Stave didn’t want to depress his son. He's just twenty years old, he thought. And if he can’t be optimistic, who can? ‘The new money will be worth something,’ he replied, trying to sound more confident than he really felt.
Karl gave a brief laugh and shook his head. ‘The famous X-day. What if nothing happens at all?’
‘It's not just something the British are doing. It's the Americans too. And they’re the real bosses. If they organise something, it happens.’
‘They certainly organised the bombing raids well.’
‘And the CARE packets. Without those a few more people would have starved to death.’
His son shook his head again pensively: ‘I wish I could believe in a better future,’ he muttered. ‘Do you?’
Stave wanted to say yes, but he also wanted to be honest. ‘I hope the future will be better,’ he replied cautiously. ‘I’m working on it. That things will be better, I mean. What else is there to do?’
‘Leap out of the window.’
‘If that was really what you thought, that there was no hope left, then you wouldn’t have survived two years in Vorkuta.’
Karl looked at him in surprise, then smiled appreciatively and clicked his fingers: ‘You’ve got me into a corner there. There's something true in that.’
‘And you’re a student now,’ his father let slip, proudly.
‘Of ancient history. Somebody needs to get to the bottom of this mess. I mean, right to the bottom.’
‘Two thousand years back?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘There has to be an origin to it all. Maybe it was the Romans who conquered Europe? Or Christianity? One way or another, the Nazis weren’t the first to have the idea of taking over the whole continent. Nor were they the first to want to kill every Jew they got their hands on. That goes way back too.’
‘What's the point of looking for reasons in the distant past?’
‘To make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.’
Stave leaned back, genuinely surprised. He had never looked at things like that. History was always about something that happened yesterday, never about tomorrow. He hoped it was optimism in Karl's case.
‘In fact it was primarily because of that that I invited myself to supper. You have a radio.’ He glanced down at an old watch on his wrist. Where had he got that from, his father wondered. Probably in exchange for tobacco.
‘The mayor is about to make a speech. I was thinking it might be interesting.’
Stave stood up and turned the old radio on. He hoped his electricity ration for the month would be enough to hear the speech to the end. To make sure, he turned off the light, which had his one remaining working bulb. The soft yellow glow of the radio valves flooded the room, the sound crackling and hissing as they warmed up. And then a voice. NWDR, North West German Radio.
They listened to Mayor Max Brauer's voice, cautiously optimistic. ‘The German people will remain poor for years yet and unable to afford any particular luxury. But there is no shame in poverty, and we above all do not need to be afraid of it as long as all decent German men and women are paid honest money for their work, money with which they can buy things, and still save some, which is what we all will have to do.’
‘He certainly has a different way of speaking compared to Adolf,’ Karl said when the broadcast ended.
‘Honest money doesn’t sound bad.’
‘But he also said we would remain poor for years.’
‘At least he wasn’t telling lies.’
Karl looked out of the window, streaming with rain. Darkness falling on Ahrensburger Strasse. ‘What would you buy first? After X-day, I mean. If the “honest money” isn’t just a load of nonsense. What would you buy with your next paycheque?’
Stave thought long and hard. ‘A pair of shoes,’ he answered finally. ‘Decent men's shoes. Leather, comfortable, with good soles. Shoes you can walk around town in, without looking like a tramp. What about you?’
‘Books. American books, English books, French books. Maybe even Soviet books. I feel as if it wasn’t just two years I spent in that camp, but my whole life.’
Let's hope the new money is a success, Stave prayed silently. Something has to work in this country sooner or later. Shoes. Books. Not a bad start for a new era.
Karl rubbed his eyes. ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘Can I spend the night here? Is the little room still free?’
‘Who else is it for?’ Stave replied, scarcely able to believe his own happiness.
Deutschmark
Sunday, 20 June 1948
Stave woke up at 4 a.m. exactly, as always without an alarm clock. If he decided the night before to get up at a specific time the next morning, he woke up at precisely that time, as if he had an internal clock. He crept into the kitchen so as not to wake Karl. X-day. Grey light, rain, far too cold for the beginning of summer. He cut the mouldy pieces off the grey bread and threw them into the bin. He cut one third of the rest and completed his breakfast by washing it down with tap water. It would take too long to heat up the old iron stove. Maybe he could get an ersatz coffee somewhere later.
