The Butcher's Tale
Page 14
The immediate context, however, was a German town that, like any town, contained rich neighborhoods and poor sections, dust-filled back streets and pleasant promenades. With a population of ten thousand, Konitz was large enough that differences were palpable and that contrary to the popular saying, not everyone knew each other. By 1900, “the good old days” of extended families, of sons learning the trades of their fathers, and of families staying in one town, one generation after the next, had long since passed.5 There were many newcomers to Konitz, though this fact did not make the town any more cosmopolitan. Since most of the new arrivals hailed from the surrounding area, they typically brought old ways, not new.6 An aura of provincial backwardness thus pervaded the town—an aura reinforced by the many petty officials who resided here.
Despite the presence of these Prussian bureaucrats, Kafkaesque figures in a distant outpost, Konitz remained a relatively poor place. With 60 percent of the heads of households earning less than 900 marks per year, the minimum threshold below which one did not pay income tax, it lagged far behind the more prosperous communities of the western parts of the empire.7 Anyone walking, riding on a wagon, or bicycling into Konitz would have noticed the indigence of its inhabitants right away. Crammed in dark houses—“each somehow livable space occupied by half a dozen children and a couple of grown-ups”—the workers lived on the fringes, in the makeshift quarters of the northern edge of town, near the Dunkershagen farm, where Winter’s head was found, or in the working-class streets, Ziegelstrasse and Hohe Höfe, which led into town from the Jewish cemetery.8 Workers also lived on the south side of Konitz, in the rows of humble houses on the Hennigsdorferstrasse, especially near the noisome banks of the Mönchsee, or on the Pulverstrasse, near the gasworks, or outside the old city walls along the Rähmestrasse, which was often used as a dumping ground (there was as yet no organized trash collection).9
The poorest workers dwelled among themselves or in dank apartments alongside widows and invalids hanging on to their meager pensions. In contrast to this group, better-paid workers typically lived in mixed neighborhoods, together with artisans, store clerks, and petty officials. When the soldiers occupied Konitz, most of them were billeted “among the small artisans and the many subalterns and lower civil servants,” some of whom fell into debt as the result of costs associated with providing quarter for the troops.10 In Konitz, these mixed neighborhoods were nestled just inside the old city walls and along back streets like the Postallstrasse. This is where Bernhard Masloff and Anna Ross cohabitated, their back window allowing them to peer into the house of Hermann Lange, the baker, and into the room rented by Ernst Winter. The more well-to-do addresses were located in the center of town, save for a few nice homes along the newer Bahnhofstrasse and Bismarckstrasse and around the Wilhelmsplatz and Denkmalplatz, where the fine houses of the anti-Semitic lawyers, Dr. Max Vogel and Carl Gebauer, stood.
It was, however, along the Danzigerstrasse, which led from the Wilhelmsplatz to the marketplace, that the actors most intimately involved in the Konitz drama resided. Starting from the corner of the Wilhelmsplatz, Danzigerstrasse 1, was the home of the cigar dealer Fischer, who would briefly become a suspect because of his affection for young boys. Matthäus Meyer, the hardware store owner accused of signing a death list that the Jews had sent around, dwelled two doors down. A few doors farther on resided Hermann Lewinski, whose cellar an anti-Semitic police inspector would later suspect as a more suitable place for a ritual murder than the cellar of Adolph Lewy. Across the street, at Danzigerstrasse 31, the house of Gustav Hoffmann cast a long, low shadow over the first bend in the Danzigerstrasse. And three doors down, their back gates abutting, was the house of Adolph Lewy.
