Dance Between Flames: Berlin Between the Wars by Alton Gill

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Berliners were a divided lot, the idle rich were totally oblivious to the world collapsing around them and the under privileged were priced out of everything by run away inflation that would cost Germany and the world dearly under the thousand year Third Rich that only lasted twelve years.


Excerpts:

Six weeks into 1919, Kessler noted: “I was hauled off by acquaintances to a place where you can dance until dawn. There are hundreds like it in Berlin now. The best description of this second phase of the revolution...is “dancing on a volcano”
Greater Berlin had fewer than 100,000 inhabitants. The rises in population were due less to births than to migration, as people came to the industrial centre from the land to seek better work. There is an old saying that most true Berliners actually come from Silesia, but city records show that the majority then came from the province of Brandenburg. By 1925, the total population of Greater Berlin had reached four million.



Inflation run away destabilized confidence in anything government
The day of Rathena’s murder, the mark stood at 300 to the dollar. By 6 July the rate was 450. The middle classes, those who had savings, trembled. Patriotic, though misguided, investment in War Loans during the First World War had cost many families their futures. Now, what remained seemed threatened with being wiped out along with any faith in received values, ethical, material or moral. By the middle of January 1923 the mark stood at 10,000 against the dollar; by the end of the month, 50,000. At this point the State Bank intervened and forced the rate down, but it could not stem the tide for long. By May the mark was down again, to 70,000 to the dollar: by the end of June it was 150,000. By August the dollar stood at 1 million marks, and the banks were issuing 46 billion marks a day. By the end of September, the rate had risen to 160 million. The Ullstein newspaper presses were commandeered to print money. The figures on banknotes were overprinted as million mark notes became billion mark notes. Currency in circulation rose to 44 trillion marks. The government was accused of deliberately allowing inflation to skyrocket in order to avoid repaying foreign debts and reparations at par value.

Anyone who hadn’t left by 1933, he said, was de facto a Nazi.



While offering all the attractions of the earlier youth movements, these Nazi organizations also indoctrinated children and turned them against rebellious or controversial parents.