Neue Freie Presse
- The Industry of Debt-Making.
- Old Josefstadt.
- 'Elysium' Week
The Neue Freie Presse of 10 October 1926 printed an article under Henry Ford's name, datelined New York. In it Ford warned that two rising American "industries", selling and debt-making, could trouble a prosperous country, though he granted that honest debts were no wrong and that credit made modern life workable. The feuilleton opened with Anton Wildgans's autobiographical preface to his Wiener Gedichte, twelve illustrated poems. Wildgans defended the city child's claim to a homeland and placed his own childhood in the eighties and nineties of the last century in the Josefstadt, Vienna's eighth district. A STAFA department-store advertisement for an "Elysium" week gave away an Austrian razor blade with every purchase and urged readers to support domestic industry.
Translation
The Industry of Debt-Making.
[?] [?] [?] [?] All rights reserved. The Industry … Making. The Damage and the Dang… By Henry For… New York, end of September. America is a flourishing country, and we all wish it to remain so. At the moment, to be sure, two great industries are on the rise that may cause us serious concern in the not too distant future: I mean "the industry of selling" and "the industry of debt-making." Nothing can be said against the legitimate business of the merchant, for this business brings the man who needs something together with the man who can satisfy that need. Nor is there anything wrong with honest debts. It is certainly better to pay cash than to run up debts; but the credit business is to be regarded as an advantageous institution without which modern life would be very difficult. The ex-
Old Josefstadt.
The next issue of the "Neue Freie Presse" will appear on Monday afternoon. Feuilleton. Old Josefstadt. An autobiographical preface to a book, "Viennese Poems"*). By Anton Wildgans. I am a child of the city. People think, and lightly mock the likes of us, that such a city child has no homeland. In my games, it is true, no forests rustled; there the paving stones shook, and yet you are a song to me, dear city. Twelve poems, gathered into a slim volume and illustrated by the hand of a kindred-spirited artist, are meant in this particular context to signify nothing other than remembrance of and greeting to childhood and homeland. That childhood, however, fell in the eighties and nineties of the last century, and this homeland is Vienna and, in the narrower sense, the Eighth District of the then capital and
'Elysium' Week
"Elysium" Week at "STAFA" Department Store Co., Mariahilferstrasse 120. From 11 to 16 October every customer receives an "Elysium" razor blade free of charge. Use only the Austrian quality blade, which is equal to the best foreign products. You save money and support domestic industry. On sale in all relevant shops. 15127
Context
Why Ford distrusted selling cars on credit
Ford's article treats consumer credit as a rising "industry of debt-making", and that stance matches what is known of his company's practice at the time. In 1919 General Motors had begun lending consumers the extra money they needed to buy its cars, through its financing arm GMAC. Henry Ford, a social conservative, scowled at GMAC's auto-loan business. The Ford Motor Company instead kept an old-fashioned Weekly Payment Plan, under which customers brought $5 to $10 a week to be deposited in an account run by their local dealer. That approach lost ground: General Motors overtook Ford as the leading American carmaker, and by 1928, two years after this article appeared in Vienna, the Ford Motor Company had set up its own auto-loan subsidiary. When the Neue Freie Presse printed Ford's warning, his company was still resisting the credit sales his chief rival was using to win buyers.
How far instalment buying had spread by the late 1920s
The worry Ford voiced in the article was shared by other American observers in the same years. In the mid-1920s the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd studied the townspeople of Muncie, Indiana, and uneasily recorded their increasing materialism and indebtedness. The Lynds wrote that the automobile had apparently unsettled the habit of careful saving for some families, the very habit Ford praised when he said paying cash was better than running up debts. The trend he warned against kept growing after 1926. By 1930 most appliances, radios and furniture in the United States were bought on the installment plan, and so were more than two-thirds of all automobiles.
