The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class (41 page)

Grosz
recalled the scene after the cab dropped them at a ‘faceless house in Berlin’s new west’. On the top floor, behind steel-reinforced and triple-bolted doors, was a wonderland:

We picked our way through the Berlin room. On either side there were crates, pots of jam, huge jars of tomatoes, gherkins and various delicacies, blue tins of Russian caviar, all piled as high as the ceiling – 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, lean and
fa
t .
. .

Then there was every type of ham, from smooth rolled
Lachsschinken
[smoked salmon] to oversized smoked Westphalian. A sight for sore eyes and grumbling bellies, and I had to pinch my nose, to see if I was dreaming.
13

‘I simply don’t know where to put it all,’ the chef confessed cheerfully. ‘Money isn’t worth a damn these days, so even the passage is bursting with the stuff . . .’ He sat the incredulous Grosz down with a ham sandwich and a tumbler of gin – fabulous
luxuries – and toasted the inflation: ‘Cheers, my dear fellow. Long live this fool’s
paradise!’

Unlike George Grosz, most Germans, in Berlin or elsewhere, had no access to black-marketeer arts groupies. Chroniclers since have written gloatingly, and so far as it goes accurately, of the availability of bought flesh to those who possessed foreign exchange or other forms of ‘material assets’ in the Germany of the hyperinflation. The collapse of money and the collapse of morals become identical. At times, such description has come close to turning the history of hope, despair and humiliation that was the early Weimar Republic into a form of pornography. In the case of Berlin, in particular, accounts relentlessly reference the colourful world of the (1960s) musical
Cabaret
in their view of a world where all manner of nudity was constantly on display, and where both the traditional prostitute class (which had long been an infamous feature of the city) and the newly dispossessed daughters (and sons) of the educated middle class, who had now also taken to the sex trade, were endlessly available at a price - preferably in cigarettes, precious metals or hard currency rather than paper marks.

Berlin in the 1920s was not only, or mainly, a nest of vice but also an earnest, workaday town. What truth was contained in the popular image had more to do with desperation than a desire to titillate.The Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who lived in Berlin between 1921 and 1923, described one particular night out in inflationary Berlin in the company of friends from Berlin’s foreign colony. It started at the Café Josty on the Potsdamer Platz and got wilder as the night went on:

We . . . ended up in a thoroughly respectable bourgeois apartment. The walls were hung with portraits of the male family members in officers’ uniforms, and there was a picture of a sunset. We were handed champagne, that is: Lemonade with a little alcohol in it. Then the two daughters of the house entered, in an unclothed state, and began to dance. The mother looked hopefully at the foreign guests: Perhaps her daughters would please them and would pay well, in dollars, of course. ‘And this is what we call life,’ the mother sighed. ‘Actually it’s purely and simply the end of the world.’
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A young journalist reporting the proceedings of the Reichstag later recalled walking home at night to the insalubrious area near the Alexanderplatz where he had taken lodgings:

My nightly walks home from the Reichstag to my working-class district were bad, the half-dark streets lined with women, many of whom were certainly offering themselves only out of sheer necessity, and with red-lit bars for foreigners with hard currency.
15

In fact, the wave of nudity and free expression in the sexual arena that followed the abolition of the old Prussian and Imperial censorship laws after 1918 was already somewhat on the ebb by 1923. The most notorious and profitable of the nude and near-nude shows, starring ‘Celly de Rheidt’ (born Cäcily Funk, wife of a demobilised first lieutenant, Alfred Seweloh, who functioned as the act’s manager and
conferencier
), was brought to court early in 1922. Despite protesting the ‘artistic’ nature of the undertaking (by this time expanded to include profitable sidelines in postcards and short films), Seweloh was fined and ‘Celly de Rheidt’ and her fellow performers forced to ‘cover up’. Needless to say, thereafter the ‘ballet’s’ public popularity underwent a steep, not to say terminal, decline.
16

In 1923, after the French occupation of the Ruhr, the Prussian authorities used the situation as a pretext to take on emergency powers and as a consequence to ban any public entertainments, in Berlin and elsewhere in the state, that gave rise to ‘concern’ (
Bedenken
). Just as dancing and similar amusements had been forbidden during the world war, so now cabarets and shows were severely restricted. One of the reasons why the authorities took this step, moral considerations apart, may have been that the nude cabarets were popular among foreign, and especially American, tourists. It was felt that such displays of extravagance and licence would encourage, or for some observers confirm, the belief that Germany’s public declarations of poverty (and therefore inability to pay reparations) concealed a world of private luxury.
17

What was certainly true, by 1923, was that the whole of Germany had become a marketplace. In this world, for those who had neither the resources nor the nerve nor the skills to participate successfully in the great sell-off, there seemed no place any more. In Berlin and other major cities, members of the newly impoverished middle classes brought heirlooms and precious belongings to impromptu salerooms, where whoever had the money could bid for them. The sell-offs, often sponsored by middle-class housewives’ associations, tended to be held in rooms provided by banks. The organisers made efforts to fix as fair a price as possible under the circumstances, but these were desperate times.

