“Quite. I developed a taste for it before the war. Too bad it’s illegal now—although it’s still easily come by.”
Now Karl knew why Ernst frequently reserved this out-of-the-way table. Instinctively he glanced around, but no one was watching.
Ernst sipped and smacked his lips. “Ever tried any?”
“No.”
Karl had never had the opportunity. And besides, he’d heard that it drove you mad.
Ernst slid his glass across the table. “Take a sip.”
Part of Karl urged him to say no, while another pushed his hand forward and wound his fingers around the stem of the glass. He lifted it to his lips and took a tiny sip.
The bitterness rocked his head back and puckered his cheeks.
“That’s the wormwood,” Ernst said, retrieving his glass. “Takes some getting used to.”
Karl shuddered as he swallowed. “How did that ever become a craze?”
“For half a century, all across the continent, the cocktail hour was known as l’heure verte after this little concoction.” He sipped again, closed his eyes, savoring. “At the proper time, in the proper place, it can be . . . revelatory.”
After a moment, he opened his eyes and motioned Karl closer.
“Here. Move over this way and sit by me. I wish to show you something.”
Karl slid his chair around to where they both sat facing the crowded main room of the Romanisches.
Ernst waved his arm. “Look at them, Karl. The cream of the city’s artists attended by their cachinating claques and coteries of epigones and acolytes, mixing with the city’s lowlifes and lunatics. Morphine addicts and vegetarians cheek by jowl with Bolsheviks and boulevardiers, arrivistes and anarchists, abortionists and antivivisectionists, directors and dilettantes, doyennes and demimondaines.”
Karl wondered how much time Ernst spent here sipping his absinthe and observing the scene. And why. He sounded like an entomologist studying a particularly interesting anthill.
“Everyone wants to join the parade. They operate under the self-induced delusion that they’re in control: ‘What happens in the Berlin arts today, the rest of the world copies next week.’ True enough, perhaps. But this is the Masque of the Red Death, Karl. Huge forces are at play around them, and they are certain to get crushed as the game unfolds. Germany is falling apart—the impossible war reparations are suffocating us, the French and Belgians have been camped in the Ruhr Valley since January, the communists are trying to take over the north, the right-wingers and monarchists practically own Bavaria, and the Reichsbank’s answer to the economic problems is to print more money.”
“Is that bad?”
“Of course. It’s only paper. It’s been sending prices through the roof.”
He withdrew his wallet from his breast pocket, pulled a bill from it, and passed it to Karl.
Karl recognized it. “An American dollar.”
Ernst nodded. “ ‘Good as gold,’ as they say. I bought it for ten thousand marks in January. Care to guess what the local bank was paying for it today?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps . . .”
“Forty thousand. Forty thousand marks.”
Karl was impressed. “You quadrupled your money in four months.”
“No, Karl,” Ernst said with a wry smile. “I’ve merely quadrupled the number of marks I control. My buying power is exactly what it was in January. But I’m one of the very few people in this storm-tossed land who can say so.”
“Maybe I should try that,” Karl said softly, admiring the elegant simplicity of the plan. “Take my savings and convert it to American dollars.”
“By all means do. Clean out your bank account, pull every mark you own out from under your mattress and put them into dollars. But that’s mere survival—hardly entertainment.”
“Survival sounds good enough.”
“No, my friend. Survival is never enough. Animals limit their concerns to mere survival; humans seek entertainment. That is why we must find a way to make inflation entertaining. Inflation is here. There’s nothing we can do about it. So let’s have some fun with it.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Do you own a house?”
“Yes,” Karl said slowly, cautiously. He didn’t know where this was leading. “And no.”
“Really. You mean it’s mortgaged to the hilt?”
“No. Actually it’s my mother’s. A small estate north of the city near Bernau. But I manage it for her.”
Father had died a colonel in the Argonne and he’d left it to her. But Mother had no head for money, and she hadn’t been quite herself in the five years since Father’s death. So Karl took care of the lands and the accounts, but spent most of his time in Berlin. His bookstore barely broke even, but he hadn’t opened it for profit. He’d made it a place where local writers and artists were welcome to stop and browse and meet; he reserved a small area in the rear of the store where they could sit and talk and sip the coffee he kept hot for them. His dream was that someday one of the poor unknowns who partook of his hospitality would become famous and perhaps remember the place kindly—and perhaps someday stop by to say hello with Thomas Mann or the reclusive Herman Hesse in tow. Until then Karl would be quite satisfied with providing coffee and rolls to starving scribblers.
