The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  As an act of unspeakable violence, the massacre in Jedwabne also raises difficult questions for our examination of the riots in Konitz that followed the murder of Ernst Winter in the summer of 1900. These riots involved a great many people, more than a thousand in the major demonstrations in Konitz and hundreds of people in surrounding towns like Baldenburg and Hammerstein. The riots were no doubt terrifying, but they did not descend into a tempest of destruction. As enmity deepened and tempers flared, instead of wanton carnage, a familiar routine of ominous threats and symbolical gestures mediated the forces of hatred, animosity, and exclusion.

  There are two simple answers, each inadequate in its own way, as to why, for the Germans of Konitz, it sufficed ritually to enact violence whereas the Poles of Jedwabne indulged in a bloody massacre. First, one might view primitive anti-Semitic violence as the historical heritage of the east—the traditional landscape of pogroms—and locate a more ideologically driven anti-Semitism within German history, leading inexorably to the systematic extermination of the Holocaust. Yet this explanation disregards both the pervasiveness of ideologically driven anti-Semitism in Poland and Russia and the prevalence of pogrom-like, anti-Semitic violence in modern German and western European history.3 The second, more convincing answer, centers on the position of the state. In 1900, imperial Germany safeguarded the rule of law and ensured the protection of its citizens, including Jews. Four decades later, the Third Reich attempted to annihilate the Jews and, as an occupying power in the Polish village of Jedwabne, encouraged violence. In this Hobbesian perspective, the state remains the only barrier between us and the hatchets of our neighbors, and, as a corollary, in 1900 only the Prussian army saved the Jews of Konitz from the clubs and axes of “ordinary Germans.”

  This explanation, aside from taking a dim view of human nature, slights the potentially civilizing influence of culture and history on humankind’s propensity for violence. It also ignores the import of what actually happened in Konitz, where a symbolic ritual of violence, not an actual massacre, was the outlet for Christian animosity toward Jews, thus confirming Durkheim’s insight that through ritual action communities reaffirm the collective sentiments that bind them together. Rather than reduce our explanation of the events in Konitz to a tough-minded platitude (they were all “willing executioners”), we can now interpret the actions of the crowd as we would a performance or a ritual. This act of interpretation does not exonerate the townspeople of Konitz. For even with respect to especially heinous historical events, the task of historians cannot simply be to assess damage, count dead bodies, and assign blame; they must also analyze meaning and, to borrow the anthropologist’s metaphor, “strain to read over the shoulder” of the people who make history.4

  II

  The crowds that filled the streets of Konitz and its neighboring towns in the twilight of the early summer were composed of different groups of people, some with central roles in the violent drama, others with cameo appearances. The human landscape was complex in this part of the German Empire, with prominent differences between Germans and Poles, Protestants and Catholics, rich and poor.

  Contrary to what some German officials believed at the time, the main force behind anti-Semitic agitation was German, not Polish.5 There were some exceptions, however. The anti-Semitic riots in Czersk, an industrial town with a predominantly Polish population, and the village jacqueries in the smaller agrarian communities of Bruss, Wielle, and Karschin drew their energy from angry Polish and Kashubian peasants. Throughout April and May, the Poles had eagerly consumed the anti-Semitic venom of the immensely popular Gazetta Grudzionska, whose articles on the murder case, though derived from the German press, no doubt inflamed the Polish population.6

  The German population was itself divided between Protestants and Catholics, though the vast majority of uprisings occurred in predominantly Protestant towns, especially in eastern Pomerania and in the predominantly German counties of Schlochau, Flatow, and Deutsch Crone in West Prussia. Significantly, anti-Semitic violence had already erupted in these communities two decades earlier, following the Neustettin synagogue fire of 1881.7

