True Crime Psychos: Armin Meiwes

Hopefully this can be the beginning of a new series for my blog. I love true crime stories, so perhaps every week or so I can talk about some of these real life monsters that are often the basis for horror films.

The true crime psycho of today is Armin Meiwes, one that many people probably don't know about. Meiwes killed only one person, but the full story behind that killing is the fascinating part. I first heard about Meiwes (MAY-ves) while searching for a book on Jeffrey Dahmer on Amazon. One of the related books was Cannibal: The True Story of the Maneater of Rotenburg. Cannibals interest me (STFU, I'm interested in the psychology behind it) and I'd never heard of this dude so I looked him up.

Armin Meiwes was a German man who lived in the small town of Rotenburg. Much in the style of Ed Gein, he had a dominant mother, a woman angered and embittered from two failed marriages. When Armin was only six, both of his half-brothers left the home and soon his father left too, leaving him alone with his mother, his only companion.

Armin Meiwes

He did not fit in well at school and was often made fun of. Armin missed his brothers and developed a relationship with an imaginary friend named Franky. He first began thinking of cannibalism at the age of eight, thinking that if he were to eat someone, then they would never leave him and would always be a part of him. He fantasized about cannibalism, becoming excited from scenes of slaughter in horror movies, and indeed enjoyed to watch videos of animals actually being slaughtered. One of his strangest quirks was to take pork or beef and mold them into shapes of human hearts, livers, and genitalia - taking pictures of his work to look at later.

Flash forward through the boring parts: Armin grows up, Mommy dies and leaves him all alone, he starts trolling around on cannibal websites. This is where the unbelievable part of the story comes in. He starts putting up personal ads on these cannibal websites saying that he is a hungry cannibal looking for somebody to eat. See, he only wanted to eat a WILLING victim. He met up with a few of them in real life and brought them to his house, showing him a "slaughter room" that he had furnished in one of the unused upstairs rooms of his house. It was complete with a cage, hooks hanging from the ceiling, and a proper butcher's table. He strung up some of his internet dates, but it soon became clear that none of them really wanted Armin to kill and eat them - it was all just fantasy. So he let them go.

Then he met someone for whom the act of being eaten alive was not fantasy. It was this man:

Bernd Brandes

Bernd Juergen Brandes, a 36-year-old engineer from Berlin. Bernd had a fantasy as well: one of self-destruction. He felt guilty about his mother's death in car crash at a young age, and as Lois Jones best describes it in her book "he started to connect his sexuality and his genitalia with the death of his mother. The only way he could see of atoning for her fatal accident was through his own annihilation and endless suffering. Bernd started to dream of being slaughtered and eaten" (From Cannibal, pg. 53). Bernd had rendezvous with male prostitutes, where kinky sex games turned serious when he would ask them to bite his penis off.

Blah blah blah, he meets Armin on the internet and they agree to carry out their fantasies together. When they actually got down to the deed, the first thing they did was cut off Bernd's penis. They tried to eat it raw but could not. Armin went downstairs to fry it, but apparently didn't do it right because it was still inedible. Bernd then lay in a bathtub of warm water as they both waited for him to die. After about 9 hours he was still alive, but unconscious, so Armin stabbed him in the neck.

Then Armin got down to the slaughtering. Apparently, you really CAN learn anything on the internet because from reading his cannibal websites, Armin knew how to butcher a human body. He kept Bernd's head around for a while because he liked talking to it. Bernd's fleshy parts were wrapped in blue plastic, in toto about 66 pounds of flesh for Armin to eat. When police searched his house about a year later, there was only about 20 pounds left.

Meiwes was finally caught when he went looking for another slaughter boy to eat on the internet. An Austrian college student realized he was serious and tipped off police. Armin was first only found guilty of manslaughter (cannibalism is not illegal in Germany) and sentenced to eight years, the main point being that Bernd Brandes was a willing victim who gave his consent (on tape, as it were, because Armin filmed the whole slaughter) to be killed.

So there's the story. My thoughts: Forget Meiwes, WTF is up with Brandes? Fantasies and sexual desires related to cannibalism is not a new story, I'm sad to say, but a man whose fantasy is to be killed and eaten alive? Where does that come from? That's the part of the story that blows my mind, yet I have heard nothing on the psychology of someone with that kind of fantasy. Jones does a chapter-long write up of Brandes in the book Cannibal, but it is not near enough to help me understand. Brandes had such hatred for his sexuality and his feelings that he wanted his penis gone, and all traces of his body on the Earth gone. He begged Armin to, after he ate him, grind up his bones and his teeth so that he would be completely annihilated. How does one come to hate themselves so much that the thought of being eaten is a comfort?

There were several movies, and even a song, made about Meiwes's case. I was excited to see a movie cleverly titled Cannibal, which was supposed to be a very graphic account of the slaughter. I'm a gorehound so I got the movie.

WARNING: VERY ANGRY BLOGGER ALERT.

I could write a formal review of Cannibal but honestly, I don't feel there is any need. And the review would probably sound a little something like this:

FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT MOVIE! THIS IS THE WORST GD ATTEMPT AT FILMMAKING THAT I HAVE SEEN SINCE CABIN FEVER 2. WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING THROUGH YOUR PEA SIZE BRAIN TO THINK THAT YOU COULD SHOW OTHER PEOPLE THIS PIECE OF FLAMING GARBAGE?? I WOULD HAVE PREFERRED TO HAVE BEEN FORCED TO LICK THE HORSE SHIT OFF OF EVERYBODY'S SHOE IN THE WORLD THAN TO WATCH YOUR FUCKING MOVIE, AND YOU KNOW WHAT??? I WOULD HAVE ENJOYED IT! BECAUSE THIS MOVIE STANK UP THE WHOLE HOUSE SO BAD, I HAD TO OPEN THE FUCKING WINDOWS! SO FUCK YOU, AND LEARN HOW TO MAKE A FUCKING MOVIE, YOU FUCKING DEGENERATES.

So you see, I don't think I could have written a fair review, because frankly, there is no fucking movie. Nobody even TALKS in this fucking movie until about 20-25 minutes in. I KNOW! What kind of shit is that? It's obviously incredibly low budget, shot on a prosumer video camera - NOT EVEN A REAL FUCKING MOVIE CAMERA. And I suppose it probably is an accurate portrayal of the slaughter of Brandes, but they do this by have two nasty-looking naked guys rolling around together, showing their penises in close-up. The slaughter scenes are very graphic, but I didn't even care because the quality of the filmmaking was so abysmally low.

Fuck, I'll admit it: I didn't even really watch the movie. After the first shitty 20 minutes, I started fast-forwarding. I stopped at some of the gore scenes, but even they were so bad and so FUCKING SLOW that I had to fast-forward through that as well, which is really sad. So, plain and simple, don't watch this movie.

Instead watch this: 

That is the effing awesome German metal band, Rammstein (with a lead singer that I would like to... well, let's just say that I would have loved to play the angel in that video) and their song, "Mein Teil." Mein teil means "my part," and the band wrote the song about the Meiwes case, from the point of view of Brandes... "my part" obviously referring to when they tried to eat his penis. A kick-ass song on its own, but even better when you know the story behind it.

And there you have it, boys and girls, the true story of the Maneater of Rotenburg, the Hannibal of Hesse... Armin Meiwes. If I've disturbed you and/or grossed you out, I apologize. Just wait until I get to the post about Albert Fish. That fucker will give you nightmares for weeks.