The chief inspector carried his bicycle down the semi-dark stairwell. The only glimmer of light came through the gap under Flasch's door. The CID man wondered in passing how his neighbour was going to get to the Landeszentralbank.
As he rode down empty Ahrensburger Strasse it occurred to him that the whole city seemed to be holding its breath, before bursting into... Into what? An adventure? A whole new era? Or a huge disappointment?
He arrived at the square in front of the city hall just before 5.30 and leaned his bike against a patrol car. There were a few uniformed police in place outside the bank, and English military police patrolling the doors. Trucks with their engines running stood alongside the building, an armed guard next to every driver.
‘It all kicks off today,’ Constable Ruge called out.
‘Back to your place,’ an overtired senior shouted at him testily. Ruge made a face but did what he was told.
Stave joined a group of detectives standing around Cuddel Breuer.
‘Okay, boys,’ their boss announced, ‘this has to go smoothly. In that building there are 600 million marks, 600 million Deutschmarks, worth so many Reichsmarks you couldn’t write it on a single sheet of paper. Our colleagues in uniform and the British soldiers are about to share them out between the 1,300 distribution centres throughout the city. It is our job to make sure they all get there safely. After that you can have the rest of the day off. You can go to your own allocated distribution centres and get your own ration of the new money. And tomorrow we’ll all be rich.’
The first truck rolled up outside the door. There were no more wooden boxes, Stave noticed. They had transferred the banknotes into sealed bags. It took only a few moments to fill it. Then the next arrived. And the next. There were no passers-by on the windy Rathausplatz, no suspicious movements to be seen on the side streets. No noise, save for the raindrops falling on the brim of his hat. The chief inspector spotted Flasch among the officials whose job it was to run alongside the bags of money, holding umbrellas over them so that they wouldn’t get wet in the few metres from the doorway to the truck. At one point Flasch recognised his neighbour and touched his cap to him. Stave returned the gesture.
After the last truck had trundled away down Alter Wall, a few post office cars came past, also laden with bags of money. Then buses. Sooner or later the vaults have to be empty, Stave reckoned. It had to have been about 6.30 a.m. before the last vehicle left the Landeszentralbank.
‘Back to mummy, everybody,’ Cuddel Breuer called out. ‘Our work here is over. Time to change money.’
Whereas most of his colleagues hurried off, Stave walked over to the bank building, showed his ID to the British military policeman on the door and was allowed in. Once inside, he stopped the first bank employee he met and pulled out the five- and ten-pfennig notes from his coat pocket. ‘Is this the new currency?’ he asked the confu
sed man.
‘Where did you get those from?’ the official stuttered. ‘You’re not supposed to be able to exchange for them yet.’
Two minutes later the chief inspector was back outside. He watched a small group of uniformed police who were still guarding the building. They had pulled their caps down as far as possible over their foreheads, in the vain hope it would give them better protection from the rain. Ruge was among them. Stave went up to him and whispered so that nobody but his colleague would hear: ‘Might you be interested in a little expedition this afternoon?’
‘In my free time?’
‘Yes. And in plain clothes.’
‘I’m on. What's it about?’
‘We’ll meet at 4 p.m. On Goldbekplatz.’ The chief inspector touched his index finger to the rim of his hat in farewell and strolled off.
‘Are we going to solve the case?’ the young constable called after him hopefully.
‘You can bet a new Deutschmark on it,’ Stave replied.
The chief inspector rode back home and put his bike away. The apartment was empty. Karl was a grown-up, no need to worry, he told himself. He hurried off to the neighbourhood ration store to get the new money.
