Over the next three weeks, Anna Ross rarely visited the Lewys. Then, on Palm Sunday, April 8, she picked up laundry from Pauline Lewy, took the wash back to her apartment, separated the clothes the next morning, and noticed a handkerchief “much cleaner” and finer than the others and with embroidered initials. Ross, who could not read, showed the handkerchief to her daughter Auguste, who identified the initials as “E.W.”38 Neither made a connection. Later in the week, Ross returned the wash to Pauline Lewy in a basket that belonged to Bernhard Masloff. She also sent her daughter Martha, Masloff’s wife, to the Lewys to work as domestic help. While cleaning, Martha happened upon a white watch chain, like the one Ernst Winter possessed, which Lewy’s wife, Pauline, grabbed from her, saying it belonged to her son Moritz. Martha also claimed that she found a cigar case with a picture of Ernst Winter inside.
The following Sunday was Easter Sunday. That afternoon, Anna Ross allegedly met a stranger, a farmhand from a village west of Schlochau, who told her that he had been in Konitz on the evening of March 11 and had observed near the synagogue three men carrying a heavy package who then disappeared in the narrow alley between the houses of Gustav Hoffmann and Adolph Lewy. On Wednesday, April 25, more than a week after Easter Sunday, and immediately following the first large wave of riots in Konitz and the surrounding area, it suddenly occurred to Anna Ross that E.W. might stand for Ernst Winter. The next day, she told Auguste, and on the day after that she went to the police station. Officer Block, who was temporarily stationed in Konitz, immediately charged over to the Lewys before they could get wind of what was happening. When he entered the house, he demanded to search Pauline Lewy’s wash, sifted through it, and found nothing.39
The stories of Masloff and Ross quickly wended their way through the taverns, but even in the anti-Semitic camp, their family hardly inspired confidence. According to one account, the Masloff home was a mess, the parents fought, the mother refused to cook and clean, and the father drank himself senseless and told notoriously tall tales.40 Bernhard Masloff, who had moved to Konitz in 1897, had a record for petty theft and, like his father, coveted his drink. Anna Ross herself was hardly an upstanding citizen. Although she had lived in Konitz longer, she had a reputation for mendacity and her two daughters had prior police records: Martha for stealing, Auguste for trespassing. Moreover, everyone knew that Bernhard Masloff and Anna Ross did not get along. In the past, Masloff had threatened his mother-in-law, even beat her, enough that she once called the police for protection and had her son-in-law charged with assault and battery. This incident occurred shortly after Masloff’s wedding in May 1898, when, much to his mother-in-law’s chagrin, he forced his new wife, Martha, to convert from Protestantism to Catholicism. Tolerance, apparently, was not something that ran in the family. Martha also took to beating her own father, once so badly with a broom that blood dribbled from his head.41
Still, the people of Konitz sided with Masloff and Ross, unlikely protagonists though they were. After all, the people of Konitz, with the help of Wilhelm Bruhn, were choosing to believe a story they themselves had helped create.
The town’s collusion with these unreliable sources was most evident in the testimony Bernhard Masloff offered on May 29. On the day that Gustav Hoffmann was interrogated, three men… Wilhelm Bruhn, factory-owner Paul Aschke (Masloff’s boss), and Karl Kuby, an engineer invited Masloff for a drink of bouillon in the entertainment room of Kühn’s hotel. The men spoke with Masloff for an hour, and Bruhn brought him to the police. That afternoon, the men went back to visit Masloff again, this time at his workplace, the gasworks.42 We do not know what was said in that first encounter. In one version, it was this: “Look, Masloff, tell the truth…. People’s lives depend on it.” Another had it this way: “You can save an honorable man from prison; the butcher Gustav Hoffmann has been arrested. You can save him.”43 In either case, the pressures on Masloff were evident. On that morning, a crowd had gathered, with Masloff at the center; the crowd was already agitated, and the lines in the sand here the forces for Hoffmann, there the protectors of Lewy were already drawn. Moreover, the most immediate pressures came from wealthy, refined gentlemen in top hats, his employer among them.
Anna Ross was not alone, either, and the circumstances of her first testimony also reveal the highly charged atmosphere out of which these stories emerged.
