9. Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Mann's "Disorder and Early Sorrow"

¹“Inflation: The Witches' Sabbath,” Ralph Manheim, trans., Encounter 44, no. 2 (Feb. 1975): 63. The German original can be found under the title “Erin nerungen aus der Deutschen Inflation” in Thomas Mann, Ü ber mich selbst: Autobiographische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1983), p. 368. Manheim's translation is abridged; for the passages he omitted, the translations are my own (as are the other translations from German in this essay, unless noted otherwise).

²For a discussion of Mann's attitude toward socialism, see Keith Bulli vant, “Thomas Mann and Politics in the Weimar Republic,” in Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1977), pp. 24-38. Bullivant argues that Mann's socialism was essentially aesthetic in nature.

³“Kultur und Sozialismus,” Politische Schriften und Reden (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1968), vol. 2, p. 173.

⁴Ü ber mich selbst, p. 477.

⁵Henry Hatfield, Thomas Mann (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1951), p. 113.

⁶Georg Lukács, Essays on Thomas Mann, Stanley Mitchell, trans. (London: Merlin, 1964), pp. 162-63. See also Lukács, Realism in Our Time, John and Necke Mander, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 78-79.

⁷I 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). For the German original, see Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke, 13 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1974), vol. 7, pp. 618-57.

⁸Although “Disorder and Early Sorrow” has been popular with readers, and is frequently reprinted and anthologized, it has attracted little attention from critics. Few essays have been devoted to it specifically, and most gen eral 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” in Harold Bloom, ed., Thomas Mann (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 292-93, as well as Ronald Hay-man, Thomas Mann: A Biography (New York: Scribner, 1995), pp. 355-56 and Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 446-49.

⁹“Disorder,” p. 179.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 191.

¹¹Ibid.

¹²Ibid., pp. 179-80, 203.

¹³Ibid., p. 179.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 183.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 196.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 186.

¹⁷For an account of the German inflation, see William Guttmann and Patricia Meehan, The Great Inflation: Germany 1919-1923 (Westmead, U.K.: Saxon House, 1975). For a useful casebook on the German inflation, includ ing many primary documents in English translation, see Fritz R. Ringer, The German Inflation of 1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). For the most comprehensive treatment of the German inflation in English, see Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Feldman mentions “Disorder and Early Sorrow” in passing; he calls it “certainly the most famous but also the most detached and even Olympian work of fiction dealing with the inflation” (p. 11).

¹⁸Ü ber mich selbst, pp. 361-62.

¹⁹Guttman and Meehan, Great Inflation, p. x.

²⁰Ibid.

²¹See Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory 1544-1605 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 1.

²²For example, as incredible as it sounds to us today, during the “golden age” of the gold standard in Britain, the value of the British pound, as measured by its purchasing power, was actually greater in 1900 than it had been in 1800. See E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1969), p. 354 (diagram 37). David Hackett Fischer makes the point effectively in terms of the life of Queen Victoria: “The purchasing power of the pound sterling was actually greater on Diamond Jubilee Day [1897] than it had been in 1819 when the old Queen was born.” See his The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 180. For the Austrian defense of the gold standard, see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 468-73.

²³For example, in the course of the twentieth century, the US dollar lost roughly 95 percent of its value in terms of purchasing power, almost all of that after it was no longer convertible to gold. See the charts in Fischer, Great Wave, pp. 182-83.

²⁴For a history of these episodes and other examples of paper currency mismanagement, see John F. Chown, A History of Money: From AD 800 (Lon don: Routledge, 1994), pp. 201-71.

²⁵I realize that the fact that pure paper currencies are subject to hyperinflation is not a sufficient argument against them, since hyperinflation may be regarded as the exception rather than the rule in the history of paper money. But still, an episode like the German inflation illustrates the more fundamental argument of the Austrian School in favor of commodity-based currency—it is the only way to take control of the money supply out of the arbitrary hands of governments and subject it to market discipline. See Mises, Human Action, pp. 470-71.

