The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  V

  Whatever his motive, Hoffmann’s denunciation of Lewy was an act of power over someone increasingly powerless, and, as such, it conformed to a more general pattern. Unlike isolated acts of violence, personal denunciations depend on a communal context. To have force, they must be credible—in the eyes of the people and, eventually, the legal authorities. In the case of Adolph Lewy, it was enough that the people of Konitz found the denunciation credible; in the unfortunate case of his son, the courts concurred as well. In Konitz, denunciations accumulated as the communal conflict deepened, as the lines dividing Christians and Jews sharpened, and as the bonds between them loosened and broke.

  Analyzing the quickening pace of the denunciations, we can perceive the communal influence on the actions of otherwise independent individuals. Although it is impossible to reconstruct the chronology of accusations exactly, it remains clear that the denunciations came in clusters and that the clusters centered on specific events that shook the community. The chronology also reveals that very few specific denunciations occurred immediately following the murder—except for Bernhard Masloff’s initial deposition and Joseph Laskowski’s drunken ravings against Adolph Lewy.65 But if initial accusations were sparse, this all changed in April, after the first journalists arrived in town. Around April 10, the first accusations were leveled against the Meyer family (whose case we will address shortly) and were reported in the newspaper.66 On April 15, Friedrich Fiedler saw Wolf Israelski carrying a sack, an accusation that led to the skinner’s arrest. Building on these initial accusations, others came forward, with denunciations often focused on the same person. The first wave of violent demonstrations, on the weekend of April 20, added momentum to the accusations. By the end of April, a number of newspapers had unequivocally identified the Jews as the killers, and on April 28, the Prussian government upped the reward to 20,000 marks. In early May, people’s willingness to denounce their Jewish neighbors palpably increased.

  The lines separating Christians from Jews had grown clearer, and by the end of May the town of Konitz had become the site of major demonstrations and, with the accusations against Gustav Hoffmann in early June, violent confrontations. The town now filled with reward seekers, private detectives, and still more journalists, many of whom helped carve out an anti-Semitic consensus. “The whole town is working to prove Moritz Lewy guilty of perjury,” one of the journalists, Georg Zimmer, noted in late September.67 These efforts paid off at the trials. At the Speisinger trial in October 1900, six people had come forward to proclaim that they had seen Lewy and Winter together; at the trial of Moritz Lewy the following February, witnesses numbered more than thirty. By this time, the consensus against the Jews based on superstitions, rumors, false testimony, and biased reporting had become an article of faith, and accusations an act of allegiance to a community that no longer included Jews. Denunciations were then not only safe but even dutiful, especially if they were directed against Jews whose lives already lay in shambles.

  VI

  If individual accusations in Konitz seemed disturbingly instrumental, it does not follow that they can be dismissed in all cases as conscious fabrications. It is, after all, still possible that the butcher believed his own tale, that Margarete Radtke really imagined her employer had hung himself from a hook, that Rosine Simanowski actually envisioned Jews chasing her with knives, and that Speisinger was convinced he had twice seen Moritz Lewy together with Ernst Winter. To raise this possibility does not make the tales true or the motives behind their telling less base; it merely keeps us from falling into “Descartes’s error,” that “thinking, and awareness of thinking, are the real substrates of being,” and that the mind’s operations of reason are neatly separable from the visceral reactions of emotion.68 Accusations may rest on motive, and the accusatory heart may have its reasons, but this does not necessarily mean that it acts without the passion and feeling that comes only with believing in the validity of one’s claims. In Konitz, some of the sightings may have been based on genuine, if distorted, memory.69

  Contemporaries proved sensitive to this possibility. “The people make an image,” we recall the wise Judge Brixus saying with respect to the sightings and accusations in the ritual-murder case in Xanten in 1892, “a few pieces of which they themselves experienced, then they gradually worked themselves into the image.”70 A similar theory of events was put forward in 1900 with respect to the Konitz case by a Berlin neurologist named Albert Eulenburg, who proposed that the sightings constituted a case of “retroactive hallucination,” which he defined as “a falsification of memory … artificially brought about in susceptible persons or even in a larger unit of individuals.”71 People under this spell often confused their own observations with ideas planted by others, and they often believed that what they had been told, or what they had read, was something they had seen or heard themselves. Although Eulenburg’s ideas were twisted with contemporary prejudices—he believed “primitive peoples,” “less developed races,” women, and uncultivated men to be especially susceptible to “retroactive hallucination”—his insights nevertheless point to a genuine problem. “Source misattribution”—one of the most ubiquitous and thoroughly documented causes of memory distortion—may well have tempered the soft substance of small-town rumor into the hard material of individual memory.72

  To separate willed mendacities from accusations constructed upon fragments of memory, one must, in the words of Arthur Conan Doyle, “concentrate [oneself] upon the details.” Within the welter of testimonies, the timing of the subject’s recall, and the precise context of what psychologists call the “receiving environment,” there may still be clues regarding the status of sightings reported.

