The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  In the spring of 1900, the Jewish communities of Konitz and the surrounding towns became the object of popular wrath. Between mid-April and mid-June 1900, three waves of some thirty separate anti-Semitic riots wracked these communities, instilling fear in the Jews and shattering their sense of belonging. The first incident occurred on Saturday evening, April 21. In the town of Baldenburg, in Schlochau County, anti-Semitic rioters prevented Jews from attending holy services and, in the course of the evening, damaged the synagogue. The president of the Central Association of Germans of the Jewish Faith complained to the Prussian minister of the interior that in Baldenburg “the small number of Jews living there see their lives in danger.”41 This was so not just in Baldenburg, however. The county official in Schlochau, Albrecht Mach, also received “complaints from the Jews about riots in Preussisch-Friedland, Stegers, and Hammerstein.”42 Not free of anti-Semitic prejudice himself, Mach reported that the complaints and the newspaper reports were “usually exaggerated,” but the actions of the local police suggested otherwise.43 In Hammerstein, where Ernst Winter’s sister lived, anti-Semitic riots got so out of hand that the police were forced to call in the army for help, and the local commander sent eighty troops to restore order in a town of less than three thousand people and with a Jewish population of under one hundred.44 Even before the troops arrived, vandals sacked the synagogue, rendering it an “appalling scene of havoc.”45 Similarly, in Konitz the anti-Semitic tumult on Saturday evening became so raucous that, according to the Danziger Zeitung, many people in Konitz “fear going out in the evening, and not only Jews, but also Christians, especially women.”46

  Word spread quickly, and the upheavals proved infectious. In Vandsburg, riots began late in the evening when “large crowds gathered and were reinforced by a significant influx of peasant sons and farmhands who swarmed in from the neighboring rural villages.”47 In Czersk, a German-Polish industrial town, the riots developed more spontaneously. Shortly before seven in the evening, a drunkard was thrown out of Jendryczka’s pub, “a Polish-Catholic tavern.” When he began smashing the tavern windows, someone yelled, “Let’s go after the synagogue.” One person tried to climb the fence around the synagogue and was arrested. As the police took him away, the crowd swelled “to a mob of several hundred.” Stones flew from the crowd first at Jewish houses, then at the gendarmes as well; in the end, shots were fired. It was not until the gendarmes drew their pistols that the crowd was dispersed.48 A similar scenario unfolded the next day in Neustettin, where nineteen years earlier severe anti-Semitic riots had followed a synagogue fire that local Christians blamed on the Jews. In Baldenburg, Hammerstein, and Czersk, the synagogue also constituted the symbolic focus of popular anger, and in these places, too, the crowd could not be scattered until the forces of order drew their weapons. While these remained the sites of greatest violence, minor incidents occurred elsewhere. In the villages of Bruss and Mrotschen, and in the towns of Bütow and Rummelsburg, synagogue windows were likewise demolished.49

  After the riots, the Jews of Konitz and the surrounding area recognized the gravity of their situation. At first, they merely closed their shops early, but then they stopped frequenting public places and many no longer went out at night at all.50 By this time, too, the town of Konitz was covered in anti-Semitic propaganda; fliers and leaflets littered the streets. “Nearly every day,” a citizen complained, “fliers arrive here … that provoke the passions to the extreme.”51 The sluggish pace of the murder investigation did not help matters. Lacking new leads, the police increasingly compiled bits of evidence ground out by the local rumor mill. Invariably, these bits of evidence incriminated the Jews.

  To gather this evidence, local anti-Semites formed an “unofficial” citizens committee. Organized in early May nearly two months after the murder—under the aegis of two schoolteachers, Jürgen Thiel and Albert Hofrichter, and a dentist, Max Meibauer, the members of the citizens committee pressured the police to take the ritual-murder tale seriously and not to leave a Semitic stone unturned.52 In search of evidence, they combed the pubs, stopped people on the streets, knocked on their neighbors’ doors, and went into their houses. The members of the citizens committee “asked people all sorts of things,” one official complained, and “suggested ridiculous stories to those hankering after a reward.”53

