[Mein Vater] war immer gut, friedlich und vergnügt mit eben dieser Welt ausgekommen, sowohl als Müller wie als Schenkwirt, und hatte jetzt also sein ganzes freundliches, braves Wesen umzuwenden, ehe er seinerseits in den großen Kampf eintrat und im Wirbel des Übergangs der deutschen Nation aus einem Bauernvolk in einen Industriestaat seine Mülleraxt mit bitterm Grimm von der Wand herunterlangte. [1]

Wilhelm Raabe’s 1884 novel Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft (Pfister’s Mill: A Summer Vacation’s Notebook) is a work that depicts a society in a state of exceptional and rapid change. The sentiment that Ebert Pfister, the story’s narrator, expresses above captures what that precisely means within the context of the novel, namely the German nation’s transition from being a Bauernvolk (agricultural people) into an Industriestaat (industrial state). As the positioning of Ebert’s father, Bertram, makes clear, this is a process that can lead to fraught outcomes against which some may wish to resist. Indeed, the imagery here, of a miller/innkeeper who must take up his axe and enter into battle (“in den großen Kampf eintrat”), recalls the idealistic image of the farmer of Ancient Rome who was willing to take up arms in defense of the city when invaded. Here, the call to arms is metaphorical: Bertram files a lawsuit alleging the Krickerode sugar factory’s complicity in the water pollution that has now irreparably damaged his livelihood and family legacy. As the aggressive imagery and the lawsuit make clear, the novel theorizes the relationship between the ideas of Bauernvolk and Industriestaat as predominantly oppositional. Considering that the novel concludes only a short while after Bertram’s death and the demolition of the mill, it also becomes evident that the two are, if not mutually exclusive, then certainly highly antagonistic.

This _Article is interested in unpacking that mutual exclusion, even while observing certain factors that complicate its formulation as a strict binary opposition. What is it about this process of societal transition from Bauernvolk to Industriestaat that necessitates the destruction of the former? What, indeed, enables such a thing to occur? I claim that the system of the Industriestaat, which in Raabe’s novel is demonstrated through the rapidly emerging mode of political economy known as industrial capitalism, necessitates the destruction of the Bauernvolk through a realignment of social and economic values that prioritizes commodification and capital accumulation. With the help of Michael Thompson’s rubbish theory, I argue that the more traditional idea of society symbolized by the mill and Bertram Pfister undergoes a devaluation, with the ‘old way of life’ giving way to new social and economic arrangements centered on activity at the sugar factory. I claim that the novel signals that change through its use of a nascent language of finance, signified by narrative figures’ adoption of terms like Aktien (shares), Aktionär (shareholder) and mitgründen (cofounding) as a means to divert scrutiny from the conspicuous disposal of the mill and its owner. In so doing, this paper makes the case that Raabe’s text brings into focus the operative tendencies of industrial capitalism that act through shifts in social and economic attitudes, essentially modifying value paradigms to justify the devaluation and discarding of previous ways of being. The resulting ambiguities, reflected through the narrator’s memories and even captured in a brief depiction of literature, highlight the alienating effects of the new system and at the same time position literature outside the newly configured value system—in other words, they rubbish literature. This act of turning literature, and the way of life preserved in it, into rubbish, however, has the paradoxical effect of reconstituting it as a repository of non-valued value beyond the trappings of industrial capitalism, which indicates the possibility of thinking about literature without any obligatory deference to capitalist conceptualizations of value.