A walk through the small salesroom with its tables and glass cases is heart-rending. There lie spread out so many lovely things so pleasing to the eye . . . wonderful Turkish and embroidered silk shawls, finely carved figurines, old porcelain, clocks, inlaid pearl, embroidered linens, silver utensils – everything in short that once decorated a house is assembled here . . . There is some old piece, a picture, a porcelain cast, which appears to the loving but unskilled eye of the owner as a true rarity and who, if she must part with it, wants to receive as much as possible. One now has to tell her that it has neither material nor artistic value, and the sick, embittered souls are always inclined to take this as a personal affront and bad will . . . A look out the window – there slides by the restless life of the metropolis, the fine silk stockings and expensive furs, there sit autos with the fat figures of
Schieber
[profiteers] inside, and here inside, in the quiet room, an impoverished Germany quietly and painfully weeps in its silent misery.
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What perhaps contributed to the alleged decline of traditional morality, among young women especially, was the fact that in Germany after the First World War, despite the deaths of around 2 million males of military age, among the higher middle class especially, the old dowry system still helped to dictate which young woman could marry which young man. So, if the money were not forthcoming, the young woman stayed unmarried. A woman who had been young at the time recalled many years later:

The inflation wiped out the savings of the entire middle class, but those are just words. You have to realise 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 so 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.
19

Erich Maria Remarque (born Erich Paul Remark in the Westphalian town of Osnabrück), became an international literary celebrity with his war novel,
All Quiet on the Western Front
. In a later piece of fiction,
The Black Obelisk
, he writes of a young woman, engaged to her sweetheart during the inflation period, whose father invests the money intended for her dowry unwisely and loses it all. When the dowry is not forthcoming, the fiancé breaks off the engagement. She is heartbroken, and the father commits suicide out of shame for his error.

Even if the money was safely delivered, it could go astray. When the great Weimar politician Gustav Stresemann got married, he received a dowry from his wife’s wealthy family. The sum was invested by being lent out as mortgages. These were wiped out by the inflation, which meant the debts could be repaid at far less than their actual value. As his son Wolfgang reported many years later, Stresemann had to live from his salary as a Reichstag Deputy and, until he became a minister, some company board memberships. Ironically, especially after Stresemann got into government and could no longer take on directorships, the family was a lot less rich than it looked. After Wolfgang Stresemann completed his first year at Heidelberg University in August 1923, having been forced to call on his father for constant increases in his allowance because of the inflation, there was even some doubt that the family would be able to continue to fund his studies.
20

Frau Stresemann’s dowry had dwindled to nothing due to the currency’s dizzying descent. Her and her family’s loss was, of course, someone else’s, perhaps another family’s, gain.

People grabbed what advantage they could among the ever more bewildering financial chaos. Like the Pörtners in Bad Oeynhausen, who in 1922, confident in the steadiness of their father’s job in a cigar factory, had signed up to buy a house that was being built on the western side of town. The price ran to 800,000 marks (the mark was still at around 2,000 to the dollar). Not so the following spring, when the account became due. ‘When we moved in on 1 April 1923,’ the son of the family wrote more than half a century later, ‘this was a sum of money that even the most sensitive soul would not have managed to worry about. A single dip into one’s wallet was sufficient to dispose of all liabilities, including the mortgage payments.’

Even the Pörtners’ apparent stroke of luck was, however, double-edged:

Unfortunately the house was only half-finished when we took possession: half-finished, wretchedly built from old materials that had been botched together. In the meantime the craftsmen would only work in exchange for payment in kind. We could not do this, and the money that father was paid, towards the end twice a day, was only just sufficient for bare survival. Even in old age, he would still tell stories about the defective stove pipe in the kitchen (our living room), and the holes and cracks from which a foul and poisonous smoke would billow. There was nothing we could do to correct this awful situation. The pipe joint we needed was nowhere to be found, and even if it had been, not for the ridiculous million-mark notes that a week after they had been issued were no longer worth the paper they were printed on.
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This is, in microcosm, an indication of an economy breaking down. The mark was plunging like a stone. However, unlike in 1921-2, neither the economy nor employment were growing as a result. After some improvements in the early spring before the currency ‘dam’ broke, both indicators were now beginning to go into decline. By the autumn unemployment would reach catastrophic levels in many parts of the country. In Prussia the numbers of supported unemployed and dependants grew from 2.7 per cent in January 1923 to 24 per cent in October; in Saxony from 8.4 per cent in January to 61 per cent in October; in Hessen from a remarkably low 0.7 per cent to a dramatic 37.4 per cent; and in Hamburg, laid low by the steep fall in trading activity as the exchange situation became more chaotic, from 11 per cent in January to 64.8 per cent in October. At least 2 million workers are thought to have become unemployed in the Ruhr by the autumn, with half the entire population of Europe’s greatest industrial area on welfare.
22

There were wry stories of the man who went into a café, ordered a coffee for 1,000 marks, then settled in for a leisurely read of the newspaper. Comfortably ensconced, he after a while requested a second cup. When he got the bill, it was not for 2,000 but for 2,500. Apologies, the waiter explained ruefully, but in between the first and second cup the price had gone up by 50 per cent . . .

Harsh everyday reality was less amusing. More than an extra cup of coffee was at stake. This was the time when employees in factories, offices and businesses, who had once been paid monthly or weekly, started to be paid, first twice or three times a week, and then daily – or even twice daily, like Herr Pörtner.