Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

• Born: January 10, 1797
• Birthplace: Castle Hülshoff, near Münster, Westphalia (now in Germany)
• Died: May 25, 1848
• Place of death: Meersburg, Baden (now in Germany)

Type of Plot: Historical

Contribution

Although primarily known within the history of German literature as an outstanding lyrical poet of the nineteenth century, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff also wrote a novella, Die Judenbuche: Ein Sittengemälde aus dem Gebirgichten Westfalen (1842; The Jew’s Beech Tree, 1914), that ranks among the best of both novellas and the historical mystery genre. Tightly constructed and vividly written, this story of murder, guilt, and the eventual triumph of justice presents a realistic picture of village life in Westphalia (now in Germany) during the late eighteenth century as well as psychological portraits of individual characters that suggest the author’s keen sense of observation. In 1844, Droste-Hülshoff began another mystery prose piece, “Joseph: Eine Kriminalgeschichte” (Joseph: a crime story), but it unfortunately remained a fragment and has never been translated.

Biography

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was born January 10, 1797, on the Hülshoff estate near Münster, in the province of Westphalia. She was born into a long-established line of conservative Catholic nobility and remained very attached to her large family. A highly intelligent and sensitive girl, Droste-Hülshoff was well versed in five languages. In her early teens she began writing poetry in the style of Friedrich Schiller and Gottfried August Bürger. After two disappointing experiences with lovers, she grew depressed and stopped writing for a number of years. The death of her father in 1826 further burdened her spirit.

In 1834, Droste-Hülshoff left the protective circle of her family and their country estate, Rüschhaus, to live with her sister Jenny, who had married a widowed Swiss scholar. They moved to the Castle Meersburg on the shore of Lake Constance. At this time, Droste-Hülshoff met and fell madly in love with Levin Schücking, a man seventeen years younger than she, whose mother had been her close friend. This intense relationship rekindled her poetic muse, and she produced a number of fine poems. She managed to have her brother-in-law employ the young man in his library, and the two lovers spent their days walking and reading each other’s poetry. In April, 1842, however, Schücking left Meersburg and later returned with his young bride. Droste-Hülshoff was devastated by the loss of her lover and poetic confidant. In 1844, Schücking published a small volume of Droste-Hülshoff’s poetry, thereby establishing her reputation as a lyric genius. Her poems deal with a spiritualized vision of nature and with issues of religious faith and doubt.

Ill-fated in love, the poet never married. The disappointing affair with Levin Schücking had caused Droste-Hülshoff great emotional stress, and in 1843 she grew seriously ill from nervous exhaustion. A sickly individual with a tubercular condition as well as psychosomatic complaints, Droste-Hülshoff died of an embolism at the age of fifty-one in Meersburg.

Analysis

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff began work on The Jew’s Beech Tree in 1837 and completed it in 1841. It was based on a true incident that had occurred in the latter half of the previous century. She had heard of the story from her grandfather, who had been a magistrate assigned to the case. She also used an 1818 newspaper account of the murder—written by her uncle, August von Haxthausen—as a basis for her tale. The case involved a Christian man who had murdered a Jew and had left the country before he could be brought to trial. Captured by the then-invading Turkish army, he had spent twenty-five years in slavery. When he escaped, he returned home. Because of the hardship he had already endured, he was not prosecuted for his crime, but his conscience drove him to commit suicide, and he hanged himself from the tree where the original murder had taken place. This strange story of guilt and justice preoccupied Droste-Hülshoff, and she set out to write a fictional account of the events. The novella went through several revised versions and was first serialized in the spring of 1842 in a literary magazine, Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser.

