Wealth & Money Quote by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Ebner-Eschenbach lands a small social bomb: the poor and the rich are supposed to be opposites, yet they share the same posture - concealment. It is an elegant reversal that punctures the moral fairy tale where poverty is visible and wealth is confidently displayed. Instead, both conditions become liabilities, not identities, and both produce self-erasure.

The sentence is built like a balanced scale. First comes the symmetry ("the poor man... and the rich man..."), then the asymmetry that matters: the poor hide to avoid contempt, the rich hide to avoid predation. She’s not flattening class differences; she’s showing how each class is disciplined by a different threat. For the poor, the danger is social: being read as lesser, unworthy, disposable. For the rich, the danger is material: being targeted, taxed, robbed, resented. One lives under stigma, the other under suspicion.

The subtext is colder: society makes privacy a survival strategy. Visibility is not neutral; it’s a risk calculation. Ebner-Eschenbach wrote in an Austro-Hungarian world where rank, inheritance, and public reputation were currency, and where the rise of bourgeois wealth scrambled old hierarchies. In that environment, shame and fear become parallel technologies that keep people in line, teaching them to manage appearances rather than confront the system that punishes exposure.

It works because it refuses sentimentality. There’s no romanticizing of the poor, no demonizing of the rich - just a precise diagnosis of how class produces its own kind of paranoia at both ends.