Berlin

As in the First World War, natural products were supplanted by ersatz concoctions. Visiting Berlin in 1920, the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg noted: “In the café Josty where I sometimes went, the wishy-washy so-called ‘Mocha’ was served in metal coffeepots with a little glove on the handle to prevent the customer from burning his fingers. Sweet cakes were made of frostbitten potatoes. As before, the Berliners still smoked cigars labeled Cuban or Brazilian though in fact they were made of cabbage leaves steeped in nicotine.”

Germans did not fare equally under the pressures of inflation. Those with plenty of goods to trade, or, better yet, with access to foreign currency, could do quite well for themselves. The sociologist Leo Lowenthal had enough foreign funds to spend the last days of the hyperinflation in the splendor of the spa at Baden-Baden. Felix Gilbert, having gone off to university in Heidelberg with fifty dollars from his uncle, used the money to buy pots of jam that he sold from time to time when he needed cash. The Berlin director Berthold Viertel was able to buy his own theater with the help of a currency-trader patron. Workers whose unions were able to bargain for steady wage increases got along much better than unorganized civil servants, teachers, doctors, and artists, whose incomes lagged far behind the price curve. Worst off were retired people on fixed incomes and citizens who had conscientiously put their savings in government bonds during the war. Such people, generally middle class, suffered the dual horror of seeing their own living standards plummet while their social inferiors held their own.

Not surprisingly, those who fared the best were those who took ruthless advantage of other people’s vulnerability. Berlin had always had its share of economic predators, but in the inflation era the city became a paradise for profiteers, or Raffkes

, in popular parlance. With small amounts of foreign currency or stock they bought up the furniture and family heirlooms of desperate widows. They purchased companies for $500 and met their payrolls with worthless marks. The most enterprising Raffke of all was Hugo Stinnes, a self-made magnate whom Harry Kessler described as “a cross between a patrician, a commercial traveler, and the Flying Dutchman.” Having built up a coal-mining empire with dubious credit, Stinnes turned his coal into foreign currency during the inflation and used that to build one of the largest economic empires the world has ever seen. This complicated operation, however, could be kept going only by the fast footwork of its founder, and when Stinnes died in 1924 his empire collapsed.

German children demonstrating that it takes 100,000 marks to buy one U.S. dollar in early 1923. By the fall of that year the dollar was worth 4.2 trillion marks

Because foreign currency, especially the dollar, was the key to the good life in inflation-ridden Germany, foreigners could live very high off the hog. Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley crossed into Germany from France in September 1922 to inspect the scene. For ten francs they received 670 marks, or about ninety cents in Canadian money (Hemingway was then reporting for the Toronto Daily Star). “That ninety cents lasted Mrs. Hemingway and me for a day of heavy spending and at the end of the day we had one hundred and twenty marks left!” he reported to the paper. Berlin in particular was overrun with Ausländer who went there to enjoy an extravagance that they could never have managed at home. The American writer Djuna Barnes, who spent the summer of 1921 in the Spree city, found “things so cheap for us that you felt almost ashamed to be there. Full of buggers from America who bought boys cheap.” In fact, most foreigners felt little shame about their wealth. Flaunting their dollars, pounds, and francs, tourists and expatriates bought up whatever they wanted, from boys to buildings. For one hundred dollars, a classical music fan from Texas rented the entire Berlin Philharmonic for an evening’s entertainment. Typical of the new breed of expatriates was the American editor Matthew Josephson, who moved his magazine Broom to Berlin because it was cheaper to publish there. According to his friend Malcolm Cowley, who visited him in Berlin in 1923, Josephson was not living the usual life of a little-magazine editor. On his salary of one hundred dollars a month he “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.”