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
2021
534
Diligent Life: The concept of the Present in Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit
91
2021
Michael Lipkin
This study examines how Gustav Freytag’s 1855 novel Debit and Credit with its focus on the present aims at the depiction and structuring of time. Freytag uses the capacity to adequately orient oneself to the present, what he calls “diligence,” to distinguish realism from rival literary movements, as well to distinguish the mercantile bourgeoisie from other social groups depicted in the novel – the aristocracy, the laborer, and the Jewish money-lender. Over the course of the novel, Freytag expands the meaning of “diligence” to incorporate further temporal registers: the securing of the present social order into the future, and the defense of the cherished values of the past. Although the novel’s circular structure seemingly succeeds in
holding together these disparate temporal registers as well as their attendant ethical directives, ultimately the balance is untenable. In this respect, Debit and Credit is both the beginning and the end of Freytag’s realism of the present.
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Diligent Life: The Concept of the Present in Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit Michael Lipkin Hamilton College Abstract: This study examines how Gustav Freytag’s 1855 novel Debit and Credit with its focus on the present aims at the depiction and structuring of time� Freytag uses the capacity to adequately orient oneself to the present, what he calls “diligence,” to distinguish realism from rival literary movements, as well to distinguish the mercantile bourgeoisie from other social groups depicted in the novel - the aristocracy, the laborer, and the Jewish money-lender� Over the course of the novel, Freytag expands the meaning of “diligence” to incorporate further temporal registers: the securing of the present social order into the future, and the defense of the cherished values of the past� Although the novel’s circular structure seemingly succeeds in holding together these disparate temporal registers as well as their attendant ethical directives, ultimately the balance is untenable� In this respect, Debit and Credit is both the beginning and the end of Freytag’s realism of the present� Keywords: Gustav Freytag, Soll und Haben, realism In an 1853 survey of that year’s novels for his Berlin-based literary review Die Grenzboten, Gustav Freytag observed that the German literature of his time had reached a dead end� Plainly, Germany was brimming with such examples of “diligent, healthy, and strong life” - its farmers, its merchants, its craftspeople - as would make excellent material for a novel (“Deutsche Romane” 79)� 1 And yet that year not one German writer had proven himself up to the task of capturing this vibrant present or the dynamic energies that had shaped it and given it its character� To Freytag the failure was not merely a stylistic one; it was also a failure of ethical understanding and imagination: “Most of our German authors take the liberty of depicting the happenings of the present without 402 Michael Lipkin sufficiently understanding the activity of the people they wish to depict, or the influence which this activity has on one’s spirit and beliefs” (79)� Because German literature does not know the present, Freytag argues, it does not know its readers and does not know how to instruct them� Freytag closed his short review with an exhortation to the German writer to better depict the diligence of the present by “becoming a diligent man himself” (79)� This exhortation was answered by Freytag himself the following year with the publication of Debit and Credit� Appropriately enough for its valorization of the diligent life of the merchant, the novel would go on to become the best-selling German novel of the nineteenth century� Although since then interest in Freytag and his socio-cultural program has largely receded, Debt and Credit has recently been the subject of a number of penetrating studies� For these analyses the novel represents the tantalizing prize, rare in any national literature, of a work of realism fully theorized by its author, in which explicit claims about realism’s social, political, and ethical ends are directly connected to an analysis of literary technique� 2 This study of Debit and Credit seeks to build on this recent work by examining the specifically didactic character of what Gerhard Plumpe has called Freytag’s Musterroman, or “model novel” - example-setting not only for subsequent works of German realism, but especially in its embrace of the novel as a tool for cultivating the “diligence” Freytag found lacking in German letters (Plumpe 27)� The secondary literature has tended to locate this didactic effect in the novel’s use of exemplary characters, especially its protagonist, Anton Wohlfahrt, as well as in the wealth of critical writing by Freytag and by Julian Schmidt, his co-editor at Die Grenzboten, expounding their program for a German realism� My own study, by contrast, argues that Freytag’s decisive contribution to the debates about realism around the 1850s was to assign a didactic function specifically to the technical elements of realist prose: in this case, to the way that the novel structures and depicts the time of the present� In his recent study of Debit and Credit, Phillip Bötcher has shown that, from a literary-historical standpoint, Freytag’s lasting influence was to furnish German realism with a content� In sharp distinction to the realist traditions of England and France, in Germany realism was first theorized - by Hegel, Karl Immermann, and Otto Ludwig, among others - and then practiced by the authors who came to prominence in the 1850s (Bötcher 306-7)� Bötcher argues that Freytag’s literature of the present was meant first and foremost to solve the aesthetico-theorical and philosophical-historical problem of how “poetry” - understood here not as a genre but as the “extraordinary” itself - could exist in the age of the “prosaic,” which is to say, in industrial society (Bötcher 302)� In the study below I will argue that Freytag understood the present as something far more than a Diligent Life 403 content or a temporal frame� “The present” is a disposition that constitutes the novel’s various social, political and ethical fields, without which there could be neither the “socio-cultural meaning-making” nor “the collective fashioning of identity” that, according to Sabine Becker, is the novel’s true subject (Becker 32)� In the following I wish to investigate how the present is constituted in Debit and Credit, and how it is differentiated from other temporalities, such as the past� These, I argue, are rejected as possible bases for a realist