Adolf Müllner

• Born: October 18, 1774
• Birthplace: Langendorf, Saxony (now in Germany)
• Died: June 11, 1829
• Place of death: Weissenfels, Saxony (now in Germany)

Type of Plot: Police procedural

Contribution

Adolf Müllner is best known in German literature for his “fate tragedies” (Schicksalstragödien) Der neunundzwanzigste Februar (1812, revised as Der Wahn, 1818; the twenty-ninth of February) and Die Schuld (1813; Guilt, 1819). His sole contribution to detective fiction is his short novel Der Kaliber (1828; The Caliber, 1999), which is often called the first detective novel in German literature. The story is told in the first person, the narrator being the examining magistrate charged with investigating the murder of a young man who is killed in the presence of his brother. The brother believes himself guilty, but he is proved innocent because the bullet that killed his brother was of a larger caliber than the ones shot by his pistol.

This work was kept from complete oblivion by being reprinted in obscure anthologies several times, the last as late as 1908. It seems to have had little influence and is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Its interest is thus primarily that of a historical curiosity.

Biography

Adolf Müllner was born Amandus Gottfried Adolf Müllner on October 18, 1774, in Langendorf, a town near Weissenfels, a small city in Saxony (now in Germany). His father was an official in the service of the electoral prince of Saxony and his mother a sister of Gottfried Bürger, a well-known German poet. Müllner attended elementary and secondary schools in Weissenfels and Schulpforte, and he studied law in Leipzig from 1793 to 1797. Later he obtained a doctorate from the University of Wittenberg. He settled down to a career in law, first in Delitzsch and then in Weissenfels, where he lived for most of his life. In 1802, he married Amalie von Logau, whom he had long loved but who had first been engaged to his stepbrother, who died before the union took place.

Müllner was a prolific writer. He wrote numerous reviews of juridical works and a number of articles and books on various aspects of jurisprudence. He was also interested in literature and the theater. His first belletristic work was a lurid novel called Der Incest: Oder, Der Schutzgeist von Avignon (1799; incest: or, the protective spirit of Avignon). He founded an amateur theater in Weissenfels in 1810 and wrote a number of short comedies that were produced there. These works are slight and imitative but dramatically effective. They were not published until 1815.

In 1812 Müllner reached the pinnacle of his literary success with his two fate tragedies, Der neunundzwanzigste Februar and Guilt. The latter was especially successful; it is considered one of the best specimens of the fate tragedy genre, in which tragic events take place on certain fateful days or in certain fateful places. Both plays are written in trochaic tetrameter, in imitation of the classical Spanish drama. Müllner essayed his hand at two more dramas in the same vein, König Yngurd (King Yngurd) in 1817 and Die Albaneserin (the Albanian woman) in 1820, neither of which met with much success. For the rest of his life he edited anthologies and journals and wrote a number of lesser works, most of them short. His novel The Caliber first appeared in the 1828 issues of a journal he edited, Mitternachtsblatt für gebildete Stände (midnight paper for the educated classes). Müllner died of a stroke on June 11, 1829.

Analysis

To qualify as a detective novel and not merely a novel depicting a crime, a work must conform to certain criteria. The mystery of who perpetrated the crime must be paramount, rather than the crime itself. The reader must be made aware of the mystery and must be shown the evidence that leads ultimately to the solution of the crime. Several suspects should be present. There should be clues for the reader to interpret, and red herrings should be drawn across the reader’s path. There must be an investigator who is perspicacious enough to interpret the evidence correctly and eventually disclose the culprit.

The many lurid tales of murder, robbery, and mayhem that were published in Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries displayed for the most part few of these characteristics. The horrible crimes themselves were the principal object of these works, together with the biographies of the villains, who generally ended up on the gallows or under the executioner’s ax. Literature of a higher order that dealt with crime was interested in the motivations of the perpetrator, or in his guilt, and seldom was much concerned with the detection of his crime.

The Caliber

There is some disagreement among German scholars as to whether Adolf Müllner’s The Caliber should be labeled a detective novel or novel depicting a crime. Certainly it contains a number of the characteristics mentioned. The story takes place in 1816 somewhere in Germany. The work is told in the first person, the narrator being an Untersuchungsrichter, or examining magistrate, roughly equivalent to an American district attorney. In those days the task of investigating crimes fell into the hands of such magistrates. Therefore, to the extent that such was possible in this period, this is a police procedural.