She first made her accusations on the night of Wednesday, April 18, three days after Easter. Police Commissioner Block and his assistant were in pursuit of thugs they had seen disappear into the courtyard where Ross lived. It was late at night, and, according to Ross, Commissioner Block pried open her window with his sword and entered her bedroom, where she and her daughter lay in bed barely clothed. Upon seeing the policemen climbing through her window, Anna Ross jumped up and screamed and ran out into the courtyard.
“Why don’t you go after the Jews and leave us alone,” she yelled.44
“What do you know about the Jews?” Block replied.
“Yes, the Jews did it…. Search at the Lewys’, in their house, there you’ll find something.”
“What do you know about the Lewys?” Block asked.
“I could tell you a lot but not like this,” she said, after an initial silence.45
Commissioner Block pressed her, and she told the story about the farmhand from a village west of Schlochau, who had come by on Easter and pointed out to her where the two men carrying a heavy package had disappeared into the narrow alley between the houses of Hoffmann and Lewy, and how a third man had then followed.46 But when she could not name the farmhand, the commissioner broke off the questioning. “You know,” he said to her, “it would be best if you wait until the man comes back; then let me know, and I’ll get him myself.”47
But if Block did not pursue the lead, other people happily stepped in. Later that week, two schoolteachers, Thiel and Hofrichter, and a dentist, Meibauer, interrogated Anna Ross in her apartment. The date of the meeting is unclear: either Saturday, April 21, or Sunday, April 22.48 Hofrichter had heard from a servant girl that Anna Ross knew something; the three men went to her apartment, a number of times, it turned out, and she recounted the story of the stranger. On another occasion, a journalist and “private detective” named Georg Zimmer, who had been writing that summer for the Konitzer Tageblatt (now edited by Martha Hoffmann’s fiancé), also visited Ross in her apartment, and she recounted the story to him as well.49
At important points in the unfolding of Anna Ross’s story, prominent townspeople, whether local notables or sensation-hungry, anti-Semitic journalists, lent credence to her story and framed it within the context of the town’s struggle. Masloff’s testimony became part of the larger divide between the faction of Hoffmann and that of Adolph Lewy, and Ross’s testimony bolstered the conspiracy theory that the Berlin police, who treated the local Christians disparagingly, had dismissed clues that led to the doorsteps of local Jews. Ross’s and Masloff’s stories also gained significance when journalists elevated their status, and that of the people who told them, by publishing them in the columns of their national newspapers. On May 1, the Staatsbürgerzeitung ran a long article detailing the evidence that had surfaced in Konitz up until this point. Entitled “On the Konitz Blood Murder,” the article emphasized those pieces of the puzzle that pointed to the culpability of the Jews and concluded with the dubious evidence offered by Masloff and Ross. The article implied that their stories were the culmination of sightings already made by “the people of Konitz.” In the printed version, the stories of Masloff and Ross were not told from the standpoint of their problematic, often inebriated tellers. Instead, the focalization, as Gérard Genette calls it, was elsewhere: “the people of Konitz.”50 Rendered as a collective singular, the people of Konitz emerged as the real detectives, the ones who collected the evidence, who knew where it pointed, and who understood what the Berlin police did not: that the Lewys killed Ernst Winter.
The stories of Masloff, Ross, and family were recounted again, but between M
ay 1, when the Staatsbürgerzeitung first printed them, and May 29, when Hoffmann was indicted, the Staatsbürgerzeitung mentioned the tales only once, on May 19, and then only as an aside, taking up the story of the white watch chain, which Martha Masloff supposedly saw while cleaning Lewy’s house.51 This changed dramatically on the day of Hoffmann’s interrogation. In the evening edition of the Tuesday newspaper, May 29, the Staatsbürgerzeitung printed the following telegraph:
Konitz. May 29, 1:26 P.M. The Christian population is very agitated: the Christian butcher Hoffmann has been apprehended and taken to the station for an interrogation. Meanwhile, his house is yet again being searched. His definitive arrest awaits. A worker Masloff has today made very incriminating statements against the butcher Lewy and his sons. He says he saw three men in the night carrying a package from Lewy’s courtyard to the lake.52
Thereafter, Masloff’s story assumed greater centrality in the minds of the people and became tied to Hoffmann’s summons. Suddenly, what Masloff supposedly heard became a standard refrain: “Nothing shall be known” appeared again and again as bylines for newspaper articles and for anti-Semitic pamphlets.53 The catchphrase had even begun to surface in the stories other people told, and the citizens of Konitz imagined Jews whispering to each other in the streets, “Nothing shall be known.” Through constant retelling in the press and in the pubs, the stories started by Masloff and Ross coalesced in the minds of the townspeople. They became part of a common store of local knowledge: what the people knew, their own story of how the murder happened.
