The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  In the hope of quelling the riot, the town sounded the fire alarm, but the crowd seemed unimpressed. Instead, demonstrators attacked police inspectors from Berlin, throwing one of them to the ground and wounding another.130 The demonstrators then marched to Lewy’s house and pummeled it with rocks. They also damaged the shop of a Jewish merchant who had not shut his storefront grate. At half past four, a group of young men, trailed by women and children, marched to the synagogue.131 Breaking inside, they smashed the wooden pews, yanked down the lamps, ripped apart the drapes, and tore pages out of the holy books. Fortunately, the Torah rolls had already been moved to a safe place, a precaution taken after the initial attempt to burn down the synagogue on the preceding Thursday night. The temple, the Danziger Zeitung reported, now “resembled a ruin.”

  Konitz, a local Jewish man wrote, was “in a state of revolt.”132 County officials agreed. When the crowd could no longer be controlled, Baron von Zedlitz, “obviously shaken and as pale as a chalkboard,” called the Prussian minister of the interior, who once again ordered that the garrison in Graudenz send the Eleventh Company of the Fourteenth Infantry Regiment. As the train carrying the troops passed through the neighboring town of Tuchel, another demonstration gathered at the railway station to shout the troops down and stone them.133 When the soldiers finally arrived in Konitz, at nine-thirty in the evening, Zedlitz read the riot act, and the infantry marched into town, with rifles loaded and bayonets fixed. Although no shots were fired, there were injuries in the clash, resulting mainly from people being struck by butts of rifles and cut by bayonets.134 As this violence erupted in Konitz, the situation became so serious that the Prussian minister of the interior, Baron von Rheinbaben, met personally with Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin to apprise him of the situation. Sensing a revolt against state authority, the kaiser immediately ordered that not just a company but a battalion be sent to Konitz. The battalion, roughly 650 men, arrived on Tuesday, June 12, stationing a soldier for every sixty paces, as well as a cordon of infantrymen around the synagogue and a special guard around Lewy’s house.135

  Military occupation of the town put an end to the major incidents of anti-Semitic violence in Konitz, though isolated instances of anti-Semitic rioting continued to occur on the periphery of the region throughout the month of June: in Berent, north of Konitz, where there had already been an alleged case of ritual murder in 1894; in Mrotschen, in the province of Posen; and in Schlawe, in Pomerania.136 In addition, anti-Semitic gangs again demolished the Jewish cemetery in Hammerstein, while in Janowitz, in the district of Bromberg, two men broke into the synagogue through the side window and proceeded to vandalize the temple.137 Moreover, isolated acts of violence against individual Jews continued. On a country road leading out of Kamin, a village south of Konitz, a worker named Josef Krajetski attacked a sixty-four-year-old Jewish trader with a pitchfork, beating him senseless. As Krajetski dealt his blows, his wife encouraged him, shouting “hep-hep.” Had the lord of the local manor not come to the trader’s aid, Krajetski would presumably have left the Jewish trader for dead.138 Similarly, in Prechlau, Ernst Winter’s village, young thugs attacked a Jewish cantor and his seventy-year-old father, who had come to the town to perform a circumcision. The father had to be admitted to a hospital with serious head wounds.139 And in Konitz anti-Semitic sentiments continued to smolder. “Despite the surface calm,” Baron von Zedlitz reported two days after the occupation, “I judge the situation as more serious than ever before.”140

  Postcard depicting the ritual murder of Ernst Winter by the Lewy family and other Jews in Konitz. “Remember the uth of March 1900. On this day the Gymnasium student Winter was sacrificed in konitz to the knife of a kosher butcher.” The publisher was sentenced to six months in prison for making this card.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Butcher’s Tale and Other Stories

  Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out: so where there is no talebearer, the strife ceaseth.

  —PROVERBS 26:20

  The real author of the narrative is not only he who tells it, but also, and at times even more, he who hears it.

