Debit and Credit

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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 books of the 19th century.

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

1 Plot
2 Significance and interpretation
3 Criticism and anti-Semitism
4 External links

[edit] Plot

The story reflects the coming-of-age, as in a Bildungsroman, of the young Anton Wohlfart. After the death of his parents, Anton begins an apprenticeship in the office of the merchant T. O. Schröter. 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 the clash with budding capitalist forces. He also has repeated interactions with another young man, the Jew Veitel Itzig, whom he knew from his home town.

[edit] Significance and interpretation

The novel's characters are divided into three basic categories: capitalist/bourgeois, noble, and Jewish:

The bourgeois Schröter family represents Freytag's view of the ideal bourgeois type, invested in order, honesty, and solid virtue.
The Jewish merchant Ehrenthal family represents a dishonest and greedy group, interested in wealth without actual creative work.
The Rothsattel family represents the unadapted nobility which attempts to preserve its privileges in a changing world. Their threatening financial ruin personifies this process.

Anton Wohlfahrt is the emerging hero. He is free to examine and experience the social strata personified by these families, and he gradually develops his own sober and virtuous outlook.

[edit] Criticism and anti-Semitism

Soll und Haben is full of blatantly anti-semitic stereotypes. Moreover, there is also hostility toward Slavs and Poles, who are described as lazy and culturally deficient. How to approach this work, which was so dramatically popular in the 19th century, has confounded German educators in the post-war period.