January 1919 there were 9 marks to the dollar; three years later there were 192. Stimulated by the assassination of the Jewish foreign minister Walter Rathenau in 1922, the "currency debauch" worsened. The British ambassador quipped that "German finance is dying beyond its means."3' In January 1923 it seemed that France was determined to finish the work of war and peace, for Poincare insisted that Germany pay while making it impossible for it to do so. As Britain dithered and the United States with-drew, France began to exploit the Ruhr, Germany's industrial powerhouse, for its own ends. Berlin retaliated with a doomed strategy of passive re-sistance which cost 4o million marks a day. Forgetting their own puni-tive treatment of defeated Russia, the Germans found a new unity in com-mon mortification. The Reichsbank made valiant efforts to hold the mark at a rate of about 2,000 to the dollar. But when these efforts failed it rose to astronomical heights. In July 1923 there were 353,412 marks to the dollar; in August, 4,620,455; in September, 98,860,000; in October, 25,260,208,000; in November, 4,200,000,000,000. It was the most colos-sal inflation in history, making the assignats of the French Revolution look almost as good as gold. To produce this currency 300 paper mills and 2,000 printing plants worked round the clock; eventually it cost more to print the notes than they were worth. Banks had to take on more clerks to count the noughts. They used the blank side of the notes as scrap paper because it was cheaper than buying pads. Eventually stacks of cash were not counted at all but weighed or measured with a ruler. Life was transformed into a bizarre paperchase. Patrons of restaurants found their meals becoming more expensive as they ate. Factory workers saw their wages shrinking in value as they queued to collect them. How-ever fast they ran to the shops, prices outstripped them. Shopkeepers, indeed, looked on their customers almost as thieves for taking goods which could only be replaced at prohibitive expense. Peasants refused to sell their produce for paper money, saying: "We don't want any Jew-confetti from Berlin."32 Beggars rejected anything less than a million marks. New notes appeared, issued by municipalities and acceptable locally. Forgeries added to the confusion. Some people paid in kind:
The Roots of Fascism 3 3 theatre seats were sold for a couple of eggs; prostitutes offered their ser-vices for cigarettes. Interest rates rose to 20 per cent a day and loans were made in terms of rye or coal or even electric kilowatts. Bureaucrats in the Finance Ministry took part of their salaries in potatoes. Those who possessed foreign currency were impossibly rich, for no one had enough marks to change anything but the smallest denominations. Ten dollars would purchase a large modern house. Foreign profiteers took advantage of the situation to make a killing, while American tourists lit their cigarettes with million-mark notes and pasted larger denominations on their suitcases, further exacerbating German chauvinism. In the words of one contemporary, "Germany was a rapidly decomposing corpse, on which the birds of prey were swooping down from all directions."33 At the height of the inflation, according to a familiar story, a woman who left a basket of marks on the pavement came back to find the basket stolen and the marks in the gutter. Currency notes were used as lavatory paper. Ger-mans talked of the death of money. Stephan Zweig minted a compelling metaphor for that awesome demise in his story of a blind man whose family had secretly sold his cherished collection of drawings in order to keep alive, replacing them in his portfolio with blank sheets of paper.34 In the same vein, Hitler dismissed the Treaty of Versailles as a scrap of paper. Not everyone suffered. Landowners actually benefited, often paying off their mortgages in depreciated marks. So did industrialists, especially if they sold abroad. Trade-unionists had a measure of protection. But at a time when a pound of ersatz butter could cost a labourer's daily wage and it might take five months' earnings to buy a suit of clothes, the working class was sucked into a maelstrom of misery. Even worse off were pension-ers and those living on fixed incomes. Their savings vanished and they faced not only indigence but starvation. Here was a revolution as sweeping as that of the Bolsheviks. At a stroke property was destroyed and "the bourgeoisie was proletarianised."35 Middle-class values were turned upside down: debtors were virtuous while thrift was a vice; wealth was no longer the index of worth. As one contemporary said, "Inflation finished the process of moral decay which the war had started." Crime spread: so many potato fields were raided that police had to guard them in order to preserve the seed crop. There was an increase in suicide, malnutrition, illness and emigration. Infant mortality rates rose. Economic paralysis set in, unemployment grew, strikes and disturbances spread, shops were ransacked and towns looted. Corruption and anti-Semitism flourished—the Jews were accused of exploiting the tragedy. Germany's physical and psychic health decayed together. Life became "madness, nightmare, desperation, chaos."36 Observing that the inflation had revived Germany's "old, bristling, savage spirit," D. H. Lawrence said: "Money becomes insane, and people with it. "37 Sexual decadence seemed to be a by-product of the bankruptcy of traditional values. A foreigner exclaimed, "Nothing brought you so much face to face with the patho-logical distortion of Germany's postwar mentality as the weird night life of Berlin."38 Describing the way in which inflation infected everything, one historian has written that it was a "revolutionary influence much more powerful than the war itself."39 Inevitably this crisis threatened Germany's fragile democracy. Since the State was unable to protect its citizens they were bound to look elsewhere, especially when, in September 1923, the impotent government surren-dered to French coercion in the Ruhr. Many workers turned to the Com-munists; Saxony and Thuringia were menaced by Red revolution. Many of the dispossessed middle class were seduced by right-wing movements. None was more rabid than the National Socialist party, which promised to restore a strong, unified Reich that was both anti-capitalist and anti-Bolshevist. And no one articulated petty-bourgeois bitterness more vehe-mently than its leader, Adolf Hitler, who larded his speeches with hideous invective against money-grubbing Jews.
