Before the Deluge, Part 2

The real revolution in Germany was the inflation.

It only took four months, but here is part two (of three) of my look at Before the Deluge by Otto Friedrich (Part one is here.)

My purpose here (other than to provide myself with a reference) is to highlight passages of Friedrich’s book that jumped out at me. In reading history, I am most interested in how major events affect the populace at large, not the elites (and also any parallels to today.)

Hyperinflations - currency collapses - destroy societies - in the case of Germany setting the stage for Hitler and all the death and carnage that followed. So many today - mostly well-off folks - talk quite flippantly about inflation “being the only way out,” as if it was some dial that can be controlled. I don’t expect anything like 1920’s Germany in the U.S. anytime soon, but we should not pretend that it could never happen. Be careful what you wish for.

There are many great quotes and anecdotes and wisdom in this book, particularly on the amorality of inflation. Elsewhere in his book Friedrich uses the phrase, “a glum parody of elegance,” which I thought as was especially apt.

As Felix Somary wrote, “…state bankruptcy is a one-time surgical intervention, while inflation is a permanent poisoning of the very bloodstream of a society.”

(If you haven’t already, you may also want to check out my post, A Very Ordinary Life.)

I don’t really provide any additional commentary below, because I think the text is self-evident.

(Remember that this book was published in 1972.)

Atelier d’Ora, Die Tänzerin Anita Berber (The Dancer Anita Berber). Photograph. In Die Dame, (1923). “During the hyperinflation between 1922 and 1924, Berlin had come to be seen as the centre of a decadent, depraved culture and Berber as one of its most provocative personalities…Contemporaries saw in Berber an anomic figure: someone who did not just live in opposition to the rules of society but outside them.”

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The Financial Times, October 20, 1923

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Simplicissimus Magazine Cover, November 19, 1923

Note the cover, and how the depiction of Papiergold (Paper Gold) stands out.

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“A Kind of Madness” - 1923 

“Nothing expressed the cynical relationship between the grim architecture and the feckless population more than the belief of the Berlin population that one of the stone lions outside the palace at the end of the Unter den Linden¹ roared whenever a virgin walked by.”

Stephen Spender

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This exchange—some scrap metal and a few words in exchange for their gold—is the story of a whole generation of the German middle class.

WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, back in the 1940’s, I went through a phase of wearing strange clothes,” says a conservatively dressed lawyer who now practices in New York. “It wasn’t like nowadays, when strange clothes are sort of a uniform. In those days, strange clothes were considered really strange, but I used to wander around Harvard Square in a Borsalino hat, and Windsor ties, and a Florentine sword cane, and various cloaks and boots and rags. My mother tried to humor me by giving me her father’s Waltham watch, which hadn’t run for years but fitted nicely into my waistcoat pocket, and then my father tried to help out by turning over his old German watchchain, which consisted of a string of little iron plaques, with one word on each plaque, saying, “Gold für Wehr, Eisen für Ehr,’ which means, ‘Gold for defense, iron for honor.’

“I gave gold for defense, I took iron for honor”

You see, his parents had turned all their gold over to the German government during the First World War, including my Grandfather’s gold watch chain, and this was what they got in exchange. And this exchange—some scrap metal and a few words in exchange for their gold—is the story of a whole generation of the German middle class.”

“Typical Reichsbank propaganda urging Germany's women to surrender their gold for the war effort. The placard reads: "Gold for the Fatherland! I gave gold for our defense and received iron as honorable recompense. Increase our gold stock! Bring your gold jewelry to the gold purchasing bureaus. Full gold value will be given in return!" - The Great Disorder

The middle class had worked and saved, and it had put its savings into gold. Gold, thought the middle class, would survive all the typhoons of war and revolution.

When the typhoons came, the Kaiser’s wartime ministers were too timorous—or perhaps too middle-class—to simply seize the gold they needed. Or perhaps they also believed in the mythology of hoarded gold, inviolable, a Nibelungen treasure. Since they did need this treasure, however, they “borrowed” it, giving in return paper notes (and iron watch chains).

