The Downfall of Money: Germanys Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class
Page 40
Thanks are due especially to the London Library, another of the world’s great literary resources. I have used its extensive electronic library, and also its book borrowing facilities, to their utmost. The staff, ever patient and helpful, have ensured that any book ordered online one day usually arrived at my door, three hundred miles from London, no more than forty-eight hours later.
Among all the books I read for this project, it would be criminal not mention those written, over a period of many years, by the late Professor Gerald Feldman of UC Berkeley. I was already acquainted, from my postgraduate days in the 1970s, with his ground-breaking book, Army, Industry and Labour in Germany, 1914–1918, but like anyone attempting to write sensibly about the early Weimar years, I have leaned heavily on his huge master work, The Great Disorder, as well as his biography of Hugo Stinnes and his many articles. I could not but express my profound thanks for and debt to this fine historian’s lifetime achievement.
Once again, Bill Swainson, my editor at Bloomsbury in London, has facilitated this project from the outset with his usual quiet determination, aided by Peter Ginna and the team at Bloomsbury in New York. At Siedler-Verlag in Germany, Tobias Winstel and Karen Guddas have also provided sterling support. And to Jane Turnbull, my agent, who is, as always, there for the troughs as well as the peaks, my most heartfelt gratitude.
The motivation for this book came in good part from Brian Perman, who has also read and commented on the writing as it has gone forward. Since I embarked on the project, a European credit crisis has become a European money crisis, with the whole question of currency viability at its heart and Germany, with its historical anxieties on this score, ever more involved in (and blamed for) the problems of the euro. Brian always thought this might be so, and so far he has been proved right.
My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Ed and Peggy Kavounas, have made finishing this book immeasurably easier through their generosity and hospitality. Lastly, my thanks to my wife, Alice, who put up with my working absences, and a hard writing winter, without a single complaint. This book is, as ever, for her.
Image Section
Pre-war idyll: Unter den Linden, Berlin 1910
War! German soldiers leave for the front, 1914
Paying for the apocalypse: advertisement for German War Bonds, 1917
Revolutionary soldiers at the Brandenburg Gate, November 1918
Reichsbank President Rudolf Havenstein, chief enabler of the wartime inflation
Hugo Stinnes, richest man in post-war Germany and ‘King of the Inflation’
Crime scene photograph of the site of Rathenau’s murder, June 1922
Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in the open-topped car in which he was assassinated hours after a midnight meeting with Stinnes
The Ruhr invasion: a French soldier guards a coal shipment in Germany’s occupied industrial heartland, 1923
Reichswehr troops arrest a Communist paramilitary in Saxony, October 1923
Chancellor Cuno (left), November 1922 to August 1923, with President Ebert
A disabled war veteran begs in post-war Berlin
Destitute middle-class Germans selling their possessions at public auction
A food queue outside a high-class grocer’s shop in Berlin during the hyperinflation
The Munich Putsch. Heinrich Himmler, later architect of the Holocaust and Reichsführer-SS (centre with flag) mans a barricade. To his left is Max Scheubner-Richter, killed at Hitler’s side just hours later
Young Hitler, early 1920s
Collection of the day’s wages from the Reichsbank for a small business (15 employees), late 1923
Worthless money finds use, as wallpaper and as a children’s amusement
Old paper marks destroyed after the currency reform, early 1924
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Notes
Chapter 1: Finding the Money for the End of the World
1 See Hew St
rachan, The First World War: A New Illustrated History, vol. 1: ‘To Arms’, Oxford, 2003, p. 833f.
2 Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics and Society in the German Inflation 1914-1924, New York and Oxford, 1996, p. 32.
3 See Leonard Gomes, German Reparations, 1919-1932: A Historical Survey, Basingstoke and New York, 2010, p. 10f. And also Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War 1914-1918, London, 1999, p. 250f.
4 See Helen McPhail, The Long Silence: Civilian Life under the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914-1918, London, 2000, p. 36n.
5 Feldman, The Great Disorder, p. 34.
6 Ibid., p. 5f for the details and for the protests.
Chapter 2: Loser Pays All
1 Quoted in Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 252.
2 For the declaration and its consequences see Alexander B. Downes, ‘Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: The Causes of Civilian Victimization in War’, in International Security, vol. 30, no. 4 (Spring 2006), pp. 185-8. He argues that the blockade was not actually caused by the German U-boat declaration, but that the latter provided a justification in the face of neutral opinion, which at that time included the USA, for the British and their allies to do something they had already been planning for some time.