1_Rubbish Theory and the Discard of Society

Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft is the tale of a family legacy destroyed by water pollution generated by the forces of industrial and economic progress. The novel is composed of a frame and inner narrative connected by a common narrator, Ebert Pfister. The frame narrative, which takes place in the late-nineteenth century, concerns the story’s protagonist, Ebert, and his wife, Emmy, who are enjoying a summer holiday at Ebert’s family mill before it is torn down to make way for industrial development. During their stay, the young couple explore the mill and the surrounding area, and Ebert reflects on his childhood and early adulthood at the mill, the people who lived there, recording his thoughts and memories on twenty-two loose Blätter (sheets of paper) that come to form the titular Ferienheft. These recollections, or reminiscences, as Roy Pascal rightly identifies them, make up the inner narrative, which centers on an environmental disaster, namely water pollution, and the subsequent closure of the family mill, marked definitively by the death of Ebert’s father. [2] In these memories, the reader encounters the figures of Ebert’s father, Bertram, Ebert’s tutor and friend, Adam Asche, the local poet (and town drunk), Felix Lippoldes, and the poet’s daughter, Albertine, as well as additional characters who fill in the background of life in a setting not dissimilar to Raabe’s own domicile of Braunschweig. Most significantly, each figure represents a particular way of understanding the unfolding events, be it as an elderly father concerned about the preservation of a family legacy and the well-being of his child, an ambitious young scientist and tinkerer determined to make his fortune, or a drunken poet whose best and most reputed works are behind him. A key feature in these memories is the Pfister mill, in the family for generations, which acts as a meeting place for the entire town and an amenity for tourists. The novel’s action takes place in the mill and its immediate surroundings. The central event of the narrative, the thing that changes everything, is the pollution of the stream whose malodorous and unsightly qualities drive away the mill’s customers and community. An investigation by Adam Asche, who in addition to being a tutor is a scientist with industrial ambitions, reveals that a nearby sugar mill, Krickerode, is responsible for the pollution that has led to a bacterial bloom that has killed the fish and filled the crystal waters of the stream with “[s]chleimige Faden” (slimy threads). [3] Bertram Pfister files and wins a lawsuit against the plant, which leads to monetary compensation and the eventual rehabilitation of the stream, but by the time these matters reach their conclusion his health along with his trust in the world have been destroyed, and he dies shortly thereafter. Collectively, the events of the novel and the varying reactions of its characters to them represent Raabe’s attempt to capture in literary form the otherwise invisible or indirect signs of a society’s transformation. The novel records a shift from an older and more traditional way of life characterized by non-commodified personal relations and certain aesthetic preoccupations with beauty as a form of poetic value (to name just two examples) to one in which economic growth, exchange, and private wealth accumulation are valued most highly.

Michael Thompson’s rubbish theory provides an apt model for reading the social dynamics at play in Pfisters Mühle. Thompson’s account of how value is created and destroyed in a society resonates with the process Raabe’s novel depicts, as the objects, places, and people that represent one way of life—a slower and more human-oriented ideal—are discarded for something else. That process, as the novel demonstrates, can be understood differently depending on the perception and prioritization of value. Thus, Bertram Pfister, the father of the narrator, Ebert, expresses his impression of society’s change in the following terms: “Die Welt will einmal in Stank und Undank verderben, und wir Pfister von Pfisters Mühle ändern nichts daran.” [4] His use of the words “verderben” (deterioration) and “Stank und Undank” (foulness and ingratitude) disclose his negative evaluation of the world that is coming into being, seeing it as a devolution into a miasmic cloud of corruption.

Bertram’s language along with formal elements of the novel, such as the prominent use of the olfactory sense, have inspired a number of different readings of the text. Sabine Wilke, for example, has made a strong argument for identifying Pfisters Mühle as the German-specific location where—to use Lawrence Buell’s concept [5]—“toxic discourse” begins to unfold. [6] In her article, “Pollution as Poetic Practice: Glimpses of Modernism in Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle,” Wilke asserts the centrality of pollution to the story as an all-encompassing and interpenetrative force whose aesthetics anticipate literary modernism. In so doing, she articulates what she describes as realism’s struggle to find “an adequate literary configuration for narrating pollution,” for which reason Raabe combines “different genres, discourses, and rhetorical figures.” [7]

Wilke’s claim is distinct from previous scholarship, namely that of Jeffrey Sammons, who reads these changes in Raabe’s novel as an indication of his move into naturalism. In Sammons’s view, Raabe’s literary development is an indication of his writing’s relevance for contemporaneous discussions of value. [8] What these and many other interpretations have in common is the observation that the novel represents an attempt to render legible the process of change. Where Wilke and Sammons read the result of Raabe’s undertaking as the anticipation or indication of shifts in his generic priorities, however, I propose to read it as the unfolding of a social dynamic: the creation and destruction of value. And for dealing with this topic and detecting its operation in Pfisters Mühle, I turn to Thompson’s rubbish theory.