“By a continuing process of inflation,” as Keynes said², “governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens…The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

Gradually, then suddenly:

Maybe having a little gold isn’t a bad idea.

“He belongs to that generation whose first step into the world was into the trenches. He does not present the ideal war that the little people, sitting by their cosy stoves, dream of, but the real, live war.”

- Paul Westheim, Helden und Abenteurer

The Trench by Otto Dix went on public display for the first time at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne in November 1923. “With pitiless realism he depicts a battlefield, a rifle-pit shot to pieces, the bodies of the wounded soldiers decomposed and distorted.”

The descent was not disastrous during the first year or two.

Between 1918 and the summer of 1921, the mark slid from its traditional rate of 4.20 per dollar to 75—bad, but not beyond comparison with what we have experienced in other times in other countries. And besides, people were still preoccupied with more basic problems.

Hunger and Death

“Hunger is what I remember most from those years, 1919, 1920,” says Salka Viertel, a darkly attractive actress in those days and now a white-haired lady living in the Swiss mountain village of Klosters. “I was always hungry, and cold. And sometimes slightly drunk, because that was one thing you could always get if you had any money at all.” 

Otto Dix, Wir wollen Brot! (We Want Bread!, 1923)

Even those who had money, though, found that what they had was evaporating. “My father had left a fortune of 800,000 marks,” says a Harvard professor, recalling those days, “but by the summer of 1922, the value of the mark had dropped to 400 per dollar. Every month, it got worse. My mother finally used her last 65,000 marks to buy a typewriter, and she began typing students’ theses to support the youngest children. I went to Holland that spring, looking for anything that would earn hard currency, and I found a job at the Queen Anna coal mines in the province of Limburg. We worked far down, at the bottom of the mine, hacking away with pickaxes. It was tremendously hot, usually one hundred degrees or so, and full of dust, but by the end of the spring vacation I’d saved fifty guilders, which was about twenty-five dollars.

Then I figured out how to beat the inflation.

I used the guilders as security for a short-term bank loan, and then I’d repay the bank loan with the deflated marks and take out another loan. I paid for a whole Semester at Heidelberg that way, and at the end I still had the same fifty guilders.” 

The assassination of Walther Rathenau shook what little faith there was in the prospects for German recovery. From a rate of 400 per dollar in the summer of 1922, the mark sank to 7,000 by the first of January, 1923, and every week it sank further.

Peter Wallenberg, then a student, now a retired UN correspondent, recalls the period as a golden era for confidence games. “I sold gold,” he says with a wink. “I told the other students in my school that my parents had gold in the closet. I don’t know why anyone believed me, but I had imagination. I took their money and hid it in a suitcase under my bed, and when my mother found it, she asked, ‘What's all this?? The whole suitcase was full of ten-mark notes, twenty. mark notes, but of course by then they were all worthless.” 

Karl Arnold, Papiergeld! Papiergeld! (illustration in Simplicissimus magazine of June 15, 1923)

That cold January of 1923, the crisis became a disaster. The government of Chancellor Wirth had collapsed at the end of 1922, when the Socialists withdrew their support. President Ebert then tried to form a more conservative coalition, one that could win the support of big business and deal with the economic problems. The new Chancellor he selected was Superior Privy Councilor Wilhelm Cuno, director of the Hamburg-America shipping line, a man whose elegant manners and appearance disguised, for a time, his total inability to rule a disintegrating nation. (“Cuno is a fat cigar,” Rathenau had once said, “which will have to be smoked someday because of its lovely band.”’) 

And the arguments over reparations went on. The Germans asked for a moratorium and dawdled in their deliveries of raw materials while they tried to negotiate for better terms. France’s vengeful Premier Raymond Poincaré refused to tolerate such tactics. He was eager, in fact, for any pretext that would permit the French to claim a violation of the Versailles Treaty and to justify a new invasion of Germany.