  As we would expect, given the imperfections of memory, many of the sightings in Konitz were reported as fragments, but not all. Major accusations came in the form of fully constructed, continuous narratives, the most comprehensive of which was that of Gustav Hoffmann, the Christian butcher. It seems extremely unlikely that the butcher’s tale was a simply remembered one. Hoffmann’s collusion with Wilhelm Bruhn, the precise coincidence of the story’s release with Hoffmann’s interrogation, his later admissions that he “only wrote down what the people already knew,” and the fact that there was no objective basis for his accusation all of this evidence strongly suggests that the butcher’s tale was a methodically constructed, willed falsehood. The same doubtless held true for the stories of Bernhard Masloff, lying in the alley listening as events transpired in Lewy’s cellar, and the complicated talcs invented by his mother-in-law, Anna Ross. The stories they told were too detailed, too motivated, too planned, too much the result of collusion, however botched, to be taken seriously as distinctive, individual memories. Perhaps it is possible that, having told their stories often enough, they came to believe them, but their utterances as they were carted off to prison suggest otherwise. Masloff punctured his mother-in-law’s story by confessing that he himself was the mysterious farmhand from somewhere beyond Schlochau who had supposedly witnessed the torso being carried to the lake. And she in turn alleged, no doubt correctly, that his whole story was made up from the start.73 The accusations of Joseph Laskowski seem similarly contrived. On the night of the murder, he “so ranted and raved against the Jews” that when he heard of Winter’s murder, he immediately concluded that it “was none other than the old Lewy.”74 These accusations constituted the main charges directed against Adolph Lewy, and of these, only the sightings of Masloff, Ross, and Laskowski were purportedly based on direct experience. The evidence suggests they were based on willed untruths, not on distorted memory.

  The secondary accusations, which appear more fragmented and illusory, seem more plausibly based on distorted memories. In the original butcher’s tale, these focused on Wolf Israelski and Matthäus Meyer. The subaltern Fiedler was the first to see Wolf Israelski walking down the Schützenstrasse with a sack containing Winter’s decapitated head. Israelski did in fact go on his rounds that morning, and he sometime
s carried a sack; Fiedler’s motivation for denouncing Israelski seems less than obvious, save that the skinner was a marginal, and harmless, figure. More decisive was the timing of the sighting, which occurred on Good Friday, a day not only of heightened symbolic awareness but also of a sharpened sense of unity for the Christian community. Furthermore, only a day earlier, the photographer Max Heyn had placed a picture of Ernst Winter in his storefront. The suggestive powers of the picture, the discussions it no doubt engendered, and the sense of community that the holidays inspired may well have made Fiedler more receptive to the familiar images of the ritual-murder charge in the form of one of its most persistent topoi—the marginal Jew carrying the head in a sack. Perhaps Fiedler had seen Israelski and from that simple glimpse—coupled with a historical narrative already familiar to him—had formed a memory. The final details of his vision were not complete until Easter Sunday, when Winter’s head was found, and “the receiving environment” proved especially propitious. Fiedler then offered his testimony twice, consolidating the memory in his own mind, so that in the course of the spring it hardened into something he believed he had really seen.

  The accusations against Matthäus Meyer may also have had their origins in memory and its distortions, and not just in the crude operation of willed falsehood. His is also the story of how readily Christians accused vulnerable Jews. A number of witnesses claimed to have seen a man come into Meyer’s store with a list soliciting the support of the Jews of Konitz for the ritual slaughter of Ernst Winter. A conversation supposedly ensued, in which Meyer’s daughter stated, “That’s murder.” The first accusation came from Mrs. Wiwjorra, the wife of a furniture maker and a woman who knew Ernst Winter well. Initially, she heard only the name Winter and the response of Meyer’s daughter: “No, let that go, that’s pure murder.” Meyer’s daughter often used the saying “That is worse than murder” to express amazement, and it seems entirely plausible that Mrs. Wiwjorra, who otherwise had no special animus against Meyer, actually heard this expression. Since the conversation took place in January, well before the murder, she had no reason to suspect anything nefarious. This may have changed after the murder of Winter, whom she knew well; it may also have changed around the time of the High Holidays, when she spoke with her neighbor Franz Arndt, a baker, at the edge of the Mönchsee. One may imagine that they spoke about the gruesome nature of the murder and that Wiwjorra might then have dimly recalled an old conversation. As it was recalled in this altogether different “receiving environment,” the memory trace now emerged in a very different form. Wiwjorra rounded the picture out, more words accrued, a person with a list (perhaps an ordinary delivery man) became a messenger collecting signatures supporting the ritual murder. As she articulated the image and the overheard conversation, the memory consolidated, and, though we can only guess at this, it became something that she believed to be true, a genuine memory. A similar case might be made for Anton Hellwig, who along with his mother also heard the conversation in Meyer’s store. He seems not to have been ill disposed toward the Meyers in any identifiable way, and anecdotal evidence even suggests that he had long been their trusted client. Moreover, he had misconstrued previous conversations. He had, for example, denounced Alexander Caminer for saying to Anton, “You look so fresh and red,” and “Blood is very expensive this year.” Caminer, who had never uttered these words, did subsequently admit to having said something like “You have such a red face, that the blood seems to be squirting out of you.”75 Perhaps the good-natured, but mentally limited, Hellwig similarly misconstrued Meyer’s words and heaped new meanings upon otherwise harmless utterances. As he repeated them, and as his mother came to believe them as well, perhaps the statements solidified in his memory. Subsequent accusations against Meyer, inspired by the testimonies of Wiwjorra and Hellwig, seemed less likely to be based on direct experiences. These accusations either came significantly later or, like those of Mathilde Borchert, a Catholic woman from the village of Muskendorf, were based on a confessed lie.”76