II
Within the cramped alleyways of Konitz and the towns around it, Christians denounced the Jews they knew. They either worked for the Jews they accused or had long been in close business relations with them, the only exception being the battery of students who came forward to claim that they had seen Moritz Lewy and Ernst Winter together. Consistent with the long history of ritual-murder accusations, the accusers generally came from the lower or lower middle classes: they included unskilled workers and day laborers, masons and a civil servant, a prison guard and a night watchman, a poor farmer and his family, a handful of apprentices, and a larger number of servant girls. Men and women came forth with accusations in roughly equal numbers (in the Third Reich, by contrast, it was primarily men who denounced their fellow citizens).11 Not surprisingly, some of the accusers were poorly educated. Aside from Franz Hellwig, who was “mentally somewhat slow,” Anna Ross could not read, nor could the night watchman Friedrich Russ, who claimed to have seen Ernst Winter and Moritz Lewy promenading up and down the Danzigerstrasse almost every night after ten.12 Finally, a few accusers had criminal records, including the key witness Bernhard Masloff, arrested for assault, Russ, a habitual drunkard, and Margarete Radtke, who had been caught stealing.
One tradition of historical analysis would view the denunciations of middle-class Jews by poorer Christians as a rudimentary form of economic or class protest. Motivated by social and economic disadvantages, Christians falsely accused their Jewish neighbors and set off the storm of riots that beset Konitz in the summer of 1900. Yet the patterns are not so simple as this seamless theory of social protest might suggest: not all the Christians who denounced Jews were disadvantaged, and not all the Jews accused were middle class. More important, economic issues hardly figured in the actual dynamics of accusation, which were more significantly bound up in the tangled web of personal relations. The prominence of servant girls among those who came forward brings this complicated issue into focus. Of the forty-six accusers, eight were domestic servants, most of whom lived in the houses of their Jewish employers. If we count Anna Ross, Martha Masloff, and Anna Berg, who washed and cleaned but did not live with the Lewys, the number is higher still.
At first sight, it seems remarkable that girls who lived in such close proximity to Jewish families should be the ones who accused the Jews they knew of something as fantastic as ritual murder. Physical proximity, however, does not imply emotional intimacy or even trust; moreover, toward the end of the nineteenth century, domestic servants increasingly existed on the margins of the middle-class family: they no longer dined with the family and often lived in a tiny room of their own, usually set off from the kitchen. Within the household, the whole weight of manual labor fell on their shoulders, for the status of a middle-class woman rested on the fact that she did not perform housework. The relationship, then, between a female servant and her employer was marked not only by proximity but also by an extreme imbalance of power.13 Denunciations reversed this imbalance, often with disastrous results for the Jewish middle-class family. This was obviously so for Adolph Lewy, who was denounced by women who performed domestic work in his own house. A similar fate befell Moritz Zander in Konitz and Max Grossmann in Bütow.
Virtually no Jew in the region was immune. This became evident through the case of Josef Rosenthal, a merchant and the wealthiest man in the village of Kamin, located about eight miles south of Konitz.14 In the beginning of July, amid the storm of anti-Semitic violence following the summons of Gustav Hoffmann, Rosenthal’s domestic servant, Margarete Radtke, claimed that her Jewish employer had participated in the killing of Ernst Winter and “was going to confess to everything.”15 Burdened by guilt, he even tried to hang himself from a hook, she said. The police pursued the lead and inspected Rosenthal’s home, but could not find the telltale hook. The Jews had obviously hidden it, anti-Semitic critics countered. The police soon returned to Rosenthal’s home, this time with an expert from Berlin who tore away part of a ceiling in order to expose the beam with the alleged hook from which Rosenthal had tried to hang himself. But when they, too, could find no hook, Rosenthal sued Margarete Radtke for defamation; she, in turn, accused him of pressuring her to commit perjury. Along with other family members, he had allegedly tried to persuade Radtke to retract her statement
s. For reasons the documents do not specify, the police arrested Rosenthal and his family, and not Radtke, and they spent several months in prison awaiting trial. While languishing in the hot and humid jail cells, two of the family members fell ill and had to be transported to a local hospital. One of them died soon afterward. The case, it turned out, never went to trial.16
What moved Margarete Radtke to envision her employer hanging himself from a hook? Rosenthal apparently believed that she was mentally unstable and no longer capable of accounting for her behavior. As the trial approached, he asked the presiding judge to have medical experts examine her psychological state, but the judge demurred, fearing that this would only encourage public wrath.17 Moreover, certain pieces of evidence suggested a girl who well knew what she was doing. She had, on a previous occasion, accused a different master of rape after he had fired her for stealing. Certainly, sexual abuse of female servants was common enough to seem credible, but the authorities investigating the case concluded that not a word of her story was true. With this second denunciation, then, one could begin to detect a pattern: Radtke accused her employers in order to spite them.18
