Money in the German-Speaking Lands ed. by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Money in the German-Speaking Lands ed. by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley John McCole Money in the German-Speaking Lands. Edited by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley. New York: Berghahn, 2017. Pp. 317. Cloth $150.00. ISBN 978-1785335884. "Money changes everything," in the simple but profound words of a pop philosopher, and this volume amply demonstrates that we keep discovering the many ways it has. Money in the German-Speaking Lands, the seventeenth volume in Berghahn's Spektrum series, assembles seventeen pithy investigations of the changes wrought by money, and how inhabitants of the German-speaking lands have come to terms with them, since the early modern period. This is not a collection of essays on economic history in the traditional sense, but rather a wide-ranging, kaleidoscopic look at the creative diversity of recent approaches to the history of money, on scales ranging from micro to macro. It provides fresh takes on venerable topics such as inflation, currency reform, and moral economy, including luxury debates; offers revisionist accounts of the genealogy of cameralism and the monetary culture of German hometowns; and supplies methodologically innovative case studies of the social and cultural imaginary of money, including its role in collective memory. Most of the essays exemplify what could by now be called the long cultural turn in historical studies. The title's term "money," as befits its protean nature, encompasses various forms of wealth ranging from currency to credit to cigarette butts (in the postwar black market economy); and money is examined, in the editors' words, sometimes as "an instrument" but more often as being "as much about culture and ideas … a psychological force-field"—and, one might add, a sociological and cultural force-field as well (2). Theory plays an important supporting role in some of the pieces; Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of social and cultural capital help animate more of the essays than the volume's index would suggest. The symbolic dimensions of money come to the fore in at least two distinct ways. The first concerns what money and wealth have stood for: we encounter some surprising twists on venerable critiques of acquisitiveness and luxury, and "wealth vs. virtue" discourses, in essays by Johannes Dillinger on the selective punishment of spirit beliefs about acquisitive behavior, Benjamin Marschke on Frederick William I's ostentatious displays of austerity, Jan Carsten Schnurr on Pietist attempts to distinguish between luxury and legitimate pleasures, and Michael L. Hughes on "predatory speculators" and "honest creditors" in the Weimar Republic. Eve Rosenhaft's essay seeks out the [End Page 143] subtexts of German responses to the eighteenth-century Mississippi financial bubble and finds imagined connections to a wider, cosmopolitan geography. A different symbolic dimension of money shows itself in the ways that owners of economic capital mobilized it to forge social and cultural connections—a process that could also work in reverse. Almut Spalding's Hamburg patricians forged quasi-kin networks of reciprocal obligation across social divides; Frank Hatje depicts a lawyer of modest means who leveraged cultural capital to generate social and even economic capital in ways that enhanced Hamburg's civic integration; and Dennis Frey's Swabian hometown artisans savvily managed the remunerative, status-enhancing, and networking potentials of an emerging cash economy. A third cluster of essays, dispersed by the volume's chronological arrangement, treats theories of money and economics: Vera Keller's rich account of the interlaced roles of alchemy and "oeconomy"; Andre Wakefield's revisionist investigation of cameralism's roots in the Saxon "mining state," producing knowledge along with silver; Jonathan Sperber's demonstration of Marx's surprisingly persistent occupation with the topic of money; and Elizabeth S. Goodstein's striking rereading of Simmel's Philosophy of Money as modernist philosophy. Taken as a whole, the volume subtly undercuts a durable, but simplistic distinction between positive and negative evaluations of money, where proponents champion the benefits of wealth and circulation and critics lament the costs. In these essays, we see how "money" has stood on both sides of the ledger: it has been the object of anxieties about transitions, corruption, decline, alienation, and the erosion of authenticity; but it has also been symbolically enabling and...