eJournals Colloquia Germanica 41/3

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/91
2008
413

RICHARD T. GRAY: Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770–1850. Seattle and London: U of Washington P, 2008. 476 pp. $ 30 (paperback); $ 70 (hardcover)

91
2008
Stephanie M. Hilger
cg4130272
272 Besprechungen / Reviews R ICHARD T. G RAY : Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770-1850. Seattle and London: U of Washington P, 2008. 476 pp. $ 30 (paperback); $ 70 (hardcover) Richard Gray’s Money Matters is a fascinating and highly readable study of the interdependence of the economic realm and the intellectual sphere in the years 1770 to 1850. Gray argues that, during this period, the «relative economic and political retardation coincide with a period of phenomenal intellectual, cultural, and literary blossoming» (10) in German-speaking lands. In eight chapters, Gray demonstrates the complicity of intellectual and economic discourse, thereby challenging the ideology of aesthetic autonomy. The first four chapters (Part I: «Economics and Intellectual Culture») consist of general cultural analyses, while the remaining chapters (Part II: «Literary Economies») are readings of specific literary texts. In the introduction, Gray establishes New Economic Criticism, founded on the reading of money as a semiotic system and materialist-historicist approaches, as the theoretical anchoring point for his study. In addition, Gray identifies Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and its focus on culture and economics as closely interrelated communicative codes as another theoretical framework for Money Matters. The first chapter discusses the language theories of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Caspar Lavater, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Johann Georg Hamann. In it, Gray traces the gradual move from an intrinsic/ substantivist to a symbolic/ nominalist conception of linguistic signs, expressed in the authors’ metaphors comparing language to money. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the abstract value of money was increasingly highlighted with the introduction of paper money, which is reflected in these thinkers’ comparison of money and language as symbolic systems of signification. The investigation of the parallels between money and language in eighteenthand nineteenth-century discourse also informs the second and third chapters. The second chapter compares Adam Müller’s economic with Novalis’s semiotic theories. Gray interprets the entrepreneur’s spirit of commerce and the artist’s creative imagination as similar acts, both bartering for meaning in the communicative act. Gray argues that Müller and Novalis both outline protostructuralist semiotic theories despite the difference in their political ideologies. The third chapter compares Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s writings on language as a constitutive element of national identity to Adam Müller’s reflections on paper currency as a similarly important constituent of national identity. The symbolic and consequently local value of paper money contrasts with the intrinsic and therefore more universal value of metallic coin, making paper money an important element in national identity formation, similar to language. The fourth chapter explores the effects of the transition from a feudal/ agrarian to a bourgeois/ industrial economy in the context of the debate over physiocracy, often seen as the beginning of economic theory, by the late eighteenth-century German thinkers Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling and Johann Georg Schlosser. During this time, an increasingly industrial and capitalist economy of excess questioned the economic principles of an agriculture of subsistence. In this chapter, Gray demonstrates how the debate on imaginary economic needs is translated into a discussion of the Besprechungen / Reviews 273 role of the imagination in the realm of art. The discussion of Johann Heinrich Jung- Stilling in this chapter, the last one of Part I, provides the transition to Part II. The first chapter of the second part explores Jung-Stilling’s ambivalence towards an economy of excess in his Lebensgeschichte (1777-1804). Gray reads his autobiography as «a massive attempt to repress the socioeconomic motivations that informed his life decisions by disguising them as adherence to divine will, imposed upon the individual from above» (194). In Jung-Stilling’s life story, which is part of the German Pietistic Revival movement, economic hardship is resolved through a divine plan rather than individual initiative. Gray argues that, even though Jung-Stilling outwardly critiques the new capitalist economy, he implicitly buys into it as demonstrated in the crossovers between religious and economic terminology in his text, between God and «Geld.» The remaining three chapters analyze the intertwinement of economic and literary discourse in three pieces of literary fiction of the period, Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche, and Adalbert Stifter’s Bergkristall. Gray explores the image of the magic purse in Peter Schlemihl (composed 1813) as a critique of excess in the early nineteenth-century capitalist, industrialized, and colonialist economy. His discussion of Droste-Hülshoff’s 1842 novella investigates the debate on the concept of private property raised by the acts of wood poaching committed by the villagers in the story. These acts open the door to other transgressions in search of surplus value, which ultimately lead to the displacement of the villagers’ self-culpability onto an Other in anti-Semitic discourse. The effect of capitalist and industrialist economic realities on remote village life also stands at the center of the chapter on Adalbert Stifter’s novella Bergkristall (1845/ 1852). Gray concludes his study of economics and the German cultural imagination with a discussion of Goethe’s Faust II and its protagonist’s insatiable drive to acquire. He argues that «Faust’s story parallels in rough outlines the (hi)story of Central Europe from antiquity to the time of its consolidation as postaristocratic civil society in the 1830s» (357). Faust’s desire for excessive consumption is reflected in his building of dams to wrestle land from the sea for his utopian society and the introduction of paper money. Faust’s blindness makes him fail and becomes an «admonition to human beings not to pin their hopes for redemption on economic principles» (363). Money Matters is a thought-provoking and dense study of the intersections of intellectual and economic discourse in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century German culture. Gray presents a highly original approach to some of the most canonical authors and texts of the German literary tradition. Gray’s theoretically-informed close readings shed new light on these texts’ significance for understanding the origins of present-day economic systems. Gray thereby highlights the complicity of intellectual and economic discourse not only in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but also in the early twenty-first century, which makes his book highly relevant reading in the context of the current fluctuations in the stock market and the worldwide economic crisis. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Stephanie M. Hilger