Over the 10 months following the killing, Meiwes stored the body parts in his freezer and is said to have eaten up to 20 kilograms of Brandes' flesh. The grisly event was found recorded in its entirety on a two-hour videotape found in Meiwes' camera upon his arrest in December of 2002 (having been reported to the authorities by a fellow member of The Cannibal Cafe, where Meiwes had previously revealed, in explicit detail, the goings-on between Brandes and himself, even advertising for a follow-up victim).
He gave Brandes heavy doses of painkillers, sleeping pills, and alcohol, kissed him on the forehead and then stabbed him in the throat in a room specially prepared for the incident, Meiwes then proceeded to hang the body before slowly dismembering it. Brandes then attempted to eat his penis raw but was unsuccessful due to its chewiness, prompting Meiwes to fry it in a pan with some of Brandes' fat, combined with additional spices and marinades (though Meiwes ended up burning it to the point where it was inedible, after which he diced it up and fed it to his dog).įollowing this, Brandes was placed in a bathtub, where he bled out for 3 hours as Meiwes read a Star Trek novel. Shortly after his arrival, Brandes, still consenting, requested that Meiwes bite his penis off, although this proved too difficult, and it eventually had to be cut off with a knife. However, differing from Meiwes' in that rather than consuming human flesh, he desired to be consumed.
An archive of the forum in question (i.e., The Cannibal Cafe) can still be accessed today via The Wayback Machine several of Meiwes' posts (under the alias "Franky") are also available via said archive.Īfter several failed attempts to bait a victim (at least one of which resulted in a potential victim meeting up with Meiwes, though later backing out), Meiwes' post eventually caught the attention of Brandes, who also had a cannibalism fetish. The two originally corresponded through a now-defunct fantasy cannibalism forum (fantasy in that the forum expressly advised anyone "incapable of separating artistic fantasy from reality" to "leave this site") after Meiwes posted an ad seeking a willing victim to be methodically killed for the purpose of being consumed. On March 9th, 2001, in Rotenburg, Germany, then-39-year-old Armin Meiwes(an IT technician) and Bernd Brandes (an engineer of roughly the same age) met after organizing over the internet to have Brandes killed and eaten by Meiwes, who had developed a fetish for cannibalism over his lifetime. It felt too real.This Page has been tagged as NSFL. I still have a hard time watching it, mainly because of the smell it conjures up while we were filming it and the believable state our actor was able to project.
I'm so grateful that Skynd embraced this concept and fostered the vision of something that was truly uncomfortable to even film, much less think about. Something, that by anyone's standard, would be a complete failure, yet in his eyes, a masterpiece of delicacy.
"The idea was built on following his manic progression of working on a recipe. There was something particularly twisted about the idea of him being addicted to cooking shows. For this video, we really wanted to explore the madness, that compulsive energy behind Armin's frame of mind. We can either live in denial and imagine they don't exist or we can dig deeper into what makes them tick so we know what to look for. Of the accompanying video, director PR Brown shares: "Monsters live among us. But then again, you might ask yourself, 'What does a cannibal even look like?' It's a story that hasn't left me for years and I feel like I have finally translated it into music."
Meiwes didn't seem like the typical beast you'd imagine when you think of a 'cannibal'. "When I investigated the case, I watched an interview with him. His urge to own someone and to fully merge with somebody trumped his common sense. He wanted to reach another level of climax, because fantasies that he had held since he was a little boy weren't enough for him anymore. Meiwes didn't have his inner animal tamed. It sounds insane on the surface, but it's also really sad story about being lonely and engaging in an internal fight of fantasy vs. Taken from their Chapter IV EP, the duo take a look at the The Rotenburg Cannibal here (just like Rammstein did on Mein Teil), with vocalist Skynd explaining of what happened: "The arrangement was an entirely consensual cannibalistic murder. The next era of SKYND is here, and the duo are kicking things off with the “bizarre story” of cannibal Armin Meiwes.