There was a long queue on the pavement, at least 300 metres. Figures under soaking wet capes, umbrellas. Blue plumes of cigarette smoke in the cool air. The smell of old shoes and unwashed bodies. Everywhere people were whispering; it was like a buzz of electricity filling the air. The tension was somewhere between that in a movie premiere and a dentist's waiting room. The CID man could only make out a few whispered words: ‘Deutschmark’; ‘new pots and pans’; ‘nothing will come of it’; ‘no good for the little man; ‘Yankee paper’; ‘new times’; ‘nylon stockings’.
The crowd crawled slowly along. How many years of my life have I wasted standing in queues? Would it ever end? He looked around. The way policemen did. Then he relaxed a little. It didn’t seem likely that there would be unrest. Nobody was talking loudly, nobody pushing. Men and women were standing patiently in the rain, resigned to their fate. He could have done with a hot ersatz coffee.
After a good hour or so, he reached the entrance. There was a poster on the wall: ‘Information about the change in currency.’ Nobody read more than the first two lines. Onwards! It was as if everybody was afraid that the door would be slammed in their face and they wouldn’t get the new money.
He showed a tired-looking steward his bluish British Zone identity card and then his current ration card, to prove his identity.
‘Move along,’ the man said, waving forward the next in line. Anyone who couldn’t show their papers was refused the new currency. On this one day alone we’ll catch more illegal dealers than in even the biggest black market raids, Stave reckoned.
There was a lot of pushing and shoving inside, the air was musty, voices muffled. A row of tables spread across the room, like a barrier. At each one sat four city civil servants, and against the wall behind them British and German police. Boards hung above the tables designated the customer alphabetically.
The CID man stood in the ‘S-Z’ queue. He glanced over the headscarf of the woman in front of him at the table: rubber stamps, a large black telephone, bundles of old Reichsmark notes, scrappy and tattered. They looked like paper rags next to the piles of green, blue and brown notes that seemed as if they had been ironed. All of a sudden his heart began to beat faster. He looked at the clock.
‘Your identity card.’ A sweating bald official was looking at him through watery eyes. Stave pulled out his papers again, as excited as a schoolboy about to take an exam. The bald man examined his documents, the man next to him noting something down in a list, then looked through his files to find the reference to Stave's name.
‘Head of the family?’
Stave stared at the official blankly, sighing deeply. ‘The head of the family is entitled to exchange money for all other family members. What is the situation in your case?’
He thought of Karl who was registered under his own address and was hopefully waiting at another distribution centre. ‘No,’ Stave answered. ‘I’m exchanging only on my own behalf.’ It sounded somehow like the acknowledgement of a divorce.
‘Then you get the pro capita sum of 40 Deutschmarks.’ The official's voice was a dull drone, a sentence he had said hundreds of times over the past few hours. Stave could hardly make him out. ‘You give us 40 Reichsmarks in exchange. In two months’ time you can exchange another 20 Reichsmarks. Coins and notes worth less than one Reichsmark are not exchangeable. They remain valid, but at just one tenth of their former value. Do you understand?’
The chief inspector nodded, as if in a dream, and handed over his bundle of notes. They were the best-preserved Reichsmarks he had found in his briefcase. The third official behind the table counted them out quickly, then added them to the pile of old notes. The fourth man handed him a neat pile of new notes.
‘Please sign the receipt. Next.’
Stave moved aside, leaned with his hip against the table and looked in amazement at the notes in his hand. A blue note with a design that resembled an oak leaf: ‘One half Deutschmark — 1948 issue.’ A turquoise note, yellow and brown, a heroic man thinking, paper in his right hand, a globe in front of him, a ship behind him. ‘Five Deutschmark.’ Majestic blue and red, a representation of Justice, with scales and shield: ‘Ten Deutschmark.’
He stroked the solid virgin paper with his fingertip, inhaling the aroma: worth, reliability. But it's just paper, a voice inside him said. Yet somehow it felt quite different to the old Reichsmarks. And in that single second, on the fringe of the scramble in the distribution centre, he realised that never again would he have to pay for something with cigarettes or butter. This is a revolution I’m holding in my hands, he thought, and nothing in Germany is ever going to be the same again.