prose not only because they overlook the wealth of artistic material furnished by the Germany of 1850s, but because they fail to guide and instruct� This article will advance two theses� The first is that Freytag’s double claim about a realism of the present - that literature must depict the present as well as foster diligence in the present - serves as the foundation for the novel’s characterization of artistic movements, classes, nationalities, and ethical dispositions� In the first section, I will examine how the novel substantiates this claim through its broadsides against Romanticism and the proto-realism of Karl Gutzkow� I will show that the novel makes use of a tripartite temporal structure in which the present is distinguished from the past on the one hand and “the now,” as the merely contemporaneous, on the other� This structure will recur again and again throughout the novel� In the second section, I argue that Freytag distinguishes the four social groups depicted in the novel - the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the laborer, and the Jewish money-lenders - not by their modes of economic production but by their respective temporal orientations� To maintain these distinctions, however, Debit and Credit must load the present with ever more conceptual baggage� This is my second thesis� In the third section, I examine how, to distinguish the characters of the Bürgerstand from their avaricious Jewish counterparts, the novel broadens its understanding of an adequate orientation toward the present - of “diligence” - to mean the securing the present social order for the future� By the same token, in the fourth section, I analyze the novel’s nationalism to show that the raft of virtues celebrated by the novel as constituting the true “value” of the life of the businessman are held over from the past� I conclude by arguing that although the novel’s circular structure seemingly succeeds in holding these disparate temporal and ethical registers together, ultimately, the balance is untenable� In this respect, Debit and Credit is both the beginning and the end of Freytag’s realism of the present� Debit and Credit follows Anton Wohlfahrt, the son of an accountant from Ostrau� Orphaned after the completion of his Abitur, Anton takes an apprenticeship at the counting house of T�O� Schröter in Breslau� Through his relentless diligence, Anton soon becomes Schröter’s right-hand man, accompanying him on a dangerous expedition to Poland to recover wares lost during a revolutionary 404 Michael Lipkin uprising� At the same time, his Jewish schoolmate, Veitel Itzig worms himself into the graces of Jewish trader and money-lender Hirsch Ehrental� Through a friend at the counting house, Fink, a young aristocrat forced by his relations to learn a trade in order to receive his inheritance, Anton befriends and takes a romantic interest in Lenore, the daughter of the aristocratic Rothsattel family� He soon learns of a plot by Itzig and Ehrental to gain control of the Rothsattel estate by encouraging the Baron to take on debt to build a sugar refinery on his estate� Anton and Bernhard, Ehrental’s bookish son, attempt to intervene, but the plot succeeds� Financially ruined and overcome with shame, Rothsattel attempts suicide, but succeeds only in blinding himself� The Rothsattels are forced to move to a rundown estate in Poland and ask Anton to oversee their finances� Soon the aristocracy in Poland organizes a peasant uprising against the Germans� Anton defends the family with the help of Fink, who returns from a sojourn to America� Fink takes charge of the Rothsattels’ affairs and marries Lenore; Itzig drowns while fleeing from the police� Anton returns to Breslau to marry Sabine, Schröter’s sister, and take over the counting house� Looking over this brief summary, we may provisionally define the present as it is understood in Debit and Credit as the contemporaneous� The business setting of the counting house, the farmers and the manufacturers whom Anton encounters, and even the Polish uprising, which was based on an incident Freytag witnessed in Strelno in 1848, are all assumed to be familiar to the German reader of 1854� The version serialized in the family newspaper Die Gartenlaube in 1872 emphasized this presumption of recognition sketched “after nature” [nach der Natur aufgenommen] by Bernhard Manfield in Breslau� Following Freytag’s argumentation in his 1853 review, we can ascribe a double function to this choice of subject matter� First, it is meant to defend as aesthetically valid precisely that segment of life that had been barred from literary representation in the “Poesie-Prosa” debates that followed in the wake of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics - namely, the world of business (cf� Bötcher 299-361)� 3 And secondly, by attaching a sense of wonder, reserved by Hegel for the mythical and the heroic, to the activities of the counting house and the inner dispositions of its employees, it valorizes them without directly commanding the reader to emulate them� The novel expresses the connection between its poetic and prescriptive aims only indirectly, in the literary debates between Anton and Bernhard, the Ehrental’s sickly, bookish son� During one of their English lessons, Bernhard reads Anton his translation of a Persian love poem, rife with vague metaphorical description, “in which a wise drinker compares his beloved to all kinds of pretty things, to animals, to plants, to the sun and other celestial bodies�” Because the poem has no grounding in an observable reality, Bernhard’s reading is “hasty Diligent Life 405 and awkward,” and ends with his complaint, echoing Hegel, that “life here is very sober […], our present is cold and uniform�” When Anton rebukes him, he continues: “How poor in great impressions are all of our civilized concerns� You must feel the same thing sometimes at your office, your obligations there are so prosaic” (SH 253)� Summing up his views, he says, “The worthiest material for poetry is a life that is rich with powerful feelings and deeds - that is very rare among us” (SH 253)� To Bernhard, such a life is possible only in the past, or such remnants of the past as still exist in the present, like the Orient� In one of his many polemics against Romanticism, Julian Schmidt linked this taste for the distant and the exotic with a total abandonment of literature’s instructive duties: “We are at home in the Eddas, in Homer, in the Vedas, in the Bible, but we are not at home among ourselves… We don’t know how to act capably [schicklich] in the simplest conflicts, how to lend the heroes a proper deportment [schickliches Benehmen]” (“Reaktion in der deutschen Poesie” 17)� Crucial here is the double sense of schicklich, something akin to the English “artful,” as a capably executed