Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit was a 19th-century bestseller and remained popular well after the Second World War. The novel serves as a reflection of the ideals of German liberal imperialism before national unification, and it intertwines themes of accounting with broader cultural and imperialistic ambitions.

In the novel, accounting is symbolically rich and embodies German virtues like hard work, honor, and order. Such discipline is a prerequisite for culture, civilization, and imperial expansion, which constitute the historical mission of the German nation. Accounting is also fundamental to Freytag’s ideal of German womanhood as a method of disciplining consumption and ensuring the reproduction of labor and capital. Moreover, to maintain discipline and order at a distance while rendering colonial resources legible to a metropolitan capital, accounting is represented as indispensable to German states’ control over Polish colonies.

Debit and Credit exhibits anti-Semitic sentiments, as Freytag associates Jewish characters with abstract thought while the concrete practice of accounting is closely tied to German identity. Join Max Ehrenfreund for a discussion on how the histories of accounting and anti-Semitism reflect parallel stories in Central Europe. Max Ehrenfreund is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of science. His research concerns the many uses of knowledge and information in economic life, with an emphasis on the economic and intellectual history of the interwar period.