Debit and Credit

Novel by Gustav Freytag

Debit and Credit (German: Soll und Haben, 1855) is a novel in six volumes by Gustav Freytag. It was one of the most popular and widely read German novels of the 19th century.^[1]^[2]

It was translated into English as Debit and Credit by Georgiana Malcolm née Harcourt in 1857.

The novel has been described as a “colonial novel”, an example of the broader trend of German nationalist Ostmarkenliteratur ("Eastern March literataure", a name of the area in terms of its geographic relation to the 'centre', suggesting medieval phenomena such as the Saxon Eastern March) concerning Prussian and German-ruled Greater Poland region, related to popular German colonial narratives. 'Reinventing Poland as German colonial territory' according to Kristin Kopp.^[3] It develops the idea of "Polnische Wirtschaft" as inferior to putative German industriousness.

The novel concerns a Polish uprising against German colonization in 'Prussian Poland', where German settlers displaced the Polish inhabitants. Freytag unequivocally endorses it, espousing ardent Anti-Polish sentiment and views German racial superiority, stating that "there is an old warfare between [Germans] and the Slavonic tribes; and [Germans] feel with pride that culture, industry, and credit are [their] side. Whatever the Polish proprietors around [them] may now be—and there are many rich and intelligent men among them—every dollar that [these proprietors] can spend, they have made, directly or indirectly, by German intelligence. Their wild flocks are improved by [German] breeds; [who] erect the machinery that fills their spirit-casks."^[4]

It has been Zeitroman^[5], literally 'novel of the times' or "social novel".

It represents are the mercantile or bourgeois class, the nobility, and the Jews:

The bourgeois Schröter family represents Freytag's view of the ideal bourgeois type, invested in order, honesty, and solid virtue.
The noble Rothsattel family represents the old nobility, who try to preserve their privileges in a changing society. Their struggle to avoid their impending financial ruin portrays this dynamic.
The Jewish Ehrenthal family are money-lenders and speculators. Veitel Itzig is a criminal employee of the family.

It has also been described as a bildungsroman Anton Wohlfart is the emerging hero. As a result of his manifold experiences, he develops a putatively sober and virtuous outlook (Weltanschauung).

In 1977, the novel came close to being filmed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but after a debate about its alleged anti-semitic content this project was abandoned.

Plot

After the death of his father, young Anton Wohlfart begins an apprenticeship in the office of the merchant T. O. Schröter in Breslau. Anton quickly succeeds through honest and diligent work, achieving a proper bourgeois existence. He has a variety of experiences with the Schröter family and also with the noble family of the Rothsattels. He later becomes involved with the liquidation of the estate of the Rothsattel family, an obvious symbol of the decline of the nobility and of its clash with emergent capitalist forces.

Anton has repeated interactions with two other young men, the Jew Veitel Itzig, whom he had known already in his home town, Ostrava, and a young nobleman, Herr von Fink, who is a co-worker in the Schröter firm.

References

^ Magill, Frank N. (1960). Masterpieces of World Literature in Digest Form. Vol. III. New York: Harper & Row. pp. 261–263.
^ Vivian, Kim, ed. (1992). A Concise History of German Literature to 1900. Rochester, New York: Camden House, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer. p. 267. ISBN 1-879751-29-1. Records show one lending library in Berlin acquiring 2,316 copies of Freytag's novel for its patrons between 1865 and 1898.
^ Kopp, Kristin (2009). "1. Reinventing Poland as German Colonial Territory in the Nineteenth Century: Gustav Freytag's SOLL UND HABEN as Colonial Novel". In Nelson, Robert (ed.). Germans, Poland and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 Through The Present (1st ed.). New York: Palgrave MacMillan US. pp. 11–37. ISBN 978-0-230-61268-6.
^ Ureña Valerio, Lenny A. Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920. Athens: Ohio University Press.
^ Garland, Henry; Mary Garland (1997). The Oxford Companion to German Literature (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 784. ISBN 0-19-815896-3.