It Is A Curiosity Repeatedly Noted in secondary literature on Gustav Freytag that, despite his extensive commercial success during the mid-nineteenth century, he does not hold a more prominent position in the German literary canon. Today best known for his social novel of business, Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855), Freytag remains something of a secondary figure in German literary history. He is dismissed respectively as a minor representative of German realism, as an author more concerned with bourgeois politics than literary aesthetics, and, in certain circles of criticism, as an anti-Semite. Literary surveys of the later nineteenth century tell how Freytag was quickly eclipsed by authors such as Theodor Fontane, Gottfried Keller, and, not least, Thomas Mann, who published that other great novel of German business, Buddenbrooks, in 1901, less than fifty years after Freytag’s own work. By the mid-twentieth century, Freytag’s popularity had all but vanished, both among the German readership and in the field of Germanistik. Nevertheless, Freytag remains a central figure for any discussion on the nature of the German bestseller. As T. E. Carter has demonstrated, Soll und Haben was one of the most widely read novels in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, its success is often seen as paradigmatic of a shift in popular reading tastes away from the consumption of novels in translation and toward novels originally written in German.

This chapter examines the status of Soll und Haben as a bestseller by considering three specific aspects of the novel that potentially helped secure its contemporary success. First, it will examine the role of bourgeois business practices in the novel. How did this theme—at first glance unlikely to capture the popular imagination—contribute to the novel’s appeal? Second, it will explore the tropes of the colonial adventure stories that dominate the second half of the novel. Why does Freytag change the narrative direction of his text, removing the reader from the carefully constructed and lovingly evoked business milieu of the first three volumes, and transport them to the protocolonial Polish setting of the final three volumes? Finally, the chapter will consider the love stories and their unusual role in depicting class relations.