The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  For Martha Hoffmann, however, this was still not enough. She told Speisinger that he would commit perjury if he withheld details and that it would be wise to set his accusation down on paper. After consulting with a friend, he did just that. At his subsequent interrogation, on July 6, Speisinger stated, “Moritz Lewy knew Winter. In the fall of last year, I saw them together on the Danzigerstrasse. Another time, I saw them standing in front of Lewy’s door.”32

  It is difficult to know what moved Martha Lehmann to pressure Speisinger into helping her “prove Lewy guilty of perjury.” She herself could not have seen Winter and Lewy together, because she was in Warsaw at the time. She did, however, concede that she “hated” Lewy and that, like her father, she had no objective evidence for her claims.33 The Hoffmanns, moreover, did not spin their tangled web of intrigue alone. When Speisinger returned to Hoffmann’s house the second time, two other men were present, the journalist Max Wienecke and a mysterious man with a white beret and a mustache.34

  By the beginning of the perjury trial of Moritz Lewy, in February 1901, nine additional witnesses had come forward to claim that they had seen Moritz Lewy and Ernst Winter together. Of these, two claimed only that Lewy had greeted Winter on the street, which Lewy did not necessarily deny. Of the seven others, the first person to come forward was Friedrich Russ, the night watchman responsible for overseeing the Danzigerstrasse and the area around it. After having seen the photograph of Ernst Winter in Heym’s studio, Russ claimed to have seen Lewy and Winter together, at least three or four times a week, if not more, and always after 10:00 P.M., even though fellow schoolmates at Lange’s boardinghouse insisted that Winter was usually home by then.35 Russ was hardly a reliable witness, however. Illiterate and barely audible, he constantly quarreled, drank more than his share, and neglected his duties on the job. He also begged, and Moritz Lewy had even given him small change.36 Why Russ accused Lewy is therefore unclear, but few people in Konitz took him seriously, except for the anti-Semitic journalists, who eagerly printed his story albeit without attribution — on the front page of the evening edition of the Saturday newspaper, on June 23.37

  A number of the sightings of Ernst Winter together with Moritz Lewy stemmed from the creative imaginations of people who had already provided spurious testimony. There was Rosine Simanowski, who had accused Heinrich Friedländer of saying, “The Jews need blood,” and who now claimed to have seen Ernst Winter and Moritz Lewy talking together in Lewy’s doorway on the Danzigerstrasse. Christian Lübke, the bricklayer who produced the strange story of Jews hiding Winter’s body parts in the secret vaults underneath the synagogue, likewise deposed that he had seen Moritz Lewy and Ernst Winter together—on at least twenty separate occasions. He did not know Ernst Winter, however, and recognized him only retroactively, after he saw his picture in Heym’s photography studio. Moreover, by late June, the anti-Semitic papers had begun to publish reports of these sightings, specifically those of Ernst Winter with Moritz Lewy. In early July, Lübke came forward with his own testimony, as did his daughter Anna.38 But before she appeared in court, Anna Lübke spoke to a woman with whom we have already become familiar: Martha Hoffmann.39

  At least two of the further sightings may be traced to special animosities. The first involves Karl Nagorra, a former policeman and now an assistant prison guard, who despite his terrible eyesight claimed to have seen Moritz Lewy and Ernst Winter walking together three times. As it turns out, Nagorra had an ax to grind: Adolph Lewy had registered the complaint about Nagorra that had led to his dismissal from the police force back in 1896.40 The second witness to whom one can trace a personal vendetta was Gustav Schlichter, a seventeen-year-old journeyman plumber, who first testified that he had once seen Ernst Winter and Moritz Lewy on the Danzigerstrase, but later “came to the conviction that I saw them often” and sometimes felt “as if I could still see them there.”41 At a subsequent trial, however, another plumber’s apprentice testified that “with his testimony Schlichter wanted to pull one over on Moritz Lewy”42 Equally revealing, Schlichter later admitted to having helped set fire to the synagogue on the night of June 9.43

  Schlichter’s alleged sightings may have inspired Franz Hellwig, a printer’s apprentice, to register that he, too, saw Ernst Winter and Moritz Lewy walking back and forth along the Danzigerstrasse and standing in Lewy’s doorway. Given that Hellwig was “mentally somewhat slow,” his sighting, reported a year and a half after the event, constituted a remarkable feat of memory.44 He did not know Ernst Winter and later confused him with someone else. But as a friend of Schlichter, the gullible Hellwig may have simply wanted to go along with his friend’s attempt to “pull one over on Moritz Lewy.”

  Of the original seven accusers, only Elisabeth Tuszik, a “pious, truth-loving” domestic servant, remained. She allegedly saw Lewy and Winter walking together, but exactly when she could not say, either in 1898 or 1899, in the summer or the winter. She claimed to have known all along that Moritz Lewy was involved in Winter’s murder. Two or three days after the murder, Tuszik leaned out her window, and as Moritz Lewy walked by she supposedly called out, “Moritz, Moritz, what did you do with Winter?” “What are you talking about, Elisabeth?” Klara Niewolinski, the lady of the house, asked. Tuszik then allegedly said, “People are saying that the Jews did it. And if he [Moritz Lewy] didn’t do it, then he probably lured him somewhere into a trap.” “I can say this,” she added, “I have seen him walking with Ernst Winter.” “You would be a good witness,” Mrs. Niewolinski then said. But Tuszik did not report her sighting until late September 1900. She was afraid, she said, “I could also be locked up.”45

  During Moritz Lewy’s trial, many more people came forward. As more people testified, the risks associated with public denunciation decreased. Among those who testified against Lewy were Regina Schultz, the Polish-speaking domestic servant of Lewy’s next-door neighbor, Hermann Aaronheim; Anna Schnick, a domestic servant who lived two doors down; a number of students and young apprentices; and Anna Hoffmann. Hoffmann’s testimony is interesting in its display of caution. When asked whether Ernst Winter knew Moritz Lewy, she fell strangely silent; like the others, though, she also said that she had seen the two together in the street.46

  Indeed, the sightings came to focus on two motifs, Lewy and Winter walking along the Danzigerstrasse, and Lewy and Winter standing in the doorway. These scenes, one may recall, had originally been reported by Richard Speisinger, whose visions postdated his conversation with Martha Hoffmann. The trail of denunciation circled around and, once again, led back to the Hoffmann house.

  Lewy’s trial had, like Masloff’s, turned into a grand spectacle in which one witness after another claimed to have seen the two boys walking or standing together. To outsiders, it seemed like a clear case of “suggestion,” but it was less than that. Among the witnesses against Moritz Lewy, there was an obvious hint of malice. Nevertheless, on February 16, 1901, the jury found Moritz Lewy guilty of three counts of perjury and sentenced him to four years of incarceration in the Graudenz prison and the loss of his citizenship for the duration. The Lewys also had to pay costs. Two days later, the family moved to Berlin, and soon thereafter Moritz Lewy began his prison term, his release date set for May 10, 1905. According to a police report, “the judgment against Lewy was received by … the great majority of the local people with satisfaction and has done much to calm their sentiments.”47

  IV

  The rhetoric of modern anti-Semitism depicted Jews as all too powerful. They controlled the press, the justice system, and the financial world and used their power in conniving ways: charging peasants usurious prices, for example, and aiding each other. In Konitz, as in many small towns and big cities throughout Germany, this image of the powerful, conspirational Jew proved pervasive. It was propagated in the newspapers and in broadsides. It was disseminated from pulpits and in schoolrooms. And one encountered it on the streets.

  Still, the reality of the allegations against Jews suggests a different rela
tionship. Especially in the initial months of the investigation, most of the Jews denounced in Konitz were themselves outsiders, in some sense marginal within the community and certainly vulnerable. There are notable exceptions. Rosine Simanowski’s denunciation of Heinrich Friedländer does not fit this pattern, for it served to reverse a relationship of power. The same may be said of many of the domestic servants who accused their employers. Yet, in other cases, the salient feature of the relationship of the accuser to the accused is the latter’s vulnerability. When the Christians of Konitz denounced Jews, they did not, as a rule, point to the powerful; instead, they focused on the powerless.

