Double-Entry Bookwriting: Mela Hartwig’s Bin ich ein überflüssiger Mensch?

Written between 1930 and 1931 but first published in 2001, Mela Hartwig’s Bin ich ein überflüssiger Mensch? traces the life and gradual decline of a female stenographer amid the economic upheavals in late 1920s and early 1930s Austria. In doing so, Hartwig redefines the “superfluous woman” as a literary figure, departing from its earlier, fin-de-siècle formulations. Through generic, narrative, and stylistic strategies that echo the mechanisms of double-entry bookkeeping, the text stages attempts at balance and equilibrium, mirroring the narrator’s explicit desire to become a “zero.” As the article argues, however, Hartwig sustains a structural imbalance that resists resolution. By emphasizing the impossibility of equilibrium within the logic of economic productivity, Hartwig reclaims superfluity as a literary strategy, turning it into a space where language resists and exceeds its systemic constraints. This article thus shows how Hartwig’s pathological bookkeeping both inhabits the masculine language of economic rationality and exceeds it, proposing a paradigm of women's writing grounded in that very excess.