  For their part, the police and the district attorney also added grist to the rumor mill. Immediately after the murder, Settegast ordered that all Jewish cantors and butchers in the region be interrogated.54 Under his direction, the police questioned the Christian maids of Jewish households in Konitz, asking them to comment on the whereabouts of their masters on the night of the murder and whether they saw or sensed anything suspicious. “Do you think the Rabbai could have committed murder?” an official asked Rabbi Kellermann’s maid.55 As one Jewish newspaper pointed out at the time: imagine the objections if the reverse were the case, and Jewish maids were asked to pronounce on the moral qualities of Christian ministers.56 But the spurious investigation continued. Desperate for clues, Settegast entertained denunciations based on spectral evidence obtained through spiritual revelation. He even pursued the story of a four-year-old girl who bragged that her father, a Jewish merchant of herculean physical stature, had thrown Winter to the ground, killed him, and cut and carved him up; the family, the girl said, then sat around the dinner table and ate him.57

  Amazingly, in this climate of rumor and gossip, of false sightings and bogus storytelling, the Prussian minister of justice increased the reward offered for clues leading directly to an arrest. Initially, the reward was set at 1,700 marks, already a handsome sum that exceeded what most workers took home in a year. The reward steadily increased: to 2,000 marks, to 6,700 marks—more money than the mayor earned—and then, on April 28, to 20,000 marks, a small fortune with which one could buy a nice bourgeois house. In the long history of the Prussian state, this was the largest reward ever offered in a murder case.58 “For this money,” a state official wrote, “I still have cautious optimism that among the Jews there will be a traitor.”59

  III

  May was, for the most part, a quiet month, but the calm was no more than a respite before the coming storm. In the meanwhile, the anti-Semites in Berlin had begun to watch the events in Konitz. The murder of Ernst Winter and the violence that followed provided the struggling anti-Semitic parties with an opportunity to revitalize their movement. In this sense, the drama in Konitz must also be understood against the backdrop of the early rise of political anti-Semitism in Germany.

  First circulated in September 1879, the term “anti-Semitism” stems from William Marr, who called his political organization the “Anti-Semitic league.”60 Frustrated and unsuccessful, Marr hoped to strike a new chord, different from previous attempts in the Christian tradition, in confronting the “Jewish question.” Rather than demand the assimilation of Jews, he rejected them; and instead of trying to convert Jews, he declared them an implacable enemy, not of Christendom, but of Germandom. He thus turned anti-Semitism into hatred based on race, not religion. The term was then appropriated by the most famous historian of the day, Heinrich von Treitschke—a stunning orator, who championed Bismarck’s unification of Germany by “blood and iron” in 1871. Throughout the 1870s, Treitschke had also supported Bismarck’s subsequent attacks against the Catholics, but when the official “Kulturkampf” came to a close in 1879, Treitschke turned his polemical fire against the Jews. “The Jews are our misfortune,” he proclaimed in an influential article in the Preußische Jahrbücher.61

  Treitschke’s article signaled a more general turn in German politics away from the liberalism of the 1870s. This reorientation, which some historians equate with a second foundation of the German Empire, ensured that henceforth anti-Semitism would be tied to conservative politics. In August 1880, a group of anti-Semites known as the Berlin Movement composed and circulated an “anti-Semitic petition” demanding that the immigration of foreign Jews be limited, that Jews be barred from posi
tions of state authority, that the Christian character of elementary schools be restored, and that the government statistics office closely monitor the Jewish population. By April 1881, the anit-Semites had gathered 265,000 signatures, mostly among artisans and shopkeepers, classes hard hit by a deepening economic depression, but also among one out of every five university students.62 Ceremoniously, the anti-Semites of the Berlin Movement presented the petition to Otto von Bismarck, who, rather unceremoniously, placed it ad acta.63

  If Bismarck’s silence suggested his reluctance to publicly engage with the populists of the anti-Semitic right, his policies bespoke a deeper ambivalence. In March 1885, Bismarck initiated the expulsion of Russian (and later Austro-Hungarian) subjects who had become residents, but not citizens, of imperial Germany, among them roughly thirty thousand Poles and nine thousand Jews, many of whom had since 1881 been driven out of Russia by vicious pogroms to seek refuge in the German Empire. These Jews would now be sent back to Russia to face an uncertain fate.64 Without endorsing an anti-Semitic petition, Bismarck thus assented to, indeed went beyond, the suggestions of anti-Semitic politicians and expelled recent Jewish immigrants.