One autumn evening, the magistrate is perusing documents pertaining to robberies that took place in the nearby forest. He is interrupted by a young man coming to his door. The man is a commercial traveler named Ferdinand Albus, and he informs the magistrate that his brother Heinrich was shot to death by a robber in the forest, yet he is not able to describe the robber. The magistrate goes to the scene of the crime with Ferdinand and the appropriate officials and finds the brother lying there shot through the heart, with his cane-sword beside him, partly unsheathed. Ferdinand tells the magistrate that he had left his pistol at the murder site, but it cannot be found. The young man is overcome with grief and cries out, “Mariane—Mariane! You won’t be able to bear it—I can’t bear it! Both—both lost!” At first the circumstances make the magistrate suspicious of Ferdinand, but he decides that there is really no evidence against him.

An autopsy shows that Heinrich was killed by a bullet that penetrated the heart and lungs but that remains lodged, only partly out of shape, in the shoulder blade. The magistrate learns that the Mariane whose name Ferdinand had invoked is the daughter of a rich merchant. He meets the daughter and becomes her confidant. He learns that she is engaged to Ferdinand, but that Heinrich, too, had been in love with her. In the meantime, with the help of the militia of the adjacent state, the robber gang has been apprehended, and the members have been divided up between the two states to answer to justice.

When spring arrives, the magistrate is informed by Mariane that Ferdinand is obsessed by the idea that he was responsible for his brother’s death. He cannot bring himself to marry Mariane because of his guilt feelings. Mariane persuades the magistrate to convince Ferdinand that he is innocent. The magistrate apparently does so, and the wedding date is set. On the eve of the wedding, however, Ferdinand confesses that he perpetrated the crime. He and his brother had quarreled, and his brother had started to draw his cane-sword on him. Fearful for his life, Ferdinand had drawn his pistol and struck Heinrich’s arm with it. The gun had accidentally fired and killed Heinrich.

The magistrate finds an able attorney to defend Ferdinand’s interests—Dr. Rebhahn. Rebhahn finds the case interesting because it deals with a gray area between intentional guilt and accident. Ferdinand had intended to strike his brother in self-defense, but he had not intended to kill him. In spite of his spirited defense, Ferdinand is found guilty and sentenced to death.

To gain time, Rebhahn procures a stay of execution until the murder weapon is found. A search is made, and the pistol is found in a nearby river where Ferdinand said he had thrown it. It is a double-barreled pistol called a Terzerol, and to everyone’s surprise both barrels still contain a ball, indicating that the pistol had not been fired. Even more surprising, it is found that the type of bullet used for this pistol is of a smaller caliber than the one lodged in Heinrich’s shoulder. Amazingly, Ferdinand, still obsessed by the idea of his guilt, refuses to listen to the new evidence, believing that the devil is behind the efforts of his friends to help him. The court, too, refuses to amend its verdict, although it does grant a further stay of execution.

Soon help arrives from an unexpected quarter. A package comes from the adjacent state, containing Heinrich’s signet ring, which had been found on the person of one of the robbers who had been apprehended. It is accompanied by a copy of the confession of the robber to the crime and his weapon, which fired bullets of the same caliber as the one that killed Heinrich. When Mariane confronts Ferdinand with this fresh evidence, he realizes that he is innocent. The court now comes to the same conclusion, and Ferdinand is completely exonerated. He and Mariane get married and emigrate to the United States.

The German critic Albert Ludwig has contended that the author had no intention of engaging the reader’s interest in the question of the guilt or innocence of the hero, that it was not the unraveling of the mystery that he wished to present but rather the love story and the history of the hero’s demented state and consequent recovery.

Hans Otto Hügel, however, the author of a learned work on the history of the German detective novel in the nineteenth century, disagrees. He notes that the story is told completely from the perspective of the examining magistrate as he investigates the case in the course of his duties. The magistrate reveals his suspicions to the reader as they occur or are dispelled, presenting all the facts of the case. He never describes the suspect’s mental state as a fact, but rather indicates what he appears to be thinking or feeling.

