The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

Gustav Hoffmann, the town’s Christian butcher, is known as a respectable, strict, middle-class family man, a devout Lutheran churchgoer, and member or leader of several civic organizations. He keeps live-in servants and leads an orderly life. The police and townspeople consider it unthinkable that Hoffmann could have committed the murder, and he does not exhibit any suspicious behavior during the initial investigations. On the contrary, he calmly goes about trying to clear his name and writes a petition detailing why he could not possibly have committed the murder.

Some investigators come to believe that Hoffmann discovered his daughter alone with Winter and, fearing for the damage to her and the family’s reputation, murdered Winter. Hoffmann epitomizes middle-class respectability. He believes that his daughter’s perceived sexual virtue is sacrosanct, and that this is rooted in his family’s class and religion. In his petition, he stresses that Anna received Holy Communion on the day of the murder, and that this precludes the possibility of her committing a sexual sin. Instead, he shifts the blame to the town’s Jewish butcher, his close neighbor Adolph Lewy, claiming that only a Jew would be capable of such a murder.

Adolph Lewy, 57 at the time of the murder, is the Jewish butcher in Konitz. Much less is known about him than about Hoffmann; there is no portrait or physical description of him. He is a “quiet, even taciturn” (42) man with two grown sons—one of whom, Moritz, becomes drawn into the case. Lewy has lived in Konitz for a long time, but he was not born there; it is common at this time for Jews to move from small towns to larger towns and cities.

Lewy is poorly known even among his fellow townspeople. He tends to keep to himself, and even his Jewish neighbors profess not to be close to him. This isolation may be a factor that leads the Christians to imagine that he was responsible for the murder, and to imagine fantastic stories about his sizing people up for slaughter.

Although Hoffmann and Lewy live on the same street and practice the same profession, they have little contact with each other because of their religious differences. This highlights the antagonism and social isolation of Jews from Christians.

Lewy finds his life in serious danger when the antisemitic crowds threaten to enact “lynch justice” on him after the arrest of Hoffmann. His son, Moritz, also becomes drawn into the case and is suspected of having had a hand in the murder. Lewy is eventually forced to move to Berlin, where Moritz joins him several years later after receiving a pardon.

Bernhard Masloff is a 24-year-old bricklayer who offers testimony in the case as a counter-witness. The antisemitic journalist Wilhelm Bruhn brings in Masloff in order to get Hoffmann off the hook and incriminate Lewy.

Masloff claims that he heard strange noises and conspiratorial talk emanating from Lewy’s house on the night of the murder. He later elaborates on the story and claims that he saw Lewy and other men come out of the house with a sack. The police at first discount Masloff testimony because of his public character; he is known for being violently abusive to his mother-in-law, being a liar and a thief, and having an alcohol addiction. Later in the case, Masloff comes under increasing scrutiny as the possible murderer (see Epilogue Summary).

Anna Ross is Masloff’s mother-in-law and lives with Masloff and her daughter (Masloff’s wife). Ross works as a cleaning lady for several households in Konitz, including the Lewy’s. After the murder investigations get underway, she offers, along with Masloff, an elaborate testimony incriminating the Lewys in the murder. Like Masloff, Ross has a poor reputation in the town: She is known as a liar, and her two daughters have police records for stealing. She and Masloff come under suspicion later on for having collaborated on the murder.

Wilhelm Bruhn is a journalist who inserts his influence into the Konitz case. Raised in a poor rural area of Germany, he had gone to Berlin to become a schoolteacher and eventually joined the editorial staff of the antisemitic paper Staatsburgerzeitung. (Struggling for money, he had at one point been arrested for gambling.) As editor, he focused on the newspaper’s policy of creating “antisemitic spectacles” and to this end traveled to Konitz to take part in the investigations.

Once in Konitz, Bruhn ingratiates himself with the townspeople in hotels and pubs in an effort to sway their opinions on the case. He finds counter-witnesses (Masloff and Ross) to testify against the town’s Jewish community and publishes Hoffmann’s petition proclaiming his innocence casting guilt on Lewy. Thus, Bruhn exerts a significant influence on the progress of the case.