  In July 1881, hundreds of demonstrators marched through the streets of Neustettin chanting “hep-hep” and “out with the Jews,” intoning as they ransacked houses and smashed the windows of stores that they would beat the Jews to death.8 From Neustettin, the riots spread throughout the region: in Hammerstein, locals attacked a Jewish judge and six mounted police proved unable to control the mob;9 in Bärenwalde, eight miles northwest of Neustettin, small bands of artisans and apprentices shouted anti-Semitic epithets, hurled stones, and damaged the synagogue.10 The worst not of all occurred in Schivelbein, nearly thirty miles west of Neustettin, where a crowd armed with crowbars and axes broke into stores, looted the wares, and tossed the furniture onto the street. Women participated as well, stealing fabric and mockingly wrapping the downtown lantern posts in cloth.11 A dozen more riots flared up in the area, six of a more minor sort and six that involved large, angry, violent crowds. A number of these riots took place in towns in which violence would begin again in the summer of 1900: in Stolp, for example, and in Baldenburg, Rummelsburg, and Jastrow. Finally, there were riots in Konitz, which lasted eight days and consisted mainly of bands of youth shouting anti-Semitic slogans and hurling stones through windows.12

  By contrast, the legacy of violence against the Jews was less pronounced in German Catholic towns, even though German Catholics read the Westpreussisches Volksblatt, a provincial Catholic newspaper that peddled a mixture of piety and prejudice– “sensational stories” and “unbelievable idiocies,” as Baron von Zedlitz complained.13 It is, of course, possible that Catholic peasants and townsmen, inspired by these “unbelievable idiocies,” rode into Protestant towns to participate in the violence against the Jews—town air makes one free, a German proverb ominously reminds us.

  In the large anti-Semitic gatherings, especially in Konitz itself, the crowd was diverse, readily crossing lines of nationality and religion. It also included women, who, if we believe Baron von Zedlitz, “had become the main proponents of a wild hatred of the Jews.”14 Certainly, the women emboldened the men of the crowd to take more vigorous action—to storm the synagogue and ransack its interior. The men who made up the violent core were mostly young, single, lower-class workers and artisans, some with previous arrests. “The smallest part [of the rioters] are to be found among the taxpayers,” Zedlitz wrote. “Idlers, half-grown boys who have temporary jobs here, servants who are roaming around the streets without the permission of their masters, these,” he believed, “are the elements that make up the rabble in Konitz.”15 But behind this core group, a wider crowd shared the evident anger of the rioters, tossing stones and desecrating holy sites. Though perhaps biased, Zedlitz thought that only “a relatively small proportion” of the middle class joined this wider crowd.16

  The realm of the middle classes proved not to be the streets but rather the meeting rooms of organizations like the Bürgerverein (Citizens Club), the Masonic lodge, and the patriotic leagues. Founded in 1874 as a liberal organization, the Bürgerverein had become increasingly conservative over the years; by 1900, it was dominated by men like Maximilian Meyer (a schoolteacher and the anti-Semitic foreman of the jury in the trials of Masloff and Ross), Julius Klotz, a city councillor and factory owner, and the anti-Semitic lawyers Gebauer and Vogel.17 The Bürgerverein voiced its dismay at the violence in the street and took umbrage at the lack of loyalty shown to Prussian officials, yet, whether out of conviction or out of cowardice, the Bürgerverein failed to blunt the riots’ specifically anti-Semitic edge.18 The second major middle-class venue was the Masonic lodge, the St. Johannis Lodge, Friedrich of True Friendship, which belonged to the national-conservative branch of the Prussian mother lodge (Zu den drei Weltkugeln), an organization that had proved especially vigilant in excluding Jews since the 1880s.19 The ubiquitous lawyer Max Vogel was the grandmaster (Meister vom Stuhl) of the lodge in Konitz, which coun
ted among its longtime members local notables such as the county medical examiner, Dr. Gustav Müller; the school inspector, Heinrich Rhode (whose wife’s handkerchief, as we shall soon see, was found near Winter’s decapitated head); and the former mayor.20 There were still other venues of sociability—patriotic associations, like the veterans’ association and the shooting club (again with Vogel as its presiding official), various church groups, and various charity and professional organizations.21

  The differences between the rioters in the streets and the leaders of the local establishment were differences in form but not substance. Mostly day laborers from the countryside, journeymen and apprentices, and industrial workers, the rioters expressed themselves in a rough and ready language of action: they threw rocks, beat houses with sticks, and threatened physical violence. Eschewing the chaos of the crowd, respectable middle-aged men preferred to pass orderly anti-Semitic resolutions.22 For the rioters, actions spoke louder than words; for the men of the middle class, words, as Louis Althusser once said of concepts, cut like a knife.