“Whatever happens,” he had warned British Prime Minister Bonar Law, “I shall advance into the Ruhr on January 15.” When the Germans continued stalling, the French made a formal complaint that the Germans had failed to deliver half of the 200,000 telephone poles due for shipment to France during 1922. The Germans blamed the delay on their state governments, which owned the forests that contained the trees that had to be cut down for telephone poles.

The British hardly took the French charge seriously—history had recorded no such political use of wood, said British Envoy Sir John Bradbury, since the Greeks had built a horse outside Troy—but the French now added a new complaint about shortages of coal deliveries from the Ruhr. Overriding British protests, they sent a Franco-Belgian “technical commission” to the Ruhr, on January 11, 1923, to find out what was going on.

The first thing they found was that the German Coal Syndicate had just moved out of the Ruhr and pitched camp in Hamburg. The French, who had sent only a few troops to “protect” their commissioners, following up with additional troops. The German government then suspended all reparations deliveries and called on everyone in the Ruhr to meet the French invasion with passive resistance. The French responded by dismissing any Ruhr official who disobeyed their orders and arresting anyone who attempted to use force. On March 31, there was a clash at the Krupp works in Essen, and French troops opened fire on a crowd of workers, killing thirteen of them.

By now the French had put the entire Ruhr under their military rule, and Germany had lost its industrial center, the source of 80 percent of its coal, iron, and steel, the machinery of its own recovery.

“A cartoon from 1923 depicting French premier Raymond Poincaré dining on children from the Ruhr region, a reference to hunger caused by food seizures.”

The German mark sank more rapidly than ever. From a rate of 7,000 to the dollar in January, when the French invaded the Ruhr, it fell to 160,000 by July. One month later, the rate was 1 million.

And the German government, which now felt an obligation to subsidize the idled workers of the Ruhr, kept printing more banknotes.

At the Ullstein newspaper headquarters on the Kochstrasse, Officials requisitioned presses to turn out the increasingly worthless paper.

“All doors were locked and officials of the Reichsbank were placed on guard,” said one of the owners, Hermann Ullstein. “Round the machines sat elderly women, staring fascinated at those parts of the machines from which the finished products came pouring out. It was the duty of these women to see that these billion-mark notes were placed in the right baskets and handed to the officials. They had to keep an eye on every single billion. Officials are so funny sometimes.”

Paul Kamm, 1923

By the middle of 1923, the whole of Germany had become delirious. Whoever had a job got paid every day, usually at noon, and then ran to the nearest store, with a sack full of banknotes, to buy anything he could get, at any price.

In their frenzy, people paid millions and even billions of marks for cuckoo clocks, shoes that didn’t fit, anything that could be traded for something else. The celebrated conductor, Bruno Walter, had to break up his rehearsals in mid-symphony for the regular midday rush, and after a typical scramble, he recalled, one of his musicians triumphantly displayed his reward for a day’s work, a bag of salt.

The battle for survival paid people in other strange currencies. “I taught anatomy to three Chinese,” says Mrs. Henry Lowenfeld, the psychoanalyst’ wife. “I spoke not a word of Chinese, and they spoke not a word of German, so I had to teach them with diagrams and sign language, and after each lesson I got paid with tea—wonderful tea—and little cakes.” Artur Schnabel gave a concert and received his fee in a suitcase full of bills. “I had to ask a man to help me carry my fee home,” he said later. “On my way home, I passed a delicatessen and to relieve my helper I spent half my fee on a couple of sausages. The next morning I saw in the paper that I could not even get one sausage for the other half of my fee.” 

