The Man Who Ate His Lover
Dr Martin Brookes
March 2004
Consider the following story line for the ultimate video nasty. Single man meets radical male masochist on the Internet. On their first date, the masochist offers up his penis as main course in a romantic dinner for two. After some teething problems over the best way to prepare the food, the two men enjoy a meal of garnished genitals. Satiated, and feeling woozy, the masochist is led upstairs to the bathroom, where he is left to bleed to death. Hours later, our host pops in to see how his date is doing, and finishes him off with a knife to the throat. He then butchers the body and barbecues the meat.
Even as fiction, this extreme tale of human weirdness would be difficult to stomach. So how do we respond when two middle-aged computer engineers turn this incredulous plot into jaw-dropping fact? Two words: shock and awe. Just when you thought you'd heard it all, along comes a German cannibal, Armin Meiwes, and his willing victim, Bernd-Juergen Brandes, to rewrite the book of bizarre human behaviour. Rarely has a criminal investigation aroused such ghoulish curiosity or raised such difficult questions about the dark places that the human mind can go.
Amid the media scramble surrounding the recent courtroom drama, there has been a clamour to understand and to explain this behaviour, which, incidentally, is not even illegal under either German or British law. In desperation, we turn to science for answers. What can rational objectivity tell us about such irrational acts of violence and mutilation? Perhaps not very much. But with little else to go on, we must be content with what morsels of knowledge we can find.
Nothing new
Cannibalism itself is hardly original. It has been documented in both ancient and modern human societies in various guises. Sometimes the motivation seems ritualistic or aggressive. In other cases it is simply a matter of survival, as it was during the infamous tragedy in 1972, when a plane carrying a team of rugby players crash-landed in a remote region of the Andes. Stranded for 70 days in a frozen wilderness, the only survivors were those who resorted to eating their dead teammates.
In court, Meiwes explained that by eating Brandes he felt that he was acquiring his victim's spirit and skills. It is a belief that seems to have been widespread in societies that have practised cannibalism. From the cannibalistic tribes of New Guinea to the Wari' Indians of the Amazon, the consumption of human flesh hasn't just been about eating, it was also about absorbing the qualities of the deceased.
Animal cannibals
Meiwes is certainly not alone in his taste for familiar flesh. The animal kingdom is littered with cannibalistic species. Snails, insects, spiders, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals all contain unscrupulous members that are undaunted by eating their own kind. When food is scarce, there is a clear Darwinian logic to cannibalism. It can even make evolutionary sense for a mother to eat her own young during especially hard times. Reproduction is a costly business, and if there is little chance of your offspring surviving to adulthood then why not eat them and recoup the energy you have invested, thus saving up for better times?
For some animals, food shortages are not the only occasions when cannibalism is a good evolutionary strategy. Take lions, for instance. When a new male joins a pride, he may kill and eat cubs fathered by other males. In doing so, he effectively removes individuals to whom he is genetically unrelated. Females will then come back into oestrous, enabling the male to father new offspring of his own. This way, he gets to re-populate the pride with his own cubs, and have a nice meal to boot.
Clearly, natural selection has favoured cannibalistic behaviour in some species. But in humans? Surely Meiwes' rather gauche attitude towards nutrition had little to do with getting his own genes into the next generation. In this case, it seems, evolutionary biology can give few clues in our hunt for explanations. Perhaps psychology, then, can offer some more salient pointers.
In mind
The cannibal mind has provided a veritable feast for hungry psychologists. But results have been difficult to digest. For a start, cannibals, we can only assume, just don't come in the kind of quantity required for rigorous scientific studies. So speculation has become the order of the day. And, judging by the number of theories now doing the rounds, cannibals may be a diverse little bunch. If we can safely say anything at all, it may be that there is no such thing as the typical cannibal.
