During the night of October 19 to 20, 1855, piercing cries rang through a tenement house near the Anhalt railway station in Berlin. “Fire!” cried a voice, heard distinctly by the royal actuary who inhabited the adjoining apartment. There followed dull thuds, the splashing of water, and then complete silence. The tenants alerted the night watchman and the patrol sergeant. They were met by a bolted door, dark windows, and subtle signs they were as yet unable to decipher. Come morning, the police uncovered four bodies within the dwelling of Rasch, a municipal officer entrusted with the distraint of debts: himself, his wife, and their two children. The chapter in the Pitaval offers no definitive motive. Above all, it recounts the night as perceived by the neighbors and the questions that the official investigation left unanswered.
Rasch’s lodgings occupied the ground floor of a tenement divided between two households. Across the vestibule resided the royal actuary, his wife, six children, and a domestic servant. Rasch, a city employee, lived with his spouse and their two young offspring. According to the account published fifteen years after the event, the household enjoyed an unblemished reputation: the rent was discharged with regularity, the furnishings were decorous, and the children attended school with diligence. Such observations reflect merely the outward gaze of the neighborhood; in themselves, they reveal nothing of the couple's private tribulations.
Around two o’clock in the morning, the actuary awoke, initially believing he had merely dreamed the ringing of a bell. A woman's voice screamed "Fire!" three times. Rising from his bed, he awakened his wife and thereupon heard a muffled, heavy pounding from the Rasch apartment, like heavy blunt objects striking something soft. The housemaid, also aroused, had heard the bell and the cries of children coming from the street. She then fancied she heard the shuffling of bare feet. On the stairs, the door to the Raschs’ outer vestibule stood ajar. The actuary called out; no voice answered. The blows diminished, then ceased altogether.
The sound of water suggested a reassuring explanation to the neighbor. Perhaps a fire had broken out, and the family was striving to extinguish it without alarming the neighborhood. He elected, nevertheless, not to intrude into another man’s kitchen, nor did he repair immediately to the police station. In retrospect, this hesitation assumes a profound weight because it preceded the grim discovery; yet at that moment, it was not an undeniable token of foul play. When he unlatched the street door, the night watchman was already standing before the ground-floor casements. One of them stood wide open, contrary to local police ordinances. The watchman had rapped against it with his staff, as was customary in such minor infractions, without eliciting a response.
The watchman summoned his superior. The sergeant arrived, rang the bell, and knocked in his turn. The keys observed lying in the vestibule proved useless for unlocking the inner doors: the locks were shot from within, and the keys turned crosswise in the keyholes. Viewed from the courtyard, the windows remained opaque, one masked by an interior blind, the other obscured by a row of flowerpots. The actuary urged the officers to force an entrance. The sergeant maintained that the evidence remained ambiguous: no flames were visible, and sounds perceived upon waking from slumber are notoriously deceptive. He did not deem himself legally empowered to break down a door simply because the occupants failed to reply.
To quiet the neighbor's apprehensions, the sergeant procured a ladder and mounted with the watchman to the open casement overlooking the street. By the beam of a dark lantern, they observed the parlor in pristine order, while the rear corridor lay wrapped in darkness. They did not attempt to scale the courtyard windows. The watchman later declared that he assumed the Rasch family had stepped out, or that thieves had gained entry. He had observed no unmistakable evidence that would authorize him, under the strict letter of his instructions, to force his way into the dwelling. Before withdrawing, he was even instructed to return on the morrow to demand the fine of two and a half silbergroschen incurred for the open window.
The actuary returned to bed, though sleep eluded him. Between four and five in the morning, the watchman, having returned to the street after a short absence, heard the sound of a closing casement. Approaching the facade, he perceived a man strike a sulfur match, then light a lamp. He knocked. Rasch parted the shutter and window, clad in his green dressing gown. The watchman reproached him for having ignored their earlier calls. “What of it!” the man retorted, before shutting the window with violence. The watchman assumed he had merely disturbed a sleeper. This brief encounter allayed his suspicions; it also created a new riddle which the chronicle cannot resolve: who had cried fire only hours before?