literary representation, which is to say, a realistic one, as well as an action that is proper to an uncertain situation� Accordingly, Bernhard is a straw man for the artlessness of Romanticism� Despite his goodheartedness, he is sickly, ineffectual, lacking virility� Anton rebuffs him passionately by describing the recent bankruptcy of a “great” house: If you had experienced the storms of feeling that broke over the business, the terrible despair of the man, the pain of the family, the munificence of his wife, who threw in every last Taler of her income to rescue her husband’s honor, you would not say that our business is poor in passion and feeling� (SH 254) Anton’s rejection of Romanticism liberates the imagination from its fixation with the exotic and reattaches it to the everyday, specifically, to the world of business that Freytag knew from his own time as a counting clerk in Breslau in the 1840s� Anton recognizes the present a stage for greatness because, as a vigorous and active young man, he is embedded in it; he is consequently able to “deport” himself “properly” later in the novel, by saving the Rothsattels� Bernhard, on the other hand, succeeds only in falling ill when he tries to save Lenore after she falls into a lake� Thus, over the course of the novel, what appeared at first to be an aesthetical and historical debate is revealed to be an ethical one� In the same scene, Anton also distinguishes implicitly - implicitly, since the counter viewpoint has no mouthpiece in the novel - the present from the “now” of the novels of Karl Gutzkow, who was regularly raked over the coals in the pages of Die Grenzboten� In theory, Schmidt and Freytag ought to have recognized Gutzkow as a realist, since his Wally the Skeptic and The Knights of the Spirit were among the few novels of the period set in the present� Schmidt, 406 Michael Lipkin however, held that Gutzkow’s revolutionary politics clouded his view of the present, which Gutzkow, at least according to Schmidt, saw as a break with the past, a transitional moment on the way to an unknown future� As a result, his characters were only “embryos,” his work mere “journalism” that captured only the surface of things (“Vergangene Tage” 219)� 4 This superficiality damaged, in turn, the instructive character of his work, especially in the controversial Wally, whose indifferent treatment of religious skepticism, adultery, and suicide was tarnished by a representational and moral relativism - “subjectivism” in the Grenzboten vocabulary, as opposed to the “objectivity” of the realist novel� Gutzkow is the unspoken target of the second part of Anton’s polemic, when he insists that his work at the counting house connects him to a common humanity: We live in many-colored tangle of countless threads that spin themselves out from one human being to another, over land and sea, from one corner of the world to another� They are connected to each individual and connect him with the entire world� Everything that that we experience, and everything that surrounds us, brings before our eyes the most remarkable facets of all foreign lands and every human activity; thus, everything becomes fascinating� And since I have the feeling that I, too, am doing my part and, so little I am able, and am also contributing, that every human being stands in continuous connection to every other, I can be happy with my activities� (SH 253) Anton’s belief, which he characteristically expresses in the language of colonial trade, is that what occurs at the counting house is artistically valid not simply because it is currently occurring, but because it links him to the unchanging present of human affairs, common across all places and - it follows - across all times, for which specific cultures are simply instantations, Erscheinungsformen� Where Gutzkow’s Wally believes herself to be adrift in a moment isolated from the virtues and codes of conduct of the past, and so commits suicide, Anton casts himself as part of an eternal race of actors and doers� Debit and Credit emphasizes this commonality by deliberately avoiding specific reference to the historical events of the 1840s and 50s� Hence its choice of the counting house, already an out-moded institution by the fifties, as its primary setting, or its vague allusion to the revolution in Poland, of which the narrator says only that “a year of misfortune fell upon the land” (SH 340)� The debate between Bernhard and Anton is key to understanding the novel’s conception of the present for three reasons� Firstly, the scene brings into focus just what is at stake for Freytag in any debate about realist aesthetics: the ability of the novel to conduct the conduct of its readers� The Romantic imaginary is absurd because it is not grounded in a perceivable reality; therefore, it cannot instruct� Inversely, Gutzkow does not believe that there is instruction to give; consequently, his depiction of the present lacks depth and credibility� Both fail Diligent Life 407 artistically because they fail morally, and they fail morally because they fail artistically� They fail on both counts because neither is adequately oriented toward the present� Secondly, that the scene is staged as a debate suggests at least a theoretical discomfort on the novel’s part with direct sermonizing� Again and again, Debit and Credit will advance its preferred perspective indirectly, through the use of differentiation, contrast, and, above all, through its use of temporal structure� And finally, the debate underlines the fact that the novel’s commitment to the present is sufficiently multi-faceted as to require multiple counterexamples to render its claims legible� I will attempt to identify these various facets below� We have seen, then, that Debit and Credit carves out the present, as a field of representation and action, to distinguish itself from rival literary movements, which it rejects on the basis of their temporal orientation� But how is the present, and the three-part structure Freytag uses to distinguish it, used to structure the novel itself? Debit and Credit has generally been read as a novel of class conflict, depicting a confrontation between the mercantile bourgeoisie and the aristocracy� Indeed, from its outset, the novel’s social space is starkly differentiated: the reader encounters the space of the aristocracy (the Rothsattel estate and the dance classes), the space of the bourgeoisie (Anton’s home and the counting house); the space of the laborer (the warehouse); and, complicating this structure, the space of the Jewish money-lenders (the Judengasse, or ghetto)� What is striking, however, is the extent to which the classes are distinguished not according to their modes of economic production, but rather by their respective temporal orientations, which determine how each class sustains itself� The primary counter-model for the counting house, which is oriented toward the present, is the aristocratic world of the Rothsattel family� This world is decisively oriented toward the past� In the sardonically narrated tour that leads the reader through the Rothsattel estate at the novel’s beginning, the reader learns that every object in the Rothsattel house has been carefully chosen by the family to remind them of their distinguished past� The house contains a rococo flagon as proof that a Rothsattel might have fought in the Crusades, or at least as proof of “the existence of the ancestor” and “as a reminder of the lovely time of the Crusades” (SH 25)� The paintings in the gallery display likenesses of various male ancestors of the Rothsattel family who died in various dishonorable (i�e�, anti-Protestant) causes� It is even believed that the house is haunted: Another [Rothsattel] had fought among various armies and under his own banner during the Thirty Years War� […] Among various young ladies of the family there existence since old times the dark belief, that this fat man could be seen now and again 408 Michael Lipkin on a great barrel of sauerkraut, where, as a restless spirit, he was believed to sit and groan as punishment for a life of terrible infractions against the virtue of the females of his day� (SH 25) The novel repeatedly draws a direct connection between three aspects of the Rothsattel family’s consciousness of their station in life: firstly, the family’s veneration of its past, even when it is a shameful one; secondly, the family’s ability to relate to the material world only as the bearer of this past; and thirdly, what the narrator repeatedly refers to as their Leichtsinnigkeit - their frivolity� Over the course of the novel, this term encompasses a range of greater and lesser sins exhibited by various members of the family: a lack of intellectual seriousness; the inability to carry out an undertaking to its end; ingratitude; unreliability; an unearned sense of superiority� The family’s belief in the status-conferring nature of the past is readily apparent in the Freiherr’s doomed attempt to dabble in the business of the present by building a sugar refinery on the Rothsattel estate without any prior business knowledge� It is also apparent in the various frivolous pursuits to which the remaining Rothsattels devote themselves� Their son Eugen is a profligate gambler who depends on his name to stretch his credit� Their daughter Lenore sketches and takes dancing lessons� Frau Rothsattel whiles away the time reading the airy works of Chateaubriand, another bugbear of the Grenzboten circle� Fink, the sole aristocrat in Debit and Credit who embraces the virtues of the counting house casually insults those he perceives as inferior, like Anton, and carelessly entertains the romantic attentions of Sabine, whose household diligence stands in pointed contrast to the indolence of the spoiled Lenore� It is tempting to leave off our analysis by concluding that because the aristocracy dwells in the past it is doomed to failure in the present� But the novel repeatedly emphasizes that not all modes of being active in the present constitute a proper “diligence�” One such mode is that of the counting house laborers, who transport the enormous bundles of goods in the firm’s warehouse, and who provide the brute force without which the Schröter enterprise could not function� Debit and Credit depicts the laborer as the loyal ally and foot-soldier of the mercantile bourgeois� While the loaders are no less hard-working that the counting house clerks, their work does not constitute a proper Tätigkeit because they lead a bare animal life, from which they have neither inclination nor the ability to lift themselves� Despite Anton’s friendship with the youngest loader, Karl, who joins him on his second excursion to Poland, he often finds himself put off by their brutishness� When he discusses Karl’s future with Sturm, Karl’s father, the loader shocks Anton by quaffing down a mixture of olive oil, beer and sugar, which he claims promotes strength� He brags that he drinks forty Diligent Life 409 half-liters of beer a day without worrying for his health� “No loader ever gets to be fifty� Have you ever seen an old loader? You haven’t seen one because there aren’t any� Fifty is the highest age a loader has ever reached� My father was fifty when he died, and the one we just buried - Herr Schröter was at the funeral - was forty-nine” (SH 245)� But the central mode of deportment toward the present rejected as inadequate by Debit and Credit is that of the Jewish characters� Through the first three books, Itzig is set up not as an antagonist but as a parallel figure to Anton� Each seeks out a mentor; each proves himself capable in his chosen enterprise; each acquires skills through tireless exertion� Itzig is no less hard-working than Anton, no less willing to endure any privation if it will bring him closer to his goal� But where Debit and Credit admires Anton for his diligence, it looks down on Itzig’s striving as greed� His labor establishes no connection between himself and other human beings; it serves only to advance himself� He knows only the commodity relation, to buy and to sell� This is made clear at the novel’s outset, when Anton and Itzig are admiring the beauty of the Rothsattel estate, and Itzig expresses his desire to buy it� It is also apparent in the child-like fascination with novelty that characterizes the décor of the Ehrental household, where everything has been purchased with “a taste for the newest,” including “tea services, bracket clocks, and upholstery” (SH 126)� As a kind of mere “nowness,” Itzig’s greed often impairs his foresight, as in the scene where he hesitates to spend two hundred Talers to learn debt law from Hippus, a disgraced lawyer, who in his turn nearly squanders his own advantage over Itzig by demanding that he throw a free bottle of Branntwein into the bargain� The novel seems to be aware of the repugnance of these characterizations, insofar as it attempts to leaven them by adding a handful of positive Jewish figures, like Bernhard and the Ehrental women� The only openly anti-Semitic remarks in the novel are made by Fink and are portrayed as being in poor taste, in contrast to Anton’s respectful conduct toward the Ehrentals� Nonetheless, the novel rejects the possibility that what it depicts as the Jewish way of life, that is, the relentless pursuit of profit, can be anything more than a shallow and rootless mode of comportment toward the present, unlike that of Anton� Before proceeding to an examination of the bourgeois orientation toward the present, I would like to draw several preliminary conclusions� The first is that, here, again, this conception of adequate relation to the present