Grim(m) tale? The Jew's Beech by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

The Jew's Beech by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848) was born into an aristocratic Catholic family near Munster and spent most of her life in rural Westphalia. She never married and rarely tasted city life. This notwithstanding it appears that she was well aware of the prevailing literary trends of the day and her apparently "limited" life experiences did not stop her from exploring deep philosophical issues in her works.

Take this strange novella - "The Jew's Beech". It is, ostensibly, a murder mystery inspired by true events - the unsolved murders of a forester and a Jewish moneylender - which were recorded in the archives of the author's family. The story itself however is just a pretext for an exploration of such themes as good and evil, the corruptibility of young minds and the stifling prejudices which, in a small community, can cloud the minds of even the best of people. 

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was primarily a poet and Die Judenbuche is her only piece of prose. For better or for worse, it is very much a poet's work. Let's start with the weaknesses first. A master storyteller could have made a nail-biting thriller out of this. Von Droste-Hülshoff however seems blissfully unconcerned about narrative conventions. Many facts are left unexplained, new characters appear with barely an introduction, the structure sometimes feels lopsided with flashbacks and flashforwards. Then there is the famously obscure ending, which lends itself to multiple interpretations and raises more questions than it answers. It leaves one wondering whether the author was being consciously obscure - a proto-(post)modernist, if you will - or whether she was merely unable to tie up the plot's loose ends. 

But in the novella's weaknesses lie also its strengths. The work is rich in allusion and metaphor - chief amongst them the striking image of the lone beech tree of the title. Although the book is firmly rooted in reality, the atmosphere conjured up by the novella is straight out of Brothers Grimm - magical forests, eerie apparitions and unsettling premonitions abound. Indeed this has been justly described as a "Gothic" work - it has many of the genre's tropes and is close in style to the literature of the "Uncanny" exemplified by Hoffmann and like-minded authors.

Alma Classics edition cover

English editions of this novella are rare. The Oneworld Classics edition I read (now reissued as part of the Alma Classics series) uses the 1958 translation by Doris and Lionel Thomas and includes an introduction and timeline.

It may not be "entertaining" in the usual sense of the word and is ultimately frustrating as a murder mystery, but this strange work is certainly worth reading.