  III

  While Konitz’s respectable citizens may have been horror-struck by the mob at the front door of their Jewish neighbors, they tacitly supported the actions of the rioters. These actions offer clues as to the meaning of the riots, not least because, despite a profusion of reports, we have little evidence of what the crowd actually said. Without banners or manifestos or discernible slogans, save for “The Jews slaughter our children” and “Moritz, Moritz, give back his head,” it is difficult to determine the message of the crowd.23 Most reports simply refer to the call “hep-hep,” the old and omnipresent slogan of anti-Semitic violence, which was introduced during the riots of 1819. Even at the time, commentators were unsure of the meaning of the slogan; explanations ranged from the acronym for “Hierosolyma [the Greek and Latin word for Jerusalem] est perdita” to an abbreviation of a German word for Jews, Hebräer.24 Sometimes “hep-hep” was paired with “Jews out” or “beat the Jews to death,” though these more violent threats appear less often in the reports. Partly, their absence in the historical record reflects the prejudices of county officials who no doubt thought the shouts of the mob unworthy of their elevated pen. Even so, there remained among the rioters a genuine poverty of expression, the effect of which was to place the burden of meaning almost solely onto the highly ritualized aggression that flared up throughout the night.25 From the occupation of the marketplace to the smashing of windows, to the attempts to set the synagogue ablaze, to the threats to beat the last Jew to death, the rioters in the streets of Konitz reenacted a familiar drama whose historical resonances and tacit meanings, like those of a text, can be interpreted.

  The riots in Konitz unmistakably evoked the historical violence of Holy Week, which occurred throughout the Middle Ages, typically involving the stoning of houses and ghetto walls, sometimes as a prelude to bloody assaults. Beginning in the thirteenth century, this violence was overtly linked to theater—oftentimes literally following passion plays, in which local Christians staged the suffering of Christ, and integrated representations of Jews as killers of Christ into the performance. Suffused with religious meaning, the riots thus enacted a form of ritual vengeance. “Let his blood be on us and on our children,” the crowd cries out in Matthew 27:25. The plays connected the Christian community of the present to its foundational moment in the past—a moment, moreover, that also marked the primal event of the Judeo-Christian encounter. In this sense, as the historian David Nirenberg has pointed out, Holy Week violence tied the two communities together through ritual. Only through staged violence against the Jews could Christians preserve the social memory of their origins.26

  In contrast to this implicit connection, Holy Week was a time of sharpened social boundaries between Christians and Jews. According to the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, Jews were not allowed to show themselves “during the last three days before Easter … for the reason that some of them … are not afraid to mock the Christians who maintain the memory of the most holy Passion.”27 The violent actions of the crowd reinforced these boundaries. As the people threw rocks and beat Jewish houses with sticks, they symbolically marked off a ghetto behind whose walls Jews were forced to hover for protection.

  In some cases of Holy Week violence, however, the people transgressed the symbolic restraints inherent in ritualized violence, and, to borrow an expression from E. Valentine Daniel, the “taming capacities of culture” failed.28 This collapse was typically associated with ritual murder and host desecration charges, perilous alibis of exceedingly violent aggression. Thus the brutal Rintfleisch massacres commenced in the town of Rötingen a fortnight after Easter in 1298.29 In Pulkau, Austria, in 1338, they killed and burned the Jews at a time when Easter and Passover coincided.30 In Upper Silesia in 1401, “the Jews were burnt outside of Glogau after Easter.”31 The tradition held in the modern era, too—during the Holy Week of 1881, pogroms began in Elisavetgrad in Ukraine. Well into the nineteenth century, the force and terror of Holy Week violence drew its power from the collective memory of these transgressions, from times when the barely controlled aggression of Christians washed over into unrestrained massacre.

  These ruptures notwithstanding, the salient feature of Holy Week violence generally, and the ritualized aggression in Konitz specifically, was its boundedness: rioters stoned Jewish houses but did not enter them; the crowd threatened to kill the Jews but usually did not. In this sense, the Jews of Konitz well understood that they were safer in town, where the protocols of ritual held, than on the open road in the countryside.32 The enhanced presence of the police in the towns also helped restrain physical violence, but until the army arrived, there was a disquieting discrepancy between the number of demonstrators and the forces of law. Equally unsettling was the aggression directed against symbols of authority seen as protecting the Jews: the attacks on the mayor, the brutalizing of the inspectors from Berlin, and the stoning of the Prussian army as it passed Tuchel by train. A sense of community was constructed against the Jews, but also, and just as significantly, against their perceived protectors. In this context, the crowd’s anger was especially aroused when officials turned their suspicions on the Christian, not the Jewish, butcher. “We won’t let him be arrested,” they shouted, and “if you take him away, we’re going too.33 Even though the demonstrators did not directly challenge the government’s legitimacy, they nevertheless criticized what they perceived as the government’s attack on the Christian community and its failure to bring the Jews to justice. And if one takes the gestures of the crowd seriously, they must be seen as also usurping, at least in form, the government’s role. For it was the demonstrators who now pursued, identified, and, by casting stones, judged and punished.34

