attorney was the renowned and highly paid attorney Erich Frey . The Circuit Court of the District Court of Berlin-Moabit condemned Krantz on 20 February 1928 for illegal possession of arms to three weeks of detention, who were serving with the remand. The court also ruled on acquittal . Magnus Hirschfeld appeared in the process as an expert witness who attested the accused “mentally premature maturity and physical immaturity”.

The case attracted great public attention throughout Germany and also in the international press and led to heated debates about the alleged moral decline of the youth in the Weimar Republic .

Paul Krantz processed parts of the incident in his novel Die Mietskaserne , published in 1931 under his pseudonym and later name Ernst Erich Noth . The largely autobiographical depiction of the life of young people in a Berlin apartment building from the Weimar period was banned as "un-German" after the shortened second edition published in 1932 and was not published again until 1982, shortly before Krantz's death.

The writer Clara Viebig took part in the trial of the Steglitz school tragedy. In her novel Island of Hope (1933), she processed her impressions of questioning young people about intimate details of their private life, which she found inappropriate and voyeuristic.

The incident itself served as a template in 2004 for the film What is the use of love in thoughts and for the novel Der Suicide Club by Arno Meyer zu Küingdorf . Before that, it was the subject of two films entitled Geschminkte Jugend , one by Carl Boese (1929) and the other by Max Nosseck (1960).

literature

Web links

Wikiquote: Hildegard Scheller  - Quotes