In the case of Paul Orda, money may have been the primary motive. In other cases, simple superstition may have fueled the imagination. There were, for example, a number of stories involving the synagogue as the murder site. In Konitz, a fifty-seven-year-old bricklayer, Christian Lübke, insisted that there were underground vaults and tunnels beneath the synagogue, and that the murder occurred within these vaults and tunnels so he allegedly overheard some Jews as saying.73 Partly through the agitation of the local press, this theory even began to assume a certain popularity, forcing Mayor Deditius to inspect the temple and to question the masons who had worked on the foundations a few years earlier.74 Similarly, a washerwoman in Konitz reported that “many years ago” she had looked into the mikveh, the ritual bath, and had seen that there were stairs leading underground to a place with “many ditferent alcoves.” The sight made an “eerie impression on her,” and she thought of it again after the murder of Ernst Winter.75
People not only claimed to have seen something suspicious, they also reported having overheard incriminating conversations—all of which pointed to a vast Jewish cabal. Thus, Johann Winkelmann the night watchman, who lived in a village to the east of Konitz, claimed that he had overheard a conversation between two beardless Jews, “one stout, the other lean,” who had been contracted to slaughter Ernst Winter. According to the night watchman’s testimony, the conversation, which took place in front of Meyer’s hardware store, went as follows:
STOUT JEW: “What did you want with the Rabbi?”
LEAN JEW: “He had me come from Czersk; I’m supposed to come to Konitz to kill someone, to slaughter him.”
STOUT JEW: “Man, don’t do that. You’ve already done enough. Let someone else do it.”
LEAN JEW: “I have to do it. No one else wants to do it, and we don’t have any blood.”
STOUT JEW: “Well, what sort do you have?”
LEAN JEW: “He is supposed to be a big guy, eighteen years old, from the Gymnasium.” …
LEAN JEW: “He should be easy to get. He was supposed to have had a long conversation with our girls.” …
STOUT JEW: “How will you kill him?”
LEAN JEW: “He will be stripped naked, and then he will be chopped under the knee.”
STOUT JEW: “He will probably be drained of his strength?”
LEAN JEW: “NO, the blood has to come out, his head will be cut off.”
STOUT JEW: “While he is still alive?”
LEAN JEW: “Although he will be drunk, he will still know what we’re doing with him.”
STOUT JEW: “NO, I wouldn’t do this for 100,000 marks. What kind of a torture is this?”
LEAN JEW: “If only I could for my part get the half of that. But I’m getting a few hundred thaler.”76
The police easily cast doubt on the veracity of the story. The Jews in question could not be found, and Winkelmann, who was Polish, barely understood German, making it difficult to imagine how he could comprehend what the Jews had said. Moreover, people in his village, such as Choinackinz, a teacher, assured the police inspector who followed up the lead that Winkelmann was “a man endowed with a prodigious imagination,” while the county official Neumann described him as the village “mutton head.”77
Whatever people may have thought of his intellectual qualities, Winkelmann appropriated themes that had circulated in and around Konitz, including the involvement of religious authorities in the murder, Winter’s alleged transgression with Jewish girls, and the necessity of Christian blood for the Jewish community. The latter theme captured the imagination and resurfaced in conversations other people allegedly overheard. For example, August Steinke, a raftsman in Prechlau, said that just before the murder in Konitz, he had carried on the following conversation with Josef Eisenstädt, a Jewish cattle trader from Schlochau:
STEINKE: “The Winter family is a respectable family with a nice son.”
EISENSTÄDT: “The son is fit for slaughter.”
STEINKE: “He is too thin.”
EISENSTäDT: “He has a lot of blood.”78
In a similar vein, Anton Hellwig, “Stutter Anton,” a Catholic farmer from the village of Görsdorf, claimed that a Jewish grain dealer, Alexander Camminer, had’ told him, “This year blood is so expensive, it costs half a million marks.”79
For the rumor mill in and around Konitz, nothing seemed too farfetched, not even the alleged statements of Alex Prinz. A twenty-three-year-old Jewish man who had never made it past the fourth grade, he was known to everyone in Konitz as “Dumb Alex.” A trader in rags, bones, and iron nails, Alex allegedly said to Auguste Schiller, the seventy-three-year-old wife of an innkeeper and a fortune-teller, that the Jewish cantor in Schlochau killed Ernst Winter with a slit to the neck. On the morning of March 13, before the torso was found in the Mönchsee, Alex came into her cottage, and according to Auguste Schiller the following conversation ensued:
DUMB ALEX: “Yes, I will fetch water, but the Jewish cantor in Schlochau murdered Winter. Cut his throat.”
