Germany didn't have any peacetime between the World Wars. At the end of the Great War, the Allied forces continued blockades for months. Starvation was already an issue for some Germans during the war, and matters only got worse when the war ended. First, the Armistice was signed in 1918, resulting in an event that the Third Reich referred to as the November Criminals. And then a year later, the Treaty of Versailles was finalized and signed. During this period and the years to follow, Germany was going through more than one government a year, assassinations utterly commonplace. "Germany" had signed the Treaty, but there was no unified German nation, and Germany itself had been a relatively recent invention; the region was previously a group of independent countries.

The Treaty of Versailles declared that Germany was responsible for WWI, and that they would need to make financial reparations to the Allied countries, vastly exceeding their ability to repay such debts [a point which brought British economist J. M. Keynes to fame]. Understandably, Germans didn't like the deal.

To make matters worse, in 1923, France invade the German Ruhr, the most industrially consequential region in Europe, and held it for the following two years.

Numerous commentators of the period warned that "punishing" Germany to such an extent would only result in worse things to come. The immediate result was German hyperinflation, which ended at the end of 1923 with Germany minting a new currency called the Rentenmark. But things didn't get easier for Germans then either. Unemployment had skyrocketed, and eventually, the world entered the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s.

Before hyperinflation, 15% of income in Germany was derived from interest rather than paid work. Generally this interest-derived income was thought to support the academic or "middle" class. By the end of hyperinflation, this class was permanently erased, as inflation harms creditors.

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German antisemitism shares some striking similarities to the notion of the 1% as coined by Occupy Wall Street. Jews represented less than 1% of Germans, prior to World War II. Jews had been residing in Germany for many centuries before then, and by no means were immigrants to the area. To many Germans, Jews represented the financial class, and Jews held a grossly disproportionate number of political offices by a per capita basis.

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What's so striking to me about this books is that it demonstrates that the Allied Forces, and in some ways most of all the United States as senior creditor, are at least as responsible for the Holocaust as the Third Reich in their inflexibility in forgiving financial debts.

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There was an intriguing subtext to this book about the equalization [albeit through mass destitution] of the classes. Food and food production became by far the most valuable asset during hyperinflation, and stocks and bonds became utterly worthless. One revealing statistic: before hyperinflation, commercial farms produced around ten times as many eggs as homestead-scale operations. By the end of hyperinflation, small-scale production outproduced industrial-scale by two to one. In other words, small scale production saw a roughly twenty-fold increase in capacity.

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Although this book doesn't focus on the financial fundamentals as much as I would have liked, I still think it's an excellent text that gives the feel of a very important chapter in history. ( )

Ordered it at the library on the strength of the review in the Economist and found myself well rewarded. It is a succinct and well written account of the first years of the Weimar Republic, the policies that caused the German hyperinflation and the measures taken to end it. It is first and foremost a political history, economics and monetary theory are not discussed in great detail, but the narrative style makes it a very agreeable read, it was a real page-turner.
There are a few caveats: Considering how often he stresses the importance and rigidity of France's stance on reparations, the lack of French sources is disappointing. At least for the Ruhr Occupation one would have wished for a closer look at the arguments of the French polity. The bibliography lists only German and English language sources.
Editing is not optimal, there were far too many instances where I stumbled across jumbled sentences. And I am a little dubious about some of the author's translations from German, "Lachsschinken" on page 274 is definitely not smoked salmon. I wouldn't normally be such a nitpicker, but since the author expressly hails the internet as a wonderful medium for doing research, he could have easily checked this in any online dictionary.
Still, highly enjoyed it.

Edited for typos ( )