The Jew’s Beech Tree

The Droste-Hülshoff work is the story of Friedrich Mergel, a poor shepherd boy whose father, a drinker, is found dead one day. He and his mother are in dire straits. His uncle, Simon, and Simon’s illegitimate child, Johannes Niemand, take Friedrich under their protection. Friedrich and the pale and worn-looking Johannes, who appears as if he were Friedrich’s brother, become close friends. Simon is, however, involved with a ruthless band of poachers who, thwarting the efforts of the authorities, roam the forests nightly and steal wood from private lands. Despite the efforts of his honest mother, Friedrich becomes involved with this band of thieves and serves as a lookout. One night, he deliberately misleads the forester Brandis, sending him to his death at the hands of one of the poachers. He later recognizes the murder weapon, an ax, as belonging to his uncle.

One day, in the autumn of 1760 during a community dance, Friedrich, now a proud and boastful young man, is publicly warned by a Jewish moneylender, Aaron, that he has not yet paid for the watch he had bought. Friedrich is shamed before his fellow villagers. The next day Aaron is found murdered under a beech tree, and Friedrich and his cousin Johannes are missing. Members of the Jewish community are outraged by the incident, and they purchase the tree with the assurance that it will never be cut down—as a living memorial to their murdered friend. With an ax, they carve a warning on the tree in Hebrew: “If you ever approach this place, what has been done to me will also be done to you.”

Twenty-eight years later, on Christmas Eve, 1788, an old and beaten man returns to the village. He claims to be Johannes Niemand. He has spent his years as a slave to the Turks and finally escaped. Later he is found hanged from the beech tree, where the original murder had occurred. From a prominent scar on the corpse it is clear to Brandis’s son, who is the one to find the decomposing body, that the hanged man is in truth Friedrich Mergel, driven to suicide by the burden of his guilt.

The Jew’s Beech Tree is a realistic tale of poverty and desperation, racial prejudice and criminal greed, and murder and nagging guilt. It contains elements of the English gothic novel—stormy nights and a ghostly forest—that lend it a mysterious, supernatural atmosphere. The novella’s German subtitle—literally, “a portrait of manners and customs from the mountain region of Westphalia”—suggests its objective, almost sociological perspective on the behavior and morals of the community in which Droste-Hülshoff lived. In her narration of the murders of the forester Brandis and the Jew Aaron, Droste-Hülshoff leaves out connecting commentary so that the reader is placed in the role of “detective” who must deduce the perpetrator of the crimes. She also provides the reader with random details—such as the uncle’s ax—that serve as clues to the guilty individual.

As is the case with most examples of mystery and detective fiction, the Droste-Hülshoff story ultimately revolves around the themes of justice and injustice. The issues of right and wrong are, in keeping with the realistic tone of the story, by no means idealized or clear-cut. The young and naïve Friedrich Mergel is born into impoverished circumstances, and although his mother attempts to rear him with the proper sense of right and wrong, he succumbs to the weight of poverty and leads the immoral life of a criminal. As a vain and arrogant individual who commits a heinous murder because of his injured pride, however, he deserves his ultimate fate. He is also the son of a violent and abusive drunkard, and the story suggests the tragic social determinism of hereditary traits.

Johannes Niemand, the illegitimate child whose name translates as “John Nobody,” is also an apparent victim of the shadowy world into which he is born. Because he is an outcast within the bourgeois world, a life of crime on the fringes of society seems to be his only option. A major theme of The Jew’s Beech Tree—and of much crime fiction—is therefore an ethical one: Life presents choices, and the ones the individual makes determine his personal guilt. The Droste-Hülshoff text questions the role of free will and draws attention to the existence of evil in the world.

The issue of racial prejudice is the most obvious example of social injustice in the novella and points to the central theological theme of the story. Aaron’s murder and the final revenge of the Jewish community suggest a biblical and divine sense of justice as in the Old Testament pronouncement of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” As in most detective and mystery novels, in which the case is always solved, the murderers eventually caught, there is in the Droste-Hülshoff story a metaphysical sense of absolute justice, an underlying conviction that all crimes within the universe are ultimately punished.