Not surprisingly, mothers feature prominently in psychological explanations of cannibalism. Some psychologists believe that the desire to eat another person stems from the time when a child is weaned from its mother's breast. The separation anxiety may lead to frustration, aggression, and cannibalistic fantasises. It's as if the child acquires an intense urge to absorb its mother into its own body. Even if this desire becomes sublimated, it may re-surface in later life, particularly in response to stress or trauma. An overbearing mother is only likely to amplify these effects in children that are already susceptible. This pattern, if true, would certainly concur with the path Meiwes has taken. He first fantasised about eating people when he was a schoolboy. But it was the death of his domineering mother, when he was 37, that seemed to send him off the rails.
Sexual highs
But this can't be the whole story. If overbearing mothers were to blame then surely we'd be witnessing a feeding frenzy of cannibals. Time then to turn to that second psychological gold mine, the sexual disorder. The sketchy evidence that exists does suggest that sex may be a prominent feature in many cases of cannibalism. In the 1920s, for instance, the notorious American cannibal Albert Fish raped and murdered a string of children. But the real fun, he insisted, was in the eating. Fish experienced extreme sexual pleasure as he devoured his victims.
During the 1950s, American farmer Edward Gein combined his twin passions of cannibalism and necrophilia. More recently, in the 1980s, a Japanese cannibal, Issei Sagawa, fell in love with and then ate a French woman, declaring her breasts and buttocks to be delicious. Others who claim to have eaten human flesh, say that they experienced a sense of euphoria and heightened sexual pleasure. Some have even compared it to the effects of taking mescaline.
In 2002, the results of a psychological survey suggested that people would be much more likely to eat someone that they found sexually attractive. Meiwes did reject several potential victims before finally settling on Brandes. But his choice seems to have been based on culinary considerations rather than sexual ones. At the beginning of his trial, he declared that sex was not the prime motivation behind his consumption of Brandes. But the court heard later that Meiwes did derive sexual satisfaction from watching re-runs of his video nasty.
Mental illness
Perhaps the strongest factor linking the pedigree of criminal cannibals is serious mental illness. Some of the most infamous flesh eaters like Fish, Gein, Sagawa, and the Russian cannibal Andrei Chikatilo, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. Hallucinations, blackouts, and a heightened sense of awareness seem to be common experiences that accompany cannibalistic activity. Yet Meiwes has not been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and psychiatrists found him mentally competent to stand trial.
We might never know what it was that drove Armin Meiwes to snack on his own sort. Maybe it was nothing more sordid than the pursuit of money and publicity. After all, a book is already in the offing. But while Meiwes is undoubtedly an enigma he is, in many ways, the less interesting of our two protagonists. For if the actions of Meiwes are difficult to explain, then those of his victim are bewildering by comparison.
Why be eaten?
According to Meiwes, Brandes had fantasised about being killed and eaten since he was a child. Yet Brandes' homosexual partner, a key witness in the trial, testified that Brandes had shown no signs of depression. Nor had he offered any hints of his peculiar suicidal fantasy. In fact the two men had been planning a holiday together shortly before Brandes bought his one-way train ticket to Meiwes' home in Rotenburg.
Few people have so comprehensively explored the antithesis of reason as much as Bernd-Juergen Brandes. So bizarre was his behaviour that it makes that apocryphal migratory journey of the Norwegian lemming seem like sound common sense. Here is a man who was a willing volunteer in his own demise; someone who not only ate his penis, but enjoyed it in the full knowledge that it was to be his last supper. In those final few hours, what thoughts could possibly have been swirling around his semi-conscious mind as he lay bleeding to death, alone in the bath? His behaviour seems to go way beyond the pleasure and pain principle of sado-masochism into far more perplexing territory. Sadly, his own account will never be told.
Find out more
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Websites
Albert Fish
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Fish
Synopsis of the life and crimes of Albert Fish who ate some of his young victims and derived sexual pleasure from it.