In addition to the employer-servant relationship, the entanglements of sexual intimacy, especially across forbidden boundaries of class and religion, provided another point at which the dynamics of personal and social power could be reversed. This was evidently the case with Rosine Simanowski, the seventeen-year-old girl who imagined that the Jews of Konitz were chasing her with knives. In her original story, she had allegedly overheard a conversation of Heinrich Friedländer, in which Friedländer said, “The Jews need blood,” and supposedly offered to buy her a “nice present” if she did not remain silent. As it turned out, Friedländer, twenty-three years old, had been sleeping with Simanowski for nearly two years. According to Friedländer, he had known the girl since November 1898 and “had slept with her often, always in [his] apartment.”19 Friedländer denied having paid her, but he admitted to having bought her presents and given her money, once to buy new shoes and once to pay off her debts to a tailor. Since July 1899, Simanowski had been under the “moral supervision” of the police and had to report for medical examinations. She was, in other words, a prostitute. But Friedländer refused to admit that he “used her” as such, even if, for him, there was nothing more to their relationship than sex.20 Essentially, Simanowski’s story corroborated his own. In closed court (“to protect public morals”), Rosine Simanowski admitted that she “gave herself to him” shortly after her confirmation in the Catholic church, and on Christmas Day 1898 he seduced her.21
Whether she was a virgin at this point is unclear; Friedländer did not think so.22 She also admitted to sleeping with him often, which begs the question of when did they stop, who stopped it, and why? On this matter, their testimonies proved enigmatic and contradictory. According to Simanowski, she had ceased to have sexual relations with Friedländer after the death of Ernst Winter, in mid-March; according to him, he “used her for the last time” in early April.23 They also gave contradictory accounts of their meetings in Friedländer’s store on a weekday in summer 1900. She recounted having been there twice to purchase clothing; he said she had been there but once. More important, she claimed to have told him that she knew that Moritz Lewy and Ernst Winter had spent time together and that Friedländer had talked about the case, saying, “The Jews need blood.”
One can only speculate about what motivated her accusations. Perhaps Friedländer was responsible for her troubles; perhaps she loved him, but he did not reciprocate. Clearly, she was the less powerful of the two: her class and social standing, not to mention her age, positioned her beneath him, and her dubious reputation made her even more vulnerable. One can therefore imagine how she might have bent his words. When he said, “I’ll buy you a nice present,” he may have been paying her for sex, a secret he would not have wanted publicly revealed. Though enamored of him, she probably resented being treated like a common prostitute; spurned, she struck back with a vengeance, accusing him of saying that Jews need blood.
Simanowski was not the only person to exact public revenge for a private slight. Joseph Laskowski, a rural laborer who recounted fantastic stories about Adolph Lewy’s sizing him up for slaughter, also had reason to be bitter. Laskowski’s story begins on the day of Winter’s murder, March 11. Hugo Lewy, Adolph’s youngest son, had arranged for Laskowski to drive a cow from the nearby village of Frankenhagen to Konitz, a distance of about four miles. For the work, Laskowski expected to be paid one and a half marks, but Lewy offered him only one and a quarter. Lewy also asked Laskowski to buy a new rope to lead the cow. Instead, Laskowski tied two used pieces of old rope together and pocketed the money himself. When Adolph Lewy heard about this, he confronted Laskowski, and when police sergeant Kühn happened to walk by, Lewy told the policeman what Laskowski had done.24 What happened thereafter is unclear. According to Laskowski, Adolph Lewy asked him to bring the cow around back and to come inside the house, where, “afraid in his heart,” Laskowski trembled and allegedly heard Adolph Lewy say the following: “we need blood,” “high school students walking,” “the cantor has much to do,” “the cantor will prepare a bath,” and “ropes, chains, Mönchsee.” Then Adolph’s wife, Pauline, came into the room and inquired about Laskowski’s age, whether he was married, and whether he had children. Sizing him up, Lewy demanded to see Laskowski’s arm. “Too white, too white, pale, pale,” Lewy allegedly muttered, and let Laskowski go.25
Naturally, the Lewys denied every last syllable of Laskowski’s testimony, which Laskowski had in any case given in “a condition of severe inebriation.”26 For the anti-Semitic press, however, no state of intoxication disqualified evidence against the Jews. By dint of constant reprinting, Laskowski’s story became an established part of the Konitz narrative, in which the Lewys sized up Christians—like pieces of meat—before preparing them for ritual slaughter.
