DROSTE-HÜLSHOFF, Annette von

Nationality: German. Born: Anna Elisabeth Franziska Adolfine Wilhelmina Luisa Maria, Schloss Hülshoff near Münster, Westphalia, 10 January 1797. Education: Educated by private tutors. Moved with her mother and sister to Rüschhaus following the death of her father in 1826. Career: From 1840 collaborated with the writer Levin Schücking who encouraged her poetic activity. Lived in Meersburg from 1846. Suffered from ill health throughout her life. Died: 24 May 1848.

Publications

Collections

Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Levin Schücking. 3 vols., 1878-79.

Sämtliche Werke: historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by Karl Schulte Kemminghausen. 4 vols., 1925-30.

Poems, edited by Margaret Atkinson. 1968.

Historische-kritische Ausgabe: Werke, Briefweschel, edited by Winfried Woesler. 14 vols., 1978-85.

Werke, edited by Clemens Heselhaus. 1984.

Short Stories

Die Judenbuche. 1842; as The Jew's Beech, 1958; as The Jew's Beech Tree, in Three Eerie Tales from 19th Century German, 1975.

Ledwina (fragment). 1923.

Play

Perdu; oder, Dichter, Verlenger und Blaustrümpfe. 1840.

Poetry

Walther. 1818.

Gedichte. 1838.

Das Malerische und Romantische Westfalen. 1839.

Gedichte. 1844.

Das geistliche Jahr. Nebst eine Anhang Religiöser Gedichte, edited by C.B. Schülter and Wilhelm Junkmann. 1851.

Letzte Gaben, edited by Levin Schücking. 1860.

Lebensgang, edited by Marie Silling. 1917.

Balladen. 1922.

Other

Bilder aus Westfalen. 1845.

Briefe, edited by C. Schlueter. 1877.

Die Briefe Droste-Hülshoff und Levin Schücking, edited by Theo Schücking. 1893.

Die Briefe der Dichterin Droste-Hülshoff, edited by Hermann Cardauns. 1909.

Drei-und-zwanzig neue Droste-Briefe, edited by Manfred Schneider. 1923.

Briefe, edited by Karl Schulte Kemminghausen. 2 vols., 1944.

Lieder und Gesänge, edited by Karl Gustav Fellerer. 1954.

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Critical Studies:

Droste-Hülshoff by Margaret Mare, 1965; Droste-Hülshoff: A Woman of Letters in a Period of Transition, 1981, and Droste-Hülshoff: A Biography, 1984, both by Mary Morgan; Droste-Hülshoff: A German Poet Between Romanticism and Realism by John Guthrie, 1989; Ambivalence Transcended: A Study of the Writings of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff by Gertrud Bauer Pickar, 1997.

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Annette von Droste-Hülshoff owes her reputation as one of Germany's greatest woman writers primarily to her mature poetry and her novella Die Judenbuche (The Jew's Beech), published in 1842. Other prose fictions remained incomplete. The most interesting, an early novel fragment, Ledwina, portrays a languid, consumptive heroine, prone to romantic daydreams and "Gothick" nightmares, constricted by the conventions of aristocratic life in rural Westphalia, the author's own milieu, that is later portrayed in Bei uns zu Lande auf dem Lande (Our Rural Homeland) via the gently ironic perspective of a visiting relation in a mode influenced by Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall. A crime story, "Joseph," barely progresses beyond the construction of an elaborate narrative frame. While these works are leisurely in narrative mode, The Jew's Beech is all terseness, closer in style, structure, thematic concerns, and atmosphere of sinister mystery to Droste-Hülshoff's remarkable ballads and longer narrative poems.

In 1818 her uncle, August von Haxthausen, had published his "Story of an Algerian Slave," a stylized account, emphasizing patterns of fate, of an actual case with which members of the family had been involved as magistrates. Inspired by this model, The Jew's Beech traces, episodically, the life of one Friedrich Mergel from childhood to his murder of a Jewish tradesman, Aaron, who has publicly humiliated him. He flees, and the case lapses. Twenty-eight years later a man returns to the village, infirm after years of enslavement by Turkish pirates, and accepts identification as Johannes "Nobody," Friedrich's double. Months later he is found hanged from the beech tree under which Aaron's body was found, and on which had been carved a Hebrew curse. In a conclusion altogether harsher than Haxthausen's, the body, now identified as Friedrich's, is interred in a carrion-pit—a suicide's fate.

Thus a tale of guilt and atonement? Of retribution exacted, when earthly justice has failed, by an austere deity? Or is this suicide the distraught act of a broken man? Or do we invoke more irrational agencies of fate that find symbolic focus in the uncanny magnetism of the Jew's Beech itself, and its inscription? The narrator refuses interpretation. Sustaining the mystery of the figure's identity precludes psychological analysis, allows only fragmentary clues from his words and gestures, none pointing directly to suicidal intent or unequivocally to remorse.

But nor is there unequivocal clarity as to Friedrich's guilt, identity, or the nature of his death. Indeed, for many critics the essential point of the tale lies rather in its very quality of obscurity, one that transcends the conventional concealments and false trails of the crime story, and expresses an epistemological scepticism. But beside strategies of mystification there are countervailing patterns of concealment and elucidation, to which the translation of the Hebrew inscription in the final sentence, with maximum emphasis, is the clearest pointer. Unobtrusive juxtapositions, parallelisms (identification of Friedrich as Johannes inverts a misidentification of Johannes on his first appearance), and inter-locking motifs (in the circumstances in which Aaron's and Friedrich's bodies are discovered) insinuate meaningful connections—and, unless this be a shaggy-dog story, so does a structural logic.

The focus of two-thirds of the story is Friedrich's development from childhood and the social and moral milieu that shapes it. The "Sittengemälde" of the story's subtitle ("A Picture of Manners from Mountainous Westphalia"), the "depiction of the life and manners" of the region, is no mere local color. A verse prologue reinforces the point, bidding the reader, raised "secure/Amid the light," not to condemn a "poor wretched life": who can assess the effect of "secret, soul-destroying prejudice" implanted "in some young breast"? In this isolated region a rough and ready law of custom prevails; Friedrich's village is communally involved in the theft of timber from the surrounding forests. His mother (movingly portrayed in her demoralization by a miserable marriage: "Ten years, ten crosses") transmits to him the community's antisemitic prejudice; superstition brands his drunkard father, after death in mysterious circumstances, a ghostly bogeyman of the forests. Taunted by his peers, a dreamy solitary, he then finds in his uncle, Simon, an ersatz father figure and, in his employ (partly as a lookout for the "Blue Smock" timber-thieves), a sense of worth, however dubious; through noisy ostentation, to compensate for early privations, he gains some dominance in the village, but such status is precarious and aggression is his response to any humiliation, be it by Aaron or earlier by the forester, Brandis.

Yet for all that, it is its chiaroscuro quality that makes the tale compelling, and its intimation of dimensions at odds with the social and psychological realism predicated by the milieu depiction. At one level, sheer narrative concision generates mystery, and, in dialogic passages especially, an extra intensity: Friedrich's confrontation with Brandis, for one, seethes with unexplained resentments and cryptic mutual accusation. As in Droste-Hülshoff's poetry, acutely observed, vividly rendered detail abounds, but its precise significance is often elusive: a late sighting of Friedrich reports his carving a spoon from a stick until "he cut it right in two"—signaling distraction or a moment of decision? And only rarely, and with some inconsistency, does the narrator assume a vantage point of omniscience, almost as often conceding puzzlement. Much is presented from the perspective of individual participants, with no single viewpoint privileged, or of more amorphous witnesses.

At another level, Johannes "Nobody," despite his realistic presence as the disowned illegitimate son of Simon, is essentially the Doppelgänger of German romantic tradition—an alter ego, embodiment of the wretched outsider, the "nobody" that Friedrich had first been and will once more be. Tales of Mergel's ghost may be rationalized as superstition, but their atmospheric suggestiveness reinforces the sense of the Breder Forest, scene of all violent actions, as a heart of darkness. Quivering leaves suggest, anthropomorphically, the death agonies of a freshly felled beech, investing the spoliation of the forests with a dimension of evil beyond mundane poaching. Above all, Simon, beyond his fleshand-blood presence as shady entrepreneur, is portrayed with details (those coat-tails like flames!) redolent of the diabolic; his "adoption" of Friedrich is a seduction to evil and depravity, in which Friedrich's "boundless arrogance" (the primal sin of superbia) is the first step on an ultimately self-destructive path. Motifs suggestive of Cain or Judas lend further weight to interpretations of the text as an admonitory moral-religious exemplum, albeit one whose intent of edification is obscured by the best instincts of a compelling storyteller.

—Derek Glass

See the essay on The Jew's Beech.