  Whether based on memory or malice, the accusations against Matthäus Meyer struck at a time of tragedy. He had already been forced to give up his business, and, at the time of the imagined conversations, he was selling his last wares out of his living room on the second floor. He had also been diagnosed with liver disease. On March 4, a week before the murder, the family moved to Berlin, and shortly thereafter his eldest daughter, Jenny, died. The move, and the death of his daughter, only encouraged suspicions. As we know, the anti-Semitic newspapers accused him of poisoning his own daughter in order to hush her up, and officials in Konitz discussed exhuming her body to see whether this was true. Even more punitively, the chief prosecutor’s office charged Matthäus Meyer with perjury, since he had denied all of the accusations against him. Although the Berlin courts did not admit the case, the pursuit of Meyer to the capital suggests the extremes to which these charges were officially carried.

  VII

  Ritual-murder charges, as Alan Macfarlane wrote of seventeenth-century witchcraft accusations, “were made between people who knew each other intimately.”77 To pursue these charges, to ferret out why one person denounced another, allows us to enter into the inner sanctum of a torn community. In Konitz, accusations between neighbors reflected the dynamics of personal power, with Christians typically asserting power over Jews they worked for, or had once been injured by, or, as in the case of Rosine Simanowski, had once been in love with. But this reversal of power relations does not cover all cases. The Hoffmanns’ accusations of the Lewys constituted less a reversal of power than an attack on a vulnerable neighbor. The same may be said of the accusations directed against the Meyers and against Wolf Israelski. The unifying theme of all of them is their basis in human relationships, and that they target the weak points in the overall system of relations.

  This is true for the specific case of ritual-murder accusations in Konitz in 1900, as it is for accusations involving witchcraft persecutions hundreds of years ago, or the more recent political denunciations in the totalitarian regimes of the past century.78 “Witchcraft,” the anthropologist Mary Douglas writes, “is not merely a brutal midwife delivering new forms to society, though it may be this; it is also an aggravator of all hostilities and fears, an obstacle to peaceful cooperation.”79 Similarly, the historian Michael Geyer has written of the “antinomic consensus—to distrust each other—that despotism engenders” and has placed the breakdown of human solidarity at the center of a new understanding of the essence of the Third Reich.80 “For it was the rejection of the possibility of human solidarity with strangers—the critical as well as moral presupposition of civil society—that the National Socialist regime made into the foundation for its existence.”81

  Such a breakdown in solidarity was also at the center of the events in Konitz. If specific accusations often had discrete and diverse individual functions, they nevertheless occurred within a communal context structured by social relations. By making accusations, people affirmed their allegiances, allied themselves with the powerful against the powerless, and severed whatever bonds they may have had with the Jews in their hometown. If the accusations in Konitz in 1900 foreshadowed the coming collapse of communal solidarity we associate with the Third Reich, they also tell a wider story about the fragility of individual human bonds.

  This sixteenth-century woodcut suggests the symbolic reversal underlying what might be called the Christian performance of ritual murder.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Performing Ritual Murder

  There can be no society that does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and collective ideas that make its unity and personality.

  —EMILE DURKHEIM

  The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties, replacing them with menance and subjugation.

  Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does mor
e than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

  —TONl MORRISON,

  Nobel lecture in literature, 1993

  I

  Aremarkable and horrific event occurred on July 10, 1941, in the Polish town of Jedwabne. The town, which had been under Soviet occupation, suddenly came under German control, and as part of the “final solution,” the Germans ordered that the local Jews be killed, The Poles living in Jedwabne alongside their Jewish neighbors not only acquiesced but carried out the task themselves. Armed with axes and nail-studded clubs, they rounded up seventy-five Jews and, while beating them, forced them to carry a heavy monument of Lenin to a designated place. The Jews were then made to dig a large ditch in which to bury the monument; when they finished, the Poles butchered them with axes and tossed their mutilated corpses into the hole. Later that day, the Poles rounded up the rest of the Jews, beat them mercilessly, and herded them into a barn, which had been doused with kerosene. The Poles then set the barn on fire and burned to death all the Jews inside.1

  The “ordinary Poles” of Jedwabne, as Jan T. Gross writes in Neighbors, had become “willing executioners” in a massacre that evoked a “deeper, more archaic layer” of anti-Semitic violence, recalling the primitive savagery of pogroms, as well as the horrible brutalities that followed the ritual-murder charges of earlier centuries.2 Like the perpetrators in these earlier incidents, the Poles of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbors: they tortured them in symbolically meaningful ways (reminiscent of the mockery of Christ carrying the cross) and ended the ordeal by burning all of them in a massive firestorm.