III
Of all the denunciations in Konitz, perhaps the most tragic involved a series of sightings of Ernst Winter together with Moritz Lewy, Adolph’s elder son. Moritz Lewy denied knowing Ernst Winter, though he conceded that he may well have been standing in his company at some point and that it was possible that he had in passing greeted the young man on the street. In all probability, Moritz Lewy was telling the truth. Willi Rahmel and Erich Boeckh, Ernst Winter’s two best friends, saw Winter nearly every day and shared intimate details with him, but even they could not recall Winter’s having ever mentioned Moritz Lewy’s name.27 Still, a series of witnesses claimed the contrary, and in October 1900 the police arrested Moritz Lewy for perjury. By the time of Lewy’s trial, in February 1901, thirty witnesses had come forward to claim that they had seen the two together—a remarkable phenomenon that highlights the various ways in which Christians, in an environment rife with accusations, marshaled dubious evidence against the Jews of Konitz.
The story of the sightings begins with the accusations of Richard Speisinger, a seventeen-year-old dropout, who claimed that Ernst Winter had carried on flirtations with two Jewish girls, Meta Caspari and Selma Tuchler, as well as with Anna Hoffmann, and that a jealous butcher’s apprentice, whom Speisinger could not identify but who may have worked for Hoffmann, had allegedly said to Winter one evening in the fall of 1899, “Wait until the next time, when we’re both alone, I’m going to make sure that your lights are knocked out for good.”28 The accusation, reported to the police in the town of Jastrow on March 27, did not implicate the Lewys, or even the Jews. If anything, it pointed the finger back at the house of Gustav Hoffmann.
The police did not take Speisinger’s initial accusation seriously. It could not be corroborated, and Speisinger’s former teachers thought him lazy, boastful, and mendacious. But when the investigation began to falter in the wake of the ill-fated Hoffmann interrogation, the police called Speisinger to Konitz to testify, and this is where the real trouble began.
When Speisinger left the Konitz county courthouse on the morning of J
une 23, he was immediately greeted by the anti-Semitic journalist Wilhelm Bruhn, who invited Speisinger out for a few drinks, and then lunch, and told him that he, Speisinger, was a star witness, terribly important to the case. In the afternoon, Bruhn took him out to meet still other anti-Semitic journalists. Together they had coffee and cake and later went to the shooting club. The next morning, Speisinger had a terrible headache, but he well remembered Bruhn’s anti-Semitic tirades. His story suddenly began to take on a different hue.
In the Monday paper, Bruhn published an article detailing Speisinger’s sensational story, excluding the parts that might have involved one of Hoffmann’s apprentices and emphasizing that Winter’s relationship with Tuchler and Caspari was more intimate than that with Anna Hoffmann.29 Still, however, Speisinger had not mentioned Moritz Lewy.
Lewy had already come into the story on Sunday. As Speisinger strolled down the Danzigerstrasse, Martha Hoffmann called him into the house to discuss the accusations. She asked him about Winter’s relationships and whether he knew that Moritz Lewy and Ernst Winter had spent time together. Speisinger replied that he knew this, but it was not confirmed. “We have to prove him [Moritz Lewy] guilty of perjury,” Martha then said to Speisinger; “it lies in our interest.”30 Speisinger then left for twenty minutes, supposedly to consult a friend; on his return, he said, “Now I know it, now I can swear it under oath.”31