2021 Article

Published in the Berliner Taz (taz.de) on July 14th, 2021

By Bettina Müller

Web link:

https://taz.de/Okkultismus-in-der-Weimarer-Republik/!5778770/

Translated from German

Occultism in the Weimar Republic

THE STRANGE ELSE

Her reputation as a famous crime clairvoyant reached as far as Berlin: 150 years ago [at the time of the article’s publication] medium Else Günther-Geffers was born.

BERLIN taz | In the year 1920 the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari caused an occultism boom in Berlin. In the film a sinister doctor uses telepathy to incite Conrad Veidt as “Cesare” to commit a murder. […] The journalist Cornelius Tabori even spoke of an “Occult fever” that had enveloped Germany. The ‘spirit world’ had taken hold of Berlin and showed no signs of letting up. This phenomenon had separated people into two camps: reverent sympathizers and grumbling skeptics.

One of the side effects of this phenomenon was ‘crime telepathy’ or ‘crime clairvoyance’: these terms described the attempts to investigate crimes with the help of trance mediums. They were supposed to, or supposedly able to, establish telepathic connections with murderers, victims, and other afflicted parties.

Since the Leipzig police had conducted the first official ‘crime telepathy experiment’ in 1919, this trend had been observed with some concern at police headquarters in Berlin.  […]

At this point in time, Else Günther-Geffers was already the most famous trance medium in Germany and would never have considered to end her contact with the spirit world for the purpose of crime solving. Due to the inflation at the time her husband had lost his job, and so the family – the couple had three children – had to support themselves with Else’s rather lucrative work.

Clairvoyance - Without a Guarantee of Success

Elbeth (Else) Geffers was born on July 11th 1871 in Gumbinnen in East Prussia. She was the daughter of a post director. She married the businessman Kurt Günther in Halle an der Saale in 1897 and took the name Günther-Geffers. As a young girl she had already prophesied the deaths of relatives and other misfortunes. Around 1912 “The strange Else” – as her relatives called her – then began her occult career with palmistry. When she unexpectedly fell into a trance for the first time during an occult gathering that took place in what was then Königsberg (Kaliningrad), she also became a trance medium and a clairvoyant. She mostly worked in East Prussia, and in 1922 founded her own investigative agency as an “investigator with special talents”, for whose investigations, however, she did not offer a guarantee of success. It appears that not even East Prussian spirits could always be relied upon after all. Naturally this was ammunition for those who thought Else Günther-Geffers a con woman to begin with.

Even though Günther-Geffers had already been tried for fraud and subsequently acquitted of the charges against her, another trial began in Insterburg against “The Medium of the Memelland” on the 30th of April 1928. People in the capital of Berlin excitedly followed the trial coverage in the newspapers, fascinated by the “clairvoyance tests” and “trance experiments” that took place in court and highly interested in the crimes that had been successfully solved by the mysterious Else Günther-Geffers.

For example, there was the case when she had been asked to assist in the search for an employee of a manor owner in the East Prussian county of Rastenburg who had disappeared without a trace. The medium picked up the trail of the manor employee in trance and proceeded toward a nearby lake. There she pointed toward a specific spot at which the man – head and hands pointing downwards, as she described - was supposed to be submerged in the swamp. The initial search for the dead body was unsuccessful, however. But months later, when workers were cutting reeds, they discovered the dead employee submerged in the swamp at the exact spot, with his head and his hands pointing downwards.

On the 4th of May 1928, the Berliner Börsenzeitung triumphantly declared that the “Clairvoyance Test in Court” had been a success. The trial ended with an acquittal for Else on all charges: “Due to inherently unreliable witness testimony and the difficult nature of the dispute, evidence of malicious intent on the part of the defendant could not be established [by the court]”. However, definitive “Occult abilities” could also not be established by the court: 25 misses were exactly opposed by 25 successes.

Already Controversial At The Time

Not only ‘crime clairvoyance’ but also its most infamous representative thus remained as ambivalently perceived as before the trial.

One year later film posters with the title Somnambul adorned columns all over Berlin. They were dominated by the silver-haired and strangely enraptured Else Günther-Geffers in trance, who, in the film, exposed a female killer who had murdered her husband in “An attack of moon-induced somnambulism”. Even before its release, the film, which was supposed to be titled The Clairvoyant (Die Hellseherin), had been the cause of considerable attention and concern. The chief inspection bureau for films in Berlin then decided to forbid its release - the film’s rather obvious message that crimes may be solved with the help of clairvoyance apparently disturbed the bureau as it was feared that this message could lead an impressionable public astray. Furthermore, it was assumed that the film would considerably tarnish the reputation of the police. […]

The bureau only allowed the film to be released after it was shortened so rigorously that its entire message had changed. After it had then also been renamed Somnambul, the film finally premiered on February 7th 1929 in [Berlin]. Else Günther-Geffers, however, had been cut out to the extent that she was no longer integral to the story.

Nevertheless, a few weeks after the film’s release the office of the interior ministry In East Prussia ordered all police departments in Germany to immediately desist from “Consulting clairvoyants, telepaths and the like for the investigations of any crimes”. Thus, the spirits may have had to dejectedly leave the stage at last, and Else Günther-Geffers, too, slowly but surely began to retreat from public life. In 1932 she was once more in the American press when she visited her son in New York and the papers used the occasion to excitedly write about the “Witch from Germany” who had offered to assist in the search for the kidnapped Lindbergh baby (Despite a ransom payment, the child was found dead a few weeks later).

After World War II Else Günther-Geffers moved to Brandenburg, where she focused on working as a spiritual healer. She died on August 19th 1959 in Treuenbrietzen. Until the end she perceived herself, as she wrote in a letter to a relative, as “A much discussed, controversial and infamous clairvoyant”.