The idea of real wealth became very important. Who can imagine paying 500 billion marks for a dozen eggs? It’s also interesting to see how society dealt with this breakdown in the currency. The price changes get ridiculous to talk about – the numbers so large that they are practically meaningless. They came, sure enough, and were in due course more than eclipsed, with the turn of the following year.” “It was unimaginable in 1921 that 1922 could hold any more terrors. “And yet things always did, from bad to worse, to worse, to worse,” Fergusson writes. The baker didn’t know how it happened… His customers didn’t know… It had somehow to do with the dollar, somehow to do with the stock exchange – and somehow, maybe, to do with the Jews.”Īs we know what would happen later in Germany, her comments are particularly chilling.Įach year, people thought it couldn’t get worse. You could go to the baker in the morning and buy two rolls for 20 marks but go there in the afternoon and the same two rolls were 25 marks. “My allowance and all the money I earned were not worth one cup of coffee. As Fergusson writes: “They picked upon other classes, other races, other political parties, other nations.” There was a long list of villains: “the greed of tourists, or the peasants, or the wage demands of labor, or the selfishness of industrialists and profiteers, or the sharpness of Jews or the speculators making fortunes in the money markets.”Įrna von Pustau, who lived through it, described what it was like:

Germany became an ugly society, looking for blame.

It’s hard to fathom.Īll this brought out the worst in people. As a practical matter, real prices were often a third higher. Butter went up 33-fold! And these were official prices. Sugar, milk, pork and potatoes went up 23-28-fold. In just eight years since 1913, the price of rye bread rose 13-fold. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson