Introduction: The Black Book of Clichés

IN DIE LITERARISCHE WELT (The Literary World) of May 21, 1926, German authors were asked to respond to the following question: “Welche stilistische Phrase hassen Sie am meisten?” (Which stylistic cliché do you hate most?). Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) responded, “Die Phrasen, die hassenswert sind, sind Legion. Es wäre falsch, eine beliebige herauszufischen. Man müßte eine Enzyklopädie, ein Schwarzbuch der Phrase herausgeben” (The clichés worth hating are legion. It would be mistaken to select one random phrase. What is needed is an encyclopedia, a black book of clichés). Eight years later, he published a novel that can be read as precisely that: the Dreigroschenroman. David Bathrick has noted that Brecht's works often consider the problem of manipulation in mass society. This is especially true of the Dreigroschenroman. As a refugee from Hitler from 1933 onward, Brecht developed an acute diagnosis of the ideological manipulations of the Nazi party in his plays, poetry, and prose writings. Dreigroschenroman, written in the winter of 1933–34 with the assistance of Margarete Steffin, is the first major work Brecht produced in exile. It explores the connections between language and power, analyzing linguistic strategies used by economic and political actors alike in order to influence the public.

In August 1934 Brecht instructed his Amsterdam-based publisher, Allert de Lange, to print passages of the Dreigroschenroman in italics to convey the impression that certain phrases were being quoted and exhibited (BFA 28:433). Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 review of the novel, emphasized Brecht's use of italics, observing that Brecht had created “eine Sammlung von Ansprachen und Sentenzen, Bekenntnissen und Plädoyers …, die einzig zu nennen ist” (a collection of addresses and maxims, affirmations and pleas, which is unique). This chapter argues that the Dreigroschenroman is a novel that exhibits certain types of discourse to show how language is used to exert political and economic influence. George Orwell made a similar point in the essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), where he observes: “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Introduction: The Media Kaiser; Business Networks

DER UNTERTAN (The Loyal Subject / The Man of Straw), by Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), depicts the rise of Diederich Heßling, a paper manufacturer who builds an economic empire in the small town of Netzig. He is a charismatic businessman who continually invokes a sense of crisis in order to achieve his ends, acting as if he is “pflichtmäßiger Vollstrecker einer harten Notwendigkeit” (“the conscientious instrument of dire necessity”). Set in the 1890s, it is a study of the German bourgeoisie in the age of global imperialism. The broad plotline bears comparison to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks: readers are presented with two rival business families, the Heßlings and the Bucks. The Buck family declines, and Diederich takes over. At the end of the novel Diederich even buys his rivals’ family home (U 453; LS 330), just as Hagenström does in Buddenbrooks. The characters in both novels share an obsession with form. As Diederich's mentor Wiebel tells him, “Formen sind kein leerer Wahn” (U 35; “good form is not a vain illusion,” LS 21). And yet Heinrich Mann comes to very different conclusions about the German middle classes than his younger brother. Der Untertan is overshadowed by the most prominent media personality of the age, Kaiser Wilhelm II. The kaiser's prominence caused him to function as the mirror in which the entire period saw itself. Walther Rathenau described the kaiser's many prominent media interventions as “elektro-journalistischer Cäsaropapismus” (electro-journalistic Caesaropapism). The reign of Wilhelm II, the “media emperor,” represents an important transitional stage between the ruling elites of the nineteenth century and their more media-conscious imitators in the twentieth century. The new configuration between politics and media influenced German literary modernism, too. Cultural production in Imperial Germany occurred under the sign of Paragraph 95 of the Reichsstrafgesetzbuch (Imperial Criminal Law Code), detailing the crime of Majestätsbeleidigung (lèse-majesté), with a penal sentence of between two months and five years.

SINCE THE TURN of the millennium, there has been extensive research on the representation of economic processes in German-language literature. The interdisciplinary dialogue between literary studies and economics was pioneered in the 1980s by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey, who argued that economic science has a “literary character” and that literary criticism can offer economists “a model for self-understanding.” For McCloskey, seeing economics as “rhetorical” does not mean “abandoning mathematics”; it means advocating “the study of how economists actually persuade each other and the world.” Adopting a similar position, Arjo Klamer describes the market as a conversation and views the entrepreneur as a “rhetor”—a person whose business it is to persuade or convince. Such interdisciplinary approaches are sometimes known as “New Economic Criticism,” after two conferences held in the 1990s in the USA. Sometimes research on literature and economics is framed in terms of a particular literary genre, e.g., the Bildungsroman, sometimes in terms of a particular economic category, such as labor, the gift, or inflation. Occasionally, research focuses on the literary marketplace itself. Richard T. Gray's study Money Matters (2008) argues that German literature is deeply implicated in the economic discourse of its time. Gray focuses on the period around 1800, however, and his emphasis on concepts of value and exchange means that he has little to say about performative aspects of business, which is the focus of interest here. The only recent study to consider performance in novels about business is by Christian Kremer, who draws on Judith Butler. Kremer recognizes that doing business is a kind of performance, but he does not connect this notion with classical oratory and rhetoric, which have informed business practice and legal practice for over two thousand years. This is where this present study comes in.

