(Photo released by the Hamburg Police) The song “Honka Honka” by Ost+Front, taken off the current album “Dein Helfer in der Not”, tells the story of a serial killer from Hamburg named Fritz Honka.
Upon the question how the band became aware of Fritz Honka, Herrmann Ostfront says: “I know them all! Of course, I knew Honka before and had already made all kinds of notes about the various crime cases. But “Der Goldene Handschuh” gave me the absolute thrill to finally create a song out of it.”
Herrmann here refers to the book written by German writer Heinz Strunk. “Der goldene Handschuh” (“The Golden Glove”) was published in 2016, winning the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize and nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. It tells the story of Fritz Honka and bears the name of one of the St Pauli bars in which Honka met his victims.
For those unaware of who Friedrich Paul ‘Fritz’ Honka is, Honka was a German concentration camp survivor who became a serial killer who between 1970 and 1975 butchered at least four women from Hamburg’s red light district, keeping the bodyparts in his flat and attic. Complaints of other people living in the house regarding the stench of rotting flesh were disregarded. Honka used large numbers of pine-scented perfume blocks in an attempt to mask the odour.
Watch the new Ost+Front Video “Honka Honka” below.
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