The Golden Glove
The Golden Glove was a dive bar on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn that opened in 1949 and kept going because certain people have nowhere else to go. Cheap beer, schlager on the jukebox, alcoholics nursing their first drink before noon. Fritz Honka was one of its regulars. Between 1970 and 1975, he murdered four women—all of them older, all of them alcoholic, all of them working occasionally as prostitutes—took their bodies back to his apartment in the Zeissstraße, dismembered them, and stored the remains in the walls and under the floorboards. His neighbors complained for years about the smell. No one investigated. The case broke in 1975 only when a building fire forced an evacuation and someone was finally obligated to look.
Heinz Strunk turned this into a novel in 2016, and The Golden Glove was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair prize—the kind of literary recognition that signals seriousness while guaranteeing the book contains things that will stay with you. Strunk’s approach isn’t to explain Honka but to inhabit his world: the bar, the flat, the particular Hamburg of the early 1970s, damp and beery and claustrophobic, where the violence feels like an extension of the atmosphere rather than an interruption of it. That’s the more disturbing choice. A monster you can contain and explain is less frightening than a man produced entirely by a specific milieu.
Fatih Akin’s film adaptation arrived in early 2019, with Jonas Dassler disappearing under heavy prosthetic makeup as Honka. Akin is best known internationally for Head-On and The Edge of Heaven—films about collision, cultural dislocation, and violence that emerges from specific social conditions. The Golden Glove fits that filmography more precisely than it might seem. The murders aren’t the work of some external aberration. They’re produced by a particular Germany, a particular Hamburg, a particular relationship between male isolation and female precarity.
What the story keeps returning me to is the invisibility of the victims. These were women no one reported missing. Their disappearance didn’t register—not with police, not with family, not with anyone. The murders went undetected not because Honka was clever—he was, by all accounts, quite stupid—but because the women were already, in some social sense, not fully counted. The neighbors’ complaints about the smell were dismissed for years. The system wasn’t fooled; it just didn’t look.
Akin’s films tend to sit uncomfortably rather than resolve, and everything I’ve read about this one suggests he held that line. The schlager songs. The beer. The regulars at the bar who knew and didn’t know. The ordinariness surrounding the horror is the actual subject. The Golden Glove is still there on the Reeperbahn, still open. Some places keep going because certain people have nowhere else to go.