²⁶Although some have acknowledged 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 Einf ü hrung in Sein Werk (M ü nchen: Lehnen, 1953), p. 64, relates Ellie's tantrum to “the general confusion of the inflation years,” but says nothing further. The most substantial 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 (Sidney Bolkovsky, “Thomas Mann's ‘Disorder and Early Sorrow’: The Writer as Social Critic,” Contemporary Literature 22 [1981]: 221). One literary critic who does discuss the importance of the German inflation for the story at some length is Alan Bance, “The political becomes personal: Disorder and Early Sorrow and Mario and the Magician” in Ritchie Robinson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 107-10. The most thoroughgoing discussion I have found of “Disorder and Early Sorrow” in light of the German inflation is in a work of cultural history, Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 169-78. 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” (“Unordnung und fr ü hes Leid,” Gesammelte Werke 11, p. 621). When Mann described the story in a letter, he called it: “'Unordnung und fr ü hes Leid,' eine Inflationsgeschichte”—“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).

²⁷The terms hyperreality and hyperrealism 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 a hallucinatory resemblance of the real with itself”; “It is reality itself today that is hyperrealist” (italics in the original; 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.

²⁸Mann said of the inflationary period: “The concept of counterfeiting necessarily went out of fashion.” See Ü ber mich selbst, p. 367; this is my translation of “Der Begriff des Geldfälschens kam damals notwending aus der Mode”; Manheim translates “Geldfälschens” as “forgery” (“Inflation,” p. 62), but “counterfeiting” seems called for in the context.

²⁹On this point, see Jean-Joseph Goux, The Coiners of Language, Jennifer Curtiss Gage, trans. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), pp. 133-34.

³⁰For example, in his 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 govern ment's “printing of money” (p. 154). For this widespread misconception, see Mises, Human Action, pp. 420-21. For a historical account of Weimar Germany that confirms the Austrian view 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.

³¹“Disorder,” p. 192. The relevant passage in Macaulay can be found in chapter 19 of his History of England (The Works of Lord Macaulay [rpt. AMS, 1980; 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 “Aladdin” (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 during 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 (we have already seen how Shelley criticized deficit financing in Britain). On Macaulay and the issue of national debt, see Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 133-34.

³²“Disorder,” p. 182.

³³As for the impact of the German inflation on Mann's own household, Hayman recounts several representative incidents: “Thomas's seventy-one year old mother, who'd come to recuperate from an illness in his house, insisted on paying for her meals, without understanding that the banknotes she handed over had lost their value” (Mann, p. 338); “By mid-February [1923], when Thomas earned 50,000 marks for a reading in Dresden, prices had risen so steeply that he'd have made a loss if he hadn't been able to stay with friends” (p. 340). The precipitous decline in the value of the German mark led Mann to seek ways to earn hard currency from foreign countries (chiefly the United States). In September 1922, he wrote to his German publisher: “Without foreign money I should not be able to manage these days with a family like mine. Like everyone else, I am considering how to earn something extra” (Heilbut, Mann, p. 358). No wonder Mann greeted the return to monetary stability in Germany in 1924 and was happy to be paid once more in a currency linked to gold; in a February 13, 1924 letter to Carl Helbing, he announced: “Deutschland zahlt in Goldmark” (“Germany pays in gold marks”)—quoted from Yvonne Schmidlin, Hans B ü rgin, and Hans-Otto Meyer, eds., Die Briefen Thomas Manns: Regesten und Register (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1976), vol. 1, p. 368. For the complicated way in which the German mark was relinked to gold, see Guttman and Meehan, Great Inflation, pp. 203-23.

³⁴“Disorder,” p. 183.

³⁵Ibid.

³⁶In German, “die Flucht in die Sachwerte”; see Mises, Human Action, pp. 424-25. Mann himself uses the phrase in his account of the German inflation (Ü ber mich selbst, pp. 365, 368).

³⁷“Disorder,” p. 192.

³⁸“Inflation,” pp. 61-62 (Ü ber mich selbst, pp. 366-67).

