Ten percent inflation means that Germany is currently experiencing one of the most severe inflation rates since the Second World War. Suddenly a ghost has returned that had already traumatized the ancestors. Unforgotten are the great-aunt’s cries of lamentation when inflation also rose threateningly in the mid-1970s and memories of the horrific years of 1922 and 1923 were awakened.
“All our savings were gone, we worked all those years for nothing,” she wailed. With her daily wages she always had to buy something immediately, the next day she didn’t get anything for this amount. In Munich in the summer of 1923, a roll cost almost four billion marks, a liter of beer 70 billion marks, and a pound of meat 180 billion marks. Many servants only had their annual wages paid out in kind, so they had at least a little something.
Inflation creates drama en masse. The worker Josefa Halbinger bought “a bar of chocolate” for her terminally ill sister in a drugstore before her money was worthless. She never afforded anything like that, the temptation was great. So, she said, “before I went to the hospital, I ate a crumb and then another crumb until half the chocolate was gone.” That’s why she only brought half a tablet to her sister’s bedside. The next day the sister died. “I was so sorry that I didn’t bring her the whole board,” she said. This transgression plagued her conscience until her own death.
Inflation only had a positive effect on people’s arithmetic skills. “Never again has arithmetic in the number space with twelve zeros been mastered with such virtuosity as in the autumn of 1923,” writes Harald Jähner in his book “Höhenrausch”. But that was the end of the hundred trillion note. A higher sum was never printed on banknotes again.
Workers, employees and business people who had invested their savings in the Sparkasse lost everything. In view of the distress in the cities, the Bavarian Council of Ministers banned public events a century before Corona. Ultimately, inflation drove people into the arms of the radicals. Even basic foods had become unaffordable. “Wherever one goes or stands, one can hear the view that an overthrow must come . . .” This is what a Württemberg envoy from Bavaria wrote to Stuttgart in 1922.