Der holzgerechte Jäger: Forester Fictions and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's Die Judenbuche
This article examines the forester Brandis by reading Droste-Hulshoff's preliminary drafts of Die Judenbuche alongside the published story and by regarding these texts as part of a larger discussion in the nineteenth-century German cultural and literary imagination. Forester fictions by Iffland, Achim von Arnim, and Gerhart Hauptmann share a common critique with Die Judenbuche: The corruption of forest rangers is a profound expression of skepticism toward legal and scientific administrative attempts to manage rural populations. Droste-Hulshoff's own forester fiction can be read as an inner-colonial narrative in which Brandis's murder is a crime against a new political order in Westphalia.