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Richard Rorty, “For a More Banal Politics,”Harper's Magazine, May 1992, p. 18.
I quote “Disorder and Early Sorrow” in the translation of H. T. Lowe-Porter, from Thomas Mann,Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories (New York: Vintage, 1989). When referring to the German original, I quote from Thomas Mann,Gesammelte Werke 13 vols. (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1974), vol. 8. Lowe-Porter's translation is filled with minor errors, omissions, and additions, which I have not bothered to correct, except where they have a bearing on interpreting Mann's intentions.
Although “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” is frequently referred to as a novella, and has many of the characteristics of the form, it seems to me brief enough to be properly called a short story. As for its seeming lack of substance, Henry Hatfield, for example, rather patronizingly says that the story “is one of Mann's less ambitious pieces, yet within its limits one of his most successful.” See Henry Hatfield,Thomas Mann (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1951), p. 87. Although “Disorder and Early Sorrow” has been popular with readers, and is frequently anthologized, it has attracted little attention from critics. Few essays have been devoted to it specifically, and most general studies of Mann mention it only in passing. If they discuss it at all, critics usually choose to concentrate on the autobiographical aspects of the story. Evidently Mann based the story largely on a party actually given in his own household in Munich. See the account of his son: Michael Mann, “Truth and Poetry in Thomas Mann's Work” inThomas Mann, Harold Bloom, ed. (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 292–93. Some critics discuss the Freudian implications of the relationship between the father and the daughter in the story. Herbert Lehnert develops a brief but interesting interpretation of the story as involving an inversion of the structure ofThe Magic Mountain; seeThomas Mann: Fiktion, Mythos, Religion, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1968), p. 97.
Though some critics acknowledge in passing the fact that “Disorder and Early Sorrow” is set in the time of the German inflation, it is surprising how little critics make of the importance of economic factors in the story. Hans Eichner,Thomas Mann: Eine Einführung in Sein Werk (München: Lehnen, 1953), p. 64, relates Ellie's tantrum to “die allgemeine Verwirrung der Inflationsjahre” (“the general confusion of the inflation years”), but says nothing further. The fullest discussion in English of the story I have been able to locate mentions inflation just once, and then as only one of many examples of disorder in the story. See Sidney Bolkovsky, “Thomas Mann's ‘Disorder and Early Sorrow”: The Writer as Social Critic,”Contemporary Literature 22 (1981): 221. In a brief essay on the story, Mann himself stressed its personal and psychological elements, but he also expressed his satisfaction that it had appeared in French translation under the title “Au temps de l'inflation,” which he says is in accord with the author's intention and meaning (“nach des Verfassers Absicht und Meinung”). He was happy that in foreign countries the story was being understood as “a document of middle-class German life after the war” (“als Dokument deutsch-bürgerlichen Nachkriegsleben”). See “Unordnung und frühes Leid,”Gesammelte Werke, 11: 621. When Mann described the story in a letter, he called it: “‘Unordnung und frühes Leid,” eine Inflationsgeschichte” (“a history of inflation” or “an inflation story”). Letter to Hans Heinrich Borcherdt, March 3, 1926, as quoted in Esther H. Lesér,Thomas Mann's Short Fiction: An Intellectual Biography (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), p. 304, n. 50.
The termshyperreality andhyperrealism originated in art criticism. They refer to a style of painting so photographically realistic that it in fact makes the work look unreal. The terms have been given a broader meaning in contemporary discourse by such writers as Jean Baudrillard, who sees the whole world we live in as hyperrealistic in its pervasive artificiality: “The unreal is no longer that of dream or of fantasy,... it is that of ahallucinatory resemblance of the real with itself”; “It is reality itself today that is hyperrealist” (italics in the original). See Jean Baudrillard,Simulations, Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman, trans. (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), pp. 142, 147. For a more popular account of the contemporary idea of hyperrealism, see Umberto Eco,Travels in Hyperreality, William Weaver, trans. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986), pp. 3–58.
For example, in his influential and widely praised study,Weimar Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), the historian Peter Gay typically mistakes the effects of inflation for the causes: in his view the Weimar inflation was “caused by a shortage of gold, adverse balance of payments, and the flight of capital” (p. 152); only later in his account does he even refer, and then merely in passing, to the government's “printing of money” (p. 154). For a recent historical account of Weimar Germany that confirms the Austrian theory of the inflation, see Stephen A. Schuker,American “Reparations” to Germany, 1919–33: Implications for the Third-World Debt Crisis (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 20: “a budget deficit that could not be financed except through the issue of floating debt discounted by the Reichsbank represented the real engine of inflation.”
The relevant passage in Macaulay can be found in Chapter 19 of hisHistory of England. SeeThe Works of Lord Macaulay (London: Longmans Green, 1898), vol. 5, pp. 335–49. That Mann had recently been reading this section when he wrote “Disorder and Early Sorrow” is suggested by a verbal echo; at one point Macaulay speaks of “the lamp of Aladdin” (p. 346), while in the German Mann refers to “Aladin mit der Wunderlampe” (p. 646); the parallel seems weaker in the translation, where Lowe-Porter merely speaks of “Alladin” (p. 204). In this section of his history, Macaulay discusses the moment when the British Parliament created the national debt to deal with the budget deficits it had incurred, chiefly in financing wars. Mann undoubtedly saw the parallels to the situation in Germany after World War I. Macaulay praises deficit financing as a wonderful contrivance for national prosperity; Mann had less cause to be this sanguine about its effects.
