Abstract
This article considers the beech tree in Annette Droste-Hülshoff's Die Judenbuche as a site where the dead return, alongside Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and Virgil's The Aeneid. I will examine the role of trees as sites of testimony to violence on the one hand, and the issue of deciphering this testimony on the other. I will discuss how these trees serve as a locus where the past appears in the present, and show how these texts generate this presence through the use of tense and pronouns. I propose that trees serve at once to preserve and to enclose the dead in Tasso, Virgil, and Droste-Hülshoff's Realist novella. This double structure of containment offers insight into how reality is constructed in Poetic Realism.
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