  The riots revealed a temporal structure that roughly corresponded to the four stages—breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration—that, according to the anthropologist Victor Turner, constitute the nearly universal progression of ritual action. Like the standardized plot lines of a familiar story, these stages framed not only the unfolding of the riots but also their meaning.

  Each of the riots started with a breach of the rules governing everyday relations between Christians and Jews, which until the murder and the ensuing riots had by all accounts been stable.35 This initial breach whether the pummeling of houses with stones or physical attacks on the streets almost always occurred in the evenings or on holy days, marking their status as events that occurred outside the weave of the quotidian—in the selvage of the “liminal.” The space of the liminal is that of the margin: if structure and hierarchy mark our everyday life, the liminal is the place where order is subverted, roles reversed, rules broken, and authority challenged.36 The first stage of the dramatic sequence also witnessed the slow accumulation of exceedingly large crowds in concentric circles of active participants, complicit supporters, and curious onlookers: the actors, the chorus, and the audience. During the initial breach, when nothing more than epithets and st
ones were tossed, these roles were still differentiated, with only limited emotional bonds connecting the three groups.

  As the authorities attempted to disperse the crowd, threatening even to open fire upon it, these bonds hardened, and, in this moment of crisis, the larger crowd of onlookers chose sides. In the gathering heat of the moment, the community that emerged included Germans and Poles, Protestants and Catholics, peasants and workers, subalterns and shopkeepers, artisans and their apprentices, women as well as men, young and old. Emphatically, it did not include the authorities, let alone the Jews. What linked the Christians in the crowd was more than just a common antipathy toward authorities and Jews, however; it was also lust for revenge. In this sense, the moment of crisis that galvanized the community of demonstrators also served as the starting point of more serious transgressions, including attempts to burn the synagogue and threats to carry out “lynch justice.” Symbolically significant, these ritual acts betray the deeper meanings of the riots.

  The attempt to burn down the synagogue resonated with the biblical significance of fire, which, as we know from the Book of Deuteronomy, is one of humankind’s oldest symbols of purification. From one direction, its flames envelop external enemies. “A consuming fire; / he [Yahweh] will destroy them, he will subjugate them before you, / so that you can dispossess them” (9:3). From another, it symbolically reduces internal deviants to blackened embers—“so you shall burn out the evil from your midst” (21:21). It is also the biblically prescribed means of eradicating the trace of religious difference, and in this sense the rioters in Konitz were following customs as ancient and timeless as ritual itself.

  Rituals draw not only on symbolic archetypes but on histories of actual destruction as well. In anti-Semitic riots, the burning of the synagogue recalled earlier occasions when men, women, and children remained inside the blazing temple and whole Jewish communities were reduced to dust and ash. The towns and cities of central Europe were replete with markers harking back to this earlier time. In Deggendorf, where all the Jews had been burned, a plaque in the local church informed parishioners that in 1338 “the Jews were killed by the Christians out of a zeal for justice pleasing to God.”37 In Büren and in Pulkau, the ditch known as the “Jewish ditch” (Judengrund or Judengrube) marks the place where Christians had burned Jews in the fourteenth century.38 The minster in Überlingen was constructed with the burial tablets of Jews who found their death on a pyre.39 And in numerous places, Nuremberg most prominent among them, temples of Christian worship were erected upon the site of former synagogues and collapsed ghettos, remnants of a Jewish community destroyed, partly by massacre, partly by fire, in the wake of the Black Death.40 In contrast to their forefathers in earlier centuries, the people of Konitz in the summer of 1900 did not intend actually to murder the Jews of their hometown, but as the intensity of their social drama deepened, they ignited a fire that called forth a history of purification, expulsion, and murder.