Rubbish theory represents an attempt to account for the transformation of value in society, to explain the gain, loss, and inexplicable fluctuation of the value of objects. As Thompson writes, social science has claimed that there are “two cultural categories—the Transient and the Durable,” which are “‘socially imposed’ on the world of objects.” [9] The transient category relates to objects that have “decreasing value and finite expected lifespans,” while the durable category concerns items whose value increases over time and whose lifespans are expected to be infinite. [10] Within this model, objects that are transient lose their value until they reach zero, at which time they are discarded and destroyed. There are some additional occasions where a transient creation manages to become durable thanks to exceptional interventions in the social context, but they are rare. This account of transient and durable objects had long been established in the social sciences, most importantly in (neoclassical) economics, yet there was one issue that kept arising: the prevailing theories could not account for the process by which a transient object that had been discarded suddenly found itself transformed into an object of durable value. Among several examples, Thompson focuses on the Stevengraph to explore that process. Following a lengthy analysis of the Stevengraph, Thompson concludes that value is itself dependent on the stuff that is thrown away, the rubbish. Rubbish, his newly created third category of value next to transient and durable, is the term for objects that have no or unchanging value. [11] Thompson theorizes that rubbish, because it is not subject to the control mechanism that regulates the distribution and exchange of transient and durable goods, “provides the channel between Transient and Durable.” [12] Rubbish, it turns out, is necessary as a covert third category of value in order to account for changes in the system of overt value constructed through the relation of transient and durable. Thus, rubbish theory can account not only for stability, but also change. It can explain the existence of value while demonstrating how that value fluctuates or is contingent.

At first blush, applying Thompson’s rubbish theory to Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle is something of an odd choice. I make that observation in consideration of the fact that Raabe scholarship frequently highlights his tendency towards ambiguity. “Raabe is at his best and richest where he propounds the situation in its unresolved problematic, in which both sides are affirmed with their drawbacks, in which the modern age is accepted because it is real, though with an ironical recognition of its failings.” [13] Ambiguity is present in Raabe’s novel, especially its ending in which Ebert describes the leisurely activities of a pleasant day (he even remarks on Asche who has fallen asleep while reading a work of literature). The characters are only able to enjoy their leisure because they are members of the petit bourgeoise, whose economic fortunes are buttressed by industrial capitalist exploitation, commodification, and wealth accumulation. Indeed, the very existence of the summer notebook gestures at a life with plenty of leisure time, which members of the working class, such as those who work in Asche’s dry-cleaning factory on the river Spree near Berlin, will likely never have the chance to enjoy. Raabe’s depiction seems to be at odds with the distinctly “Heraclitean” nature of Thompson’s theory, which emphasizes the non-arbitrary nature of attributions of value according to social forces. [14] The ending of Raabe’s novel, with its tangible absence of “strife” and “conflict,” would seem to occlude the very social forces that Thompson’s theory attempts to bring into focus. How can Raabe’s apparently obscurant move function with rubbish theory’s call for clarity?

There are two key aspects of Thompson’s theory that buttress the case for using it to think with and through Pfisters Mühle’s representation of value change. First and foremost, rubbish theory is not restricted to a critique of capitalism, although it has much, as I argue, to contribute to that conversation. [15] Admitting as much would again seem odd considering the claim laid out above that Raabe’s text draws attention to the alienating effects of capitalism that Karl Marx theorizes first in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and later in The German Ideology (1845/46), the Grundrisse (1857/58), and Capital (1867). Far from contradicting my claim, I would point out that while industrial capitalism had become dominant and Marx had published all of the aforementioned volumes by the time Raabe was writing, Raabe’s understanding of capitalism and its political implications was still developing and, what is more, there is no reason that a novel should necessarily be as systematic as Marx’s economic and philosophical treatises—a novel theorizes in its own way. [16] That being said, Raabe at least indirectly engaged with Marx and Engels’s ideas through the Social Democratic party that he perceived with considerable distaste. [17] Whether he was unconvinced or uncertain of the implications of their work, it would be a hasty generalization to equate that engagement with a fully expressed system of thought in relation to the social organization of industrial capitalism. It is partly for that reason, in fact, as well as a desire to reduce Raabe’s novel to some kind of “use-value” that Jeffrey Sammons conveys reservations about reading the text as engaging with the theme of capitalism, preferring instead to characterize it as an encounter with industrialism. [18] However, Horst Denkler points out that, by 1870/71, the sugar industry in Braunschweig—where Raabe lived when writing the novel—had become inseparably linked with capitalist modes of production. [19] Considering that much of the novel is based on the actual situation of sugar production in Braunschweig and that much of the primary material comes from the findings in a court case that was underway, I think the case for reading Raabe’s text as addressing industrialism and capitalism simultaneously is sound. [20] The two are inextricably linked, something that will become abundantly clear through the analysis of finance language below. In any case, Thompson’s theory is focused more generally on value creation and destruction as broader social process, not just on that which takes place under capitalism. Thus, when I apply it here to help elucidate how Raabe’s novel forms an image of life under industrial capitalism, I need not fear the discrepancies that may arise from Raabe’s text as a result of an ambiguous reception of Marx. Indeed, Thompson’s theory helps to produce a reading of Pfisters Mühle that can account for and not be limited by the representation of the industrial capitalist system, permitting a more productive interpretation of the depiction of the society’s change in values.

