37 pages • 1 hour read
Helmut Walser SmithThe Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
On Sunday, March 11, 1900, a murder was committed in the West Prussian town of Konitz, in present-day Poland. The body parts of the victim began to turn up in various sections of town two days later, each cut neatly and wrapped in packing paper. Many of the townspeople immediately blamed the murder on the town’s Jewish community. The accusation hearkened back to a centuries-old myth that Jews carried out ritual murders of Christians in order to use their blood to make matzo for their Passover meal.
The murder accusation led to an outbreak of violent riots against the town’s Jewish population, with the Prussian army called in to keep order. This antisemitic tumult foreshadowed the events of the Holocaust some 40 years later, yet it was seemingly not in keeping with recent German history. After the abdication of the authoritarian chancellor Otto Von Bismarck in 1890, Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II had pursued more democratic tendencies. The German economy, literacy rates, and educational system improved. Yet antisemitism remained a menacing undercurrent in German society. Pushed to the fringe, it festered and would eventually emerge with full force in the Nazi era.
Speaking in the first person, Smith explains how he was born in a small town in Germany and grew up in a small town in the United States, how he came to understand the social atmosphere of such towns, and how he later came to study the history of German antisemitism. Yet none of this prepared him for the extent of prejudice found in the story of Konitz as he researched it for his book.
The Konitz case provides an opportunity to see, on a small scale, how antisemitic rumor and innuendo played into existing patterns of political and religious beliefs and prejudices.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Murder and Retribution”
Konitz citizens Johannes Winter and Hermann Lange, while searching in the local lake (the Mönchsee) are shocked to find the dismembered torso of Winter’s son, Ernst. Ernst Winter was an 18-year-old gymnasium (college prep school) student who was murdered on March 11, 1900. Tall, athletic, and good-looking, Winter was known as an overtly sexual man. He was the only son of a Protestant family with four sisters and a construction worker father. Winter’s body parts are neatly severed from his body, completely drained of blood, and wrapped in packing paper. The job seems to have been done by an expert hand, either a butcher or surgeon. Through an autopsy that examines the contents of his stomach, doctors are able to pin down the time of day (shortly before 7:00 pm) that Winter died.
According to the county official, Gottlieb von Zedlitz, “nearly the whole population of the town of Konitz” are convinced that Winter was the victim of a Jewish ritual murder (29). The people base this belief on several “facts,” notably, the proximity of the murder to the Easter holiday, the draining of blood from the corpse, and suspicious sounds heard from the town synagogue at the time of the murder.
Widespread vandalism and hectoring of Jewish citizens continue, prompting the mayor of Konitz, Georg Deditius, to issue a warning. Two Jews in particular find themselves the object of suspicion: the butcher Adolph Lewy and the skinner Wolf Israelski. A witness claims to have seen Israelski, an outcast in the town, carrying a sack—supposedly containing Winter’s head—across town. Israelski is arrested; the crowds turn upon other Jewish citizens in a series of antisemitic riots in which the town’s synagogue is vandalized. These riots become so intense that local military forces are called to restore order.
Adolph Lewy, whom some townspeople claim to have seen sharpening his saw two days before the murder, finds his business faltering because of deepening suspicions. Yet when the special investigator from Berlin, Johann Braun, arrives in town to pursue the case, he first interrogates not Lewy but the town’s Christian butcher, Gustav Hoffmann (who is Lewy’s close neighbor) and Hoffmann’s 15-year-old daughter, Anna.
Hoffmann is a respected, upstanding Lutheran family man with nine children. Even though Ernst Winter is known to have flirted with Anna, the notion that Hoffmann murdered Winter is considered “psychologically almost unthinkable” (45) by most citizens, and he produces a solid alibi. However, the summons of Hoffmann and his daughter inflames the town’s antisemites. They form a “citizens’ committee” and call as witnesses Bernhard Masloff, a “crude, barely literate” (47) bricklayer, and his mother-in-law Anna Ross, who produce evidence implicating Lewy in the murder.
Braun arrests Masloff and Ross for perjury. This unleashes a new wave of antisemitic rioting and threats of “lynch justice” to free the Christian detainees and punish Lewy. Soldiers from the Prussian army arrive to keep order, and the mayor issues a plea to citizens not to go out of their homes after dark. Arsonists set the town synagogue property on fire, and rioters throw rocks at Lewy’s house and ravage the inside of the synagogue. Antisemitic newspapers claim that the fires were started by the Jewish community to destroy incriminating evidence. To quell the violence, Zedlitz places the town of Konitz under military occupation.
Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis
In the Prologue, Smith provides personal testimony by describing how his background as a German American man growing up in small towns prepared him for the investigation of the story of Konitz. This touch lends credibility to his account of the story and shows his personal involvement and interest in it.
In Chapter 1, Smith establishes the history and character of the Jewish community in Germany, “perhaps the most integrated Jewish minority in all of Europe” (31). With the founding of the Second German Empire in 1871, German Jews had attained full emancipation. Among the prominent and accomplished Jewish citizens of Germany were scientists Paul Ehrlich and Albert Einstein and artist Max Liebermann. German Jews very much identified as German citizens despite enduring discrimination. At the same time, the prospect of over-assimilation through conversion, marriages, and weakened religious practice troubled many Jews.
On the other side, antisemitism continued to grow and to transform into a movement based on race and nationality rather than religion. Where previously Jews had been seen as the enemies of Christendom, now they were conceived as the enemies of Germandom. In the wake of economic depression, German politics moved away from the liberalism of the 1870s. A number of pieces of antisemitic legislation were enacted, limiting or expelling Jewish immigrants from the country.
The rise of antisemitism in Germany was reflected abroad in the Dreyfus Affair, in which a French Jewish military officer was convicted of betraying his country. Although later exonerated and pardoned, Dreyfus became a lightning rod for growing antisemitism.
Another notable precursor of the Konitz case is the murder of Agnes Hruza, a seamstress in the small Bohemian town of Polna. When her body is found drained of blood, townspeople accuse the Jews of having carried out ritual murder. The case has parallels with that of Konitz, including the figure of Leopold Hilsner, a marginal Jewish outcast much like Wolf Israelski who is accused of having committed the murder. The Polna case was very much on the minds of the people of Konitz when the Winter murder erupted.
Antisemitic sentiment strongly influences the investigations into the Winter murder. In the absence of leads, the local police are all too ready to listen antisemitic rumors. These often come from big-city journalists who have taken residence in Konitz to drive the narrative in a certain direction. By contrast, the inspector Braun has “nothing but scorn” for the notion of Jewish ritual murder (45).
