Annette von Droste-Huelshoff Die Judenbuche, 1842

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s ‘Die Judenbuche’ The Jew's Beech Tree (1842)


The subject of this one of the most highly praised and yet tirelessly discussed works of prose fiction in German literature is Die Judenbuche (The Jew’s Beech-tree) by Anne Droste-Hülshoff, a nineteenth-century German poetess and novelist with strong Roman Catholic convictions and a member of the lesser nobility in Westphalia, then a part of Prussia’s domains to the north of the Rhineland. To state the obvious, the novella’s title names a tree, not a person, not a theme and not a location, which places the work, along with Waiting for Godot and “The Pardoner’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales, among literary treatments of tree-centred symbolism in which a tree symbolizes life and death and calls the Garden of Eden and Calvary to mind. I conjecture that the cryptic reference to a ‘rude red tree’ in Dylan Thomas’ “Altarwise by OwlLight” integrates such religious imagery with the world of writing, books and the words and letters that compose them. After all, the word book derives from the common root of Buche and beech.
Its narrative core was not a pure invention created in the author’s mind but a given: a factual account of the events surrounding an unsolved murder case in which a Jewish moneylender was the victim and a certain rough character involved in forestry and timber trading in Westphalia the chief suspect. 1
In the judgment of literary historians Die Judenbuche has gone down as a very early example of the detective story, a genre that at least in embryonic form emerged in late Romantic fiction and stories written by Edgar Allan Poe. It could even be thought to betray the main features of a whodunit. While the protagonist Frederick Mergel poses the principal person under suspicion for the murder of the Jewish moneylender Aaron, other candidates for this role cannot be eliminated until the mystery is solved in the final line of the story, ostensibly at least, thanks to the translation of a sentence in Hebrew that had been carved into the bark of the beech-tree that marked the scene of the murder. The briefest of outlines may help to elucidate this issue.
The opening pages of the novella describe the social and geographical backdrop of the action, presenting a somewhat bleak picture of a remote area in Westphalia like the Wild West, where a state of lawlessness resulted in the illegal felling and spiriting away of trees on a massive scale, the local rangers proving powerless to interdict this nefarious activity, conducted as it was with great cunning and power of coordination. To modern ecologically conscious readers this account of the rape of natural resources will doubtlessly appear strikingly noteworthy and relevant. The focus of interest next turns to the family history of the protagonist Frederick Mergel. This commences by revealing the circumstances of his parentage and continues to unfold the main events that influenced the development of his character until the age of eighteen. His father confined his bouts of drunkenness to the weekend but not his habit of wife beating. His second wife was Frederick’s mother, a hardy, longsuffering and devout woman who tried her best to inculcate discipline and Christian virtue in her son, initially at least with limited success. Then tragedy struck. His father was killed, the murderer unknown, by the blow of an axe to his head; what is more, ominously enough, beside the beech tree so central to the plot and symbolism of the story.
Soon, his mother’s brother Simon Semmler, a very sinister character indeed, entered his life and as his adoptive father
exercised a pernicious influence on his life while at the same time encouraging him to gain greater self-confidence and become less moody. His fishlike physiognomy reflected his demonic inner self and his evident affinity with the devil himself, as when he told Frederick that his father was bound for hell as a consequence of his sinful life and his lack of an opportunity to receive the last unction and confess his sins.
He discouraged Frederick from going to confession for fear that the father confessor would be informed about misdemeanors in which he himself was implicated. From that point on Frederick became ever more lax in religious observance and lost his moral compass. On visits to Simon’s house he met John Nobody, a boy of his own age and strikingly similar to him in appearance. Officially he was an orphan but local gossip held that he was Simon’s illegitimate child. One night he was accosted by a forester who sought information as to the whereabouts of the timber thieves close by. He misdirected the forester unaware that the path he indicated would lead into an ambush that resulted in the forester’s death and Frederick’s sense of guilt and foreboding grew more burdensome.
By the age of eighteen Frederick had become something of a peacock among the beaus of the village. During an uproarious wedding festivity he paraded his fine looking pocket watch to impress bystanders only to be accosted by Aaron, a Jew who had lent him the money to purchase the watch which Frederick had not yet repaid according to the terms of the loan. Aaron’s somewhat aggressive manner of demanding the watch aroused consternation and anti-Semitic taunts but once both Frederick and Aaron left the scene, the uproar ceased. Three days later Aaron’s dead body was discovered in the undergrowth surrounding the ill-fated beech tree. Both Frederick and John Nobody were nowhere to be found. Frederick was the prime suspect in the murder case but the Baron responsible for law and order found that firm proof of Frederick’s complicity was lacking. Besides, a member of the Jewish
community confessed that he had murdered a fellow believer by the name of Aaron but took his own life before providing further evidence. Did Annette von Droste-Hülshoff draw a red herring over the readers’ path long before Agatha Christie would employ such a device a century later? Aaron’s distraught widow repeatedly uttered ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ in a desperate plea for justice.
The Jewish community purchased the beech tree to ensure that it would serve as a constant reminder of Aaron’s martyrdom and saw to it that a sentence in the Hebrew language and script was carved into the trunk of the tree. This was totally unintelligible to local Gentiles of course, but more on that later. Twenty-six years had passed before one Christmas day a way-worn poorly clad itinerant arrived in the village and claimed to be the long-lost ‘John Nobody.’ He convinced the Baron of his identity and was given the means to support himself. He explained that Frederick and he fled from the village as Frederick did not expect a fair hearing at his prospective trial. They enlisted in the Austrian foreign legion but in the course of a military campaign against the Turks they were separated, captured and enslaved. After enduring the most oppressive of conditions John Nobody escaped to Amsterdam on a Dutch vessel and, not wishing to linger among heretics any more than he had among Infidels, returned to his native land to ensure himself a Catholic burial. One day John Nobody was nowhere to be found, that is until his corpse was discovered hanging from a branch of Jew’s beech. The Baron, on inspecting the corpse, was shocked to see a scar on the victim’s neck which he had once seen on the body of Frederick Mergel. Case solved, and now for the final slug line, the words carved into the bark of the Jew’s beech, now translated, read: “If you approach this place, what you did to me will happen to you.”
Case solved? What if Frederick, assuming it was him, had not committed suicide but had been murdered and then suspended on the tree? Are we to wander within a labyrinth of endless and indeterminable speculations in our attempt to solve some kind of
riddle? We could of course simplify matters by asserting that Frederick was the culprit as the Baron assumed. After all the final slug line implies some kind of conclusive disclosure of the ‘one who dunnit’ in accord with our expectations of how a murder story should end. We should not forget that the story has a basis in a real unresolved murder case and not a freely invented mental conundrum. Then again, does it matter that we can or cannot prove the identity of the culprit? Even the plain meaning of the translated inscription leaves an open question and our answer to this may lie less in a semantic analysis of words than in our own cultural assumptions rooted in our upbringing. Is the message a stern reminder that Providence provides extrajudicial rewards and punishments or does it reflect a negative attitude to Jewish ethics as already intimated by Aaron’s widow when dolefully repeating ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It is doubtful whether any completely ‘objective’ and ideologically neutral reading of the novella is possible. In Germany any suggestions that the work betrays any element of anti-Semitic bias are in danger of being muted in deference to the demands of political correctness. Conversely, the claim by Ms. Martha B. Helfer that the novella is a deeply antiSemitic work2 ignores the pervasive influence of any writer’s cultural background on habits of thought and consciously or unconsciously determined choices of imagery and archetypal allegories, etc. In Die Judenbuche the fact that decisive events occur on important days in the church calendar such as Epiphany, Easter and Christmas Eve points to an underlying Christian sense of time. Do we not discern in the distraught figure of John Nobody an inverted counterpart of the Wandering Jew, who like Ulysses is recognized on account of a scar? Like the Wanderer in Willhelm Mueller’s ‘Der Lindenbaum,’ the guilt-laden penitent seeks a resting
place granted by a tree ‘where the innocent suffer in the place of the guilty.”

Those who delve into the symbolism of trees might note that Simon’s grim assertion in the matter of the eternal destiny of Herrmann Mergel, Frederick’s father, was made in the presence of a decayed oak-tree. The oak was revered as a holy tree by the ancient Germans and in the immediate neighbourhood lay the Teutoburger forest where Arminius alias Herrmann crushed three Roman legions. A hint that Simon embodied the nascent spirit of German nationalism. The anti-Semitic vituperation placed in the mouth of some villagers might also signal the rise of a new kind of antiSemitism. As long as Jews were perceived as a withdrawn and secretive group in their funny clothes and inscrutable ways, they were taken to be relatively harmless. It was only when they had greater freedom to enter the mainstream of the open world as a result of the process of social emancipation, a process already initiated by Napoleon, were Jews seen to pose a direct threat to the populace as potential rivals in trade, employment and professional advancement. Annette von Droste- Hülshoff based her story on a report of events that had taken place in latter half of the eighteenth century. However, her intuition sensitized her perception of the stirrings of nationalism and a new form of anti-Semitism that was by no means confined to Westphalia, and yet circumstances peculiar to her province enhanced the growing restlessness that culminated in the events subsumed under the title of Vormärz hopes in which were so tragically dashed by the crushing of incipient democracy by Prussia and Austria in the aftermath of the dissolution of the parliament in the Paulskirche. In defence of the people of Westphalia I might add that this region recorded the lowest level of support for the Nazis in elections prior to Hitler’s takeover in 1933 and only here was any effective resistance put up against measures enforcing euthanasia thanks to the courageous
opposition of the archbishop of Munster. Clemens August Graf von Galen

1 https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Geschichte_eines_Algierer-Sklaven http://www.artikel33.com/deutsch/1/die-judenbuche--die-historischen-grundlagen.php

2 Martha B. Helfer ,‘Wer wagt es,eiten Blutes Drang zu messen’: Reading Blood in Annette von Droste-Huelsoff’s Die Judenbuche, The German Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 3,(Summer, 1998) pp.228-253.

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