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Noting that Germans needed to humiliate others in order to compensate for their own sense of mass worthlessness during the "witches' sabbath of devaluation,"43 Elias Canetti thought that without it the Rihrer could not have induced them to par-ticipate in the destruction of the Jews. Hitler was a small, nondescript figure. His complexion was pallid, his limbs were ill-coordinated, his lank hair flopped over a receding fore-head, his toothbrush moustache was the image of Charlie Chaplin's. Only expressive, sensitive hands and luminous blue eyes saved him from being totally unprepossessing. In his heavy boots, blue serge suit, broad-brimmed black hat and dirty mackintosh, he resembled, in the words of his affluent acolyte "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, "a suburban hairdresser on his day off" or "a waiter in a railway station restaurant." Hitler's style of life was shabbier still. He rented a small, dingy room in a poor district of Munich. It contained a single bed, a few sticks of furniture and a couple of threadbare rugs to cover the worn linoleum. Hitler's habits were Bohemian: he was erratic and unpunctual. So were his tastes: he had an insatiable appetite for sweet things, cream cakes, coffee flavoured with squares of chocolate, white wine enriched with spoonfuls of castor sugar. In the presence of upper-class people his manners were gauche. Yet even at this stage Hitler had developed "unmistakably Napoleonic and Messianic airs."Accompanied by a savage Alsatian dog, he swaggered about pack-ing a pistol and cracking a rhinoceros-hide whip. His pretensions knew no bounds. He once exclaimed, "I must enter Berlin like Christ in the Tem-ple of Jerusalem and scourge out the money-lenders."Absurd as his rhetoric sounds, when Hitler spoke he convinced audiences that he really was the saviour of Germany. He was transfigured by oratory. No prophet ever had a more vivid appreciation of the "magic power of the spoken word." As he wrote in Mein Kampf: The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. And all great movements are popular movements, volcanic erup-tions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses.
Hitler despised the kind of middle-class political meetings where professo-rial figures in frock coats and monocles read their speeches in hushed tones to a somnolent audience. "Only a storm of hot passion can turn the des-tinies of peoples," he believed, "and he alone can arouse passion who bears it within himself." Hitler himself was so passionate that Hanfstaengl described his perorations as "an orgasm of words."They induced ecstasy in his audiences and it later became his practice, at the climax, to crush his spectacles in his clenched fist. To quote another witness, who had never experienced such "hypnotic mass-excitement," he displayed the "fanati-cally hysteric romanticism of a brutal will."But if Hitler played the demiurge he also learned the tricks of the demagogue. Apparently he stud-ied the techniques of Ferdl Weiss, a popular Munich comedian. He rehearsed in front of a looking-glass, timed his entry to perfection, used every aid—bands, banners, spotlights, salutes. Emblazoned all around was the swastika, described by Barbusse as "two interlaced gibbets."5° Hitler varied his rhythm and orchestrated the crowd's responses like an inspired musician.
Hitler ost about five pounds in weight during every speech- he sweated so profusely that the dye running from his suit stained his shirt and underwear blue.
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