The second aspect derives from its treatment of the loss of value. In Thompson’s theory, when value depreciates due to changes in social relations, it does not immediately become ‘rubbish.’ Rather, as Reno again lays out, “[d]iscards do not become ‘rubbish’ until social processes and practices conspire to remove them from circulation and consideration.” [21] The plot of Raabe’s novel traces the social processes and practices that lead to the Pfister’s mill’s removal from circulation and consideration. When the sugar factory, Krickerode, pollutes the river on which the mill sits, by dumping its chemical byproducts into it, one is witnessing a kind of industrial capitalist social practice, one with an empirical referent in the work’s historical context no less. [22] The effects of the water pollution help to demonstrate how the discarding process works under industrial capitalism in the novel. As the pollution unfolds over the course of several years, the mill and its beer garden are steadily devalued until no one patronizes them. At the same time, Bertram’s health declines and the fish and wildlife that depend on the river ecosystem suffer. [23] Although they are able to win a lawsuit against the mill that provides monetary compensation, the business’s value along with Bertram’s has been depleted. Bertram dies, and the mill is sold and demolished to make way for new development. What one observes in Raabe’s text is the wholesale transfer of a once durable object (or person, in the case of Bertram) into rubbish. Rubbish theory not only makes that transition from durable to rubbish legible, but it also helps to make visible the system of values—with its ‘social processes and practices’—that enable the discard of the society as it had existed up until the events depicted in Pfisters Mühle. The system that enables the discard of the previous model of society is none other than industrial capitalism. It remains to be seen, however, exactly how that process is exhibited beyond the simple cause and effect of the plot. In the next section, I demonstrate how Raabe’s use of a nascent language of finance highlights the social practices that encourage the discard of Pfister’s mill and its proprietor.

2_Finance and the Discard of Society

In Pfisters Mühle, the finance discourse is restricted to the highly localized matter of the sugar mill, Krickerode, though it also arises towards the end of the story when Ebert invests in Adam Asche’s dry-cleaning business. The reasons for this restraint are somewhat difficult to discern, though it might come down to the story’s realist fundamental of being based on an actual event, namely the court case of Müller and Lüderitz vs. the Refinery at Rautheim. [24] It may also be the case, though, that the subject matter was exceedingly difficult to grasp for what was a formative period of German financial markets, especially as it pertains to their relations with the wider economy and, in particular, industry. [25] Regardless of the inspiration for Raabe’s use of terms like Aktien (stocks), Aktionär (stockholder), and mitgründen (cofound), their presence once again speaks to the period in which Pfisters Mühle is being written. Raabe is a member of a society in which concepts about capital flows, economic growth, and wealth accumulation have ‘trickled down’ into everyday language. [26] In today’s environment, characterized by 24/7 financial news and the proliferation of apps that reduce such complex and risky decisions to taps on a screen, such a development may appear quaint. Yet, the nineteenth century witnessed significant innovations in corporate and government financial mechanisms that aimed to capitalize (literally and figuratively) on the expansion of empires and the advent of more integrated networks of economic relations that began to mature and cover the globe. From the standardization of coinage under the so-called Latin Monetary Union (LMU) of 1866 to the adoption of gold standards in countries like the United States (in 1879) and Russia (in 1897), as well as the export of capital from Europe to developing markets across the world, it all signaled a new age of commercial opportunity based on the movement of money within and across borders. [27] Capitalism—in Germany’s case industrial capitalism—had come of age. Thus, the appearance of a sort of nascent literary representation of financial discourse in Raabe’s text marks a greater shift in the structure of life in the time around 1884 and, more importantly, a change in the approximation of value.

But how does Pfisters Mühle conceptualize value? What is the meaning of that term within the context of the novel? The novel’s working definition of value comes about through the opposition introduced through the opening quote of this essay, namely that of the Bauernvolk and the Industriestaat. The system of values enshrined in the former is symbolized by the way of life acted out by figures such as Bertram Pfister, whose mix of manual and service labor does not foreclose meaningful social interactions with others. Indeed, his relationship to his customers as well as his employees (prior to the water pollution) is what permits him to labor without being alienated from his work or his community. By contrast, the Industriestaat, represented by Krickerode, forgoes such connections. In fact, a figure representing the factory never appears in the novel; they are always at a distance from the events that their actions bring about, an abstraction captured in the language of finance, as discussed below. Based on those descriptions, Pfisters Mühle seems to juxtapose concepts of value that emphasize labor (Bauernvolk) and exchange (Industriestaat). This is not to reduce Raabe’s novel to an acting out of Marxist vs. capitalist theories of value. Rather, it is to say that certain elements of that opposition come about in the course of the novel’s exploration of the value transition. This opposition can likewise be read into the depiction of green places in Raabe’s fiction, as Alexander Phillips demonstrates through his analysis of Pfisters Mühle and Die Akten des Vogelsangs (1896). According to Phillips, Raabe’s texts offer reflections “on the conditions of possibility for art and artistic representation in an era of ecological plunder” that generate an “implicit, self-reflective critique of nineteenth-century industrial-capitalism,” by using industrial capitalist activity as a “destabilizing counterforce to the aestheticization of pre-industrial ‘green’ places.” [28] This is not a simplistic juxtaposition, as Bayerl points out, since the choice to have the setting of the story be a mill actually highlights certain continuities of mechanization between the world of the Bauernvolk and the Industriestaat, which unsettles any attempt to place the two into a simple binary or make a claim of mutual exclusivity. [29] The result is that Raabe’s novel generates a circumstance in which two competing sets of values come into conflict without the novel aligning with any set system. That one beats out the other is not an endorsement but an observation of what Raabe saw occurring in the real world and which he attempted to render through his text. Thus, in a very general sense, value is defined as that which receives the greatest priority by the society, that which maintains its value regardless of the system in place.

The characterization offered above by Bertram Pfister about the deterioration of the world highlights the emergence of the Industriestaat, which is made possible by the movement, investment, and accumulation of capital, processes that are rendered legible vis-à-vis the language of finance. It is the confrontation of that new system of value, which is focused most keenly on growth—in terms of personal wealth but also, on a larger scale, economic growth—and the old that brings into focus the discard of the form of society represented by the mill in Raabe’s text. This is where Thompson’s rubbish theory, with its ability to illuminate the transition from durable object to rubbish, comes into play. The mill and Bertram can be identified as the objects that are unable to maintain their value in the new system of industrial capitalism and are hence discarded. They are like Thompson’s Stevengraphs. Absent the ability to adapt to societal changes they fall away or are actively disposed of to make room for more important things, like the production of commodities (such as sugar) or providing services (like dry-cleaning).

Yet, Raabe is well-known for being an author who does not easily take sides, though he does sometimes dip into a sort of sentimentality. Pfisters Mühle is shot through with ambiguities and uncertainties that disturb any simple attribution of values or moral consideration to its author and, consequently, the story maintains a striking openness to the very destructive tendencies one witnesses within the system of industrial capitalism. It is for this reason that, in addition to showcasing the discard of society, Raabe’s text can also be said to depict the ways in which that might not be the case. Rather, it shows how human actors, while necessarily operating within a web of relations beyond their capacity to control, can maintain the sort of outlook held by previous generations, like that of Bertram Pfister. This delicate balancing act is precisely what makes Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle so valuable. In the remainder of this article, I undertake three tasks: (1) to identify the moments where financial discourse arises in the novel, (2) to demonstrate how finance language signals the fundamental change of values in the transition to the industrial-capitalist system, and (3) to show how the novel resists the totalizing propensity of that shift and may signal the opportunity for a derivative of the way of life at the mill to find its way back into the form of a durable good. In so doing, I assert that Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle produces unique insights into how a society and the literature produced in it adapts to highly disruptive and sustained change.

