cw mentions of rape, abuse and violence
Hallo. My name is unimportant. It’d be a distraction.
Elisabeth, this is an open letter to you. It’s just for you, even though I never actually want you to read this. I want people to know you exist, even if it’s just on a blog post.
I hope you never make a tumblr for multiple reasons, but mostly because there’s a community here of soulless, heartless true-crime ‘enthusiasts’ who never cease to take stories of people like you and get rid of all of the humanity and personhood until all that’s left is a topic, and I seek to not do that yet again.
But as the words entered my head, I worry that I am doing the same thing. I’m writing this with the prompt of spreading your story, not with the prompt of spreading the aesthetics of your suffering. The words themselves teeter in my head, going back and forth between being cold and wanting ”artistic merit” and wishing I that I didn’t want to write this at all.
My dad had every Rammstein album, including the one with your song. As I listened to it with him one night, lyrics in my hand, I asked him what it meant. He didn’t like doing research or learning in general so when I asked him what they were talking about when they screamed ‘welcome into the darkness’, he guessed that it was a drinking song.
In actuality, it’s part of the reason why I drink. I listened to it a few days ago for the first time in months and it made me queasy. I can only imagine how it makes you feel.
When I was a really little kid I watched a true-crime special on tv about unsolved disappearances and I projected the information on to my sister for the next year; following her everywhere to make sure she was secure. At the time, your story wasn’t on there, and I always wanted her to be safe at home.
You weren’t on there because nobody knew where you were until I was ten years old.
I want to reiterate that I truly don’t know how to articulate what I’m saying, or if I even have something to say. I already stated that I’m trying to write to you as a person and not as artistic inspiration.
Mädchen im Dunkelheit; Mädchen der Dunkelheit.
Typing that makes me feel honest but disgusting and not like I’m “pushing boundaries”. You are a person and you are not merely the actions done to you. I myself speak your language and felt that adding some Deutsch would add to my post in some way, but I realised it wouldn’t do anything but make people go to google translate or just scroll really fast. Like I said, my thoughts teeter back and forth, including linguistically. And perhaps this is mere tribalism- Speaking For One Of Your Own. But I don’t care.
I want you to understand me.
Ich will, dass du mich verstehen.
Because fear has no nation. It wears any face it can. It has no family and it has every family.
And I fear that your father will never die.
I re-read your Wikipedia article yesterday in about an hour, and I was disgusted by how the media tried to humanise him.
“She’s a victim of his crimes, but he’s a victim of society!”
I see bits of him in every man I will ever meet. I wish I was just being hyperbolic. The lies, the subtle changes in his story, the loyalty of the press, it all seemed to be such an extreme- but it’s among the most basic ways men manipulate the structures of patriarchy. Misogyny and paedophilia are tools that men receive, grasp, and use.
We want to pathologise people like him- saying ‘he must’ve had a bad brain.’ But the reality is that he consciously conspired every day of your hell in a manner that any doctor would call neurotypical.
We meet monsters every day and it is terrifyingly easy to convince oneself of anything.
But I’m done talking about him.
In fact, that’s why I named this post after you and avoided his name entirely.
I am not putting the focus on the criminal like so many people do.
This post is about who tragedies are remembered for. I live in America where victims’ names are burned and expunged instantly from the past, leaving only the name of their tormentor to get exalted in the press. If anyone reading knows of the case I’m talking about, you see what I’m saying. When I went to tag the family name, it wasn’t you, Elisabeth, it was him. All of the events I’m describing are named after him and what he did, rather than treating his victims with any dignity or respect. This post is a rebuttal to that entire system of victim-burying. If my blog is the only platform I can use to say this then it’s one more than existed before I started typing this.
If I can only give empathy and overthought words, please take them and know it’s all for you.
