Serial Killers (II): The Pathological Public Sphere

Abstract

In 1932 Sylvestre Matushka went on trial for engineering a series of train crashes that had killed more than thirty railway passengers. He stated his profession in these terms: 'train wrecker, before that, businessman.' At the time of his arrest police discovered in his possession train schedules and a map with sites marked out that were planned for future wrecks at the regular rate of one a month. Matushka, it turned out, was something of a train fiend, albeit of a markedly singular style. He explained at his trial that he could only achieve sexual release when witnessing a train crashing and, consequently, made a career of staging these spectacular accidents. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Matushka escaped confinement. He reappeared in 1953, during the Korean War-as the head of a military unit for blowing up trains. I am not interested in this case merely because repetitive murder appears in the form of a distinctly modern choice of occupation. Nor is my interest merely in the conjunction of compulsive sexualized violence, on the one side, and technological system, schedule, and routine, on the other, that defines these crimes. These components in instances of serial violence are perhaps familiar enough.2 Clearly, the murderous railway accident (as Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued) dramatically concretizes