The first use of financial language comes at a pivotal moment in the novel, specifically in the fourteenth sheet simply titled “Krickerode.” [30] In it, Ebert and Adam Asche are collecting samples from the stream in order for the latter to determine the cause behind the water pollution. Since the findings are actually revealed in chapter ten (“Krickerode!” [31]), the reader does not experience the search for the evidence until then. As they head out to collect their data, Ebert and Asche are accompanied by Felix Lippoldes, the local poet and, importantly for Asche, the father of Albertine, in whom Asche is romantically interested. As they reach the end of their task, the group comes to the factory that is ultimately responsible for their troubles, at which point Asche states:

“Der reine Zucker!” rief Asche. “Da schwatzen die Narren immerfort über die Bitterkeit der Welt. Da können sie sie niemals süß genug kriegen, und da—stehen wir, das Leid der Erde wiederkäuend, vor dem neuen Tor. Sie sind nicht Aktionär, Lippoldes—Vater Pfister auch nicht, und von dir jungem Bengel ist es ebenfalls noch nicht anzunehmen.” [32]

Standing in the muck outside the factory, amid the stench of its byproduct, [33] Asche attempts to establish a kind of understanding between the other two members of his party and those who run the factory. While he refers to them as “Narren” (fools), he only does so because they are focused on producing sugar, which Asche considers something of a lowlier endeavor compared to his own, which is focused on textiles. Otherwise, Asche clearly holds a certain admiration for the “Aktionär” (stockholder) behind the activity at Krickerode, such as when, in response to Ebert pointing out the fact that Asche himself is not an Aktionär in the factory, he says: “Ich wollte, ich wäre es schon.” [34] The manner in which Asche utters this is telling, denoting a clear desire for imitation—and one only imitates that which one perceives to hold value. Compare his reaction with that of Lippoldes, who a short while later in the same chapter warns Ebert “‘Sieh es dir an, Knabe, und finde auch du dich mit ihm ab, wie [Asche] da—wissenschaftlich oder als Aktionär.” [35] He continues, admonishing Asche at the same time:

Uralte jüdische Weisheit und Prophezeiung, auf die ihrerzeit auch niemand geachtet hat! Rate dir ebenfalls zu der Lektüre, wenn dir einmal alle andere abgestanden, stinkend und voll fauler Fische vorkommen wird, wie deines Vaters Mühlwasser, Ebert Pfister! Zephanja im ersten Kapitel Vers elf: “Heulet, die ihr in der Mühlen wohnet, denn das ganze Krämervolk ist dahin, und alle, die Geld sammeln, sind ausgerottet!” [36]

The tension of this scene turns on the use of the term Aktionär. For Asche, to be a shareholder is something to be admired, pursued, and imitated; for Lippoldes, however, it is something to be wary of, a brash and arrogant form of identity against which ancient Jewish wisdom and prophecy speak. In an important respect, this quote discloses a clash of identities. Lippoldes is a poet, a person dedicated to the creation of beautiful verses speaking eternal truths. [37] Yet the manner in which Asche describes the work of the Aktionär, described in greater detail below, mimics the language of creation. For Asche, there is no great distinction between writing poetry and discovering a new way to mass produce sugar or, in his case, to treat textiles. In Lippoldes’ eyes, however, the shareholder is not only a conman, but also the modern financial products through which he operates represents little more than a new version of an ancient sin—avarice.

As stated above, Asche sees things differently. He finds something ennobling about becoming a shareholder, about participating in economic activity. From his perspective, the person who knows to make the best with what his time and place offers is to be commended. [38] Through the tension of these two diametrically opposed viewpoints, centered as they are on the perceived value of being an Aktionär, Raabe is teasing out the details of two systems of value. Lippoldes, with his reference to ancient scripture, clearly represents the traditional system based on Judeo-Christian morality. In that system, one treats the pursuit of wealth with skepticism if not outright hostility (as evidenced by his reaction above). Asche, who obviously envisages himself becoming a shareholder of a major business one day, serves as the representative of the industrial capitalism that has come to dominate Germany in the latter-half of the nineteenth century. In that configuration, exchange value and speculative value come to hold sway over decision-making. Whereas the former is perhaps not so alien to previous generations, the latter signals something truly disruptive, allowing for the perception of value to generate value all on its own. That quasi-metaphysical construction of value has a limited connection to reality, and, in Lippoldes’s view, that creates an opportunity for Krämervolk (hucksters) to have their way. For him, there is no discerning between the huckster and the shareholder. Yet for Asche, such reactionary alarmism fails to account for the creative and productive capacity to which the new system has given rise. What becomes evident in Lippoldes and Asche’s exchange is that the value system that Asche exemplifies is quickly replacing the old, and Lippoldes is clearly concerned as to what that portends. Asche’s somewhat blunt rebuttal to Lippoldes’s protestations only seem to confirm the latter’s suspicions. [39]

The scene at Krickerode is not the only time when the use of financial terminology brings into frame society’s changing value system based on industrial capitalism. The term Aktie (stock or share) is used only once in the novel, in this case in the outer narrative by Ebert’s wife right at the beginning of the sixteenth chapter.

