Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815 by Matt Erlin (review)

In Necessary Luxuries, Matt Erlin carefully analyzes the German book around 1800, both as a cultural artifact and a social institution (5), to argue that culture in Germany (1770–1815) was conceived as a form of luxury (1). Books in Germany around 1800, locally produced commodities (in contrast to exotic commodities from abroad), are central examples of a domestic luxury object. Erlin examines the book as both a physical object and as containing information that communicates with and informs broader discourses of the time, such as the intersection of luxury and cultural consumption. Influenced by New Historicism and discourse analysis (16), Erlin’s monograph, which includes illustrations replicated from the novels he studies, first situates and explores the German landscape of luxury in the eighteenth century and then examines representations of luxury in individual novels. By the end of Necessary Luxuries, Erlin has a plethora of historical and literary evidence to support his argument that one’s understanding of the transformation of how authors and intellectuals think about art and literature can be enriched when the category of luxury is added to the otherwise simple comparison between didactic and autonomous art (101).

The first three chapters of Necessary Luxuries cover major trends and frame a discussion of luxury and luxury editions in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany as well as the discourse surrounding the German public’s desire to read and consume written texts. When Erlin examines Germany’s voracious appetite for reading around 1800 and the rapid growth of the book market in this period, he likewise notes that many critics at this time perceived reading to be especially dangerous (78). Against this backdrop, one can see how the then-common fears of Lesewut (reading mania) and Lesesucht coexisted with the “politicization of readers from the lower social strata following the French Revolution” as well as the alleged neglect of feminine duties by female readers (78). Reading, Erlin demonstrates, was acceptable when “organized around principles like ‘taste,’ ‘comfort,’ or ‘convenience,’” because it contributed to a “socially sanctioned, rationally pursued project of self-cultivation,” which makes it “part of a production process rather than a mere source of passive, anesthetizing, sensual pleasure” (98). In this first part of Necessary Luxuries, Erlin reminds of us not only of the eighteenth-century debates concerning a culture of reading consumption, but he also provides ample evidence of what, exactly, is at stake in these different debates.

The final four chapters of Necessary Luxuries outline and problematize depictions of luxury in novels by Campe, Wieland, Moritz, Novalis, and Goethe. Erlin analyzes these novels in chronological order, which serves to trace how luxury and the consumption of luxury goods change in this period. Each subsequent chapter, then, responds in part to the previous chapter. Chapter 4 pairs Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere with Wieland’s Der goldne Spiegel to address how both novels are preoccupied with affluence and ornamentation (104). Chapter 5 understands Moritz’s Anton Reiser as an example of “antifiction,” which both critiques and offers an alternative to “an allegedly inferior kind of fictionality” that is associated with excess (172). Chapter 6 reframes the relationship between the miner and the artist in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen by way of modern consumer culture (200). Chapter 7 concludes the analysis of novels from 1770–1815 by arguing that Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften, which is “obsessed with exchange and equivalence,” looks backward in that it “shares many of the basic assumptions regarding luxury, consumption, and needs that also shape earlier works” (205). After detailing the landscape of literature, consumption, and luxury editions through the lenses of various novels, Erlin concludes that luxury is a discourse of both subjects and objects (232), and that literature is part of an “expanding universe of material artifacts and the behaviors associated with them” (233). By way of these canonical examples...