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 meaning beyond the words on the page, often...