  Even with Bismarck’s tacit support in matters of policy, overtly anti-Semitic parties hardly made a dent during his reign; only one delegate, out of more than four hundred, being elected to the Reichstag in 1887. After Bismarck’s departure in 1890, the anti-Semites met with more success, winning five delegates in the summer of 1890 and sixteen, or 3.5 percent of the total vote, in 1893. Hardly a breakthrough, the victory nevertheless alarmed authorities. Beginning in 1894, the Berlin police closely monitored the trajectory of these anti-Semitic parties. In 1895, the police reported “complete stagnation,” and in the following years “decline.” They attributed this deterioration to improving economic indicators and to the deleterious effects of intraparty struggles.65 By the general election of 1898, what had seemed like a rising tide of anti-Semitic politics had already begun to ebb. The anti-Semitic parties lost six of their sixteen districts and, though their vote total increased slightly, their lack of progress over the last five years boded ill for the future.66

  With their parties in disarray by 1900, the anti-Semites considered how they could exploit the possibilities for sensation that Konitz presented. Political anti-Semitism was not a uniquely German phenomenon, and in France and Austria-Hungary the anti-Semites flourished in the late 1890s. France’s Dreyfus affair provided one blueprint for revitalizing a sagging anti-Semitic movement in Germany, while a ritual-murder case in the Bohemian town of Polna suggested another.

  As is widely known, the French army in 1894 accused Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew from Alsace with a spotless military record, of selling secrets to the German embassy after offering expert testimony that Dreyfus’s handwriting appeared on an incriminating list. It was a thin shred of evidence, yet in the swift trial later in the same year, a military court found Dreyfus guilty as charged and sentenced him to a life of exile on Devil’s Island. Within two years of the sentence, it became apparent, as a result of the meticulous research of a persistent lawyer from Lyon, Bernard Lazare, that not Dreyfus but a Hungarian major named Walsin Esterhazy had leaked the information. Public voices demanding that the trial against Dreyfus be reopened became increasingly insistent and louder still after Esterhazy was acquitted by a military tribunal in January 1898 on the basis of forgeries generated within the army itself. In the wake of the tumult, Emile Zola published his famous statement “J’accuse,” denouncing the army for its shameful cover-up and for betraying the ideals of the French Revolution. He also excoriated the Catholic right for conjuring the demon of anti-Semitism to serve its own selfish interests. The country divided into two camps: the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards, those who fought for equal protection before the law as the bedrock of the republic and those who saw any diminution of the army’s status as an erosion of national glory. On one side stood the socialists, led by Jean Jaurès, with the intellectuals and the anticlerical republicans. On the other stood the forces of order: the church, the army, the conservatives. Since the bloody repression of the Communards in 1870, no other event had divided the Third Republic as dramatically. When, following Zola, the Dreyfusards called for the army to repeal the false conviction of Captain Dreyfus, anti-Dreyfusards rioted throughout France: in some cities, such as Angers, Marseilles, Nantes, and Rouen, thousands of people ran through the streets, smashing windows, pillaging shops, and shouting, “Death to the Jews.”67 Although Dreyfus was pardoned by the president of France in 1899, and exonerated by the courts in 1906, a dynamic new nationalist and anti-Semitic movement, the Action Française, had emerged from the affair, and it would powerfully influence the politics of the Third Republic until its fall in 1940. Germany’s anti-Semites closely watched these developments, and one of them later remarked that Konitz would put Dreyfus in the shadows.68

