From My Commonplace Book, No. 6
[Earlier posts in this series: Introduction/#2/#3/#4/#5]
The following is an excerpt from Stefan Zweig’s “The World Of Yesterday,” his magnificent tribute to life in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the first several decades of the 20th Century (and the utter destruction of that world in the aftermath of World War I), describing the hyper-inflation of the 1920s in Austria and Germany:
An economist who knew how to describe graphically all the phases of the inflation which spread from Austria to Germany, would find it unsurpassed material for an exciting novel, for the chaos took on ever more fantastic forms. Soon nobody knew what any article was worth. Prices shot up at random: a box of matches could cost twenty times more in a shop that had raised the price early than in another, where a shopkeeper was still selling his wares at yesterday’s prices.… Standards and values disappeared during this melting and evaporation of money. There was but one merit: to be clever, shrewd, unscrupulous, and to mount the racing horse instead of be trampled by it…. The most grotesque discrepancy developed with respect to rents, the government having f
Article from Latest
