Talking to ... Thomas Maeder

The serial killer is a figure of pop culture. This may be one
reason why one of the strangest cases in this field is little
known to this day: the case of the French doctor Marcel Petiot,
who spread the rumor in occupied Paris that he was helping people
escape to South America, but then murdered his victims, most of
them Jews, himself. The American author Thomas Maeder has written
an excellent book that captures the figure of the psychopath in
all its complexity while at the same time allowing the madness of
the time to emerge. And this outlines the cosmos of the author
himself. Maeder, the son of a psychoanalyst, has studied the
connection between Crime and Madness and the Origins and
Evolution of the Insanity Defense. And he recently just finished
work on a book that tells the story of a great passion - and in
which love and crime bizarrely mix.


The previous conversations


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