is sufficiently multifaceted as to require multiple countermodels to render itself legible� The second is that, in the novel’s social panorama, temporal orientation, and not economic activity, is the decisive organizing principle� The existence of the classes, how they produce wealth, how they interact with members of their own group and others, how they dress and decorate their homes - all this follows 410 Michael Lipkin from their chosen orientation toward the present and not vice versa� And lastly, we can observe that, as in the analysis of literary movements in Debit and Credit, an adequate orientation toward the present is an absolute criterion� If among artistic movements a literature of the present is a legitimate literature, then among classes only one is destined to flourish, while the others are destined to perish� What, then, is the relation toward the present that Debit and Credit holds up as exemplary? If it is not simply an awareness of that which is currently occurring, what is it? And how does it inform the novel’s realism? A preliminary answer can be found in the novel’s title: Debit and Credit� At first glance, this title would seem to refer to the double-entry bookkeeping that is the primary occupation of Schröter’s counting house� The title can also be taken as an implicit reference to Wilhelm Meister, specifically the scene in which Werner suggests that Wilhelm drop his theatrical ambitions and enter the world of business� Here, the title seems to say, double-entry book-keeping (which Werner regards as mankind’s greatest creation) will finally receive its artistic due� But, above all, the title describes a poetological practice taken from the world of business: the act of surveying the world as an inventory of immobile objects, which has as its ethical correlative a will to mastery over it� This task, which Anton performs again and again, doubles as a literary device employed by the narrator to introduce a description of Anton’s physical environment� In the fourth book of the novel, for example, Anton arrives in Poland as the Rothsattel’s plenipotentiary in order to inventory the meager estate in Rosmin they have been duped into buying: They looked through empty courtyard� - Four horses with two grooms - they had ridden into the woods -, a few damaged plows, a pair of harrows, two handcarts, a britschka, a basement full of potatoes, a few ears of oats, some straw - the sketches didn’t take long to draw up; for the most part, the buildings were damaged not by advanced age, but rather through the indifference of men, which had done nothing to hinder the incursion of the elements� (SH 532) Here the narration is scarcely to be distinguished from the language of itemization and evaluation, the m-dashes doubling as bullet points on a manifest� Similarly, in the first volume, when Anton arrives at Schröter’s, he is shown into the firm’s enormous warehouse: There was a large, gloomy, vaulted room on the ground floor, barely illuminated by the light coming in through the barred window, in which there lay samples and small inventories for the traffic of the day� Tuns, crates and bales were piled on each other, with only narrow aisles winding their way between them� Almost every land, every race of mankind had worked and gathered, in order to heap up useful and valuable Diligent Life 411 things before the eyes of our hero� The floating palace of the East India Company, the swift American brig, the patriarchal ark of the Dutchman, the stout-ribbed whaler, the smoky steamer, the gay Chinese junk, the light canoe of the Malay - all these had battled with winds and waves to furnish this room� A Hindu woman had woven that matting, a diligent Chinese woman had painted this chest with red and black hieroglyphs, there a Negro from the Congo in the service of the Virginia planter had looped these canes over those cotton bales; this trunk of dyewood had been thrown onto the sand by the waves of the bosom of the Mexican sea had thrown; this square block of zebra-wood had stood in the swampy jungle of the Brazil, where apes and colorful parrots had hopped between its leaves� (SH 65) The storm of poetic feeling that the sight of these wares calls forth in Anton, for whom the sound of the city becomes “the roar of the sea - a sound he only knew in his dreams,” has been read as a remnant of Romanticism in Freytag’s realism, a moment when the prosaic objects of the world of business are poeticized (SH-65)� But while in Romanticism objects, like Eichendorff’s Marmorbild, possess their own mysterious life, in the Schröter warehouse, human beings and objects alike are subdued by the language of colonial trade and brought into uniform order: “This delight in what was foreign and unfamiliar never wore off, but led [Anton] to become, by reading, intimately acquainted with the countries from which all these stories came, and with the men by whom they were gathered” (SH 65)� In the novel’s final scene, Anton is at last fully master of this process� He is granted access to Schröter’s ledger, the firm’s Geheimbuch, which affords him the supreme perspective over the transactions and wares of the counting house: the book’s inscription reads “Mit Gott,” casting the divine entity as the accountant of accountants (SH 893)� To comport oneself properly toward the present is first and foremost to understand it in its totality and to master it� But how can the present be mastered if at any moment it might be overturned by the future? It is precisely to address this problem that Debit and Credit sets its action in the world of business� Insofar as Debit and Credit tracks Anton’s rise from novice to partner, Debit and Credit is generally categorized by the secondary literature as a Bildungsroman� And yet, the novel contains none of the openness toward the world, none of the embrace of chance and of experiences not yet known that, in her work on Wilhelm Meister, Dorothea von Mücke has shown to be an essential aspect of Goethe’s original Bildungsroman (cf� von Mücke, “Illusion and Reality”)� In the world of business, at least as Freytag depicts it, the life of the individual runs along a closed track of experiences, whose twists and turns are visible from its outset� Insofar as Anton’s path curves toward milestones and pathmarks that are seen, desired and attained, Debit and Credit is his curriculum vitae, understood here in its double sense a life 412 Michael Lipkin and as a list of positions successively held� Consequently, many of the novel’s subplots are structured around Anton’s gradual mastery of a skill - that is, with apprenticeship, or “on-the-job training�” The novel’s second book, for example, tracks Anton’s progress at the dance lessons to which he accompanies Fink� Despite the frivolity of the activity, Anton excels thanks to his “orderliness and dutifulness” (SH 178)� He shows “the regularity of a man, who did his duty with delight, he appeared punctually, he made every step, he danced every dance, he always showed good cheer and found pleasure in engaging neglected young ladies” (SH 179)� Throughout the novel, Anton also makes steady progress in learning English, the language of international trade� Not long after Anton’s arrival at the counting house, Fink discourages him from trying to curry the principal’s favor and advises him to pick up an English workbook: “Buy yourself an English workbook and make sure you get somewhere in it, before you start to rust in here� Nothing you learn here will make you a diligent man if you don’t have already have the stuff to be one” (SH 64)� In the next book, we learn that, “after much effort, [Anton] succeeded in penetrating the mysteries of English pronunciation” (SH 249)� Under Bernhard’s tutelage, Anton graduates to the novels of Sir Walter Scott - together with Dickens, the twin pillars of realism for the editors of Die Grenzboten (cf� Stark, “Dickens in German Guise? ”) - and by the time of the relocation to Rosmin, Anton is proficient enough to give lessons to Lenore, though she is too frivolous to take them seriously� The novel’s sense of diegetic development is wholly determined by what Goethe in the Natural Daughter referred to as Stufenglück, namely, the happiness of seeing the world as organized into stages, ranks and steps, and the pleasure of ascending from one to the next� In Debit and Credit, the world of business is, then, not only a subject matter, but a spatio-temporal framework that gives shape and rhythm to the individual life, in which the future is made manifest in the present, and thereby secured� Freytag also uses the temporal of structure of mastery to frame Itzig’s story� But what distinguishes the two is not simply the unscrupulousness of Anton’s Jewish classmate� Rather, Anton’s mode of deportment to the present is a legitimate one because it demonstrates a care for the future� He regards his present diligence not just as a way of pursuing profit - though that is, in fact, what he spends much of the novel doing - but as a way of securing the future existence of his way of life� It is this convergence of diligence and care that grounds the concept of mimesis, and by, extension of realism, in Debit and Credit� On the novel’s very first page, the first thing that the reader learns about the young Anton is that he takes great pleasure in and has an unusual knack for imitation: Diligent Life 413 His greatest joy, however, was to sit opposite his father, to cross his little legs over one another, as his father did, and to smoke out of toy pipe, as his father liked to do from an actual pipe� Then he listened to all the things his father had to recount, or he recounted his own tales� The women of Ostrau all agreed that he did this with so much gravity and dignity, that he looked, all the way up to his blue eyes and his rosy childish face completely like a little man working in the state service� (SH 8) Anton’s skillful mimicry quickly earns him the admiration of his drawing teacher, who urges him to become a painter; as well as of a professor at the university, who suggests that Anton become a philologist� The young Anton recognizes in the figures that populate his present a range of possible futures for himself, and in him they recognize the continuation of their way of life� They inculcate virtues in him by not by counsel or command, but simply by existing, by possessing greater skill, by discharging greater responsibilities and commanding greater respect� At the novel’s end, Anton’s unmatched diligence among the counting clerks allows him to imitate Schröter himself and become a partner in the firm, removing the last boundary between literary and social mimesis� For Freytag as well as for the reader, to “become a diligent man” is to attune oneself to one’s world and imitate it, thereby assuring its survival� This Veitel Itzig cannot do� Though he, like Anton, gains knowledge and mastery, he can never succeed at the social mimesis that gives this skill its ultimate value� He speaks only garbled German and is regarded as an outsider wherever he goes� When, finally, he is wealthy enough to buy himself a well-appointed office and an expensive suit of clothes, it is nothing more than a costume� At the end of the day, when he is alone, he retires to a sparsely furnished room and strips it off, relieved that he no longer has to imitate his betters� Thus, the representation of the present in Debit and Credit is meant, above all, to jolt the desire and train the capacity for imitation, by depicting a future for the reader that is both desirable and credible� The novel seeks to assure the survival of the present into the future by bringing together what is and what will be in a single image of what ought to be� This is the point of intersection between diligence and mimesis, in its artistic as well as its social sense� For the individual life, Freytag finds this temporal-ethical structure in the world of business� For his readership as a whole, he finds it in the political project of German nationalism, as I will show in the section below� So far, we have seen that the orientation toward the present championed by Debit and Credit is something considerably more complex than simply the representation of contemporaneous events or the championing of diligent labor� The novel recognizes that a life devoted to the pursuit of profit, however diligent it 414 Michael Lipkin may be, is socially destructive� Instead, it advances an orientation toward the present that is comprised of a two-fold diligence: first, a kind of striving toward an end already manifest in the present, like the mastery of a skill or a position in an enterprise, so that when it arrives it will not disrupt the existing order of things; and secondly - its converse - a diligence motivated by a care for the present that seeks to shepherd this order into the future� But if, given this conception of an adequate relation to the present, Anton Wohlfahrt’s proper goal is to be the head of his firm, what is the proper goal for a nation of Anton Wohlfahrts? This is the concern of the novel’s second half of the novel, the Rosmin adventure, which at first glance seems extraneous to the novel’s main plot� The answer is unequivocal: the realization and the defense of German nationhood� If we leave aside the author’s nationalist sympathies and political engagements and approach this question through the problematic sketched out so far, why is the German nation the only legitimate collective goal for the readership of Debit and Credit? Here again, some valuable context is to be found in the critical writing in the pages of Die Grenzboten, particularly