This book explores the representation of business rhetoric in nine German-language novels published between 1901 and 2013.

Introduction: The Art of Doing Business

MOST SCHOLARSHIP ON Buddenbrooks has tended to focus on the theme of decline and on what the Germans call Innerlichkeit: the interiority or inner life of the characters. Sometimes the characters’ inwardness is interpreted in terms of economic change: Anna Kinder and Michael Cowan argue that the nervousness of the Buddenbrooks increases in direct response to the economic uncertainty of capitalist modernity. Unfortunately, this tendency to focus on the characters’ “interiority,” even when it is connected to the wider economic framework, distracts attention from the actual business practices depicted in the novel. It also runs the risk of ignoring something the characters themselves take very seriously: external appearances (Äußerlichkeiten). If Thomas Mann (1875–1955) learned one thing from Theodor Fontane, it is that only by paying close attention to so-called casual appearances is it possible to gain an understanding of society. Few scholars have seriously considered appearances and externalities in Buddenbrooks. Notable exceptions are Martin Swales, who observes the portrayal of a family that consciously works very hard to sustain its public role, and Elizabeth Boa, who considers the ways in which the Buddenbrooks seek to regulate sensual pleasure. Reading Buddenbrooks, we find that appearances, far from being casual, are careful constructs to which the family members themselves attach huge importance. Many valuable studies of Buddenbrooks that investigate the character and ethos of the family in terms of a sociohistorical perspective miss the point, noted in the introduction to this book, that classical authors consider ethos to be a performative construct. Referring to classical oratory helps us to comprehend the Buddenbrooks as actors in both senses of the word: as participants in economic (and political) processes, and as theatri cal performers. In this sense, the Bürger (citizen) is also, simultaneously, a performing Künstler (artist). There is a constant social performance that is required of the Buddenbrooks precisely because of their social position. Social convention means that they are always both citizens and artists, in the sense of the daily social performance they must enact.

BUSINESS RHETORIC HAS contemporary relevance: think of Donald Trump's Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), cowritten with the journalist Tony Schwartz. Trump's own career trajectory from real estate developer to TV show host to president of the United States exemplifies the many fluid interconnections among business, performance, and politics. Literary criticism can make a modest contribution to this complex interdisciplinary field. Focusing here on German-language novels and their depictions of economic activity, we have seen that rhetoric is central to business. The denials of rhetoric that we so often encounter here (Heinrich Mann's factory owner, Röggla's management consultants) are not to be taken at face value: such denials are a highly rhetorical move. The novels studied here alert readers that behind claims to be factual or impartial, there is always a political and/or economic agenda. The classical tradition of rhetoric, which still informs public relations, has often been sidelined, but these novels acknowledge the inevitability of rhetoric and the need to understand how it operates. As John Henderson points out, although Aristotle concedes that rhetoric involves manipulation, the ultimate aim of Aristotelian rhetoric is to attain the logos of reasoned debate. The teachers of rhetoric did not “wish away” the persuasive and performative aspects of oratory, but they “kept plugging the ethical into the performative.”

Many of the novels studied in this book contain set pieces in which the outcome depends upon the delivery of a public speech. In Buddenbrooks Consul Jean takes the wind out of his opponents’ sails with a few wellaimed quips delivered in Plattdeutsch; Grünlich talks his way into getting his hands on Tony's dowry; and Hanno's lack of business talent is confirmed by his failure to recite a poem. In Der Untertan the protagonist achieves success as an orator precisely because he is so good at staying within his role. Käsebier contrasts two funeral orations, the authentic and the inauthentic. The Dreigroschenroman shows that noneconomic factors can have an important bearing on business, as Macheath persuades his workforce to accept their own pauperization. In Malina the narrator frustrates her interviewer because she refuses to remain in the rhetorical place he has assigned to her.

Introduction: Liberal Critique

GABRIELE TERGIT (1894–1982), born Elise Hirschmann, was a respected journalist and court correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily News) from 1924 to 1933. Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (1931; Käsebier Conquers the Kurfürstendamm), her first novel, is set against the background of the Wall Street crash of October 24, 1929, and its devastating consequences for Germany. The novel is also informed by a Berlin corruption scandal that began on September 26, 1929. The three Sklarek brothers, clothing retailers, had a government contract to supply clothes for civil servants; they forged receipts somewhere in the region of ten million marks. The scandal provided considerable fuel for National Socialist propaganda. In early 1932 Tergit reported on the trial of Moritz Rosenthal, a business partner of the Sklareks, pointing out that he was at the same time an administrator and beneficiary of public funds. The emerging details of the Sklareks’ backroom deals certainly influenced the composition of Käsebier. The novel depicts German liberalism in crisis. The collapse of the monarchy in 1918 had led to a “Sinnkrise” (crisis of meaning) for the educated middle classes, as they lost the special entitlement they had enjoyed in the Wilhelmine state; the idea of Bildung was stripped of its prestige and was replaced by the worship of money. That year the liberal author Carl Sternheim commented on the intellectual bankruptcy of the German nation, remarking

Sternheim argues that humanist values such as Geist (a term that combines aspects of “intellect” and “spirit” and will henceforth be left untranslated) and Bildung have been replaced with economic rhetoric: