Regarding the grandmother---I don't believe J. ever had any such 'plan'. E. may have somehow brought it up as a joking fantasy to play around with; sometimes gradually building to some sort of hilarious absurdity, such as stealing a giant golden Buddha. You have to be very careful with what E. says. She presented J. as a sexual psychopath when it suited her to dial up her ongoing psychopathic delusion of being one of the World's Victims and disguise what she knows she did to him. She would say anything about anybody. Englade, at the beginning of Chapter 19, page 126, has got some things wrong, including 'demands', 'porn freak', magazines etc. J. was not a sexual psychopath. He wrote that lovely thing about her, waking up together. (And she was slobbering.)
And there was: "My great love."
God, it must have hurt to learn that these things were said after what he had done for her. His "sacrifice." A Liebestod. Like Kleist. Except J. did a couple of families, including his own.
E. loved the idea of weird sex, and from early on Jens began responding to her. He's interested, too, but both are writers, and any topic is fair game and can be sort of fun. Except that at that time I think that her interest in sex that is cruel, humiliating, even violent, was very much a part of her imagination and is a sign of the BPD.
Remember she told Dr. Showalter that her career choices would be either to become an academic at Cambridge or a career criminal.
I wasn't saying that JS wasn't capable of great violence. But in re Oma--or Nana-- she lived in a very handsome villa outside of Bremen and was from what I was told a formidable person. Jens would have been wary of her. My guess is that she employed at least three persons, a gardener (part time, maybe), a cook, and a butler/chauffeur/general attendant who directed the cleaning people when they came and polished the silver etc. Again, that is my guess, but this was a rich woman who had been through a bad war and was intent on enjoying life. Oma would never have let EH into that house. She knew too much about her by then. If she had allowed Jens to visit I think that he might have found a lawyer waiting for him in the drawing room with her with papers ready to expedite his surrender right then and there while he was safely in Germany. I don't think EH would even have let Jens go see his grandmother. She would have thought that he might never come back. She had the psychopath's insight into the people they focus on.
Regarding Source 1 / the grandmother's Gutenberg Bible: It is only a guess, but in view of the many indications that greed, if not the main motive, plays a certain role in Jens Söring's life, the mention of the Gutenberg Bible to Gardner seems to me personally like a revealing Freudian slip. Possibly Jens Söring wanted to rule out greed as HIS motive at the time by boasting and referring to his grandiose inheritance (in the same clumsy way that he often exposes himself) - after all, he apparently thought at the time that the Haysoms' fortune was far greater than it ultimately was at under a million dollars. In Söring's mind at that time, investigators could well "follow the money" and regard greed as a motive, so Söring, grossly overestimating the Haysoms' wealth, wanted to rule himself out as a suspect by "cleverly and with foresight" dropping the information that a multi million-dollar inheritance awaited him.
From today's perspective, his reference to his grandmother's supposed inheritance could be interpreted as a Freudian slip, indicating that he might have thought that greed was a motive from a police point of view - and this idea of his could stem from the fact that he himself very much considered greed to be indeed one of HIS motives.
Following Jens Söring´s story for many years this question always came to my mind.
You are doing a great job, putting your finger on the point.
Thank you.
Regarding the grandmother---I don't believe J. ever had any such 'plan'. E. may have somehow brought it up as a joking fantasy to play around with; sometimes gradually building to some sort of hilarious absurdity, such as stealing a giant golden Buddha. You have to be very careful with what E. says. She presented J. as a sexual psychopath when it suited her to dial up her ongoing psychopathic delusion of being one of the World's Victims and disguise what she knows she did to him. She would say anything about anybody. Englade, at the beginning of Chapter 19, page 126, has got some things wrong, including 'demands', 'porn freak', magazines etc. J. was not a sexual psychopath. He wrote that lovely thing about her, waking up together. (And she was slobbering.)
And there was: "My great love."
God, it must have hurt to learn that these things were said after what he had done for her. His "sacrifice." A Liebestod. Like Kleist. Except J. did a couple of families, including his own.
E. loved the idea of weird sex, and from early on Jens began responding to her. He's interested, too, but both are writers, and any topic is fair game and can be sort of fun. Except that at that time I think that her interest in sex that is cruel, humiliating, even violent, was very much a part of her imagination and is a sign of the BPD.
Remember she told Dr. Showalter that her career choices would be either to become an academic at Cambridge or a career criminal.
Andrew,
I wasn't saying that JS wasn't capable of great violence. But in re Oma--or Nana-- she lived in a very handsome villa outside of Bremen and was from what I was told a formidable person. Jens would have been wary of her. My guess is that she employed at least three persons, a gardener (part time, maybe), a cook, and a butler/chauffeur/general attendant who directed the cleaning people when they came and polished the silver etc. Again, that is my guess, but this was a rich woman who had been through a bad war and was intent on enjoying life. Oma would never have let EH into that house. She knew too much about her by then. If she had allowed Jens to visit I think that he might have found a lawyer waiting for him in the drawing room with her with papers ready to expedite his surrender right then and there while he was safely in Germany. I don't think EH would even have let Jens go see his grandmother. She would have thought that he might never come back. She had the psychopath's insight into the people they focus on.
Regarding Source 1 / the grandmother's Gutenberg Bible: It is only a guess, but in view of the many indications that greed, if not the main motive, plays a certain role in Jens Söring's life, the mention of the Gutenberg Bible to Gardner seems to me personally like a revealing Freudian slip. Possibly Jens Söring wanted to rule out greed as HIS motive at the time by boasting and referring to his grandiose inheritance (in the same clumsy way that he often exposes himself) - after all, he apparently thought at the time that the Haysoms' fortune was far greater than it ultimately was at under a million dollars. In Söring's mind at that time, investigators could well "follow the money" and regard greed as a motive, so Söring, grossly overestimating the Haysoms' wealth, wanted to rule himself out as a suspect by "cleverly and with foresight" dropping the information that a multi million-dollar inheritance awaited him.
From today's perspective, his reference to his grandmother's supposed inheritance could be interpreted as a Freudian slip, indicating that he might have thought that greed was a motive from a police point of view - and this idea of his could stem from the fact that he himself very much considered greed to be indeed one of HIS motives.