Food, indeed, became both a currency and an obsession. It was, according to George Grosz, “the only popular subject of the day… - mornings, at a breakfast of turnip coffee, mildewed bread and synthetic honey, one discussed lunch. At lunch of turnip cutlets, muscle pudding and turnip coffee, one discussed a dinner of muscle wurst.” And if food was a currency, a new kind of banker inevitably appeared—the hoarder. One of these dealers took Grosz to his headquarters, an apartment crammed with tubs of butter, sacks of flour, and various other riches. “Cans of Russian caviar were piled up to the ceiling,” Grosz observed, “that is, as much as one could see of the ceiling, because from it dangled all kinds of wurst…spiced Italian salamis, tongue bolognas…countless slabs of bacon, both lean and fat.” The black marketeer, a restaurant cook, gave Grosz a ham sandwich and a glass of gin and said, “Prost, my dear. Long live this fool’s paradise.” 

For foreigners, too, the Berlin of 1923 seemed like some Brueghel fantasy of daydreams fulfilled. Malcolm Cowley, the critic, went to Berlin to visit his friends Matthew Josephson and Harold Loeb, who had moved there because it was so much cheaper to publish their little magazine, Broom. Cowley found that “for a salary of a hundred dollars a month in American currency, Josephson lived in a duplex apartment with two maids, riding lessons for his wife, dinners only in the most expensive restaurants, tips to the orchestra, pictures collected, charities to struggling German writers—it was an insane life for foreigners in Berlin and nobody could be happy there. We hurried back to France on an international express full of smugglers.” 

Georg Scholz, Arbeit Schändet (Work is Disgraceful, 1921)

By one means or another, by bartering and maneuvering, the Berliners managed to survive, and, in some cases, even to flourish. Berthold Viertel, for example, was an ambitious young director who had always wanted his own theatre, and the inflation brought him a sponsor, a currency speculator who yearned for cultural prestige. Viertel (the model for the temperamental director in Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet) promptly organized a repertory company called Die Truppe (The Troupe) and commissioned two Bauhaus students to design a modern setting for The Merchant of Venice, with Fritz Kortner as Shylock. The actors got a minimum of nine million marks a year, plus a sliding scale of raises, but the mark kept sliding faster. “Night after night we were sold out,” according to Viertel’s wife, Salka, “only to see in the morning paper that we were just as broke as ever.” 

The survivors smile now at the madness of 1923, but the destruction of an economy brings considerable suffering to the poor and the helpless, and even though the inflation made everyone poor, it made some people poorer than others. Louis Lochner, who arrived in Berlin during this period and eventually became bureau chief for the Associated Press, got the usual first impression of “cafés crowded with stylishly garbed ladies” but soon found a different story on the side streets off the fashionable boulevards.

“At first I will break the will of the children.”

“I visited a typical Youth Welfare Station,” he said later. “Children who looked as though they were eight or nine years old proved to be thirteen. I learned that there were then 15,000 tubercular children in Berlin; that 23 percent of the children examined by the city health authorities were badly undernourished.” The old were equally helpless.

“Barbarism Prevailed”

One elderly writer named Maximilian Bern withdrew all his savings, more than 100,000 marks, and spent them on one subway ticket. He took a ride around Berlin and then locked himself in his apartment and starved to death. “Barbarism prevailed,” said George Grosz. “The streets became dangerous…We kept ducking in and out of doorways, because restless people, unable to remain in their houses, would go up on the rooftops and shoot indiscriminately at anything they saw. Once, when one of these snipers was caught and faced with the man he had shot in the arm, his only explanation was, ‘But I thought it was a big pigeon.’ ” 

The fundamental quality of the disaster was a complete loss of faith in the functioning of society.

Money is important not just as a medium of economic exchange, after all, but as a standard by which society judges our work, and thus our selves. If all money becomes worthless, then so does all government, and all society, and all standards.

In the madness of 1923, a workman’s work was worthless, a widow’s savings were worthless, everything was worthless.

“The collapse of the currency not only meant the end of trade, bankrupt businesses, food shortages in the big cities and unemployment,” according to one historian, Alan Bullock:

“It had the effect, which is the unique quality of economic catastrophe, of reaching down to and touching every single member of the community in a way which no political event can. The savings of the middle classes and the working classes were wiped out at a single blow with a ruthlessness which no revolution could ever equal.

