{"id":32950,"date":"2018-03-30T08:58:13","date_gmt":"2018-03-30T13:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32950"},"modified":"2018-03-30T08:58:23","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T13:58:23","slug":"the-specter-of-hyperinflation-remarques-the-black-obelisk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32950","title":{"rendered":"The Specter of Hyperinflation: Remarque\u2019s \u201cThe Black Obelisk\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Specter of Hyperinflation: Remarque\u2019s \u201cThe Black Obelisk\u201d<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em><\/a>, produced a novel in 1956 called The Black Obelisk<\/em><\/a> about the nightmarish hyperinflation that battered the German mark in the early 1920\u2019s and led to the rise of fascism.\u00a0 Germany\u2019s experience during the troubled Weimar era, as detailed by Remarque, offers a frightening glimpse of what might well happen to this country in the years ahead.<\/p>\n

Remarque\u2019s novel describes a population that races breathlessly from Monday through Saturday to keep pace with inflation: \u201cThere\u2019s no new dollar quotation Saturday afternoons.\u00a0 From noon [Saturday] till Monday morning our currency is stable.\u201d\u00a0 (Note the importance of the \u201cdollar quotation\u201d.\u00a0 Already the US dollar had become the international currency of exchange.)<\/p>\n

This is a world where those ruined by hyperinflation are \u201cthe people who have property they are forced to sell, small shopkeepers, day laborers, people with small incomes who see their bank accounts melting away, and government officials and employees who have to survive on salaries that no longer allow them to buy so much as a new pair of shoes.\u00a0 The ones who profit are the exchange kings, the profiteers, the foreigners who buy what they like with a few dollars, krone, or zlotys, and the big entrepreneurs and manufacturers, and the speculators on the exchange whose property and stocks increase without limit\u201d.<\/p>\n

Remarque\u2019s protagonist Ludwig Bodmer is an embittered veteran of the trenches who resides in the fictional town of Werdenbr\u00fcck, where he plays the piano for amusement and the organ for a local church and earns his living selling headstones for Heinrich Kroll and Sons, Funeral Monuments.\u00a0 He categorizes the firm\u2019s inventory as follows: \u201ccheap little headstones of sandstone and poured concrete with narrow pointed socles, for the poor, who live and slave in honesty and naturally get nowhere.\u00a0 . . . Next come the monuments of sandstone with inset plaques of marble, gray syenite, or black Swedish granite . . .\u00a0 for small businessmen, foremen, artisans who own their own businesses . . . \u201d\u00a0 Then come the larger polished monuments for \u201cthe more prosperous middle classes, the employer, the businessman, the larger store owner, and of course that diligent bird of ill omen, the higher official . . .\u201d and finally there are elegant showpieces for \u201crich farmers, property owners, profiteers, and clever business people who deal in long-term promissory notes and so live on the Reichsbank, which keeps paying for everything with constantly replenished and unsupported paper currency\u201d.\u00a0 Spouses and relatives of suicides are also frequent customers.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Specter of Hyperinflation: Remarque\u2019s \u201cThe Black Obelisk\u201d Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, produced a novel in 1956 called The Black Obelisk about the nightmarish hyperinflation that battered the German mark in the early 1920\u2019s and led to the rise of fascism.\u00a0 Germany\u2019s experience during the troubled Weimar era, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7],"tags":[19552,19554,359,413,19553,12230],"class_list":["post-32950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-survival-2","tag-chris-weizenbach","tag-erich-remarque","tag-germany","tag-hyperinflation","tag-the-black-obelisk","tag-weimer-republic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32950"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32951,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32950\/revisions\/32951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}