When the magistrate first hears of the crime, he is immediately suspicious of the witness’s statement, as an examining magistrate should be. He asks Ferdinand about his gun, which he declares he left in the woods. Ferdinand is unable to describe the assailant—his memory seems to fail him, says the narrator. At the scene of the crime a feverish horror seems to overcome him when he views the corpse. His excessive grief and his invocation of the name of Mariane feed the magistrate’s suspicions. The narrator says:

Even the unworthy suspicion that the witness of the murder himself could be the murderer occurred to me, and tried to impress itself on my mind, while my heart discarded it in disgust. A criminal magistrate will be pardoned such a thought. This position accustoms even the best-humored person to attribute the greatest malevolence to others. But mind and heart became united before I arrived at the village. The horrible suspicion was basically without foundation except for the excess of grief on the part of Ferdinand Albus and the invocation of a “Mariane.”

When he learns that Heinrich, too, was in love with Mariane, the magistrate’s suspicions are again aroused. He realizes that Ferdinand is the one loved by Mariane, but he wonders if Ferdinand knew this when he invoked Mariane’s name and cried, “Mariane, you won’t be able to bear it!” When Mariane describes Ferdinand’s character to him, however, especially his tendency to torture himself, the magistrate discards his suspicions again. After Ferdinand’s confession, the magistrate is forced to believe him guilty of manslaughter, if not of deliberate murder, but the reader sees him change his mind again when the pistol is found.

The story is replete with clues that the shrewd reader can interpret. The significance of the condition of Ferdinand’s pistol, with the barrels still loaded, and the disparity in caliber strike the reader before they are elucidated by the narrator. For example, if the ball had been shot from close range it would not have been stopped by the shoulder blade, according to Hügel. (Whether this was so for the muzzle-loading pistols of this era only an expert on weaponry of the period can say.) More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that an autopsy was performed (surely a rarity in this period) when it was clear how the victim had died; also, the use of evidence from the autopsy, evidence eventually strong enough to free the accused, is unusual. That Ferdinand could not remember how the alleged robber looked adds to the intrigue.

The title supports Hügel’s contention that The Caliber is a prototype of the mystery. The caliber of the bullet is, after all, the central clue in the mystery, and the title surely emphasizes that for Müllner the mystery and its clarification formed the salient material. Although the ballistics evidence is crude from a modern point of view, this certainly is one of the first works in crime fiction in which ballistics plays an important role.

The theme of rivalry between two brothers for the hand of a girl, as well as involuntary fratricide, also appeared in Müllner’s drama Guilt. In the drama the protagonist kills his rival, who is married to the object of his passions, but he is unaware that the two of them are brothers. Doubtless this theme originated in the author’s personal life. He and his stepbrother loved the same girl, who, however, favored the stepbrother, whom Müllner despised. Fortunately for Müllner, his stepbrother died young, and he was able to marry the girl he loved. Perhaps he expiated his guilt by writing on the theme.

The actual crime depicted in The Caliber is not a very likely one. The fact that the robber shot from some distance at the exact moment that Ferdinand struck his brother is hardly realistic, nor is it quite believable that Ferdinand mistook a distant shot for one from his own pistol. Also, why did the robber not dispatch Ferdinand at the same time and rob both of them? Did Ferdinand actually see a robber? If not, and it appears that he did not, it is again quite coincidental that the very story he made up turns out to be true. Clearly, The Caliber is not a great work, yet as an early example of the detective genre, it is not without significance.

Bibliography

Bloch, Ernst. “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel.” In Literary Essays, translated by Andrew Joron and others. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Bloch’s essay is a classic, among the most well known and influential German-language studies of detective fiction. Sheds light on Müllner’s work.

Daviau, Donald G. “Adolf Müllner.” In European Authors, 1000-1900, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz and Vineta Colby. New York: Wilson, 1967. Müllner is covered in this massive bio-bibliographic dictionary of nine hundred years of European literature.

Evans, Richard J. Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. A rare English-language study of nineteenth century German detective and crime fiction. Provides context for understanding Müllner.

Tannert, Mary W., and Henry Katz, trans. and eds. Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction: An Anthology. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999. Müllner’s The Caliber is included in this anthology with commentary on the history of German and Austrian mystery stories.