The result of the inflation was to undermine the foundations of German society in a way which neither the war, nor the revolution of November, 1918, nor the Treaty of Versailles had ever done. The real revolution in Germany was the inflation.” 

“Yes, the inflation was by far the most important event of this period,” says a seventy-five-year-old journalist, a woman who still lives in Berlin. She is white-haired and rather large, and she nibbles cookies as she talks, forgetting that it is already two in the morning. “

The inflation wiped out the savings of the entire middle class, but those are just words. You have to realize what that meant.

There was not a single girl in the entire German middle class who could get married without her father paying a dowry. Even the maids—they never spent a penny of their wages. They saved and saved so that they could get married. When the money became worthless, it destroyed the whole system for getting married, and it destroyed the whole idea of remaining chaste until marriage. 

“The rich had never lived up to their own standards, of course, and the poor had different standards anyway, but the middle class, by and large, obeyed the rules, Not every girl was a virgin when she was married, but it was generally accepted that one should be. But what happened from the inflation was that the girls learned that virginity didn’t matter any more. The women were liberated.” 

Professor Fritz Bamberger is drawing a map. The horizontal Jines show Unter den Linden, and the vertical lines show its main cross street, the Friedrichstrasse. Professor Bamberger sits in a study on the East Side of Manhattan, filled with leather-bound volumes of Spinoza, and he writes carefully with a silver pencil on a small pad of paper. Though he is in his sixties now, rather courtly, with a gray mustache and a cigar, he remembers the scene vividly. “To the north here,” he says, drawing neatly, “there was a little bridge, the Weidendammbrucke, and then it turned into the Chausseestrasse, and that whole street was filled with little girls. And older ones, who made themselves up to look like young girls. They all wore special clothes—mini-minidresses—and they would swing their handbags. There were cheap hotels all around, and dance halls…” 

Hans Baluscek, A Nutte at the Carnival, 1923

They wandered up and down the Friedrichstrasse and the Kurfiirstendamm, and they stood in clusters along the Tauentzienstrasse, just beyond the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and everyone remembers their peculiar costumes. Klaus Mann, the son of the novelist, described them as looking “like fierce amazons, strutting in high boots made of green, glossy leather. One of them brandished a supple cane and leered at me as I passed by…She whispered into my ear: “Want to be my slave? Costs only six billions and a cigarette. A bargain. Come along, honey!”

Josef Sternberg, the movie director, noted a different type, which, “flaunting pigtails and schoolbooks, paraded to appeal to those who hurried to meet them with set jaw and clenched fists.” An Anita Loos, on a visit from Hollywood, remarked that “any Berlin lady of the evening might turn out to be a man; the prettiest girl on the street was Conrad Veidt, who later became an international film star.” 

Conrad Veidt

“All values were changed, and…Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world,”

said Stefan Zweig. “Bars, amusement parks, honky-tonks sprang up like mushrooms….Along the entire Kurfürstendamm powdered and rouged young men sauntered and they were not all professionals; every high school boy wanted to earn some money and in the dimly lit bars one might see government officials and men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without any shame. Even the Rome of Suetonius had never known such orgies as the pervert balls of Berlin, where hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eyes of the police.

Marcel Vertès, Parisian Night at the Lokal

In the collapse of all values a kind of madness gained hold

particularly in the bourgeois circles which until then had been unshakeable in their probity…But the most revolting thing about this pathetic eroticism was its spuriousness. At bottom the orgiastic period which broke out in Germany simultaneously with the inflation was nothing more than a feverish imitation…The whole nation, tired of war, actually longed only for order.” 