Ja, das wollte ich eigentlich auch schon längst einmal fragen, Herz—wirklich, weshalb hat denn dein armer Papa nicht mit auf die große Fabrik unterschrieben, da alles ihm doch so bequem lag, und hat keine Aktien genommen, sondern ist leider gestorben, obgleich die Herren Asche und Riechei ihm doch seinen Prozeß gewonnen haben? [40]

Emmy is inquiring as to the reason Ebert’s father did not choose to sign on as a shareholder at Krickerode. If he had, her reasoning goes, he could have lived comfortably rather than die following the successful lawsuit against the factory. The curiosity with which this question is asked shows definitively that capitalist values have settled into the common understanding of how society ought to function. Up to this point in the story, Emmy has listened (though she frequently nods off) to Ebert’s recollections of his past, about Asche and Albertine, whom she knows. That she has heard so much up to this point about the character of Ebert’s father, Bertram, and yet struggles to comprehend his decision not to become a Mitbegründer (cofounder) of the factory emphasizes the distance that has opened up between generations in a relatively short time. Ebert’s response to Emmy’s inquiry heightens that sentiment further: “Weil er nicht anders konnte, Lieb.” [41] Bertram cannot act in the manner to which Emmy and her generation have become accustomed because he is unable to work with the new system of values. For him, the talk of investment and shareholding is a foreign and incomprehensible language. But for his daughter-in-law and son, the latter of whom it is said will invest his Kapital (capital) in Asche’s business, it is practically the lingua franca. [42]

If Lippoldes’s relation to the new system of values can be characterized as confrontational, in a manner not dissimilar to scripture, Bertram’s can be described as resigned. While his persistence in pursuing legal action against Krickerode displays a degree of tenacity, his decision early on to have Asche tutor Ebert in Greek and Latin, which successfully leads to his gainful employment in adulthood as a teacher in Berlin, betrays a distinct awareness of how life is already changing. [43] Indeed, at one point in the story it is made clear that Ebert sells the mill in part because he does not know how to run it. If Bertram had actually expected for the mill to continue, he would have taught his son how to run the mill and pub. Instead, he anticipates the end of the family legacy, albeit not in its particularities. Bertram understands that he, his profession, and the family legacy, symbolized by the mill, are losing value in society, that they have become transient and, ultimately, are doomed to be discarded by a society with new wants and desires. Pushing his son to find a life elsewhere, to do something different than that which the men in the family had done for generations signals the metaphorical tossing of the whole constellation onto the rubbish heap. And it is the language of finance that allows one to trace that whole process from start to finish.

3_Rubbish and the Value of Literature

Pfisters Mühle demonstrates the steady devaluation and discarding of the society and system of values of the Bauernvolk, represented by Bertram Pfister. [44] This comes about due to the changing values of a society in industrial capitalism: with its prioritizing economic growth and industrialization, new financial mechanisms and alienated forms of labor, ultimately resulting in things like environmental degradation. This industrial capitalist system is distinct from that taking place at Pfister’s Mill. The difference between these two systems of value as well as the shift from one into the other are reflected in the emergence of a highly abstract language of finance, which contributes to tangible changes in the day-to-day lives of people while occluding their source. Raabe’s novel not only shows how the values of the society change, but also how the entire paradigm through which value is to be perceived in the first place is transformed. Consequently, many of the operative tendencies of industrial capitalism become visible, even in their abstraction.

Yet as Thompson’s theory clarifies, rubbish, while no longer bearing the value cherished in the predominant system, still has a role to play, namely in accounting for and regulating the stability and shifts that occur in the valuation of objects. It represents a third category of value. I return to this point because I perceive a resonance in Thompson’s description of rubbish and the positionality of the way of life captured in the pages of Ebert’s Sommerferienheft and, indeed, literature under capitalism.

