Recently to improve my German, I began viewing a soap opera titled Altes Geld (Old Money). The series was so bad, I stopped watching halfway through the first season. The show follows a super-rich family as they move from travesty to depravity and back. While the characters are presented as an old, established family, in truth they aren’t. The family made their fortune by collaborating with the Nazis. At the time the show aired, their fortune would have been only seventy years old. As a friend of mine said in response to the premise, “that isn’t old money—just an old way of making it,” meaning crony capitalism and opportunism, not siding with the Nazis. Despite my reaction to the series and its anti-rich message, it did make me think about what is “old” and what this means in the sense of legacy or tradition in a society, which in my view is turning increasingly toward fictions as part of a nostalgic utopian vision.
The so-called patriarch in the tv series pontificates on familial tradition and the way things have always been done. As they are a new family, I’m fairly certain the patriarch’s monologues are satirical; after all the family isn’t old enough to have any real traditions and the way they’ve done things is certainly not to be emulated. Yet, an attitude, a posturing of being people who know things, have tried-and-true ways of doing things which is (probably) satire on a soap opera appears in real life as a trope, repeated with gravity by public figures, often in the context of a “decline of the middle-class.”
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