Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany. By Bernd Wittig. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xvi , 277.

Extract

This book examines the links between a culture of modernity and inflation on the basis of literary works, films, cartoons, and photographs (all taken from Hans Ostwald's Sittengeschichte der Inflation [Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, 1931], or “Moral History of the Inflation”). Bernd Wittig's point of departure is the suggestion by Elias Canetti in Masse und Macht (Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1960) that there was a link between the depreciation of money and the degradation of personal and social identity, and that the Weimar Republic's experience of inflation in a significant way prepared the path for National Socialism and genocide. People grew accustomed to enormous but personally meaningless figures (millions, billions) and developed a brutal indifference. According to Canetti, “An inflation cancels out distinctions between men which had seemed eternal and brings together in the same inflation crowd people who would scarcely have nodded to each other in the street.” Wittig then brings this perspective to bear in a detailed analysis of a short novella by Thomas Mann, films by Fritz Lang (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler) and G. W. Pabst (Freudlose Gasse). These are familiar works, and Wittig adds little in the way of new analysis. Nor does he give any rigorous quantitative evaluation to his striking claims, for instance that prostitution increases in the course of inflations. He gives figures for prostitution in Berlin in 1910, and tells us that the number of women charged with illegal prostitution in Vienna rose from 1918 to 1920, and that more of them had venereal diseases.