Weimar America: Four Major Ways We're Following In Germany's Fascist Footsteps

[caseymoz]

6. Irony.

Just to say first, the Germans regard the Wiemar years from 1923-1933 as being a sort of cultural Golden Age. And they're probably right. I mean, you had Bertolt Brecht, you had avante garde theatre, you had Fritz Lang making films, you had artist such as George Grosz and Otto Dix in the Grotesque school of art along with Max Ernst in the Dada school, then you had the Bauhaus School of Design (later a great name for a band.) I mean, the country was just brimming with culture. And of course, in science you had Albert Einstein.

The cultural developments during the Wiemar Republic are still affecting us today.

Another more important irony, the hyperinflation. Conservatives have totally misstated what caused it and what the problem really was. Germany's industry got shut down by the French (I won't into how and what). German's didn't grow food then, they traded manufactured goods for it. So, when the factories shut down, and with Germany being a pariah state, Germans had no commodities in their stores to buy.

The problems wasn't too much money supply. The problem was currency with no goods available at all. As commodities became scarce, and prices rose, the government did print up more and more money. But still there was nothing to buy, and so what you could find was incredibly expensive.

They didn't make the money worthless by printing up to much. There was nothing in the shops. That was the problem. Money with nothing to buy becomes pretty worthless fast. And it couldn't have happened without the French. Just saying, it wasn't bad monetary policy that brought it on. And it's not comparable to anything going on in strapped economies today.