  As the smoke cleared from the Dreyfus affair, another anti-Semitic cause célèbre erupted in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. On April 1, 1899, the “bloodless” body of the seamstress Agnes Hruza was found in a wood outside the small Bohemian town of Polna. Convinced from the start that it was ritual murder, the people of Polna immediately accused the Jews in particular, Leopold Hilsner. A twenty-two-year-old cobbler’s apprentice, Hilsner was, like Wolf Israelski, a social outcast. A poor worker given to drink and not particularly observant, he often took liberties with the truth. When accused, he lied about his alibi, and when convicted, he incriminated two other innocent Jewish men of being accomplices. Hilsner himself had been accused of having “in association with others, murdered Hruza,” and of being “an accomplice in the murder.” In September 1899 in the district court of Kuttenberg, the jury found Hilsner innocent of the first charge (murder), but guilty of the second (accomplice to murder). The trial turned on the ritual-murder allegation, implicating as the real killers the Jews of Polna. “Hruza,” the state prosecutor argued in his closing comments, “was murdered by a society that lives among us for the sole object of taking our blood from us.”69 The court sentenced Hilsner to death, but after the bold intervention of an audacious politician, Thomas Masaryk, the emperor stayed the execution and transmuted his sentence to life in prison, of which he served nineteen years until he was pardoned and set free, though not cleared.70 In 1899, the events in Polna created a sensation and were reported in newspapers from Paris to St. Petersburg, whose readers had already been gripped by the Dreyfus case. The Polna case immediately preceded the Konitz affair, and aspects of the case were still pending when violence first erupted.71 In mid-May 1900, Polna was the subject of a public debate in the parliament of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and it was clearly in the minds of the men and women who mourned the death of Ernst Winter just over a week later.

  Winter’s funeral was to take place on Sunday, May 27. The event already worried local officials, who in the preceding week had attempted to convince both Winter’s parents and Eduard Hammer, the pastor who was to perform the services, that it should take place on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, when riots were less likely to occur. But the pastor, wishing to preserve the ceremony’s religious aura, ignored their pleas. As local officials expected, the funeral, far from solemn, became a “stage piece for the many thousands of onlookers,” who, as if attending a passion play, streamed into Konitz in their Sunday best from neighboring villages and towns.72 According to the police, many of the onlookers were “anti-Semites,” and more than a few accompanied the funeral procession by shouting anti-Semitic slogans while beating on the doors and windows of Jewish stores as they marched from the Protestant church on the marketplace, down the narrow Danzigerstrasse, and out to the Wilhelmsplatz. The townspeople along the way crowded at their balconies and windows and watched as every cobblestone of the street below became black with mourners marching by. When the procession reached the Protestant graveyard, Hammer delivered the funeral oration. A modest man, a pastor in Konitz for more than two decades, Hammer did not mention the Jews; he
merely intimated that the murder must have been planned.73

  The funeral only deepened the public’s desire for swift justice, and the people of Konitz had reason to feel optimistic. On May 14, the Prussian police had sent to Konitz a special investigator from Berlin, Johann Braun, in order to solve the murder case posthaste.74 Like others before him, Braun was impressed by the precision of the cuts and believed that a trained hand, a surgeon’s or a butcher’s, must have made them. In Konitz, there were no surgeons, but two butchers lived near the scene of the crime, the backs of their properties abutting in a dark alley, the Maurergasse. One of them, Adolph Lewy, was Jewish. A quiet, even taciturn man, a fifty-seven-year-old father of two grown sons, Lewy had moved to Konitz sometime between the Revolution of 1848 and the founding of the German Empire in 1871, most likely from a neighboring town, like Flatow, Schlochau, or Schloppe, or from one of the towns to the south of Konitz, like Krojanke, Cammin, Jastrow, or Zempelburg.75

  Over the course of the nineteenth century, such migrations had become commonplace, as many of the Jews who lived in these small towns moved to larger towns and cities. This process began with the edict on the civil status of the Jews in the state of Prussia, issued by King Frederick William on March 11, 1812. For German Jews, this marked the beginning of their emancipation: with the stroke of a pen, it put an end to the special taxes they had to pay, to discriminating trade laws, and to the special permits required for marriage and residence. More important, Jews had now became citizens of the Prussian state and ostensibly enjoyed equal rights with Christians. But the edict was predicated on an imperative: that Jews also change. They were to use the German language and the Roman alphabet in their business dealings, and they were to adopt permanent surnames, preferably ones that did not evoke the Old Testament. Salomon Abraham of Schlochau now became Salomon Abraham Lewy. Not only his addition of a new last name was important, but also the fact that he had kept the name of his father as a middle name, out of respect for his Jewish heritage. In Berlin, where more Jews wished to assimilate into German culture and to distance themselves from the old ways, more than a quarter of the Jewish men dropped the name of their fathers.76 But in the villages around Konitz, nearly everyone kept his paternal name.77