The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class (61 page)

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Acknowledgements

Anyone casting an eye over the sources I have used for this book will notice that, more than ever, digitally stored and organised information has come to play an important role. As a writer who matured professionally in the company of the printed word, and who once viewed digital sources with some reservation, I initially had to force myself to embrace the internet. Now, however, I have arrived at a point where I find it hard to conceive of a working life that does not rely heavily on the treasures to be found (along with the dross, of course) within the ever-expanding online universe.

In researching
The Downfall of Money
, a book dealing with a historical period outside the scope of most living human memory, I have not been able to conduct interviews, as I have for my other work. However, I have been able to access newspapers of that time through an internet connection. Where, even at the beginning of this century, one still had to trek to libraries and archives, and spend days or even weeks trawling through thousands of pages of newsprint, it is now possible to read the thoughts, words and observations of men and women, recorded in print ninety or more years ago, through the medium of a home computer connection – and with searchable databases enabling huge savings in time and energy. To be able to check the value of the mark against the dollar or other foreign currencies, for every day between 1919 and 1924, through the financial pages of a Berlin newspaper of the time – and by referring to other press sources to compare the quotidian financial reality with the often tragic fates of the human beings affected by it – has been a terrific gift. We may worry about the future of the printed word, and the viability of the traditional book, but for research purposes ours is in many ways a new golden age. To those who have digitised millions of such precious pages and made them available online, profound thanks.

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’