³⁹The same thing happened to Mann himself. In his memoir on the infla tion, he says that it caused him to lose his “own modest fortune, the product of [his] work and that of [his] father, grandfather, and great-grandfather” (Ü ber mich selbst, p. 362). On the social disruptions caused by inflation in “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” see Widdig, Culture and Inflation, pp. 172-74.

⁴⁰“Disorder,” p. 191.

⁴¹Ibid., p. 202.

⁴²Ibid., p. 204.

⁴³Mann discusses this process in his inflation memoir (Ü ber mich selbst, pp. 365-66). For Mises's account of how inflation benefits some at the expense of others, see Human Action, pp. 409-10.

⁴⁴“Disorder,” p. 207.

⁴⁵Ibid.

⁴⁶It may seem extreme to blame the rise of Hitler on the German infla tion, but see Hayman, Mann, pp. 334-35, 343-44. For an insightful discussion of the connection between inflation and Nazism, see Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, Carol Stewart, trans. (New York: Seabury, 1978), especially pp. 187-88. Canetti even links the devaluation of human life represented by the Holocaust directly to the German inflation. For Mises's account of Weimar politics, and the role of inflation in the rise of Nazism, see his Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), pp. 193-228. For specific connections between the German inflation and Hitler's attempted coup in Bavaria in 1923, see Ringer, German Inflation, pp. 163-218.

⁴⁷“Inflation,” p. 63 (Ü ber mich selbst, p. 370). Mann goes on to explain his claim in a very interesting fashion:

It was during the Inflation that the Germans forgot how to rely on themselves as individuals and learned to expect everything from “politics,” from “the state,” from “des tiny.” They learned to look on life as a wild adventure, the outcome of which depended not on their own effort, but on sinister, mysterious forces. The millions who were then robbed of their wages and savings became the “masses” with whom Dr. Goebbels was to operate. Inflation is a tragedy that makes a whole people cynical, hardhearted and indifferent. (p. 63)

⁴⁸Hyperinflation obviously causes greater problems than ordinary inflation does. Nevertheless hyperinflation ultimately only reveals in extreme form the way any inflation undermines an economy and a people's way of life.

⁴⁹See Mises, Human Action, pp. 421-22.

⁵⁰“Disorder,” p. 102.

⁵¹Ibid., pp. 202-03.

⁵²Ibid., p. 203. On the importance of this moment, see Widdig, Culture and Inflation, p. 176.

⁵³Mann was of course not the only writer of his day who portrayed the effects of inflation, although it is surprising how little attention literary crit ics have paid to this phenomenon. One article that deals with the depiction of the 1920s inflation in literature is Friedrich Achberger, “Die Inflation und die zeitgenössiche Literatur,” in Franz Kadrnoska, ed., Aufbruch und Untergang: österrichische Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938 (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, called Kobes (1925); Hugo Stinnes, the German industrialist who profited heavily from the inflation, provided the model for Kobes. 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” (Heinrich Mann [New York: Twayne, 1967], p. 83).

⁵⁴For historical accounts of the psychological and cultural impact of the German inflation, which parallel many of the details of Mann's story, see Widdig, Culture and Inflation and Guttman and Meehan, Great Inflation, especially pp. 173-202. The fullest account I have found of the cultural impact of the German inflation is Martin H. Geyer, Verkehrte Welt: Revolution, Inflation und Moderne: M ü nchen 1914-1924 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), which does a thorough job of relating the inflationary envi ronment of Weimar Germany to the development of modernism. For the complex relation of the devaluation of money to the revaluation of values— “(Geld-)Entwertung und Umwertung”—see especially pp. 382-88. As Geyer's subtitle indicates, he concentrates on Munich, which he regards as the focal point of the revolutionary transformation of traditional Germany. In view of the fact that Munich provides the setting for “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” it is surprising that Geyer mentions Mann's story only in passing (pp. 269-70).

⁵⁵An interesting literary parallel can be found in the third part of Hermann Broch's trilogy The 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)

⁵⁶“Disorder,” p. 184.

⁵⁷Ibid., p. 198.