In German, “die Flucht in die Sachwerte”; see Ludwig von Mises,Human Action (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 424.
The German here is more specific—the character is aBörsenspekulant, a “stock market speculator” (p. 646).
It may seem extreme to blame the rise of Hitler on the German inflation, but for an insightful discussion of the connection between inflation and Nazism, see Elias Canetti,Crowds and Power, Carol Stewart, trans. (New York: Seabury, 1978), esp. pp. 187–88. Canetti even links the devaluation of human life represented by the Holocaust directly to the German inflation. For Mises's own frank account of Weimar politics, and the role of inflation in the rise of Nazism, see hisOmnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), pp. 193–228.
Here the English translation is in some ways more appropriate than the original German. Mann has Cornelius speak of Xaver asFestordner (p. 645), “master of ceremonies,” not “minute-man.”
Mann was of course not the only writer of his day who portrayed the effects of inflation, though it is surprising how little attention literary critics have paid to this phenomenon. I have been able to locate only one brief article that deals with the depiction of the 1920s inflation in literature; appropriately it treats Austrian authors. See Friedrich Achberger, “Die Inflation und die zeitgenössische Literatur,” inAufbruch und Untergang: Österreichische Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938, Franz Kadrnoska, ed. (Vienna: Europa, 1981), pp. 29–42. Achberger lists 33 Austrian literary works with the inflation as their theme, including works by such well-known authors as Heimito von Doderer, Robert Musil, and Stefan Zweig. From Achberger's descriptions, these works evidently have much in common with “Disorder and Early Sorrow.” Achberger mentions that Mann's brother, Heinrich, also wrote a novella dealing with the inflation period calledKobes (1925); Hugo Stinnes, the German industrialist who profited heavily from the inflation, provides the model for this work. Rolf Linn remarks: “This makes ‘Kobes’ unique, for the vast literature about the turbulent post-war years in Germany—all but forgotten with the exception of Thomas Mann's ‘Disorder and Early Sorrow’—deals largely with the victims of the rapid devaluation of the mark.” See Rolf Linn,Heinrich Mann (New York: Twayne, 1967), p. 83.
An interesting literary parallel can be found in the third part of Hermann Broch's trilogyThe Sleepwalkers, Willa and Edwin Muir, trans. (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964). His character Huguenau finds his world unhinged by the process of inflation: “Currency hitherto accepted becomes incalculable, standards fluctuate, and, in spite of all the explanations that can be adduced to account for the irrational, what is finite fails to keep pace with the infinite and no reasonable means avail to reduce the irrational uncertainty of the infinite to sense and reason again” (p. 640). Economics had represented the world of rationality to Huguenau, but inflation turns that rationality into irrationality: “even that most characteristic mode of the bourgeois existence, that partial system which is hardier than all others because it promises an unshakable unity in the world, the unity that man needs to reassure his uncertainty—two marks are always more than one mark and a sum of eight thousand francs is made up of many francs and yet is a whole, a rational organon in terms of which the world can be reckoned up—even that hardy and enduring growth, in which the bourgeois desires so strongly to believe even while all currencies are tottering, is beginning to wither away; the irrational cannot be kept out at any point, and no vision of the world can any longer be reduced to a sum in rational addition” (p. 641).
Alexis de Tocqueville,Democracy in America, Henry Reeve, Francis Bowen, and Phillips Bradley, eds. (New York: Vintage, 1959), vol. 2, p. 53. De Tocqueville illustrates this principle with a personal anecdote: “When I arrived for the first time in New York... I was surprised to perceive along the shore... a number of little palaces of white marble, several of which were of classic architecture. When I went the next day to inspect more closely one which had particularly attracted my notice, I found that its walls were of whitewashed brick, and its columns of painted wood. All the edifices that I had admired the night before were of the same kind” (p. 54). For further thoughts on the connection between democracy and the simulacrum, see Baudrillard, pp. 78–79. Contemporary French thinkers might be surprised to learn how many of their ideas were anticipated by their aristocratic countryman in the nineteenth century.
Consider in this context Samuel Beckett's famous formulation of the non-representational character of modern art: “there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” See Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues,”Disjecta (New York: Grove, 1984), p. 139. With one substitution, this passage becomes an excellent characterization of the world of paper money as legal tender: “there is nothing to exchange, nothing with which to exchange, nothing from which to exchange, no power to exchange, no desire to exchange, together with the obligation to exchange.”
