The era of hyperinflation: how youth blossomed in Remarque’s time in Germany

That year, newspaper readers again had the opportunity to engage in an exciting number game, similar to the one they played during the war with data on the number of prisoners of war or spoils of war. This time the figures were connected not with military events, although the year began belligerently, but with completely uninteresting, daily, stock exchange affairs, namely, with the dollar exchange rate. The fluctuations in the dollar exchange rate were a barometer, according to which, with a mixture of fear and excitement, they followed the fall of the mark. Much more could be traced. The higher the dollar rose, the more recklessly we were carried away into the realm of fantasy.

In fact, the depreciation of the brand was nothing new. As early as 1920, the first cigarette I surreptitiously smoked cost 50 pfennigs. By the end of 1922, prices everywhere had risen ten or even a hundred times their pre-war level, and the dollar was now worth about 500 marks. But the process was constant and balanced, wages, salaries and prices rose by and large in equal measure. It was a little inconvenient to mess around with large numbers in everyday life when paying, but not so unusual. They only talked about «another price increase», nothing more. In those years, something else worried us much more.

And then the brand seemed to be furious. Shortly after the Ruhr War, the dollar began to cost 20, held on for some time at this mark, climbed up to 000, hesitated a little more and jumped up as if on a ladder, jumping over tens and hundreds of thousands. Nobody knew exactly what happened. Rubbing our eyes in amazement, we watched the rise in the course as if it were some unseen natural phenomenon. The dollar became our daily topic, and then we looked around and realized that the rise of the dollar has ruined our entire daily life.

Very soon there was nothing left either of the pennies in the savings banks, or of the huge fortunes. Everything melted. Many moved their deposits from one bank to another to avoid collapse. Very soon it became clear that something had happened that destroyed all states and directed people’s thoughts to much more pressing problems.

Food prices began to run wild as merchants rushed to raise them on the heels of the rising dollar. A pound of potatoes, which in the morning cost 50 marks, was sold in the evening for 000; the salary of 100 marks brought home on Friday was not enough for a pack of cigarettes on Tuesday.

What should have happened and happened after that? Suddenly, people discovered an island of stability: stocks. It was the only form of monetary investment that somehow held back the rate of depreciation. Not regularly and not all equally, but stocks depreciated not at a sprint pace, but at a walking pace.

So people rushed to buy shares. Everyone became shareholders: a petty official, a civil servant, and a worker. Shares paid for daily purchases. On the days of payment of salaries and salaries, a massive assault on banks began. The stock price shot up like a rocket. Banks were swollen with investments. Previously unknown banks grew like mushrooms after the rain and received a giant profit. Daily stock reports were eagerly read by everyone, young and old. From time to time, this or that share price fell, and with cries of pain and despair, the lives of thousands and thousands collapsed. In all shops, schools, in all enterprises they whispered to each other which stocks were more reliable today.

Worst of all had the old people and people impractical. Many were driven to poverty, many to suicide. Young, flexible, the current situation has benefited. Overnight they became free, rich, independent. A situation arose in which inertia and reliance on previous life experience were punished by hunger and death, while speed of reaction and the ability to correctly assess the momentarily changing state of affairs were rewarded with sudden monstrous wealth. Twenty-year-old bank directors and high school students took the lead, following the advice of their slightly older friends. They wore chic Oscar Wilde ties, held parties with girls and champagne, and supported their ruined fathers.

In the midst of pain, despair, poverty, a feverish, feverish youth, lust and the spirit of carnival blossomed. The young now had the money, not the old. The very nature of money has changed — it was only valuable for a few hours, and therefore the money was thrown, the money was spent as quickly as possible and not at all what old people spend on.

Countless bars and nightclubs opened up. Young couples wandered through the entertainment districts, like in films about the life of high society. Everyone yearned to make love in a mad, lustful fever.

A «new realism» of love was discovered. It was a breakthrough of carefree, abrupt, joyful lightness of life. Love adventures have become typical, developing at an unimaginable speed without any roundabouts. The youth, who in those years learned to love, jumped over romance and fell into the arms of cynicism. Neither I nor my peers belonged to this generation. We were 15-16 years old, that is, two or three years younger.

Later, acting as lovers with 20 marks in our pocket, we often envied those who were older and at one time started love games with other chances. And in 1923, we were still only peeping through the keyhole, but even that was enough to make the smell of that time hit our noses. We happened to get to this holiday, where a cheerful madness was going on; where the early mature, exhausting soul and body licentiousness ruled the ball; where they drank ruff from a variety of cocktails; we have heard stories from slightly older youths and received a sudden, hot kiss from a boldly made-up girl.

There was also another side of the coin. The number of beggars increased every day. Every day more reports of suicides were printed.

The billboards were filled with «Wanted!» ads as robbery and theft grew exponentially. One day I saw an old woman — or rather, an old lady — sitting on a bench in the park unusually upright and too motionless. A small crowd had gathered around her. «She’s dead,» said one passerby. “From hunger,” another explained. This didn’t really surprise me. We were also hungry at home.

Yes, my father was one of those people who did not understand the time that had come, or rather did not want to understand. Likewise, he once refused to understand war. He hid from the coming times behind the slogan «A Prussian official does not deal with actions!» and did not buy shares. At the time, I considered this a blatant manifestation of narrow-mindedness, which did not harmonize well with the character of my father, because he was one of the smartest people I have ever known. Today I understand him better. Today I can, albeit in hindsight, share the disgust with which my father rejected «all these modern outrages»; today I can feel the implacable disgust of my father, hidden behind flat explanations like: you can’t do what you can’t do. Unfortunately, the practical application of this lofty principle has sometimes degenerated into a farce. This farce could have been a real tragedy if my mother hadn’t figured out a way to adapt to the ever-changing situation.