⁵⁸Ibid., p. 193.

⁵⁹Ibid., p. 179.

⁶⁰Ibid., p. 182.

⁶¹As with inflation itself, the development of ersatz products in Ger many was spurred by the economic exigencies of World War I. See Bance, “Disorder,” p. 107. On the substitute reality in Mann's story, see Widdig, Culture and Inflation, p. 171.

⁶²“Disorder,” p. 189.

⁶³Ibid., p. 195.

⁶⁴For this “inflation effect” leading to “the decay of business morals” and the impulse to “defraud,” see Ludwig von Mises, A Critique of Interventionism, Hans F. Sennholz, trans. (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1977), p. 32. I owe this reference to Robert Higgs.

⁶⁵Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve, Francis Bowen, and Phillips Bradley, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1959), vol. 2, p. 53. For further thoughts on the connection between democracy and the simu lacrum, see Baudrillard, Simulations, pp. 78-79. On Tocqueville's view of democratic culture, see my essay “Postmodern Prophet: Tocqueville Visits Vegas,” Journal of Democracy 11 (2000): 111-18.

⁶⁶On this point, see Widdig, Culture and Inflation, p. 174.

⁶⁷“Disorder,” p. 184.

⁶⁸Mann, “Unordnung,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, p. 624.

⁶⁹“Disorder,” p. 198.

⁷⁰Ibid., pp. 198, 199.

⁷¹Ibid., pp. 200, 201.

⁷²Ibid., p. 204.

⁷³Ibid., p. 203.

⁷⁴Ibid., p. 180.

⁷⁵To be sure, as long as people have faith in a given paper currency, it can be exchanged for real commodities, and in that sense can still be said to represent value. But as the quick collapse of paper currencies like that of Weimar Germany shows, their “reality” is highly attenuated compared to that of gold-backed currencies.

⁷⁶As far-fetched as this claim may sound at first, it has been taken seri ously by an increasing number of critics. I do not have the space to deal in detail with the significant body of commentary that attempts to link the gold standard to representational art; I can mention only some of the highlights. Probably the most important book in this area is Goux, Coiners of Language, which centers on André Gide's modernist novel The Counterfeiters. Goux offers this challenge at the beginning of his book:

Was it purely by chance that the crisis of realism in the novel and in painting coincided with the end of gold money? Or that the birth of “abstract” art coincided with the shocking invention of inconvertible monetary signs, now in general use? Can we not see in this double crisis of money and language the collapse of guarantees and frames of reference, a rupture between sign and thing, undermining representation and ushering in the age of the floating signifier? (p. 3)

For a compressed statement of Goux's thesis, see his essay “Cash, Check, or Charge?” in Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, eds., The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the intersection of literature and economics (London: Rout-ledge, 1999), pp. 114-27 and especially p. 115:

The fact that our century has experienced what has come to be called the dematerialization of money, leading to a radically nominalist conception of the monetary instrument and culminating in inconvertibility and floating exchange rates, and that this same century is also marked by an unprecedented rupture in the mode of representation as well as by a deepening concern with the nature of the sign and the philosophical status of language, is certainly not a simple coincidence.

Along similar lines, John Vernon, in his Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), states his thesis this way: “my most persistent analogy is the comparison between the novel's claim to represent reality and paper money's claim to represent things of (presumably) enduring value: gold and silver” (p. 7). Jochen Hörisch, in his Heads or Tails: The Poetics of Money, Amy Horning Marschall, trans. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), evaluates the theories of Goux and Vernon (p. 71) and also discusses an article by Ralf Schiebler on “modern art and the gold standard” that appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 29, 1995; Schiebler argues “that those times in which the currency has a high percentage of gold are times of pronounced realism in art” (quoted by Hörisch, p. 178). Brantlinger, Fictions of State, pp. 205-06, critically evaluates Goux's thesis and offers this important caution:

Goux's insistence on the importance of the shift from the gold standard to inconvertible “token money” is perhaps simplistic, in part because it suggests a monocausal expla nation of cultural change not much different from the old Marxist base/superstructure paradigm (money changes, so culture changes). As Britain's early paper money era (1797-1821) suggests, the movement away from the gold standard for most modern nation-states has been gradual and uneven, rather than a sudden, turn-of-the-century affair. (p. 206)

Brantlinger's objections to Goux's thesis are well-taken and equally qualify my claims about the cultural importance of the German inflation. Finally, on the subject of relating the gold standard to literary realism, see my discussion of Walter Benn Michaels in note 84.