in Julian Schmidt’s broadsides against Schiller, who, in the mid-1850s, had begun his ascent into the canon of German literature as the political author par excellence� In Schmidt’s view, which echoed his attacks on Romanticism, the “humanity” championed by Schiller is too vague, too airy to be something concretely and legitimately achievable� It was only with the coming to maturity of German nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century that German literature had finally been furnished a tangible and realistic political aspiration� Schmidt’s assessment of the political failures of German literature underlies two key scenes in Debit and Credit, which are staged so as to mirror one another: Schröter’s conversation with Anton during the first Polish excursion and Anton’s harangue to Fink during the second� In the first scene, Schröter is chagrined by the chaos he and Anton are witnessing� He considers it futile, since the national character of the Poles destines them to serve the Germans: There is no race, which so lacks the stuff needed to come up in the world and to acquire humanity by its capital and education, as the Slavs […] Over there the privileged class claims to represent the people� As if some aristocrats and serfs could form a state! (SH 350) Poland, unlike Germany, has no bourgeoisie� It is the Bürgerstand that stands for “civilization and progress, and that raises up a heap of scattered fields into a state� […] Free labor and free labor alone makes the life of a people great and secure and durable” (SH 350)� In Schröter’s view, a state is not invented wholesale, through the forging of new institutions and the redistribution of power� It must be “raised up” from a way of life already given� It is the ratification of a Diligent Life 415 national character, which as we saw above, lies in its economic activity, insofar as this activity is the outward manifestation product of its temporal orientation� In other words, the German nation will exist in the future because it already exists in the present� Anton underlines this point to Fink, as he prepares to defend the Rothsattel estate� Wherever German “intelligence” is at work, there the German nation is to be found: Through our sheep their wild herds have been ennobled, we build the machines that fill the taps from which their liquor flows, their mortgages are secured by German credit and German trust� Even the rifles with which they at this moment seek to kill us, have been made in our factories, or delivered to them by our firms� (SH 667) In both passages the Bürgerstand is best understood not as a class, or as an aggregate of merchant-citizens, but literally, as a stance [Stand], a bearing, a way of setting one’s feet on the ground and facing the world� In promoting this attitude, which Anton believes to be as real as the rifles in the hands of his enemies, the novel defends the pursuit of profit as a form of civic virtue, while setting a goal for its readership that can stand up to the charge of “idealism” that Schmidt leveled against Schiller� Why does the novel feel compelled to set a collective goal for its readers at all? Like Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, published seven years earlier, Debit and Credit grapples with the double character of capitalism, as productive and destructive, emancipatory and exploitative� If labor is, as Marx says, man’s metabolism with nature, then ceaseless diligence cannot but transform the very present toward which Freytag hopes to attune his reader� If the rise of credit and trade has brought about a world that has left the aristocracy behind - in which aristocratic virtues, like the refusal to work, are now considered vices - who is to say that the same fate might not one day befall Anton? That he, too, will not one day melt into air, along with all else that is solid? The novel addresses these concerns through the character of Fink, whose initial role in the novel to serve as Anton’s entrée into the world of the aristocracy� Fink openly mocks the pieties of the counting house, and eventually leaves Germany to make his fortune in America, inviting Anton to do the same� In the novel’s third book, after shocking the clerks at dinner by burning a hole through one of Sabine’s cherished napkins, Fink proceeds to sing the praises of the new world: As for me, I praise what you call the American’s lack of feeling [Gemütlosigkeit]� He works like two Germans, but would never think to fall in love with his cabin, his fence, his plough animals� What he owns, that is worth to him only what can be expressed in dollars� Quite coarse, you might say with disgust� I praise this coarseness, which is 416 Michael Lipkin always thinking about how much or how little a thing is worth� Because this coarseness has also created a state that is powerful and free� (SH 283) Like class, national character in Debit and Credit is distinguished according to the temporal orientation� On the side of the past is the moribund feudal state of Poland; on the side of a “mere” present is America� In the middle stands Germany, diligent in its pursuit of a value greater than profit� Anton expresses this view of “the German manner” [die deutsche Weise] when he rebuts Fink and successfully convinces the young aristocrat that the latter has more feeling than he lets on: All of sitting and standing here right now are workers in a business that does not belong to us� And each of us conducts his affairs in the German manner, which you have just condemned� It never occurs to any of us to think, I receive such-and-such number of Talers from the firm, therefore the firm is worth such-and-such an amount to me� Whatever may be gained by work, to which we contribute, that brings joy to us, too, and fills us with pride� And when a certain action results in a loss, so is every man here vexed, perhaps even more than the principal� (SH 285) To Anton, though the counting house is a profit-oriented enterprise and though its employees spend their days working to make a profit, their real reward is the joy and pride conferred on them by the business’s success� What they gain, as members of a collective undertaking, is a codex of virtues - “the German manner” - which grants them a sense of identity and purpose that the individual struggle for advantage never can� This argument echoes our analysis above of the contrast between Anton’s diligence and Itzig’s avarice� Only here diligence, which we defined earlier as being active in the present and caring for the future, gains a third temporal dimension� For what is the origin of these virtues and this sense of identity? It cannot be the world of business, since in America business is successfully conducted without them� Insofar as they are taken from “the German manner,” which is to say, a standing reservoir