Börsenfieber und Kaufrausch. Ökonomie, Judentum und Weiblichkeit bei Theodor Fontane, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler und Émile Zola (review)

Around the turn of the 19^th to the 20^th century, German writers and thinkers, disoriented by the somewhat exaggerated post-unification panic of 1873 and nostalgic for traditional artisanship and the alleged moderation and human warmth of the German merchant ethos, became dismayed by modern finance, credit, the stock market, and speculation, shifting the responsibility for these alien forces onto the cold, rational, international Jews and, in Franziska Schößler's penetrating account, the obsession of women with shopping and luxury. The grammar of finance became the insecure future tense, as indeed we can see every day on CNBC. While Jews and women became exemplars of the culture of avarice, Jewishness was feminized and the uproar of the stock market reflected female hysteria. In her inevitable theoretical proem, Schößler distinguishes two methods for dealing with this. One is the extraction of economic metaphor from literature—the reader's belief in the narrative is a form of credit; intertextuality is borrowing; the abandonment of the gold standard is the loss of mimesis; speculation is fiction and vice versa. While this can be done circumspectly, as in Anna H. Helm's The Intersection of Material and Poetic Economy (2009), there is always a danger of equivocation created by scholarly ingenuity, and Schößler rightly prefers social resonance (Greenblatt), though she does not eschew metaphorical and metonymical associations.

She begins with Fontane's L'Adultera, in which stock market activity is theft from the people and modernization is projected onto the Jewish minority. Love and marriage are business relations. (Schößler comes back repeatedly to this matter, as though there had been no precapitalist history of marriage from motives of property and power.) Here the adulteress is sold back to her husband. Assimilation is demanded and regarded with suspicion; the happy ending is made possible by the loss of Jewish wealth. Schößler then turns to Heinrich Mann's Im Schlaraffenland, the satirical tone of which permits antisemitic conventions to be more explicit. Jews and women are paralleled as consumers; men in general are feminized by luxury; women's dress makes them incapable of work, like Jews, who are mutable, flexible, and abstract. As a symptom of Heinrich Mann's tendentiousness, Schößler points out that he fictionalizes Strousberg's railroad finance scandal with no indication that rail lines were actually built.

Thomas Mann was more subtle in his portrayal of Jews, but it is clear that in Buddenbrooks there is an uneasiness about Jewish commercial methods. Tony's "(Ehe) Geschäfte" (130) are market strategies that fail despite her allegiance to the family achievement ethos. However, the dramatic moment is the demonstration of the pitfalls of operating in the future tense, Thomas Buddenbrook's disastrous purchase of the unharvested grain from a Jewish merchant, contrary to the traditional principles that have guided the firm. Königliche Hoheit puts credit into the center of the narration. Schößler points out that Spoelmann was originally supposed to be a Jewish Davidsohn. Imma's cold rationality is coded Jewish; her mathematical documents are associated with the Kabbalah. As for Jewish writers, Schößler has found some lesser-known ones who defend Jewish manliness and charitableness, and the integrity of competent stock market investors, blaming crises on amateurs—what today we would call the day traders—but Schnitzler in Fräulein Else accepts the negative discourse about the market and projects it onto a Jewish female; Else is doubtless an unambiguous case of a female as exchange object.

After an excursus on Walther Rathenau, the wealthy, speculative, luxuriously living Jew who attacked wealth, speculation, and luxury in ways that seem to affirm the anti-Jewish discourse, Schößler examines American examples: Frank Norris's The Pit, which influenced Brecht's Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe, and Theodore Dreiser's The Titan. The Americans...