  —GéRARD GENETTE

  The advent of the twentieth century was remarkable enough, but the spring season that emerged in the year 1900 was particularly noteworthy. For the first time ever, a brilliant sheen of electric light illuminated the Eiffel Tower, completed eleven years earlier, as if to augur the technological advances of the coming years. Enthusiasts of speed would soon crank their engines and drive their Daimler-powered cars through dust-filled streets in the Paris-Lyon road race; Graf Zeppelin would launch the first of his famous cigar-shaped airships, which hovered far above Lake Constance; and by the end of the year, Max Planck would discover quanta as a measure of energy emitted by radiating atomic particles, thus opening the way for other physicists, Albert Einstein most prominent among them, to unlock further secrets of the physical universe.

  It was a time of optimism, if not uncritical satisfaction, and contemporaries had a general sense that through reason they could overcome obstacles, conquer prejudice, and slay superstition. The events in Konitz, located on the eastern fringes of the German Empire, and on the western edge of a Slavic pogrom landscape, could hardly diminish the sense that, setbacks notwithstanding, mankind was moving forward. The superstitions that gave rise to anti-Semitism could still “turn the heart of a nation into stone,” Thomas Masaryk wrote in the wake of the Polna ritual-murder accusations of 1899. Nonetheless, like most of the best and brightest of his contemporaries, Masaryk believed that these superstitions belonged to a “dying century.”1

  It thus seemed easy to dismiss the violence in Konitz as, at best, a Dreyfus affair à demi, a backwoods witch trial, an inquisition altogether out of step with the times. The anti-Semitic journalists, however, did not make this mistake, sensing in the murder story the possibilities of a public sensation not just a story to be told but a spectacle, like a Wagnerian opera, to be created.2 From late May onward, they traveled to Konitz and stayed there for weeks on end, the most dedicated among them taking up local quarters and throwing themselves fully into the cause. One of these journalists was Wilhelm Bruhn, whom we’ve already met, the thirty-one-year-old editor of the Staatsbürgerzeitung, an anti-Semitic newspaper that mixed news and prejudice so thoroughly as to render them indistinguishable.

  Born in rural Pomerania, Bruhn had arrived in Berlin in 1894, after serving, like many other professional anti-Semites, as a schoolteacher, a lowly position that in Wilhelmine Germany paid all too modestly. He first purchased a printing press and published a local newspaper in Berlin-Weissensee; four years later, he joined the editorial board of the Staatsbürgerzeitung. Whether he joined this anti-Semitic newspaper for the money or out of conviction is difficult to say. Like many journalists barely scraping by, he no doubt needed a steady income and had already been arrested for gambling.3 Now writing for the Staatsbürgerzeitung, he set out to create the anti-Semitic spectacles from which he and his newspaper lived.4 He had already once before canvassed the Pomeranian and West Prussian countryside, spreading anti-Semitic invective.5 On May 26, he headed east again, this time to take part in Ernst Winter’s “solemn funeral.”6

  Bruhn undoubtedly boarded a train bound for Konitz at the austere, if spacious, Silesian Station in Berlin. The train crossed the Oder River, which after World War II became the dividing line between Germany and Poland, before heading deeper into the eastern territories, through flat empty spaces and row on row of rye fields.

  As the landscape passed by, Bruhn may have focused his attention on the lead articles of the day’s newspaper. The Boer War in South Africa continued, portrayed in the German press as a struggle of desperate, but valiant, settlers fighting for the soil not to mention the gold and diamonds of their homeland against the Uitlanders, rapacious foreigners supported by the brutal British armies of Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener. More prominent still was the Boxer Rebellion, which, according to the German press, pitted bloodthirsty Chinese rebe
ls against civilized nations in a conflict that would soon involve the murder of Christians and foreigners, including Germans, who had significant investments in China. Closer to home, there was the naval race, stirred with new vigor by the imperial government’s plan to build ships at a pace so dizzying that it would force Great Britain to concede to Germany what the soon-to-be chancellor, Bernhard von Büllow, called its rightful place in the sun. These were important developments of the time: in provoking the aggressiveness of modern nations, each event foreshadowed the coming war whose horrors people would honor by calling it the Great War.