⁷⁷For a discussion of postmodernism, particularly its connection to democracy, see my essay “Waiting for Godot and the End of History: Postmodernism as a Democratic Aesthetic,” in Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., Democracy & the Arts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 172-92, 201-06.

⁷⁸In The 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, and 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, polar izes theory, dilates style, dilutes content, hyperpluralizes the political and social order while homogenizing culture. Above all, inflation masks stasis.

Unfortunately the book is weakened by Newman's failure to understand the economics 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). This is another case of mistaking the effects of inflation for the cause.

⁷⁹In Simulations, Baudrillard defines the simulacrum as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (p. 2), “a liquidation of all referentials... substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (p. 4).

⁸⁰That is of course why a pure paper currency is easier to inflate than a gold-backed currency. To see how close this situation is to the world of simulacra conceived by Baudrillard, consider his characterization: “The relation between them is no longer that of an original to its counterfeit... objects become undefined simulacra one of the other” (Simulations, p. 97). That Baudrillard himself senses a connection between his notion of the simulacrum and paper money is shown by the fact that he often speaks of the circulation of simulacra; his description of Los Angeles, for example, is an apt characterization of the modern money supply: “a network of endless, unreal circulation” (p. 26; see also pp. 11, 32). Baudrillard makes the connection explicit when he compares the process of simulation to “the floating of currency” (p. 133). It is a curious historical coincidence that the poststructuralists' obsession in the 1970s with what they called “free-floating signifiers” roughly coincided with the end of the gold-exchange standard, which resulted in the free floating of national currencies, wholly uncoupled from any tie to gold.

⁸¹“Disorder,” p. 180.

⁸²Ibid., p. 197.

⁸³For 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 postmodernism and poststructuralism is shown by the fact that Michel Foucault wrote a long essay about it, published in English as This Is Not a Pipe, James Harkness, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Foucault 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, this is a peculiarly apt characterization of the illusory world of paper money.

⁸⁴David 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 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, comparable to what we saw in Percy Shelley and William Cobbett (unfortunately Wells's argument is weakened by his clinging to the labor theory of value and his ignorance of the law of mar ginal 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 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 without accepting any of the traditional arguments in favor of a commodity-based money.

⁸⁵Thinking along the same lines, and trying to find an image for the misrepresentation involved in an inflated currency, Wells is led to imagine the twentieth-century world of the simulacrum, foreseeing the creation of ersatz products: “the painted cotton, silk, wool, and leather could be made to look so exactly like the real articles, that it was only when the attempt was made to exchange the representation for the real that the difference was clearly discernible” (Crusoe's Money, p. 94). For another critic who discusses Wells and Nast in conjunction with Magritte, see Marc Shell, Art & Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 75-84.

⁸⁶Lukács is thus correct to associate Mann with the great nineteenth-cen tury tradition of realism. As we have seen, Mann is very modern and perhaps even postmodern in the way he explores the problematics of representation in the twentieth century. And yet Mann's own art remains fundamentally representational. In his fiction, he paradoxically gives a representation of the movement toward non-representation in modern art and life.

⁸⁷As Mann says in his memoir on the German inflation: “I am perhaps in a position to give a somewhat more personal commentary on the statistics of the German inflation. For, believe me, to experience a situation oneself is something completely different from reading the most basic statistics about it” (Ü ber mich selbst, p. 362).

⁸⁸This 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 especially p. 1.

⁸⁹Mann himself drew this distinction in a public address: “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” (“Deutsche Ansprache: Ein Appell an die Vernunft,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11, p. 871).