AUGUSTE SCHILLER: “A [kosher] cut? Oh my God!”
DUMB ALEX: “Yes, a [kosher] cut!”
AUGUSTE SCHILLER: “Alone?”
DUMB ALEX: “No, three Jewish cantors. Haller from Tuchel, Hamburger from Schlochau, and the one from Elbing.”
AUGUSTE SCHILLER: “Where did it happen? It had to happen somewhere?”
DUMB ALEX: “Yes, at Lewy’s, in the cellar.”
AUGUSTE SCHILLER: “So! Who did it?”
DUMB ALEX: “Lewy! Lewy!”
AUGUSTE SCHILLER: “So! Well.”
DUMB ALEX: “He didn’t have any money.”
AUGUSTE SCHILLER: “Alex, for God’s sake.”
DUMB ALEX: “Yes, blood fetches a dear price.”
AUGUSTE SCHILLER: “Where did they put the blood?”
DUMB ALEX: “It was sent away, and they got 100,000 thaler for the blood!”
AUGUSTE SCHILLER: “So! But, Alex, the blood stains?”
DUMB ALEX: “That will all be cleaned up. All cleaned up immediately.”80
Despite its inconsistencies, the conversation took up standard motifs, concerning blood, money, ritual slaughter, conspiracy, and the use of Lewy’s cellar. How did Dumb Alex come to say such things? Alex claimed that “the youngsters at Jeleniewskis got [him] drunk,” and told him what to say, but according to his mother, Rosalie Prinz, Auguste Schiller served Alex the lines he was to repeat and, reading it in her cards, promised him a lot of money.81 In court, a grinning Dumb Alex confirmed this and said, “Go to America!” Instead, his mother gave him a beating. Finally, Auguste Schiller did not go to the police with the news, but rather went to the butcher Gustav Hoffmann, and she did not go there until June 15, by which time she claimed that Dumb Alex had visited her twice again, each time with more news. At Hoffmann’s there was also a “certain Mr. Bruhn,” who took notes on the story82 This is how it landed in the Staatsbürgerzeitung and circulated throughout the town.
In the main, such stories came from marginal sources: from the drunken Dumb Alex; from the night watchman Winkelmann, the “mutton head”; and from the likes of “Stutter Anton,” whose superstitions his fellow pupils in Görsdorf had earlier ridiculed.83 Nevertheless, when dignified in print, the stories of Dumb Alex and “Stutter Anton” became part of the narrative of ritual murder. Like other pieces of evidence, their stories were discussed in the pubs and on the streets, adding, with every retelling, to the store of local knowledge.
What exactly did this “local knowledge” signify to the people who told the stories, and to the many more people who repeated them? In spite of the vast historical record of the events in Konitz, one cannot be certain about the inner thoughts of the townspeople. Separated by history and perspective, we remain beholden to the indeterminacy of interpretation; but I would like to suggest that when pieced together, the various stories imply an allegory about community, about the lines people draw between themselves and their neighbors.
Each tale from that
of Masloff and Ross to that of Dumb—Alex spoke about transgression, and transgression presupposes that boundaries separate communities, dictating limits and defining the company one may keep. Certainly, the repeated reference to Ernst Winter and the “Jewish girls” suggests as much. This reference surfaced in Winkelmann’s story but had been circulating in the newspapers and in the banter of the pubs for many months. It was also the point of a song commonly sung in the taverns, one refrain of which went as follows:
Ernst Winter, he was young and handsome,
With a Jewess he wanted to take a stroll.
And as he to the Temple came
There the Jews him stole.84
On both sides of the religious divide, there were strong social sanctions against Christians’ marrying Jews. Yet, as the story goes, it was the Jews who took revenge for the alleged sexual transgression. One version of the story even referred to a Jewish “blood court,” which meted out a sentence to the Christian boy for seducing Jewish girls.85
The cautionary tale addressed this sexual transgression at one level. At another level, it spoke, if obliquely, about social pollution through either religious or racial defilement. Blood is both material and metaphor, referring beyond itself. At the turn of the century, the blood of a dead Christian boy symbolized both the blood of Jesus Christ, signifying the Christian community, and the blood that defined race. What unites both meanings is the focus on a specified community, in the one case of believers, in the other of a people defined by unalterable genetic factors outside the reach of history and culture. What differentiates these meanings is that the former was an old idea; the latter, in its social Darwinist guise, a new one. Christianity has a long history of exclusionary practices, but race, to cite Henry Louis Gates, “is the ultimate trope of difference.”86
It is impossible to discern the degree to which religion, or race, constituted the principal interpretive parameters people used to understand the stories they told. Still, in either instance, defilement remains central to the story: the Jews not only took the blood of a German Christian but also cannibalistically consumed it, mixing the fluid of the two bodies, the one German and Christian, the other Jewish. Finally, one may understand this mixture as the crime itself, against which the tale is told. In this way, too, the tale admonishes: to police the boundaries of community, to keep separate what belongs separate, and to recognize a well-defined “we” opposed to, and distinct from, an increasingly alien “they.” An allegory of community, these tales were implicitly hostile to the century of Jewish emancipation and assimilation.
The social origins of the stories—born of hearsay and furtive observations possible only in an integrated community also points to their function as allegories of that community, warning itself against the dangers of social pollution. Many stories came from people who seemed to know intimate facts about the Jews in question. This was especially true of the tales told by female servants. In addition to the involved narratives of Anna Ross and her daughters, two other stories proved particularly spectacular.
The first came from Mathilde Rutz, who claimed that Adolph Lewy had tried to rape her as she was carrying winter potatoes into his cellar. When she dumped out the potatoes, the lantern went dark. “I can’t find my way out,” she screamed. Lewy then relit the lantern, and as she was running out they came face to face and Lewy began to press against her. “Don’t say anything,” he said. “I’d like to cut you off a piece of meat.” She then tried to get out, but Lewy grabbed her breasts and pulled her into the straw. “I just want to have fun with you,” he supposedly said. Struggling, she brushed him aside with a sweep of her arm, and then her son, who was there the whole time, took her by the hand, and together they ran out of the cellar.87
Good evidence speaks against such accusations: Lewy was, by all accounts, a shy and reticent, if sometimes cantankerous, man; Mathilde Rutz was a woman who liked to tell tall tales.88 Like her husband, who was registered on the police list of town drunks, she drank excessively, though she claimed that during work hours she had only a shot of schnapps a day, and was never so drunk that someone had to carry her home.89 There was also a great deal of yelling and screaming in her house, and she often beat her husband.90
The second story involved seventeen-year-old Rosine Simanowski, who developed such persecution anxiety that she left Konitz and moved to Berlin, saying that the Jews were “following” her and trying to stab her with knives.91 She had a gift for inventing conversations in her mind, which, via the courts and the press, reached the wider public. She reported, for example, the following conversation with Heinrich Friedländer, a Jewish merchant, in his store in Konitz:
FRIEDLÄNDER: “The Jews need blood.”
SIMANOWSKI: “Why?”
FRIEDLÄNDER: “They just need it.”
SIMANOWSKI: “That’s why you slaughtered Ernst Winter.”
FRIEDLÄNDER: “I don’t know about that.”
She was just about to leave, when Friedländer allegedly said, “You don’t have to go talking about this,” and then repeated, “Don’t say anything, I’ll buy you a nice present.”92 Simanowski had more stories, so many that they ceased to be credible, even to the people of Konitz. But the stories and denunciations, especially from servant girls, kept coming. In Kamin, a village due south of Konitz, Josef Rosenthal’s servant claimed that she overheard him saying to his wife that “he could not live on after his deed.” Soon after saying this, Rosenthal allegedly tried to hang himself on a nail, but was pulled down by his brother.93 In Bütow, a town to the north, young Marie Schmidt allegedly saw her Jewish master, Max Grossmann, return home from Konitz on March 11 with blood stains on his clothes and a bottle of blood in his hand. Grossmann, it turned out, had been in Berlin.94 The original story, moreover, may have been twisted by the newspapers, as Schmidt later claimed that she saw blood stains only in the sink, and a dry patch of blood on Grossmann’s pants, which she herself rubbed out with a dry brush.95
IV
Why did so many people side with the butcher’s tale and the fantastic stories that, like baroque columns, both supported and adorned it?