Unimpressed by their testimony, Inspector Braun arrested Masloff and his mother-in-law and charged them both with perjury. For good measure, he also charged Ross’s two daughters, Auguste and Martha. Still, the subsequent trial, which took place in November in the Konitz county courthouse, hardly untangled what Inspector Braun called a “powerful tissue of lies.”54 Rather, the trial became a spectacle of the first order, a farce in which witness after witness recounted stories incriminating the Lewys and other Jews in the ritual murder of Ernst Winter.
Spearheaded by Dr. Max Vogel, a prominent Konitz lawyer, the defense sought to prove the innocence of Masloff and Ross by demonstrating the credibility of their tales. To this end, and over a period of two and a half weeks, the defense called a series of witnesses testifying to suspicious circumstances in the house of Adolph Lewy. Beyond this, further witnesses testified against other Jews in the area. There was a Jewish conspiracy, the defense claimed, in which Adolph Lewy played the central role. And if the Lewys were guilty, the defense further argued, the innocence of Masloff and Ross followed.
Certain peculiarities of the justice system in imperial Germany favored the anti-Semitic strategy’. The trial was held in Konitz, it was public, and it was to be adjudicated by a jury. Unlike the United States, imperial Germany possessed no legal provision for moving trials to neutral ground in cases where the local population proved especially partial. And in Konitz, the population was nothing if not partial. According to a report of the Anti-Defamation League, 90 percent of the people of Konitz assumed that the family would be found innocent of perjury.55 Since the trial was public, the court attempted to appease the anti-Semites in the streets and among the spectators. “In order to calm public opinion,” a ministerial memorandum reported, “every clue pointing to the Jews was carefully pursued … even far beyond what was necessary and appropriate.”56
The jury, too, was not entirely unbiased. In imperial Germany, judges did not ordinarily screen jurors to ensure that they were impartial with respect to the case at hand. Instead, judges simply selected men whom they considered upstanding local citizens. As a consequence, the jury often reflected a conservative, even authoritarian, frame of mind, and its members often knew about the case before entering the courtroom. In the perjury trial against Masloff and Ross, there were twelve jury members and four substitutes: of the sixteen men chosen, nine were manorial landowners, and three owned and farmed smaller plots of land; in addition, there were two merchants, a town council member, and a teacher.57 The teacher, Maximillian Meyer, served as the foreman of the jury. Like many of his colleagues in the Konitz Gymnasium, he also waxed anti-Semitic.58 As if this were not enough, the wives of the jurors sat close by and often “let their sympathies and antipathies be known.”59 Finally, in the foyer of the courtroom, members of the unofficial citizens committee—especially Hofrichter and Meibauer- busied themselves by conducting their own investigation, interrogating witnesses before and after they took the stand, and influencing their testimony.”60
The courtroom thus constituted a stage on which to rehearse the butcher’s tale and other stories all over again. It was, moreover, an elevated stage, because the juridical rendering of the stories lent them an air of legitimacy, raising their status from marginal gossip to public evidence. As more and more townspeople became involved with the event, the courtroom drama pit the partisans of the butcher’s tale against the defenders of local Jews in an epic confrontation, the “Konitz civil war,” as one commentator called it.61
The war ended in a pyrrhic victory for the prosecution. The jury found the principal defendants, Bernhard Masloff and Anna Ross, guilty of perjury, and the judge sentenced Masloff to a one-year prison term and Anna Ross to a two-and-a-half-year term. But with respect to Masloff, the perjury charge only pertained to his deposition under oath of May 2 (following his testimony of late April), when he withheld “the fact” that he had stolen meat from Adolph Lewy on the night of March 11. On the second charge of perjury, pertaining to the sworn deposition of June 8 (following his statements at Kühn’s hotel on May 29), the jury found him not guilty. “The untruth of the statement, which the defendant Masloff swore under oath on June 8, has not been proven.” the jury proclaimed.62 The jurors thus confirmed the credibility of Masloff’s account of three men leaving Levvy’s cellar carrying a sack to the Mönchsee. How exactly they reached this conclusion is more difficult to discern. The defense conceded that Lewy had a solid alibi, but argued that Lewy may have leased his cellar to the killers, and that the ritual murder could nevertheless have taken place as Masloff testified.63 Moreover, the jury found Martha Masloff, Bernhard’s wife, and Auguste Berg, the other daughter of Anna Ross, innocent, even though they actively colluded in the stories that Ross had told. These stories the jury found less credible, and concluded that Ross was guilty as charged.
