Money is more than just a medium of financial exchange: across time and place, it has performed all sorts of cultural, political, and social functions. This volume traces money in German-speaking Europe from the late Renaissance until the close of the twentieth century, exploring how people have used it and endowed it with multiple meanings. The fascinating studies gathered here collectively demonstrate money's vast symbolic and practical significance, from its place in debates about religion and the natural world to its central role in statecraft and the formation of national identity.

Jared Poley is Professor of History at Georgia State University. He is the author of the books The Devil's Riches: A Modern History of Greed (Berghahn, 2016) and Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Peter Lang, 2005) and a co-editor of the collections Migrations in the German Lands, 1500-2000 (Berghahn, 2016) and Kinship, Community, and Self (Berghahn, 2014).

List of Tables and Figures

Introduction
Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley

Chapter 1. Money from the Spirit World: Treasure Spirits, Geldmännchen, Drache
Johannes Dillinger

Chapter 2. Perfecting the State: Alchemy and Oeconomy as Academic Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern German-speaking Lands
Vera Keller

Chapter 3. The Money Tree: Living in the Shadow of a Patrician Family in Hamburg
Almut Spalding

Chapter 4. Silver Thaler and Ur-Cameralists
Andre Wakefield

Chapter 5. "All that glitters is not gold, but...": German Responses to the Financial Bubbles of 1720
Eve Rosenhaft

Chapter 6. A Conspicuous Lack of Consumption: Money, Luxury, and Fashion in King Frederick William I's Prussia (c. 1713-1740)
Benjamin Marschke

Chapter 7. "Alles Geld gehet immer auf":  Money in an Emerging Consumer and Cash Economy, Göppingen (1735-1860)
Dennis Frey, Jr.

Chapter 8. Status, Friendship, and Money in Hamburg around 1800: Debit and Credit in the Diaries of Ferdinand Beneke (1774-1848)
Frank Hatje

Chapter 9. Luxury and the Nineteenth-Century Württemberg Pietists
Jan Carsten Schnurr

Chapter 10. Marx on Money
Jonathan Sperber

Chapter 11. Modernism, Relativism, and the Philosophy of Money
Elizabeth S. Goodstein

Chapter 12. A Narrative in Notgeld: Collecting, Emergency Money, and National Identity in Weimar Germany
Erika L. Briesacher

Chapter 13. Predatory Speculators, Honest Creditors: Money as Root of Evil or Proof of Virtue in Weimar Germany
Michael L. Hughes

Chapter 14. Mobilizing Citizens and their Savings: Germany's Public Savings Banks, 1933-1939
Pamela E. Swett

Chapter 15. "One Would Not Get Far Without Cigarettes": The Cigarette Economy in Occupied Germany, 1945-1948
Kraig Larkin

Chapter 16. When the Deutsch Mark Was in Short Supply: Reconstruction Finance Between Currency Reform and "Economic Miracle"
Armin Grünbacher

Chapter 17. Between Memorialization and Monetary Re-Valuation: The 1990 Currency Union as a Site of Post-Unification Memory Work
Ursula M. Dalinghaus

Afterword: Simmel's Berlin and Money as Social Consensus
Michael J. Sauter

Index