Throughout Raabe’s novel, Ebert repeats a question over and over with one of the last times coming at the opening of the twenty-first sheet: “Wo bleiben alle die Bilder?” [45] On this occasion, he makes clear that he is referring to his memories of life at the mill, his father and the love and affection he received there. Half asleep, staring out the windows of a fast-moving train on the way back to Berlin, enjoying the bountiful colors of the passing landscape, Ebert seeks within himself evidence of the mill’s survival, at which point he states: “Wie unauslöschlich fest steht Pfisters Mühle gemalt in meiner Seele!” [46] The use of the term “unauslöschlich” (indissolubly) stands as a stark contradiction to the apparent discarding of the mill. While physically gone, the mill is nonetheless preserved in an aesthetic variant. “Hier halte ich das letzte des bunten Buches [das Sommerferienheft] fest.” [47] That is not to say that the mill’s metaphorical representation in the pages of the summer notebook constitute a return to durability, as sometimes occurs with discarded objects. Rather, the mill’s “unauslöschlich” quality echoes that which Thompson attributes to rubbish, specifically its unchanging value. The mill and its proprietor may have lost their value and been discarded under the new system of industrial capitalism, but their representation, captured in the memories of Ebert Pfister and committed to paper end up being preserved in a form of non-value. By virtue of being removed from circulation, the quasi-idyllic form of life becomes constitutive of the broader system of values—a system whose various objects of meaning would lose all worth were it not for the non-value of the rubbish it has cast away.

While towards the end of the novel Ebert places the assembled pages of the summer notebook in the “tiefsten Tiefen [s]eines Hausarchivs,” [48] its existence and its paradoxically valuable non-value continue. Rubbish has the effect of preserving what once was while providing the base upon which new value is (re)created. Whether he is conscious of it or not, Ebert’s life in Berlin is contingent upon the life he had at the mill; just as the industrial capitalist forms of value rely to some extent on their difference from what had preceded them. Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle tells the story of a society undergoing relentless and swift change in material circumstances as well as in values. The evidence of society’s transformation is recorded in the novel’s portrayal of discarded objects, the most prominent of which is the summer notebook itself. In so doing, Raabe’s novel may very well be said to theorize a new category of value for writing and literature. These products of culture are unable to maintain their value in industrial capitalism and, given his distrust of social democrats, there is little reason to believe Raabe would have thought it might be different in a more Marxist arrangement. Instead, the novel opens up the possibility of a value outside of value. In other words, by removing the story from the circulation of goods, it arrives at a positionality that preserves its independence from the practical purposes. If my interpretation is valid then Raabe’s text opens up a radical horizon where one can conceive of a realm of value beyond that in which we currently operate.

As Barbara Thum claims, Raabe’s narrative is characterized by a “Wissens- und Kulturpoetik des Restes und des Abfalls” that “betreibt eine literarische Archäologie, die am Umgang mit Abfällen, Resten und lebendigen Dingen die kulturellen Codes zur Bestimmung der Grenze zwischen Natur und Kultur, zwischen Tier und Mensch sowie zwischen Wert und Unwert des menschlichen Lebens abliest.” [49] The work I have completed here emphasizes primarily that final opposition through an analysis of differing and shifting values communicated via a nascent language of finance and constituted by rubbish. Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle not only depicts life in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century as industrial capitalist values become dominant in a way that is true to its realist credentials, but also, in this endeavor, ends up possibly theorizing literature as something simultaneously beyond that system and constitutive of it too. After all, to what end the productivity of industrial capitalism if not to provide leisure time for its beneficiaries to enjoy? Whether to write a summer notebook, visit art exhibitions or family homes, or even just fall asleep while reading a work of literature? The very things that are devalued, discarded, been made rubbish end up being precisely that which signals the success of people within the new system of values. Yet, far from being caught up within that system, that is to say, dependent on its circulation, literature becomes defined according to its independence from it.

To better understand literature’s independence from industrial-capitalist values, one need only compare it to the sugar factory or Asche’s textile factory. Both are valued for their ability to produce a commodity, which bears an exchange value. As finance discourse makes clear, the factories also accumulate value through speculation on the profit to be derived from the sale of sugar and textiles. The earnings of the factories provide the revenue to fund the dividends that Asche and Ebert enjoy, even if Ebert must still work as a teacher. The flow of capital illuminates explicitly and implicitly a broader system upon which the whole of its value depends, meaning that value is always to be found partly elsewhere and outside of itself. [50] By contrast, the novel theorizes literature, and the world it maintains, as something that no longer bears such dependencies precisely because the world it represents no longer exists. Its value is wrapped up within its own pages, either bound or as loose leaves. It is unauslöslich. It is a repository of non-valued value. It is rubbish.

_How to Cite

Matthew Childs. “The Value of Literature: The Discard of Society in Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft.” On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture 17 (2024). <https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2024.1442>.