InThe Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1985), Charles Newman attempts to relate postmodernism to the prevalence of inflation in the twentieth century. This book is the most serious attempt I know of to discuss the cultural implications of inflation; see especially pp. 6–7, 187–90, or his summary statement (p. 184): “In cultural matters, inflation abstracts anxiety, suspends judgment, multiplies interpretation, diffuses rebellion, debases standards, dissipates energy, mutes confrontation, undermines institutions, subordinates techniques, polarizes theory, dilates style, dilutes content, hyperpluralizes the political and social order while homogenizing culture. Above all, inflation masks stasis.” Unfortunately the book is seriously weakened by Newman's inability to develop a sustained argument; he comes up with some brilliant insights, but fails to develop them systematically. He is also woefully ignorant of economic truth, especially about the nature of inflation, which he claims “is primarily caused not by... monetary policy or government spending... but by inflationary assumptions anticipated by the entire culture” (p. 167), another case of mistaking the effects of inflation for the cause. One would be hard pressed to find a stupider statement than Newman's judgment on free markets: “every seller constitutes a monopoly to the degree that he has the power to increase prices without affecting sales, and such pricing institutions are not on the whole undesirable, as pure price competition would be totally disruptive of the economy” (p. 165). When literary critics are as ignorant of economic truth as this, it is hardly surprising that their economic analyses of culture are confused. Still, Newman is the only critic I know of who has understood how pervasive and insidious a force inflation has been in twentieth-century culture.
For a general study of the role of the simulacrum in Mann, see Berhard J. Dotzler,Der Hochstapler: Thomas Mann und die Simulakren der Literatur (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1991).
For a discussion of this painting, and others like it by Magritte, see Suzi Gablik,Magritte (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 124–31 The importance of this painting to poststructuralism is shown by the fact that Michel Foucault wrote a long essay about it, published in English asThis Is Not a Pipe, James Harkness, trans. and ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Foucault suggests several interesting ways of reading the statement “This is not a pipe.” He also connects Magritte's painting to the idea of the simulacrum: “Resemblance predicates itself upon a model it must return to and reveal; similitude circulates the simulacrum as an indefinite and reversible relation of the similar to the similar” (p. 44), once again a peculiarly apt characterization of the illusory world of paper money.
David A. Wells,Robinson Crusoe's Money; or, the Remarkable Financial Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Remote Island Community (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876), p. 57. This fascinating book presents a view of the evolution of money very similar to that developed by Austrian economics, and offers a cogent defense of the gold standard (unfortunately Wells's argument is weakened by his clinging to the labor theory of value and his ignorance of the law of marginal utility). I learned of this book from reading Walter Benn Michaels,The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 145–47. Michaels's book is one of the most famous examples of the so-called New Historicism, the kind of deconstructed Marxism that currently dominates literature departments, largely derived from the thinking of Foucault. Michaels develops an intriguing argument about the relation between the gold standard and the concept of representation in nineteenth-century America, in some ways similar to the line I am pursuing. But Michaels cannot take the gold standard seriously, and regards as naïve any attempt to distinguish “real” from “fake” money. On p. 147, he writes: “in insisting that ‘good money’ must ‘of itself possess the full amount of the value which it professes on its face to possess' (p. 26), writers like Wells were insisting that the value of money as money be determined by (and indeed identical to) the value of money as the commodity it would be if it weren't money.” Here Michaels reveals his ignorance of economics and his inability to follow Wells's argument. Like the Austrains, Wells argues that money must originally have been a commodity with its own value, but he is perfectly aware that it acquires a new and additional value once it starts to function as a medium of exchange. Michaels is blind to the whole point of the bimetallism controversy he is discussing; if the demonetization of silver in 1873 disastrously lowered the price of silver, as Michaels himself indicates (pp. 144, 175), then there must be a separate component in the value of any commodity serving as money that corresponds specifically to its monetary function, as all the parties to the bimetallism debate acknowledged, including Wells. Michaels's failure to understand this simple point of economics vitiates his whole argument. Given how much contemporary literary critics speak about economic matters, it is astounding how ignorant they remain of economics.
In a final twist on this subject, at the time of the German inflation, Dada artists used real banknotes to create works of art in their collages. Having become virtually worthless, the “real” banknotes turned into imaginary money, one might even say play money. The Hungarian artist, Moholy-Nagy, used a 100 billion mark note in one of his collages. See John Willett,The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short (New York: Abbeville, 1984), p. 42.
This name has been given to the twentieth century by Jacques Rueff,The Age of Inflation, A. H. Meeus and F. G. Clarke, trans. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964); see esp. p. 1.
Mann himself drew this distinction in a public address: “man braucht nicht materialistischer Marxist zu sein, um zu begreifen, dass das politische Fühlen und Denken der Massen weitgehend von ihrem wirtschaftlichen Befinden bestimmt wird” (“one does not have to be a materialistic Marxist in order to grasp that the political feeling and thinking of the masses is largely determined by their economic condition”). See “Deutsche Ansprache: Ein Appell an die Vernunft,”Gesammelte Werke, 11: 871.
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Cantor, P.A. Hyperinflation and hyperreality: Thomas Mann in light of Austrian economics. Rev Austrian Econ 7, 3–29 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01102134
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01102134