The answer lies, in part, in the way the people of Konitz constructed a collective narrative, a script they wrote and read and, in violence, acted upon. The butcher’s tale was the centerpiece of their narrative. It gathered together narrative strands from the various stories on the streets, some of which had already made it into print, and it wove them together into a stronger, more intricate pattern. But the butcher’s tale was more than a series of interlacing accusations—it was also a story with a plot.
In Reading for the Plot, the literary critic Peter Brooks has pointed out that the “original sense” of the idea of plot “is the idea of boundedness, demarcation, the drawing of lines to mark off and order.”96 Plots include and exclude, defining who belongs and who does not. In the butcher’s tale, the plot limns the lines of community. It opposes a protagonist, Hoffmann, to the villain, Lewy. Although both men are butchers and neighbors, Hoffmann belongs to the respectable middle class, whose daughters are innocent; Lewy, by contrast, to a “lowly community” for whom “nothing is sacrosanct.” Behind each is a chorus. For Hoffmann, the chorus consists of the demonstrators on the streets: respectable, upstanding, honest citizens from Konitz, “mostly married men” who have come out into the streets to defend the honor of a man and a girl and the faith of Christ. Women do not appear, except to be protected by men. On the other side, the Jews who help Lewy are the ragged, skulking characters of a provincial underworld. There is poor and pitiful Wolf Israelski, the lean “beardless” Jew who will kill for a hundred thaler, and the unnamed cantors from nearby towns. They are mostly men, but women support them in ancillary roles, like Lewy’s elder sister, as bearers of implements or carriers of body parts, or as Lewy’s wife, Pauline, quick to cover up evidence, or as the characteristically unnamed Jewish girl who lures Ernst Winter to his death trap. Because Jewish women also bear the mark of Cain and wander the earth,
they are as deceitful as their men.
Neighbors thus do not share the same world, an impression sharpened by the story’s use of visual description. Whereas Hoffmann is described in great detail, and photographs of him as a model citizen abound, Adolph Lewy remains a shadowy historical figure. We do not know what he looks like or how long he has lived in Konitz. The butcher’s tale also uses the predictable clichés of light and shadow to express its point. Hoffmann’s property is open to plain view, while Lewy’s back shed remains hidden in a dark alley (in reality they abut in the same back street). The murder takes place in a still-darker cellar, lit only by the light held by Lewy’s niece. The cliché is further extended from sight to sound. The Jews, generally, do not speak in sentences; preferring to “murmur” or repeat curt phrases—”nothing shall be known,” “tie him up,” “Mönchsee.” Between Christians and Jews, there is barely a common language. Like the “niggers” of Joseph Conrad’s “dark continent,” they are a civilization apart, and, as if peering into the “Heart of Darkness,” one questions their humanity.97 They are also portrayed in the story as particularly cruel, not simply in killing a young man, but in the more precise and graphically detailed sense of kosher slaughter, which in the 1880s had been the subject of parliamentary debates, often misinformed, about cruelty to animals, but which by 1900 had become an issue mainly of the anti-Semites. This imagined cruelty, in which Jews are bereft of feelings, reinforces their estrangement. By casting shadows and muting voices, the tale further highlights difference by portraying Lewy as dark, secretive, inaudible, and cruel, while implicitly rendering Hoffmann as white, truthful, audible, and innocent. The tale thus encourages the binary strategies of identification, but it also cries for popular justice to punish the crime of a singular act (ritual murder) carried out in the name of the collective, against an individual (Ernst Winter) but aimed, symbolically, at the entire Christian community. The crime, finally, occurred because of a transgression—sexual, spatial and because Jews, whose crimes are timeless and outside the civilizing effects of history and culture, have done this many times before.
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