Peter Čapek (Petr Čapek): The functionary who wanted to turn a monster into a leader

In episode 64 of Monster, the anime adaptation (Madhouse, 2004-2005) of Naoki Urasawa’s manga, a white-haired man in glasses gets the news that the Baby, the neo-Nazi ringleader who worked for him in Frankfurt, has been found murdered in a hotel room. The man is Peter Čapek, and he decides to hide in a house in Idstein that, he believes, nobody knows about. In the car he remembers the day he met Franz Bonaparta and the first time he saw the twins. When they arrive he grows nervous, wants to go somewhere else and, in a panic, shoots his own bodyguard. He walks up to the house alone. The guards who were supposed to be waiting for him are gone. He sits down in the living room, and then Johan Liebert appears, wanting to know just one thing: whether Franz Bonaparta is still alive. Čapek is the man who stands above almost every villain Monster places in Frankfurt. Czech, raised in a small town near the Austrian border, he was an official at Czechoslovakia’s Ministry of Education and Bonaparta’s right-hand man: he took part in the readings at the Red Rose Mansion in Prague and in the eugenics experiment that produced Johan and Nina. In 1989 he left for Germany. There he became one of the four leaders of the organization that wants to put Johan at the head of a new Germany, and the Baby, the far-right thugs and the gunmen who hunt Eva Heinemann all work for him. (Spoiler warning: this file reveals how his story ends.)

// The theoryThe crime that is decided at the top

Classical criminology almost always looked down: at the thief, the gang member, the poor neighborhood. Critical criminology proposed turning its head. Richard Quinney argued in The Social Reality of Crime (1970) that crime is a definition created by those with the power to impose it. Frank Pearce titled his 1976 book Crimes of the Powerful and showed that large companies and their political allies cause enormous harm that rarely ends up in court. And William Chambliss, in his presidential address to the American Society of Criminology, published in 1989, spoke of state-organized crime: acts the law forbids that officials commit while carrying out their own government’s policy. The common idea is that the harm done by the powerful is the hardest to see, because it is decided in an office, carried out by others and spread across so many hands that no one seems responsible.

// The subjectThe man who signed off on the jobs

The series almost always shows him from a distance, and that says a lot already. In episodes 58 to 60 (manga chapters 121-127), Martin Reest, an ex-convict working for the Baby, recalls the job he and Čapek gave him: escort Eva Heinemann to Frankfurt and take her to high-society parties so she could identify Johan, whom she had seen years earlier. Eva points him out, Čapek introduces Johan to a young man named Christof Sievernich and, once the job is done, orders Martin to kill her. Martin refuses, helps her escape and dies after a gunfight with the men Čapek sends afterward. In episode 62 (chapters 131-133), Tenma meets Milan Koláš, a dentist who was Čapek’s childhood friend and who brought him to Germany. Milan tells him that Čapek taught German classes to children in Frankfurt, that his pupils began to kill themselves and to attack one another, and that the boy singled out as the ringleader, who only asked to go back to those sessions, was his own son, who took his own life soon after. For the viewer, the echo is clear: those classes recall the reading sessions at the Red Rose Mansion. He also blames him for the attacks on the immigrants of the Turkish quarter, including the plan to burn it that Tenma and Nina had foiled years before. The next day Milan tries to kill him at a convention center, and the police guarding the event kill Milan instead. The end comes in episodes 64 to 67 (chapters 136-143). With the Baby dead and Johan waiting for him in his hideout, Čapek realizes he controls nothing. In episode 65 he sends his men to fetch Nina, who aims a gun at him and does not fire; he explains that Johan has kept him alive because the one meant to kill him is his sister. In episode 66 he tells her how the twins were born: an experiment that paired their parents without their mother knowing anything, with Bonaparta as its mastermind. In episode 67, after taking her to Johan, he walks out of the building wondering what he and Bonaparta were trying to create, and his own bodyguards shoot him dead, in revenge for the comrade he had shot in the car.

// The crackFour old men are not a structure

Monster sets a gentle trap for critical criminology. The theory talks about structures: states, markets, classes, institutions that cause harm without a villain behind the curtain. The series, by contrast, imagines a conspiracy of four older men pulling strings from the shadows, which looks more like a spy novel than like what Pearce or Chambliss described. The harm of the powerful rarely needs a mastermind; it is enough for many people to do their jobs without asking questions. The series itself also dismantles Čapek’s power: the man who thought he was the puppeteer turns out to be a piece in the plan of Johan, who has no office, no money of his own and no party.

Nor should Čapek be turned into a mere cog. He chooses to serve Bonaparta, he chooses to repeat his readings with children in Frankfurt and he chooses to have Eva killed once she is no longer useful. Critical criminology does not excuse him: it asks why a man like this could thrive under two different systems, and why, in both, it was easier to go after the person who tried to stop him than after him. Explaining Čapek is not excusing him. It is also looking at the door he came in through.