BBC News Europe Armin Meiwes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/
europe/3254074.stm
Article about the trial of Armin Meiwes and the modern taboo of cannibalism.
Brief History of Cannibal Controversies
http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/
news_cannibalism_pt2.htm
Online interview and video of Beth Conklin, well respected anthropologist and author of Consuming Grief (see Books below).
Cannibalism 'rife among prehistoric humans'
http://www.newscientist.com/news/
news.jsp?id=ns99993615
Article in the New Scientist that sheds light on the history of cannibalism through genetic research findings.
Cannibalism: The ancient taboo in modern times
http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/
psychology/cannibalism/index.html?sect=19
In-depth look at the history of cannibalism and the different reasons that it occurs.
Giving Cannibalism a Human Face
http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/
news_cannibalism_nsv.htm
Anthropologist Beth Conklin discusses her work with the Wari' tribe.
Government in Shock Move to Legalise Cannibalism
http://www.deadbrain.co.uk/news/
article_2004_02_02_2208.php
Spoof article in the online magazine, Deadbrain.
Mad Ignorance USA
http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/
ignorance12004.cfm
Disturbing article that looks at the meat industry in the US and argues that BSE has been able to spread through livestock by agribusiness changing cows from herbivores into carnivores and cannibals.
Books
The Cannibal Within (Evolutionary foundations of human behaviour) by Lewis Petronovich (Aldine de Gruyter, 2000)
Argues that cannibalism is an evolutionarily derived instinct that arises as a survival strategy in extreme circumstances such as chronic famine or acute starvation and not a pathology that erupts in psychotic individuals. Neo-Darwinist Petrinovich explores the historical and archaeological evidence.
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Consuming Grief: Compassionate cannibalism in an Amazonian society by Beth Conklin (University of Texas Press, 2001)
As late as the 1960s, the Wari' Indians of the western Amazonian rainforest ate the roasted flesh of their dead as an expression of compassion for the deceased. Wari' death rites helped the bereaved kin accept their loss and go on with their lives. Drawing on the recollections of Wari' elders who participated in consuming the dead, this text presents one of the richest, most authoritative ethnographic accounts of funerary cannibalism ever recorded.
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Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a cultural science by Peggy Reeves Sanday (Cambridge University Press, 1986)
The practice of cannibalism is in certain cultures rejected as evil, while in others it plays a central part in the ritual order. Through a detailed examination of ritual cannibalism in selected tribal societies, and a comparison of those cases with others in which the practice is absent, Reeves shows that cannibalism is closely linked to people's orientation to the world.
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Films
Alive (1993)
Directed by Frank Marshall
A team of young rugby players, survivors of a plane crash in the Andes, discover that the search for them has been called off. With their food and water nearly gone, their lives become a nightmare and they resort to eating their dead colleagues.
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The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (1989)
Directed by Peter Greenaway
A French restaurant is the setting for murder, sex and revenge in this disturbing and sumptuous offering by Greenaway. Michael Gambon plays the thief and Helen Mirren his downtrodden wife. The final scene of revenge involves Mirren's lover, murdered by her husband, being cooked and carved up, and Gambon being made to eat him.
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The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
A serial killer who skins his female victims is on the loose. FBI agent Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster, seeks the help of psychiatrist-turned-cannibal, Dr Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins. The film is based on Thomas Harris' novel, in which Lecter is actually inspired by the infamous Albert Fish, who ate many of his young victims in 1920s/30s America.
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Hannibal (2001)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Doctor Hannibal Lecter escapes from incarceration and travels to Florence. Once again, Clarice Starling, this time played by Julianne Moore, finds herself on the trail of one of the FBI's most wanted. He's back and he's still hungry!
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Red Dragon (2002)
Directed by Brett Ratner
The first chapter in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy, this is the story of FBI agent Will Graham, played by Edward Norton, who is assigned the task of catching 'The Tooth Fairy'. In order to do so he must try to persuade Lecter to advise him.
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