The Neue Freie Presse and the standing of its feuilleton
The Neue Freie Presse was a Viennese daily founded on 1 September 1864 by Adolf Werthner together with the journalists Max Friedländer and Michael Etienne. Its feuilleton, the cultural section in which Wildgans's preface appears on this page, carried unusual weight among readers. Stefan Zweig, himself a feuilletonist for the paper, recalled in The World of Yesterday that in fin-de-siècle Vienna, for the entire Viennese bourgeoisie, important works were those that won praise in the Neue Freie Presse. He added that readers felt anything published in the feuilleton was vouched for by the highest authority. If the feuilleton kept something of that authority in 1926, a poet's preface to a slim volume of twelve poems printed there reached readers with more prominence than an ordinary book notice would have had.
Anton Wildgans and the Vienna of his childhood
Anton Wildgans was born in Vienna on 17 April 1881 and was a jurist as well as a dramatist and poet, so the childhood in the 1880s and 1890s that his preface locates in the Josefstadt fits his own life. He obtained a law doctorate in 1908 and worked as an investigating magistrate from 1909 to 1911 before turning to writing. By the time of this 1926 preface he had already managed the Vienna Burgtheater once, in 1921/22, and he would take the post again in 1930/31. During the First Republic he was also a strong advocate of Austria's independence. In the preface he answers those who mock city children as homeless by naming Vienna, and its eighth district in particular, as his homeland. Wildgans died in Mödling on 3 May 1932.
Original
Die Industrie des Schuldenmachens.
[?] [?] [?] [?] Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Die Industrie d machen Der Schaden und die Gefa Von Henry For Newyork, Ende September. Amerika ist ein blühendes Land, wir wünschen alle, daß es so bleibe. Im Augenblick sind freilich zwei große Industrien im Aufstreben begriffen, die uns in nicht zu ferner Zukunft ernste Sorgen bereiten können: ich meine damit " die Industrie des Verkaufens " und " die Industrie des Schuldenmachens ". Man kann nichts gegen das legitime Geschäft des Kaufmannes einwenden, denn dieses Geschäft bringt den Mann, der etwas braucht, mit dem zusammen, der diesen Bedarf befriedigen kann. Es ist auch nichts Schlimmes an ehrlichen Schulden. Es ist gewiß besser, bar zu bezahlen, als Schulden zu machen; aber das Kreditgeschäft ist als eine vorteilhafte Einrichtung zu betrachten, ohne die das moderne Leben sehr schwer wäre. Die Aus -
Die alte Josefstadt.
Die nächste Nummer der " Neuen Freien Presse " erscheint Montag nachmittag. Feuilleton. Die alte Josefstadt. Ein selbstbiographisches Vorwort zu einem Buche " Wiener Gedichte " *). Von Anton Wildgans. Ich bin ein Kind der Stadt. Die Leute meinen, Und spotten leichthin über unsereinen, Daß solch ein Stadtkind keine Heimat hat. In meinem Spiele rauschten freilich keine Wälder, da schütterten die Pflastersteine, Und bist mir doch ein Lied, du liebe Stadt. Zwölf Gedichte, zu einem schmalen Bande vereinigt und von der Hand des gleichgestimmten Künstlers verbildlicht, wollen in diesem besonderen Zusammenhange nichts anderes bedeuten, als Erinnerung und Gruß an Kindheit und Heimat. Jene Kindheit aber fiel in die achtziger und neunziger Jahre des vorigen Jahrhunderts, und diese Heimat ist Wien und im engeren Sinne der achte Bezirk der damaligen Haupt - und
»Elysium«-Woche
» Elysium «- Woche bei der " STAFA " Warenhaus A. - G. Mariahilferstrasse 120. Vom 11. bis 16. Oktober erhält jeder Käufer gratis eine " Elysium " - Rasierklinge. Benützen Sie nur die österreichische Qualitätsklinge, die den besten ausländischen Erzeugnissen gleichwertig ist. Sie sparen Geld und fördern die heimische Industrie. Verkauf in allen einschlägigen Geschäften. 15127