As a result, this is what life looked like from the outside in the family of a high-ranking Prussian official. On the thirty-first or first day of each month, my father received his monthly salary, on which we only lived — bank accounts and deposits in the savings bank have long since depreciated. What was the real size of this salary, it is difficult to say; it fluctuated from month to month; one time a hundred million was an impressive sum, another time half a billion turned out to be pocket change.

In any case, my father tried to buy a subway card as soon as possible so that he could at least be able to travel to work and home for a month, although subway trips meant a long detour and a lot of time wasted. Then money was saved for rent and school, and in the afternoon the family went to the hairdresser. Everything else was given to my mother — and the next day the whole family (except for my father) and the maid would get up at four or five in the morning and go by taxi to the Central Market. A powerful purchase was organized there, and within an hour the monthly salary of a real state councilor (oberregirungsrat) was spent on the purchase of long-term products. Giant cheeses, circles of hard-smoked sausages, sacks of potatoes — all this was loaded into a taxi. If there wasn’t enough room in the car, the maid and one of us would take a handcart and carry groceries home on it. About eight o’clock, before school began, we returned from the Central Market more or less prepared for the monthly siege. And that is all!

For a whole month we had no money at all. A familiar baker gave us bread on credit. And so we lived on potatoes, smoked meats, canned food and bouillon cubes. Sometimes there were surcharges, but more often it turned out that we were poorer than the poor. We didn’t even have enough money for a tram ticket or a newspaper. I can’t imagine how our family would have survived if some kind of misfortune had fallen on us: a serious illness or something like that.

It was a difficult, unhappy time for my parents. It seemed to me more strange than unpleasant. Due to the long, circuitous journey home, my father spent most of his time away from home. Thanks to this, I got a lot of hours of absolute, uncontrolled freedom. True, there was no pocket money, but my older school friends turned out to be rich in the literal sense of the word, they did not in the least make it difficult to invite me to some crazy holiday of theirs.

I cultivated an indifference to the poverty in our home and to the wealth of my comrades. I didn’t get upset about the first and didn’t envy the second. I just found both strange and remarkable. In fact, I then lived only a part of my «I» in the present, no matter how exciting and seductive it tried to be.

I have read Buddenbrooks and Tonio Kroeger, Niels Luhne and Malte Laurids Brigge, poems by Verlaine, early Rilke, Stefan George and Hoffmannsthal, November by Flaubert and Dorian Gray by Wilde, Flutes and Daggers by Heinrich Manna.

I was turning into someone like the characters in those books. I became a sort of worldly-weary, decadent fin de siècle beauty seeker. A somewhat shabby, wild-looking sixteen-year-old boy, grown out of his suit, badly cut, I wandered the feverish, crazy streets of inflationary Berlin, imagining myself now as a Mann patrician, now as a Wilde dandy. This sense of self was in no way contradicted by the fact that in the morning of the same day I, together with the maid, loaded the handcart with circles of cheese and sacks of potatoes.

Were these feelings completely unjustified? Were they read-only? It is clear that a sixteen-year-old teenager from autumn to spring is generally prone to fatigue, pessimism, boredom and melancholy, but have we not experienced enough — I mean ourselves and people like me — already enough to look at the world wearily, skeptically, indifferently, slightly mockingly to find in ourselves the traits of Thomas Buddenbrock or Tonio Kröger? In our recent past, there was a great war, that is, a great war game, and the shock caused by its outcome, as well as the political apprenticeship during the revolution that greatly disappointed many.

Now we were spectators and participants in the daily spectacle of the collapse of all worldly rules, the bankruptcy of old people with their worldly experience. We have paid tribute to a range of conflicting beliefs and beliefs. For some time we were pacifists, then nationalists, and even later we were influenced by Marxism (a phenomenon similar to sexual education: both Marxism and sexual education were unofficial, one might even say illegal; both Marxism and sexual education used shock methods of education and committed one and the same mistake: to consider an extremely important part, rejected by public morality, as a whole — love in one case, history in another). The death of Rathenau taught us a cruel lesson, showing that even a great man is mortal, and the «Ruhr War» taught us that both noble intentions and dubious deeds are «swallowed» by society equally easily.

Was there anything that could inspire our generation? After all, inspiration is the charm of life for youth. Nothing is left but admiring the eternal beauty blazing in the verses of George and Hoffmannsthal; nothing but arrogant skepticism and, of course, love dreams. Until then, no girl had yet aroused my love, but I made friends with a young man who shared my ideals and bookish predilections. It was that almost pathological, ethereal, timid, passionate relationship that only young men are capable of, and then only until girls really entered their lives. The capacity for such relationships fades rather quickly.

We liked to hang around the streets for hours after school; learning how the dollar exchange rate changed, exchanging casual remarks about the political situation, we immediately forgot about all this and began to discuss books excitedly. We made it a rule on every walk to thoroughly analyze a new book we had just read. Full of fearful excitement, we timidly probed each other’s souls. The fever of inflation was raging around, society was breaking apart with almost physical tangibility, the German state was turning into ruins before our eyes, and everything was just a background for our deep reasoning, let’s say, about the nature of a genius, about whether moral weakness and decadence are acceptable for a genius.

And what a background it was — unimaginably unforgettable!

_{Translation: Nikita Eliseev, edited by Galina Snezhinskaya}

Sebastian Hafner, The Story of a German. A Private Man Against the Thousand-Year Reich». Book of Online Ivan Limbach Publishing House.