In one of the early versions of the novella, the exact day of the murder was October 28, and as is also the case in the final version, Friedrich returns to the village twenty-eight years later. Similarly, it is the son of the forester whom Friedrich had sent to his death at the hands of his uncle who finds Friedrich’s hanged corpse. These seeming coincidences again suggest the existence of a transcendent order of justice—a divinely established universe—behind the seemingly chaotic and random flux of appearances. Droste-Hülshoff, reared as a strict Catholic, was very much concerned with matters of faith and was horrified at the idea that no God, no transcendent order existed in the universe. Thus, in a very real sense, the “mystery” in her tale of Friedrich Mergel and his just fate is that of faith itself, and the “solution” to the crime becomes a revelation of the divinity and the divine plan.

The most interesting character in the story is certainly that of Johannes Niemand. He is described as closely resembling Friedrich. In the poor light of the fire one night, even Friedrich’s mother mistakes the haggard and brooding Johannes for her son. Droste-Hülshoff employs here a time-honored literary device, that of the doppelgänger, or double. As Mr. Hyde is to Dr. Jekyll in the well-known Robert Louis Stevenson novel, the outcast Johannes serves as the dark alter ego of Friedrich, the aspect of his personality that is attracted to the criminal side of life. Thus the Droste-Hülshoff story remains very much a psychological one, Friedrich Mergel/Johannes Niemand symbolically depicted as two sides of one person. The psychology of the criminal mind—the influence of heredity and environment—is another major theme in the genre of crime fiction, and the dual characters in the Droste-Hülshoff story suggest the inner struggle between good and evil within the self. As the horrible Mr. Hyde takes over the personality of the benevolent Dr. Jekyll, the criminal life of Johannes consumes the existence of Friedrich. It is fitting that Friedrich returns to the village and commits the act of suicide in the guise of his cousin Johannes.

Within the genre of the historical mystery, Droste-Hülshoff ultimately presents a moral tale that reaffirms her belief in a structured, divinely based universe. The naturalistic world of her story is one in which a transcendent reality underlies the chaotic appearance of events. This duality of reality versus appearance is a fundamental structural principle of most mystery and crime fiction in the sense that the task of the detective—and that of the reader—is to uncover the truth of events by interpreting the seemingly random clues found at the scene of the crime. The investigator seeks the order hidden within the chaos of details. Because the detective’s job is to bring the criminal to justice, the central issue in mystery and crime fiction, as it is in The Jew’s Beech Tree, is one of morality.

Bibliography

Foulkes, Peter. Introduction to Die Judenbuche: Ein Sittengemälde aus dem Gebirgichten Westfalen, by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1989. English-language introduction to and analysis of a German-language edition of Droste-Hülshoff’s mystery novella.

Mare, Margaret. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. London: Methuen, 1965. Probably the most comprehensive study of the life of Droste-Hülshoff available in English. Includes a bibliography.

Morgan, Mary E. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff: A Biography. New York: P. Lang, 1984. Book-length study of the life of the German poet, playwright, and author.

Pickar, Gertrude Bauer. Ambivalence Transcended: A Study of the Writings of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1997. Detailed, comprehensive study of Droste-Hülshoff’s oeuvre, including her portrayal of women, her representation of fantasy, and her use of narrative perspective.

Webber, Andrew. “Traumatic Identities: Race and Gender in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche and Freud’s Der Mann Moses.” In Harmony in Discord: German Women Writers in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, edited by Laura Martin. New York: P. Lang, 2001. Focuses on the distinctively nineteenth century German nature of Droste-Hülshoff’s mystery and its particular representation of race and gender.

Whitinger, Raleigh. “From Confusion to Clarity: Further Reflections on the Revelatory Function of Narrative Technique and Symbolism in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche.” In Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literatur-wissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 54 (1982): 259-283. Detailed discussion of Droste-Hülshoff’s use and generation of revelation—a key aspect of The Jew’s Beech Tree and of any mystery story.