  That conflict, of course, was still over a decade away, and more immediate issues concerned the journalist. After some five hours of travel, Bruhn’s train approached Konitz through Pomerellen, a landscape known for its gentle fields and old-growth forests, for its small lakes and still smaller villages.7 But the beauty of the Pomerellen deceived. This land was, as Max Weber once called it, “among the parts of the monarchy least blessed by nature.”8 The soil was sandy and stubborn, and the farmland dominated by the Junkers, reactionary Prussian lords who served as employer, magistrate, police, and judge. The common people led their lives in the shadow of these men, and most of them never had the chance to till their own soil. Instead, they worked as farmhands with yearly contracts or as day laborers, maids, or servants. There were some independent farmers, but as a result of agricultural depression, those who owned small plots increasingly fell into the ranks of the landless poor. And poor they were. The countryside around Konitz belonged to one of the most destitute regions in all of Germany. In Konitz County a day laborer earned about two marks per day in the summer, and slightly more than a mark per clay in the winter. Women workers earned less still, just over half of a man’s wage.9 And children, when they worked scratching potatoes from the earth, earned twenty pennies per day, barely enough to pay for a loaf of bread.

  The conditions in this rural region remained harsh and difficult, and the 1880s saw a powerful exodus from the area, part of the largest exodus ever from the German countryside. Young men and women, many of whom had never experienced so much as a whiff of economic independence, boarded ships destined for the United States, dreaming of five-acre homesteads on the great plains of Kansas. Although the wave of emigration to the New World had already subsided by 1900, migrations continued to western Germany’s steel mills and smelting factories, and to the dark shafts of the coal mines of the Ruhr. As in many impoverished places throughout the earth, migration remained the bitter tribute the poor paid to their poverty, their requiem for the land they left behind.

  More than just poverty marked the Pomerellen, however. If Bruhn left the compartment of his train to walk down the aisle, he perhaps looked north to an area populated mostly by Kashubians and Poles, who together made up the majority of the population in Konitz County. Warmly evoked in the novels of Günter Grass, the Kashubians spoke a Slavic language separate from the Polish and settled south and west of Danzig. In the countryside north of the broad Berlin-Königsberg highway, which cut a northwesterly diagonal through Konitz County, they were the oldest inhabitants, if also the poorest and least educated.10 In 1886, a survey of Konitz County listed its inhabitants as 45 percent Kashubian and 15 percent Polish, but in 1900, more and more Kashubians claimed Polish as their primary language and identification.11

  If Bruhn instead looked out of his compartment window, he would have seen the southern part of the county, populated by German Catholics whose forefathers had settled there in the sixteenth century in a belt of villages collectively known as the Kochschneiderei. He would also have seen villages of German Protestants and villages that were mixed: Protestant, Catholic, German, Polish. For although West Prussia was a hinterland, it was also an area of religious and ethnic diversity, and within this diversity, occupying a special position, though closely linked to the Germans, were the Jews. In the Pomerellen, many of the villages to the south of Konitz like Krojanke, Cammin, Jastrow, and Zempelburg once boasted significant Jewish populations. As late as the early nineteenth century, the majority of Prussia’s Jews lived in the eastern provinces, most in small villages and towns and some in towns whose Jewish populations rivaled Berlin’s.12 But those days had passed. There were fewer Jews in the countryside now, though they could still be seen walking on the dirt road with their bundles, sitting atop their wood wagons, or leading their cattle to market.