At dawn, the vestibule door remained unfastened. Rasch’s wife, who was accustomed to fetch the morning rolls from a local tradeswoman, failed to appear. The tradeswoman knocked upon the door to no avail. The neighbors now sensed that a calamity had occurred. The police officers returned. A locksmith was summoned but could not pick the deadlocked bolts; a pane of glass was broken from the courtyard. The first constable who peered into the breach recoiled in horror: “The whole family lies murdered, swimming in blood,” the chronicle records. Once the portal was forced and the police surgeon arrived, the dreadful reality was confirmed: Rasch, his wife, and their two children lay dead.
The interior bore no marks of a ruined household. The rooms were handsomely furnished; money, bank notes, a gold pocket watch, and sundry jewels were found untouched. The beds were virtually free of blood. The victims had been dragged or forced into the small kitchen, where an axe, a curved cavalry saber, and a straight razor were discovered. The medical report, as epitomized by the Pitaval, indicates that the wife and children were likely assailed first with the razor, then finished with the axe. Rasch himself exhibited a deep wound in the abdomen, which may have been inflicted by his wife in self-defense; he had ultimately cut his own throat with the razor. These conclusions remain those preserved in a retrospective compilation, and not those of a contemporaneous inquest record consulted directly.
The inquiry never culminated in a trial, for the sole presumed culprit was dead. The authorities concluded that no outside hand had taken part in the butchery. The depositions of acquaintances portrayed a marriage that had soured into misery. Rasch, a former non-commissioned officer, was described as quarrelsome, obstinate, and increasingly given to intemperance. He frequently returned home inebriated, heaping verbal abuse upon his wife and children. His mother-in-law and her brother had repeatedly urged the woman to sue for divorce. A few days before the tragedy, an outburst of domestic violence had brought the mother-in-law to the door, listening intently and ready to intervene; yet the wife had ultimately begged her to leave, protesting that the storm had passed.
The true motive remains buried in obscurity. Jealousy was whispered of in neighborhood gossip: an architect had lodged with the Rasch household, only to be turned out several days prior to the murders after Rasch terminated the tenancy. An alleged rendezvous between this gentleman and Frau Rasch at the Anhalt railway station rested, by the chronicler’s own admission, upon mere speculation on the part of the deceased woman’s brother. Nothing establishes an improper liaison, let alone marks it as the catalyst for the slaughter. As for the Sunday preceding the discovery, no living soul could recount what had transpired behind those walls.
The chronicler speculates that Rasch may have butchered his wife in a sudden paroxysm of fury or drunken delirium, and then turned upon the children upon realizing that they would be left parentless. He ponders the strange topography of the crime: why drag the victims from their beds into the confines of the kitchen? Why leave a window wide open to the October night? Why wait nearly two hours before turning the blade upon himself? To each inquiry, he advances several hypotheses—a desire to spare the parlor carpets and furniture, a desperate craving for fresh air, or the lingering stupor of shock—only to concede that none can be substantiated. He even reconstructs the screams heard by the neighbors, questioning whether they issued from the mother or her doomed children. These, however, are the literary musings of the 1870 narrator, not established historical facts.
The watchman saw Rasch standing upright, seemingly calm, as the day broke. He went about his round, wholly unaware of the slaughter that lay behind the window he had just seen slammed shut. The relatives of the deceased wife came forward to claim the bodies of the mother and the two children for Christian burial; no one came forward to claim the corpse of Rasch. Thus, the affair preserves but two narrow certainties alongside an abyss of unknowns: four corpses in a locked apartment, and neighbors whose nocturnal senses were inadequate to fathom the horror unfolding beside them. Everything that might yield a final explanation for that night—jealousy, madness, remorse, or premeditation—remains forever beyond the reach of the historical record.