The Butcher's Tale by Helmut Walser Smith

Author:Helmut Walser Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393245523
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

III

Of all the denunciations in Konitz, perhaps the most tragic involved a series of sightings of Ernst Winter together with Moritz Lewy, Adolph’s elder son. Moritz Lewy denied knowing Ernst Winter, though he conceded that he may well have been standing in his company at some point and that it was possible that he had in passing greeted the young man on the street. In all probability, Moritz Lewy was telling the truth. Willi Rahmel and Erich Boeckh, Ernst Winter’s two best friends, saw Winter nearly every day and shared intimate details with him, but even they could not recall Winter’s having ever mentioned Moritz Lewy’s name.27 Still, a series of witnesses claimed the contrary, and in October 1900 the police arrested Moritz Lewy for perjury. By the time of Lewy’s trial, in February 1901, thirty witnesses had come forward to claim that they had seen the two together—a remarkable phenomenon that highlights the various ways in which Christians, in an environment rife with accusations, marshaled dubious evidence against the Jews of Konitz.

The story of the sightings begins with the accusations of Richard Speisinger, a seventeen-year-old dropout, who claimed that Ernst Winter had carried on flirtations with two Jewish girls, Meta Caspari and Selma Tuchler, as well as with Anna Hoffmann, and that a jealous butcher’s apprentice, whom Speisinger could not identify but who may have worked for Hoffmann, had allegedly said to Winter one evening in the fall of 1899, “Wait until the next time, when we’re both alone, I’m going to make sure that your lights are knocked out for good.”28 The accusation, reported to the police in the town of Jastrow on March 27, did not implicate the Lewys, or even the Jews. If anything, it pointed the finger back at the house of Gustav Hoffmann.

The police did not take Speisinger’s initial accusation seriously. It could not be corroborated, and Speisinger’s former teachers thought him lazy, boastful, and mendacious. But when the investigation began to falter in the wake of the ill-fated Hoffmann interrogation, the police called Speisinger to Konitz to testify, and this is where the real trouble began.

When Speisinger left the Konitz county courthouse on the morning of June 23, he was immediately greeted by the anti-Semitic journalist Wilhelm Bruhn, who invited Speisinger out for a few drinks, and then lunch, and told him that he, Speisinger, was a star witness, terribly important to the case. In the afternoon, Bruhn took him out to meet still other anti-Semitic journalists. Together they had coffee and cake and later went to the shooting club. The next morning, Speisinger had a terrible headache, but he well remembered Bruhn’s anti-Semitic tirades. His story suddenly began to take on a different hue.

In the Monday paper, Bruhn published an article detailing Speisinger’s sensational story, excluding the parts that might have involved one of Hoffmann’s apprentices and emphasizing that Winter’s relationship with Tuchler and Caspari was more intimate than that with Anna Hoffmann.29 Still, however, Speisinger had not mentioned Moritz Lewy.

Lewy had already come into the story on Sunday.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.