The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor Read Free Book Online

and was extended as the war went on, though even this did not guarantee a decent diet for the population. A ration system could hope to distribute food more fairly; it could not of itself increase the amount available.
    The authorities, later acting in tandem with a network of ‘price examination agencies’ set up under government decree, tried to enforce their own, varying interpretations of fair pricing in their own districts, and to combat profiteering and black marketeering. This led to widespread withholding of supplies by hard-pressed farmers, who resented the restrictions, and in turn to large-scale requisitions by the military authorities. Towards the end of the war, the army even organised searches of farms suspected of hoarding produce. 3 Some military districts were less stringent in their enforcement of price controls, and, like water running downhill, produce tended to find its way to those areas. 4
    It was clear that Germany was turning into two countries: an urban Germany, dependent on food imported from abroad or the countryside; and a rural Germany, which was self-sufficient and reluctant to release what it grew or reared unless the price was right. The division would continue well into the unhappy peace.
    Germany’s cities were not just suffering a crisis over food. Amid desperate government attempts to control rents, the housing shortage in the cities worsened steadily as the war went on. The flood of labour into areas containing large numbers of war factories put accommodation there at a particular premium. Ordinary Germans were also suffering from disastrous shortages of shoes, clothing, coal and soap. The last problem affected miners and heavy-industrial workers especially seriously. This led, shamefully for a people that took pride in its cleanliness, to an epidemic of lice. 5
    In fact, arguably it was mostly the renewed hope of military victory that kept the lid, for the moment, on popular discontent. As the liberal German journalist and writer Sebastian Haffner (b. 1907), then a schoolboy in Berlin and keen fan of the war, wrote twenty years later in a memoir of the time:
     
    Bad food – OK. Later also too little food, clacking wooden soles on my shoes, threadbare suits, collecting bones and cherry stones * in school, and, curiously, frequent illness. But I have to admit that all this made no deep impression on me . . . I thought as little about food as the football enthusiast at the cup final thinks of food. The daily Army Reports interested me much more than the dinner menu. 6
     
    Young Haffner was the son of a senior Prussian civil servant and at that time an enthusiastic, not to say excitable, nationalist. Unlike him, not everyone found patriotic fervour, or the thrill of the daily Army Reports, to be acceptable substitutes for a square meal. Towards the end of January 1918, the pot threatened to boil over. Four hundred thousand workers in Berlin had downed tools, partly in protest at reductions in bread rations for heavy work, but more importantly also in support of a peace without annexations, an end to the militarisation of the factories, and democratic political reforms. These political strikes spread quickly to Kiel, Hamburg, Halle and Magdeburg before being suppressed with the aid of harsh measures that included conscription of many strikers into the military, and long prison sentences for ringleaders.
    The major industrial stoppages were over by the second week of February. Between March and July, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and while the drama on the Western Front was still being played out with some prospect of success, there ensued a period of relative political and social calm.
     
    The ‘peace bonus’ from victory in the east, such as it was, had been meant to manifest itself in more (and more successful) war in the west. The formal end of the war against Russia meant that a large proportion of the German forces hitherto tied up there could be sent into action in the west.