The Butcher's Tale
Page 18
In the Konitz riots, lynching was another threat freighted with meaning and horrific associations. Baron von Zedlitz ceaselessly worried that the crowd armed with sticks and clubs would drag Adolph Lewy from his bed in order to satisfy its lust for “lynch justice.” He had also heard that on May 28 the crowd intended to liberate Hoffmann, and, as Zedlitz wrote, “no one doubts that lynch justice against the Lewy family would have followed.”41 Although we primarily associate lynch justice with the postbellum American South, German crowds nearly lynched a number of people during the Revolution of 1848 and intermittently in the wake of ordinary crimes thereafter.42 Admittedly, these instances bore none of the harrowing features of racially motivated torture, mutilation, and cruelty endemic to Euro-American lynching of African Americans. In Germany, the ritual did not culminate as it did in roughly five thousand cases in the United States between the end of the American Civil War and 1968—in actual human sacrifice.43
Still, such a sacrifice was indeed intimated and remained a real danger, partly through the popular association with the American practice, partly because such deadly violence against Jews had occurred many times in the long history of ritual-murder accusations. The parallels between American lynching and German violence against Jews prove revealing. Like the accusations that led to lynching in the American South, ritual-murder accusations often focused on sexual defilement across lines of religion and race, and they almost always targeted a man, who was then tortured and murdered. But whereas American lynching involved a single human sacrifice, the violence of ritual-murder accusations often widened to include the whole community (since Jews allegedly acted in collusion). And whereas the burning cross often endowed American lynchings with an unmistakably sacral symbol, ritual-murder accusations had become increasingly secular, though not completely, and as late as 1892 in Neuss, following the Xanten case, “large blood red crosses” were painted on Jewish houses. Finally, whereas real human sacrifice continued to occur in the United States, the rituals on the streets of Germany remained, at least in Konitz in 1900, just that: rituals.
In Konitz, the rioters simulated the sacrifice of the Jews of their hometown. The events hastened to a climax in which the Christian community, believing itself aggrieved and sinned against, turned and turned violent. In this “redressive” phase of the ritual, the Jews of Konitz barricaded themselves in their houses and huddled in corners, where—blinds down, lights out, their rage repressed—they prayed.44 A demonstration of power and a spectacle of public degradation, the ritual imparted to the Jews of Konitz a sense of humiliation and power-lessness, which no doubt lingered for a very long time. When Rabbi Kellermann left Konitz to live in Berlin, he kept a stone on his writing desk; it was a stone, his son later recalled, that “had smashed his window during the anti-Semitic riots in Konitz, the little town in West Prussia where he had served as a rabbi.”45 The stone had cast him from a community of which he had once been a part, and it reminded him of why he was now in Berlin.
As the stone on Rabbi Kellermann’s desk in Berlin suggests, the sacrifice of the Jews was symbolic in nature, not literal, for the stone was thrown in the midst of a performance. The theatrical link here is not purely metaphorical, but rather suggests the logic of the events. The imperatives of theater and its staging governed the movements and gestures of the people in the streets, including the use of resonant elements and themes, such as fire and stones, and the appropriation of a familiar ritual-murder script passed down through generations. The significance of the performance emerges only, though, when the script of the past is brought together with the improvisations of the present, and the actors and the audience lose themselves in the drama. In this sense, performance elicits real emotions the anger of the crowd, its lust for vengeance—which have been rehearsed and learned.46
These emotions remain powerful, despite the fictive character of the performance. The Stanford prison experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1972, demonstrated that role-playing can dramatically influence people’s behavior and emotional state. In this experiment, college students were divided into two groups, prison guards and prisoners, each group outfitted with uniforms appropriate to their roles and brought to the basement of the Stanford University psychology building, remodeled to simulate the alienating conditions of an actual prison. Within days, student guards began to humiliate student prisoners, inflicting degrading and dehumanizing punishments on them. And they did this, moreover, with all the seeming conviction of real guards beating real prisoners, fists clenched, muscles taut, their teeth grinding like stones.47
It remains to ask how such emotions are engendered and how the beliefs that accompany them are instilled. With respect to the anti-Semitic riots, a feature of the ritual, its lack of verbal expression, provides one answer. In ordinary language, statements lead to further statements, sometimes in agreement, sometimes in contradiction; but one does not argue with a song or contradict a chanting crowd. Slogans are either repeated or there is silence.48 In the streets, neither conversation nor argument, but only repetition occurred. “The first and most obvious of the implications of abandoning linguistic choice,” the anthropologist Maurice Bloch writes, “is that an utterance instead of being followed by an infinity of others can be followed by only a few or possibly only one.”49 This narrowing effect is heightened in the context of ritual, which, according to Bloch, brings forth the emotional assent that we associate with belief.
It is, then, the context of the words the situation in which they are uttered—that determines their salience and modulates their power. The philosopher J. L. Austin was among the first to consider that for certain classes of speech, context, rather than reference, determines meaning.50 The force of hate speech, for example, depends on who utters the words and who is listening. When the farmhand Laskowski “so ranted and raved against the Jews” in a country inn, he made purely referential statements of little immediate importance, but when he denounced Adolph Lewy, he initiated a chain of events for the Jewish butcher.51 What, then, resulted when he yelled, “Jews out” and “Beat the Jews to death,” as a member of a menacing crowd brandishing sticks and torches?
That the force of words cannot be severed from context is now immediately apparent. The threatening pose gives the statement a perilous thrust; language is not just spoken—it is performed. “Speaking,” to cite Judith Butler, “is a bodily act,” and as such can slide into the juridically different domain of conduct—i.e., that of action.52 Words, in this case, wound. “Oppressive language,” to quote Toni Morrison, “does more than represent violence; it is violence.”53
To imagine the stakes of Morrison’s remark, consider the way in which the law traditionally argues the converse. Punishable conduct usually occurs when property is violated, when the flaming cross is burned on the black man’s lawn, when the windows of Adolph Lewy are smashed. Compensation typically concerns the damage to the lawn or the windowpane and not, emphatically, the pain of the person violated.54 And yet we know this pain exists; it sears because this is a ritual with a history, and a script known to both sides, and because it rein-scribes a relation of domination and subjection. We know that this is an open wound. The real force of the speech act is to slice into it again.
The crowd’s cry of “Jews out!” was not an exhortation to the authorities but an utterance that barred Jews from community, because community, as we have seen, is constructed by the stories told, the history invoked, and the accusations made by its members. A murder did not follow the call to “beat the Jews to death,” though three years down the road in nearby Stegers, a Jewish man from Warsaw was mortally beaten by four men in an inn, his tormentors forcing him to kneel and recite the Lord’s Prayer before striking him dead.55 Still, one might argue that the riots brought about “social death,” in the sense described by the sociologist Orlando Patterson. In his explication of slavery, Patterson has described the slave as living a kind of “social death”: controlled without consent or contract, utterly bereft of autonomy,
alienated from birth on, past and future erased, marginalized utterly, there but not there.56 This does not describe the Jews in Konitz in 1900, though it comes close to characterizing the concentration camp universe forty years later.57 Patterson’s description suggests that social death was achieved, and then reinscribed, in ritual, in particular in rituals of degradation. And this, in turn, is what would give the words “beat the Jews to death” force: in referring to the devastations of the past, they elicited trauma in the encoded memory of the present. Spoken in the context of the riots, the words did not kill but they enacted and performed, and what they performed was a murder: a ritual murder.
Not the Jews but their Christian accusers performed the ritual murder. This reversal, I would submit, is the key that gives us access to the meaning of the events in Konitz. Just as it unlocks the motivation behind the telling of the butcher’s tale, it reveals the hidden script of the blood libel that bedeviled Christian relations with Jews for nearly a millennium.
IV
If rituals have a climax, they also have a denouement, what Victor Turner terms reintegration. In Konitz, this did not simply mean the reintegration of the Jews, though this occurred to some extent as well. More generally, it means the shift from the short-lived fever pitch of collective action to a community that existed, like all communities, in the dull gleam of the everyday. Rioting workers and artisans returned to their roles as ordinary Germans. Men who broke the law bent to its rules. There were arrests and prosecutions, ninety-two for Konitz and the area around it, with charges ranging from disturbing the peace and rebellion to property damage and assault and battery. Save for isolated cases in the town of Stolp, though, jail sentences never stretched beyond a year, and most were significantly shorter. Many of the rioters simply paid fines, and not a few remained too young to be prosecuted.58 While twenty-nine-year-old Moritz Levy languished in prison, rioters had already returned to their families, jobs, and school.
As people resumed their everyday lives, they found that the events had changed the community. One could see this in the timidity with which local notables addressed what they, at some level, must have seen as the evident mendacity of the butcher’s tale. Despite the private misgivings of some of its members, the town council, in a public meeting of July 26, 1900, provided Gustav Hoffmann with the public declaration of honor (Ehrenerklärung). Its members sat silently as the butcher reiterated his opinion that “the Jews wanted to destroy [him] by any means so that the Jewish murderer of Winter would remain unpunished.”59 The increasingly anti-Semitic consensus of the town fathers was further evident in the summons, dated November 24, 1900, to found a local organization, the Association to Solve the Konitz Murder, whose purpose was to “to help solve the murder and to ruthlessly pursue every clue.”60 The emphasis upon these last two words betrayed the real goal of the organization: to track down clues that incriminated the Jews, who the anti-Semitic lawyer Carl Gebauer and his associates believed were being let off the hook. “If one only put together a compendium of the clues brought forth and proved by the Christian population,” one of the organization’s declarations averred, “the murder as well as the perpetrators and accomplices would be as clear as day.”61 The summons was signed by the most important men in local affairs, by the pastor and the priest, by all the members of the town council, by important lords of manorial estates, and by the deputies to the provincial diet, the Prussian Landtag, and the German Reichstag.62 By this time, in the wake of the riots, the center of power had shifted from the angry and capricious people in the crowd to the bourgeois men of Main Street, who once again became the principal organizers of the collective enmity directed against Berlin officials and the Jews next door.
Not everyone in Konitz and the surrounding area took part in the anti-Semitic consensus. Some resisted: the mayor, Georg Deditius, for example; the county official Baron von Zedlitz, who publicly declared “as superstition the idea that the Jewish religious community carried out a ritual murder”; the two non-Jewish liberals in the town council, the merchant Friedrich Paetzold and the high school teacher Dr. Ignaz Praetorius; and Dr. Paul Petras, a local publisher who founded a left-liberal newspaper intended to combat the infamies of the Konitzer Zeitung and who would pen an incisive critique of the events in Konitz.63
There may have been others whose protests went unrecorded, but the fate of Petras’s newspaper suggests otherwise. In December 1900, he and other liberals attempted to publish a new local paper, the Ostdeutsche Zeitung (also known as the Konitzer Anzeiger), which promised “impartiality,” to be “free of hatred,” and to “dedicate ourselves to Kaiser and Reich.”64 Its editors insisted that “there are in fact many upstanding people (who are not anti-Semites) in our area.” In the next sentence, however, the editors conceded, “Of course, they are silent now.”65
This oppressive communal silence reflected the stillness of complicity and cowardice, the dead echo of a process that had started early on. “Respected members of the Jewish community, who had previously moved in different Christian social circles, were avoided like the plague,” one paper reported in late April. “In the taverns one no longer speaks with them; their greetings are not returned.”66 Hofrichter, the schoolteacher, refused not only to speak with Jews but also to extend his hand to anyone he saw conversing with them.67 Soon taverns and shops followed the ways of the street, where Jews “are constantly insulted.”68 The Golden Lion advertised itself as a place where you could get “good, home-cooked meals, refreshing drinks, comfortable beds and lodging free of Jews.”69 And Prussian soldiers, stationed in Konitz until the following year, had to safeguard the funeral of an old Jewish woman.70
Thus the divide deepened. It is difficult to gauge the breadth of the chasm that separated Christians and Jews: no questionnaires were distributed, no public opinion polls taken, and subsequent elections offer only mixed and indirect evidence. It is true, on the one hand, that the supporters of Mayor Deditius won a county election in 1903 against an explicitly anti-Semitic party.71 Yet, in the same year, in a Reichstag election based on universal manhood suffrage in the neighboring and predominantly German district of Schlochau-Flatow, the anti-Semites received a third of the vote in the first round of the election. In the second round, after no single party received a majority, the anti-Semitic candidate ran against the Polish Party, and received a stunning two-thirds of the vote. This means that nearly all the Germans, except perhaps the Jews who were left, and the Catholics who followed the dictates of their party and supported the Poles, voted for the anti-Semites.72
Fewer and fewer Jews stayed in Konitz. The exodus had already been underway before the events of 1900, but since the murder and the riots that followed, the Jewish community had, according to the estimate of Mayor Deditius in 1902, declined by almost a third.73 The Lewys had followed the Meyers to Berlin, and by 1905, according to the local address book, Wolf Israelski, Heinrich Friedländer, and Cantor David Nossek had left as well.74 We also know that Rabbi Kellermann moved to Berlin and that, a bright moment in bleak time, Dumb Alex got his wish and with his family was able to emigrate to America.75 As a result, the character of the Danzigerstrasse changed markedly, even as the street, and the downtown generally, remained marred by mutual incrimination.
Lawsuits, the most public manifestation of this mutual incrimination, abounded. Before the cantor left, Gustav Hoffmann charged David Nossek with slander, because the cantor had claimed that Hoffmann knew something about the murder.76 He also sued a member of the synagogue council, the merchant Soldin, and brought suit against a Jewish butcher’s apprentice, Jacob Heymann, who claimed that Hoffmann “carved up the body in order to better carry it away.”77 Never more than two steps behind her father, Martha Hoffmann (now Lehmann) sued the editor of a satirical magazine for suggesting that her anti-Semitic remarks placed her in the close company of the plebeian mob.78 Mayor Deditius charged the schoolteacher Hofrichter with insulting a state official, and Hofrichter returned the favor and charged Deditius with the sa
me for saying that he, Hofrichter, had pressured others to give false testimony.79 Weichel, a teacher, also sued a number of journalists for defamatory remarks.80 Inspector Block charged a conservative member of the town council, Hermann Stöckebrant, with perjury, and the town council member, in turn, brought suit against the police inspector for slander.81 There was also a question whether or not to charge Martha Hoffmann, who had actively worked to condemn Moritz Lewy, with perjury. The authorities, though, were timid and desisted from another row with the butcher and his outspoken elder daughter.82 Finally, an anti-Semitic lawyer in Berlin persuaded the bereaving father of Ernst Winter to sue Adolph Lewy in a civil suit for the murder of his son.83