It was customary for moralizing observers like Zweig to ogle the girls on the streets and then to bemoan the consequences of economic hardship and spiritual confusion, and yet the Kurfürstendamm, in these times of prosperity, is still full of girls. They are young and pretty, too, unlike the furtive creatures of the side streets, and they are as bold in their invitations as they ever were. Their boots are in high fashion, and they still carry umbrellas, not, one suspects, because of any peculiar fetishism, but because, on an average day in Berlin, a sudden shower drenches the city for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then a rainbow arches overhead. The nights are cool. The wind is brisk. “Na?” she asks, on the glittering, wet street, striped red and blue from the neon lights. “Spazierengehen? Like to take a walk?” A harmless encounter. Organized vice requires organization… 

Is this all there is, or ever was, to the famous night life of Berlin? In describing it as “by far the most immoral city of Europe,” Walter Slezak, the actor, had singled out another place: “The Eldorado nightclub, where female impersonators and transvestites performed, was patronized by: homosexuals and curious tourists and operated openly.” A half-century later, it is still there, still operating openly, and still an attraction for “curious tourists.” One of the standard guidebooks, Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day, describes how even the budget-minded traveler can see freak shows at modest cost: “Now for the action…The connoisseurs among you…will want to sample some of the more erotic nightspots in Berlin. One of the typically weird (though not inexpensive) ones is the Eldorado, 28 Martin Lutherstrasse, where every one of the ‘waitresses,’ ‘hat-check girls’ and ‘bar maids’ is a female impersonator. You'll want to see this, but you won’t want to spend more than an hour at it. Therefore, sit at the bar, where a couple can have a cognac and beer, as Hope and I did, and not be pressed to have a single thing more. There’s a 2-mark (50¢) admission charge; then 8 marks for your first drink, 2.50 marks thereafter.” 

Red Mill Cabaret 1919-19

It seems a rather high price to pay for the unedifying spectacle of men parading around in women’s clothes, and one senses that the whole mythology of vice in the 1920’s has been overtaken by events. Right across from the bombed hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, for instance, there flourishes a kind of sexual supermarket called Beate Uhse. Miss Uhse was a pilot during World War II, and then, looking around for some way to take part in the postwar “economic miracle,” she decided to open a store for people in need of erotic materials. It was such a success that it has become a chain of stores throughout Germany. The windows of the Berlin headquarters emphasize mainly books with titles like Die Sexspiels des Alfred Kindermacher (The Sex Plays of Alfred Childrenmaker), but the doorway offers an inviting blast of rock-’n’-roll, and throngs of people crowd in to inspect racks of color pictures, “adult” records (“Gruppensex Tralala’’), and long counters containing every variety of pills and creams, aphrodisiacs and contraceptives—Erekta Prompt, End-spurt, Topcraft, Energie, and Happy End—and an artificial implement advertised as a “cordless electric vibrator.” 

This is nothing very special, of course. We can find the same kind of equipment in Times Square in New York. And from the miasmal swamps of the current “sexual revolution,” we can look back on the “sexual revolution” of the 1920’s and see that Scott Fitzgerald considered revolution a matter of necking in the rumble seat. Berlin was, as always, ahead of its time, but now that this time has come, even the most flamboyant hedonism of the 1920's acquires, in retrospect, a quality of guileless innocence.  

The Blue Angel, 1930

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The Economist, November 17, 1923

“General conditions go rapidly worse. The number of unemployed, which on October 1st was 1,111,500, is now unofficially put as high as 4,500,000. In the cities, for all but a small class, living conditions are becoming unbearable’ hours are spent every day in obtaining food, and between prices and earnings there is now no calculable relationship at all. Owing to the stopping of central heating in flat-houses, hundreds of thousands of families heat only one room, and that insufficiently. The lack of fats and meat aggravates the situation.

While it is hard to see anything like a sudden political collapse approaching—this, on the ground that no party of strength worth mentioning considers that a collapse would better things—there is a prospect of rapid disintegration, which is likely to place before the Allied countries a very much harder problem than that of dealing with an organised and prosperous, even if defiant, Germany.”

Note how Germany even had periods of “deflation” as late as 1920-1921:

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unter_den_Linden

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“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become “profiteers,'' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace