Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von - Jane K. Brown (essay date October 1978)
Jane K. Brown (essay date October 1978)
SOURCE: Brown, Jane K. “The Real Mystery in Droste-Hülshoff's Die Judenbuche.” Modern Language Review 73, no. 4 (October 1978): 835-46.
[In the following essay, Brown interprets Die Judenbuche as a critique of language and its power to obscure as well as clarify. She describes the mystery of the story as an epistemological question rather than a criminal who-done-it, with its ambiguity emphasizing not merely the complexity of the moral issues in the story, but the difficulty of rendering them in language.]
The greatest German literature of the nineteenth century is a literature of understatement; the Novelle especially always means much more than it says. This tendency rests, I think, on the Romantics' faith in the power of language to communicate some kind of transcendent truth. Even today when we interpret these texts we implicitly make a similar assumption: the text has a...
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