Novel
Debit and Credit
Soll und Haben
Gustav Freytag · 1855
Opening lines
Ostrau ist eine kleine Kreisstadt unweit der Oder, bis nach Polen hinein berühmt durch ihr Gymnasium und süße Pfefferkuchen, welche dort noch mit einer Fülle von unverfälschtem Honig gebacken werden.
Ostrau is a small district town not far from the Oder, famous as far as Poland for its grammar school and its sweet gingerbread, which is still baked there with an abundance of unadulterated honey.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from zeno.org
Synopsis
The orphaned son of a bookkeeper, Anton Wohlfart enters the firm of the merchant Schröter in Breslau at eighteen as an apprentice, and wins the esteem of the house by his punctuality and probity. On the way, he has met again Veitel Itzig, a former Jewish schoolmate who enters the service of the broker Ehrenthal and learns shady dealings, and he has fallen in love with Lenore, daughter of Baron von Rothsattel. A noble colleague, Fritz von Fink, introduces him to the world of balls, while the baron lets himself be drawn by Ehrenthal into speculation.
Context
The novel appeared in 1855 in Leipzig, in six books, and remained a bookshop success until the beginning of the twentieth century; Franz Mehring held it to be the most widely read novel of its century. Conceived at first in three books and directed against the nobility, it then shifted its emphasis towards a critique of speculation. It extols the trade of Breslau and sets against it a ruined nobility, Jewish speculators painted by stereotype, and the Poles, which governs the way it has been viewed since: in 1977, a film project by Fassbinder was abandoned after a long debate over its antisemitism. The French translation by W. de Suckau appeared from Hachette in 1866.
Who it is for
A long novel in six books, to be read also as a document: its prejudices against Jews and Poles are part of its subject.
Prizes and reception
The typical example of German bourgeois realism, translated into almost every European language.