He quickly flicked through the rest of the notes. Right at the bottom were the five- and ten-pfennig notes. I’ve seen you before, he whispered contentedly, and walked out into the open air.
Karl was waiting for him back at the apartment. He had spread out his own DM notes on the table as if they were a deck of cards. ‘It's going to take a while to get used to them,’ he said quietly.
Stave wasn’t sure whether he heard hope or fear for the future in the sentence. ‘In six months’ time we won’t even remember what the old Reichsmarks looked like,’ he said.
‘You really think the Yankee money will be a success?’
‘It's our money now, Karl. It's the Deutschmark, not the Allies’ mark. It's a new beginning.’
‘Sounds as if you’re proud of this money?’
Stave looked at his son in surprise. ‘You’re right. There's no logical reason behind it, but yes, I am proud.’
‘Who would have thought that you would let yourself be distracted from logic,’ Karl replied genially. Then he looked back down at the notes. ‘A lot of books there,’ he muttered, looking at the table as if the works themselves were already lying on it.
‘You can pick up the latest weekly subscription novels for a few pfennigs each. With that amount of money,’ Stave nodded to the notes lying on the table, ‘you could buy a whole library.’
‘But you won’t fill your shoe cupboard that quickly.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Are you going into town later?’
‘Yes. To Goldbekplatz. On business.’
‘Take a detour via Mönckebergstrasse. Take a look at the shops.’
‘It's Sunday. There are no shops open.’
‘That doesn’t mean that the grocers are sitting on their backsides. Go and take a look.’
‘Are you coming with me?’
‘I need to get back to my allotment. We’ll see one another in the next day or so for sure.’
A tiny black flower of disappointment fell on Stave's heart but he refused to let it depress him. ‘See you in the next day or so,’ he replied and forced a smile.
‘Maybe I’ll find a kiosk that's op
en on a Sunday. See if they have these weekly subscription novels.’ He shuffled the banknotes back together and waved the bundle of notes. ‘Heil Deutschmark!’ he exclaimed. But he didn’t sound bitter. He was laughing. Karl, laughing. Laughing like a young man, jovially, ironically, carefree. When was the last time I heard him like this, Stave asked himself. And then he joined in laughing, so hard that his chest wound hurt, but even that he treasured.
The chief inspector set out earlier than he actually needed to as he decided to take Karl's advice. Even before he reached Mönckebergstrasse he realised what his son had been reckoning on: the shops were full. ‘New currency – new prices!’ stood on two huge posters above the display at a women's clothing shop. Everywhere men and women were standing like curious children with their noses squashed against the shop windows. Stave got off his bike and pushed it. Despite the bad weather there were people everywhere. Eventually he stopped and stared down Mönckebergstrasse.
‘I simply don’t believe it,’ he muttered. Then he realised he had been talking to himself out loud. Don’t let yourself be bowled over, he told himself, but nonetheless he had the impression that the ground had been taken out from under his feet.
There were cigars in the shop window, bottles of Rhine wine, smoked sausages piled in artistic bundles on porcelain plates. A car dealer had even a shiny black Opel Olympia in his showroom, with ‘6,785 DM’ on a cardboard placard behind the windscreen. The CID man took a moment to realise what the two letters stood for.
And shoes, shoes, shoes. Men's leather shoes. Brightly coloured women's shoes with heels. Children's shoes. Working boots.
‘Where has it all come from?’ whispered an elderly lady, standing next to Stave at a shop window.
A young girl pointed to a sign in the corner of the window display: ‘Not hoarded stock,’ it said. ‘All lies,’ she hissed.
Stave turned towards her, too astonished to be angry. The humiliating feeling of having been betrayed. The realisation that during years when one had to creep out on to the windy black market squares like an embarrassed John visiting a prostitute, to offer the family jewels to grinning young crooks when all the time these scarcities, these treasures, these essentials actually existed: hidden away invisible, hoarded in warehouses, cellars, back rooms. Hoarded by merchants you gave your ration cards to, people you had known for years, neighbours even. People who had hidden away what they had despite the misery, all in waiting for today: X-day. New money.
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