III
The impact of the outside journalists and the elevation of Masloff’s and Ross’s sightings and suspicions to a courtroom drama of “us” versus “them” was considerable. Yet all of these efforts to blame the Jews would have been in vain had it not been for the people for the treacherous acts they imagined and for the secret conversations they thought they heard. Fortified by their fears and anxieties, a disturbingly large number of people in Konitz and the surrounding area publicly proclaimed their suspicions of their Jewish neighbors.
The faltering investigation provided an opportunity—as long as the police had few leads, they were forced to pursue every shred of evidence, no matter how tenuous. They searched people’s private homes on at least eighty separate occasions and took every story, every accusation, seriously.64 And in Konitz, as we know, there was no shortage of accusations, especially since the advent of the 20,000-mark reward.65 By July, there had already been four hundred separate incriminations by people coming to the police and to the newspapers with stories of what they saw, heard, smelled, even dreamed.66
These stories take us into the heart of the anti-Semitic imagination. Some stories were born of half-baked theories of how the murder must have happened, others came from conversations people imagined themselves as having overheard, and still others involved further evidence about Jews already suspected of being implicated in the killing. But few people came forward to tell the complete tale of ritual murder. More often, people imagined small parts of the whole story. But when soldered together, the bits and pieces formed an imposing edifice of tangled and twisted fictions.
The murder, many people assumed, was planned in advance. In Konitz, this belief structured a series of accusations against the Jewish merchant Matthäus Meyer, who owned a hardware store on the Danzigerstrasse, across from Adolph Lewy’s house. Witnesses claimed to have seen a Jewish-looking man walk with a list under his arm into Meyer’s hardware store. A discussion supposedly ensued, with Meyer’s youngest daughter, Rosa, insisting that her father not sign the petition to slaughter Ernst Winter. “That is murder!” Rosa allegedly said, vexing her father greatly.67 The mother, in one version of the story, also contributed to the conversation, saying, “We don’t need the blood for Matzo but only for good luck,” and later, “Drag him to the Mönchsee.”68 But in another telling, the mother supposedly said, “The poor young man, he is really to be pitied.” In this version, the father, upon hearing the resistance of his wife and daughter, returned the list, saying, “No, I will not sign, I am not going to do something like this, and I am not going to stay in Konitz.”69
The Meyers had in fact moved to Berlin in early March, a week before the murder. But the accusations had a disturbing sequel. When Meyer’s eldest daughter, Jenny, died, people accused the Meyers of having poisoned her in order to stop her from warning Ernst Winter of what awaited him.70 The rumor gained currency, and officials in Konitz even discussed the possibility of exhuming the corpse. Fortunately, this was avoided. The daughter, it turned out, had fallen into a cataleptic trance.71
A second set of stories more specifically addressed the question of who killed Ernst Winter, where, and how. Here too, rumors echoed throughout the region.
Paul Orda, a wayfarer passing through Konitz after his release from prison, claimed to have been walking down a country road on his way to seek employment on a farm when two men one older, one younger approached a nearby fence. A wagon full of Jews pulled up, and one of their number lassoed the younger man, jerking him to the ground. “What do you want?” the younger man cried out. “I am Winter.” Yet no fence existed where Orda claimed it had, and Orda was not in Konitz when he said he was. Furthermore, he had been arrested for false accusations before. Now he would be arrested again, find his way back to prison, and languish there for another five years.72
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