  Of the Jews in Konitz, Wolf Israelski an inebriate skinner, a man who could not hold down a job and who, by his own admission, was “weak of thought” proved an easy target.48 That Israelski was once a skinner is also relevant because in the symbolic economy of the artisanal guilds, skinners, unlike butchers, had long ranked among the “dishonorable” and “defiled” trades. They handled “cold flesh,” and it was their job to dispose of carcasses. In earlier eras, they sometimes did the work of hanging as well, leaving the privilege of beheading to the executioner, who was also “dishonorable” but of higher status than the lowly skinner. Like the executioner, and in some cultures the shepherd, the miller, and the latrine digger, the skinner was historically condemned by the laws governing social pollution to be a permanent outcast.49

  The initial accusation against Israelski came from the subaltern Friedrich Fiedler, who claimed to have seen Israelski limping along with a gray sack over his back, carrying the head of Ernst Winter to a ditch on the outskirts of town. Other witnesses later followed Fiedler’s lead: the railroad worker Julius Dühring; Klara Streubing, the wife of a harness maker; and August Steinke, a raftsman from Prechlau who had allegedly overheard Josef Eisenstädt saying that Winter was fit for slaughter. Steinke overheard another conversation as well. Near the train station, someone mentioned Israelski’s name, and Steinke heard, “Hey, everything is paid for.”50 Meanwhile, the newspapers generated mendacities on their own accord. On May 1, the Staatsbürgerzeitung reported that Israelski had traveled to Xanten to receive directives, that he was related to Adolph Buschhoff (the Jewish butcher in Xanten), and that the A on the torn handkerchief stood for Alma, Israelski’s sister.51 Later on, the paper also reported that Alma had often gone to Berent (the site of an alleged ritual murder in 1894) and that when Israelski was in prison, he had received a note scribbled on a piece of paper. Stuffed into a potato, the note supposedly instructed Israelski on what he was to say during his interrogation.52

  Obvious fabrications, such stories nevertheless hardened the conviction that Israelski could not have worked alone, and this in turn led to further denunciations, widening the circle of incrimination around him. In this context, Paul Brüggemann, a thirty-two-year-old carter, claimed that he had on the Wednesday before Easter seen Adolph’s sister, Pauline Lewy, carrying underneath her arm a package roughly as large as a head. Known in Konitz as “Rag Lewy,” Pauline (who had the same name as Adolph’s wife) had drawn her shawl tightly around her so that no one could identify her. She was an old woman who could hardly hear, could neither read nor write, and barely eked out an existence by selling her wares, rags and string. Powerless, she perfectly conformed to the pattern of accusations against marginal Jews. Brüggemann claimed that Adolph Lewy was walking “ten to twenty paces” behind her. It was sometime after 10:00 P.M. on the Danzigerstrasse, and they were, so Brüggemann opined, carrying the head to the house of Wolf Israelski.53

  Israelski stood trial on September 8, 1900. Despite extremely specious evidence, Chief Prosecutor Settegast pleaded, if halfheartedly, that the court find Israelski guilty as an accomplice to murder, and he requested a sentence of five years’ imprisonment. To support his case, Settegast called a chain of witnesses, two of whom claimed to have seen “a suspicious-looking man” near the ditch, and one of whom saw a person who walked like, but did not look like, Wolf Israelski. Further witnesses included Dumb Alex and the barmaid Przeworski, who claimed that “twelve Jews must be the killers, since the Jews have twelve tribes.”54 Przeworski testified that on a day in March she had seen a man carrying something long, perhaps the arm. To round out her story, Stolpmann—another barmaid, whose husband had denounced Selig Zander—took the stand and maintained that, at the time of the murder, Israelski had been in a suspiciously bad mood; her eleven-year-old daughter, who was also called to testify, said so as well. This parade of less-than-stellar witnesses left Settegast with his initial witness, the subaltern Fiedler—who allegedly saw Israelski carrying a sack with something round in it and the known indiscretions provided by Israelski’s wife, who complained that her husband was a drunk.

  Accordingly, the judge found Israelski innocent, much to the chagrin of the angry throng that packed the seats of the court as well as the anti-Semitic demonstrators on the street outside. The latter desisted from further rioting however, since it was September, and the Prussian army still controlled the center of town.55 Though substantial violence was, at this point, narrowly avoided, one denunciation supported by a series of vague secondary sightings managed to ensure the temporary incarceration, and near-condemnation, of a man already in many ways on the margins of local society, both Christian and Jewish.

  Denunciations of the vulnerable also fueled the central accusation of our story. Here one must, to be sure, measure words. People pointed to Lewy because he was a Jewish butcher and because he lived near the supposed scene of the crime. Yet his position in local society lent credence to the accusations. Adolph Lewy was a cantankerous recluse. In the past, he had been quick to report others to the police, and a few of his accusers, including Joseph Laskowski and Karl Nagorra, now incriminated him in turn. Even among his Jewish neighbors, he was an isolated figure. With the merchant Hermann Aaronheim, his next-door neighbor, he had for a time lived in “conflict,” and the two men “almost never” spoke to each other. After the accusations, this changed slightly. “He came to me,” Aaronheim said, “and I could not just show him the door.”56 Lewy did occasionally go to Falkenberg’s pub and watch the other men play cards, but with the exception of Moritz Brünn, none of the pub regulars seem to have come to Lewy’s house.57 Lewy was rarely in the company of the notables among the Jewish community in Konitz, men such as Rabbi Kellermann and City Councillor Fabian, or even Gustav Caspari, the wealthy merchant who lived across from him. Whether Lewy maintained close ties to the synagogue is more difficult to say, though his son Moritz admitted, “I seldom go to synagogue.”58 By all accounts, Adolph Lewy kept to himself; few people, Christian or Jewish, knew very much about him.

  But when the accusations began to fly, Adolph Lewy’s private world quickly collapsed. Already in April, he had to close down his butcher shop, and his son Hugo had to travel to Berlin to look for work.59 When Adolph Lewy tried to sell meat at the marketplace, crowds gathered around. “Christian meat,” they screamed; Lewy “butchers Christians.”60 The assaults were not only verbal, however. In May, a worker threatened to stab him with a knife; in June, a number of men broke into his house with axes and demanded money.61 Thereafter, Adolph Lewy could walk the streets only with armed guards. For his wife, too, the accusations made life intolerable: “I have suffered so much grief and unhappmess,” Pauline Lewy said in October, when the trial of her son was still to come.

  Gustav Hoffmann’s public accusations of the Jewish butcher fell within the context of the humiliation and eventual destruction of Adolph Lewy and his family. Printed on June 13, the denunciation had been completed and presented to the investigating officials on June 5, having been composed sometime during the week before, in collusion with the reporter Wilhelm Bruhn. Although no doubt a distressing time for Gustav Hoffmann as well, it was a perilous period for Adolph Lewy and his family. During the demonstrations, Hoffmann could watch as thugs repeatedly hurled bricks and stones through his neighbor’s windows. The people who darkened the streets clearly and un
mistakably sided with Hoffmann against Lewy. More distressing is Hoffmann’s appropriation of public outrage. “I only wrote down what the people already knew. Everybody thinks as I stated it there,” he later said.62 When asked under oath whether he had any objective evidence for what he had seen and heard, he replied, laconically, “no.”63

  A number of possibilities might explain why, lacking evidence, Hoffmann offered the butcher’s tale. Perhaps, one might speculate, there was a feud between his family and Lewy’s. But there is no evidence of open conflict, only icy separation. As far as one can tell, the two men hardly exchanged a word, though they lived next to each other and shared the same occupation. Lewy, a butcher, was a competitor, and perhaps this motivated Hoffmann, but the Christian butcher was already by far the more successful of the two. His business was flourishing, and he had a number of apprentices and domestic servants. Lewy, by contrast, had no apprentices, save for his two sons, and—in his most solvent days—he could not even afford a live-in servant.64 By early June, when Hoffmann made his accusation public, Adolph Lewy and his family were on the edge of ruin. What could have driven Hoffmann to accuse his neighbor? Perhaps he was merely trying to deflect attention from an unpleasant investigation, which would include indiscreet questions about his daughter’s virginity. Or perhaps he desired something more simple and base: the cover-up of a crime and the destruction of his Jewish neighbor’s life.