"Ist er kein Jude, so verdiente er einer zu sein": Droste-Hulshoff's Die Judenbuche and Religious Anti-Semitism

Abstract

Bell & Howell Information and Learning: Foreign text omitted. Jews were bit players upon the New Testament stage, present to drive the major argument that demonstrated that Christianity had succeeded where Judaism had failed, that God had chosen a new people, and that as a result of our win/lose mentality, present if not articulated in the history of Christian interpretation, we, that is, the Christians, won, and they, that is, the Jews, lost. History, we are told, even biblical history, is written by the winners. We do not ask questions about what isn't there. -Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book (118). There is something about Die Judenbuche which draws out the sleuth in readers.l This enigmatic novella seems to possess a bit of the attraction the eponymous beech tree is itself said to hold: again and again critics try their hand at solving a mystery the author may intentionally have left unresolved. Though other important aspects have also come to light, it is the novella as detective story-a Criminal-- geschichte as Droste-Hulshoff herself called it-that has dominated the criticism of the last thirty years. One school holds that undecidability is itself the point; another is bent on teaching us how to read the novella so that we recognize Friedrich as the perpetrator hanging in the beech tree at the story's conclusion.2 Has any stone been left unturned in the more than 150 years of interpretation this novella has called forth? Critics of the latter school, intent upon restoring the story's moral and/or narrative order, helpfully remind us of the author's unequivocal aspiration: clearly Droste-Hulshoff intended a kind of Christian morality tale. This group overreaches, however, in its assertion that the didactic goal has actually been achieved. For such a position can only be maintained, as the essays of Helmut Koopmann and Wolfgang Wittkowski amply illustrate, by assuming a homogenous religio-ethical tradition that frankly does not square with the novella's own religious polemic.3 We may today, particularly in the post-Holocaust era, wish to invoke an all-embracing Judeo-Christian ethic in our approach to this work; but it would be mistaken to read this ecumenical mindset into the more contentious ideological matrix of Die Judenbuche. In point of fact, the story is structured by an anti-- Judaic polemic which, for a number of reasons considered at the end of this essay, remains largely unacknowledged in the secondary literature.4 Though the novella's deployment of anti-Jewish stereotypes has recently come under critical scrutiny, this phenomenon has yet to be sufficiently explored as a product of religious anti-Semitism and in a manner which simultaneously takes stock of the novella's noted ambiguity.5 Die Judenbuche, however, is no mere predictable replay of that ancient rivalry between Synagoga and Ecclesia, though it undoubtedly draws on that well-known masterplot. The novella presents Jews and Judaism not, in the first instance, as a viable threat worthy of specific denigration; rather, Droste-Hulshoff seems to take the defeat of Lady Synagoguevirtually for granted. Yet the author does not assume the full victory of Ecclesia; indeed, the drama of this narrative derives from the failure of the Christian community to live up to its particular religious calling. In the process of chiding her fellow Christians for religious hollowness, the author deploys a set of anti-Jewish stereotypes that, as Hal Draper has exhaustively shown,6 was hardly remarkable in nineteenth century Germany. It therefore is not my principal aim to expose what can hardly be surprising today: that a story with significant Christian motifs, written in the first half the nineteenth century, should exhibit aspects of the dominant anti-Semitic discourse. Rather, by tracing the novella's anti-Judaism, I hope to shed light both on that final, enigmatic scene, and on the web of hermeneutic strictures that have determined various-and sometimes questionable-readings of this still quite popular novella. …