Overview
Debit and Credit (, 1855) is a novel in six volumes by Gustav Freytag. It was one of the most popular and widely read German novels of the 19th century.
It was translated into English as Debit and Credit by Georgiana Malcolm née Harcourt in 1857.
The novel concerns a Polish uprising against German colonization in Prussian Poland, where German settlers are seen as displacing the ethnically Slavic Polish inhabitants. Freytag unequivocally endorses this displacement, espousing ardent Anti-Polish sentiment and German racial superiority, stating that "there is an old warfare between [Germans] and the Slavonic tribes; and [Germans] feel with pride that culture, industry, and credit are [their] side. Whatever the Polish proprietors around [them] may now be—and there are many rich and intelligent men among them—every dollar that [these proprietors] can spend, they have made, directly or indirectly, by German intelligence. Their wild flocks are improved by [German] breeds; [who] erect the machinery that fills their spirit-casks."
The novel, a Zeitroman or "social novel", deals with interactions among broad segments of German society during the 19th century. The classes represented are the mercantile or bourgeois class, the nobility, and the Jews:
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