of customs, traditions, and values - respect for the head of a family or enterprise; honor in one’s dealing with others; the ability to delay immediate gratification for later reward - they are taken from the past� Anton’s defense of the counting house and his plea for the “German manner of conducting affairs” is, then, an attempt to bring these older values, developed over centuries of German life, into confluence with the single principle that guides Schröter’s affairs, namely, to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest� We have, at last, a full picture of the “diligence” which Freytag hoped a literature of present would promote in his 1853 review� It does not consist simply in depicting the present� Nor does it seek to encourage its reader to be more Diligent Life 417 hard-working� Rather, Freytag’s realism is an attempt to represent vigorous labor that is sufficiently idealized as to stir the reader’s desire to imitate it and sufficiently recognizable as to allow the reader to successfully do so� Such a representation would promote not only the creation of wealth, but would take the values of the past and secure them indefinitely into the future� Thus the diligence that Freytag demands of the reader links an inner labor, the recognition and affirmation of the values of the past, as well as a care for their continued existence in the future, to an outer labor in the present, namely, work� By the same token, the writer’s diligence consists of fusing together these disparate temporalities and their rival ethical claims, resolving the tension and the contradictions between them into a single recognizable depiction of the present� What Debit and Credit seeks to do is something far more than plead for the artistic legitimacy of the world of business� It advances the belief that, with sufficient vigor, literature can impose moral and social order onto a world whose existence is one of ceaseless social, economic, and political upheaval� Does Debit and Credit ultimately succeed in bringing together these three temporal and ethical registers - the values of the past, the diligence of the present, and the care for the future? For an answer we must see see what sort of Nachwelt, the world presumed to exist after the events of the novel, Anton Wohlfahrt has to look forward to at the novel’s end� The novel ends with Anton’s triumphant return from Poland, having successfully defended the Rothsattel estate and cured himself of his single fault - his fascination with the aristocracy and his desire to be accepted by them� Anton’s sense of honor will not permit him to abandon the family� He leaves them in the care of Fink, who has both the necessary business experience to manage the Rothsattels’ affairs and the necessary social standing to marry Lenore� He returns to marry Sabine and is made partner in the firm by Schröter, thereby becoming the principal of his own household as well as of his workplace� Anton protests that he doesn’t possess sufficient capital to be a worthy partner, but Schröter reassures him: No, my brother� Sabine has acted as a clever businessman� Property and prosperity have no value, not for the individual, and not for the state, without the vigorous energy that sets the dead metal into creative life� You are bringing the robust force of youth and a proven wisdom into the house� Welcome to this house, and to our hearts! (SH 894) By injecting the counting house with a rejuvenating force, Anton assures its continued existence� Thus the novel of linear development and advancement is revealed, in fact, to be circular, leaving the reader secure in the knowledge that the enterprise of the present will flourish into the future without losing the 418 Michael Lipkin past values which distinguish it from the rapacious money-lenders of the Jewish ghetto� Within the novel, at least, its various narrative strands, and the temporal and ethical tensions that animate them, are resolved into this circular structure of the present, which underpins them all� And yet, it is telling that, despite his full-throated call for a realism of the present, Freytag would never again return to the theme with the ideological confidence - one might say, chauvinism - of Debit and Credit� Precisely because Freytag’s work, as a literature of the present, was so bound to the present of its day, to the virtues of a social formation that promised very concrete historical outcomes, it proved uniquely vulnerable to the currents of a time of rapid social and culture change� Freytag’s writing from the 1860s onward registers a virtually perpetual disappointment with the state of affairs in Germany, beginning with the defeat of the Liberal cause by Bismarck in the constitutional struggle of 1862� Far from shifting power to the middle classes, “the German manner of conducting affairs” turned out to mean the domination of the economic sphere by the aristocracy - not by Wohlfahrts, but by Rothsattels� This era of Freytag’s life, which ended in 1888, ended in a decade-long economic depression, brought on by the banking crises of 1866 and 1873, which pointed ahead to a century in which the creation of wealth and diligence had been permanently decoupled� That both crises originated in Anton’s beloved England, further suggested that the Anton Wohlfahrts of the world were perhaps no less rapacious than the Veitel Itzigs� The end of Freytag’s life was devoted not to a depiction of this period, but rather to the historical novel, his Ancestors cycle� Thus, rather than grounding a program, Debit and Credit represents its end-point; the belief that, if only literature properly represented the present, it could stop the future from arriving� Notes 1 All citations of Freytag in this article are taken from the original German� All of the translations are my own� 2 Cf� Ridley, “Zwischen Anstank und Ästhetik”; Hausen, “Debit and Credit”; Stockinger,Zeitalter des Realismus; Wagner, “Verklärte Realität”; and Bötcher, Gustav Freytag� 3 I am indebted to Bötcher for his analysis of the Hegel reception of the 1830s and 40s� 4 I am grateful to Michael Swellander at the University of Iowa for his insight into Schmidt’s reception of Gutzkow� Diligent Life 419 Works Cited Becker, Sabine� “Erziehung zur Bürgerlichkeit: Eine kulturgeschichtliche Lektüre von Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben im Kontext des Bürgerlichen Realismus�” 150 Jahre Soll und Haben: Studien zu Gustav Freytags kontroversem Roman� Ed� Florian Krobb� Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005� 29-46� Bötcher, Philipp� Gustav Freytag: Konstellationen des Realismus� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018� Freytag, Gustav� “Neue deutsche Romane 1853�” Romantheorie und Romankritik in Deutschland. 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