  Bruhn’s train finally arrived at Konitz station, where he stepped out and was taken to Kühn’s hotel by carriage along the Bahnhofstrasse, still full of ruts and holes from the April thaw and the recent rains. He had been here a number of days earlier, and the owner of the hotel, Paul Kühn, sympathized with the anti-Semitic cause. Here Bruhn could also join the Stammtisch, the common table, where he could converse and drink beer with men who thought and felt as he did. There he is likely to have met Franz Schleiminger, a bookseller, and Max Heyn, a photographer, along with the master mason Rudolf Hermann and the dentist Max Meibauer (a founder of the anti-Semitic citizens committee), Dr. Arthur Müller (son of the county medical examiner who performed the autopsy), and a number of prominent merchants, postal workers, a baker and a butcher, and the proprietor, Paul Kühn himself, who may have joined his anti-Semitic guests, “real German men,” for a drink.13 That Bruhn might have met any or all of these men over a glass of beer at Kühn’s hotel was not a coincidence. In 1888, in fact, an officer of the church complained of the “veritable cancer” that Konitz counted “not fewer than fifty places to drink beer.”14 More than just the quality of beer separated the taverns of Konitz. One could discern differences by looking at the newspapers they displayed. Since February, Kühn would have undoubtably hung the Staatsbürgerzeitung, clamped into a wooden spine, on the wall for guests to read, pass along, and discuss.15 One could also tell taverns apart by their clientele. Kühn’s counted as a good middle-class tavern, the kind of place frequented by men like Gustav Hoffmann (“who went only to those taverns in which the better society meets”).16

  We don’t know whether Gustav Hoffmann, the Christian butcher, met Wilhelm Bruhn, the editor of the Staatsbürgerzeitung, at Kühn’s hotel, or at his home no more than a hundred yards across the marketplace and down the Danzigerstrasse. But that they met, on the evening of May 29, is certain. And their meeting proved to be a turning point of the events in Konitz.

  I

  On June 13, 1900, the day after the Prussian army marched into town, Wilhelm Bruhn’s Staatsbürgerzeitung published a remarkable and lengthy document, carrying the date of June 5, 1900, called the “Petition of the Konitz Butcher Gustav Hoffmann Pertaining to the Matter of Winter’s Murder,” which set in print the butcher’s tale.17

  In this petition, Hoffmann began by describing his interrogation of May 29 and the substance of the inspector’s accusation against him. Around seven o’clock in the evening of March 11, the police suggested, Hoffmann left his house to look for his daughter Anna and found her together with Ernst Winter, her body entwined with his. Enraged, Hoffmann first strangled and then stabbed the boy. The accusation, Hoffmann told Inspector Braun, was baseless and the interrogation insulting. Here are Hoffmann’s words:

  My daughter is the child of an upstanding middle-class family, and he [Inspector Braun] should know that daughters of this class are sexually unapproachable. My innocent child, who on that afternoon received, along with myself and the whole community, Holy Communion, this child should then have in this way committed a sexual transgression? Only a lowly Jewish fantasy could imagine such a thing. Not even the most depraved hussy would, on the day that she went to church and received Holy Communion, commit such a sin. But nothing is sacrosanct to the Jews, especially when the aim is to falsely accuse a Christian of murder in order to deflect the justifiable suspicions against them.

  Hoffmann then recounted the events of the evening following the arrest. Until around ten o’clock, there had been isolated cases of boys shouting “hep-hep” and “here and there a window pane secretly sma
shed.” But then, according to the butcher, “the Jews and their collaborators spread the rumor that I would be arrested in the night.” This changed everything. “Upon hearing the news of my arrest, a few thousand grown-ups, mostly married men, gathered in a completely voluntary way in order to prevent the arrest of my person, a slap against all Christians.” He then rehearsed his own credentials—a citizen of Konitz since 1876, homeowner for seventeen years, nine children, city council member since 1888, Obermeister of the general artisan guild from 1885 until its dissolution in 1899, currently Obermeister of the butchers’ guild, and member of the adult-education board. He enjoyed the trust of all classes of people, he wrote.