But even from the beginning, the shop had paid nonpecuniary dividends. It was his entrée to the literati, and from there to the entire artistic caravan that swirled through Berlin.
“Any danger of losing it?”
“No.” The estate produced enough so that, along with Father’s army pension, his mother could live comfortably.
“Good. Then mortgage it. Borrow to the hilt on it, and then borrow some more. Then turn all those marks into US dollars.”
Karl was struck dumb by the idea. The family home had never had a lien on it. Never. The idea was unthinkable.
“No. I—I couldn’t.”
Ernst put his arm around Karl’s shoulder and leaned closer. Karl could smell the absinthe on his breath.
“Do it, Karl. Trust me in this. It’s an entertainment, but you’ll see some practical benefits as well. Mark my words, six months from now you’ll be able to pay off your entire mortgage with a single US dollar. A single coin.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“You must. I need someone who’ll play the game with me. It’s much more entertaining when you have someone to share the fun with.”
Ernst straightened up and lifted his glass.
“A toast!” He clinked his glass against Karl’s. “By the way, do you know where glass clinking originated? Back in the old days, when poisoning a rival was a fad among the upper classes, it became the practice to allow your companion to pour some of his drink into your cup, and vice versa. That way, if one of the drinks were poisoned, you’d both suffer.”
“How charming.”
“Quite. Inevitably the pouring would be accompanied by the clink of one container against another. Hence, the modern custom.” Once again he clinked his absinthe against Karl’s schnapps. “Trust me, Karl. Inflation can be very entertaining—and profitable as well. I expect the mark to lose fully half its value in the next six weeks. So don’t delay.”
He raised his glass. “To inflation!” he cried and drained the absinthe.
Karl sipped his schnapps in silence.
Ernst rose from his seat. “I expect to see you dollar rich and mark poor when I return.”
“Where are you going?”
“A little trip I take every so often. I like to swing up through Saxony and Thuringia to see what the local Bolsheviks are up to—I have a membership in the German Communist Party, you know. I subscribe to Rote Fahne, listen to speeches by the Zentrale, and go to rallies. It’s very entertaining. But after I tire of that—Marxist rhetoric can be so boring—I head south to Munich to see what the other end of the political spectrum is doing. I’m also a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party down there and subscribe to their Volki
scher Beobachter.”
“Never heard of them. How can they call themselves ‘National’ if they’re not nationally known?”
“Just as they can call themselves Socialists when they are stridently fascist. Although frankly I, for one, have difficulty discerning much difference between either end of the spectrum—they are distinguishable only by their paraphernalia and their rhetoric. The National Socialists—they call themselves Nazis—are a power in Munich and other parts of Bavaria, but no one pays too much attention to them up here. I must take you down there sometime to listen to one of their leaders. Herr Hitler is quite a personality. I’m sure our friend Freud would love to get him on the couch.”
“Hitler? Never heard of him, either.”
“You really should hear him speak sometime. Very entertaining.”
* * * *
Today it takes 51,000 marks to buy a single US dollar.
—Volkischer Beobachter, May 21, 1923
A few weeks later, when Karl returned from the bank with the mortgage papers for his mother to sign, he spied something on the door post. He stopped and looked closer.
A mezuzah.
He took out his pocket knife and pried it off the wood, then went inside.
“Mother, what is this?” he said, dropping the object on the kitchen table.
She looked up at him with her large, brown, intelligent eyes. Her brunette hair was streaked with gray. She’d lost considerable weight immediately after Father’s death and had never regained it. She used to be lively and happy, with an easy smile that dimpled her high-colored cheeks. Now she was quiet and pale. She seemed to have shrunken, in body and spirit.
“You know very well what it is, Karl.”
“Yes, but haven’t I warned you about putting it outside?”
“It belongs outside.”
“Not in these times. Please, Mother. It’s not healthy.”
“You should be proud of being Jewish.”
“I’m not Jewish.”
They’d had this discussion hundreds of times lately, it seemed, but Mother just didn’t want to understand. His father, the colonel, had been Christian, his mother Jewish. Karl had decided to be neither. He was an atheist, a skeptic, a free-thinker, an intellectual. He was German by language and by place of birth, but he preferred to think of himself as an international man. Countries and national boundaries should be abolished, and someday soon would be.
“If your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish. You can’t escape that. I’m not afraid to tell the world I’m Jewish. I wasn’t so observant when your father was alive, but now that he’s gone . . .”
Her eyes filled with tears.
Karl sat down next to her and took her hands in his.
“Mother, listen. There’s a lot of anti-Jewish feeling out there these days. It will die down, I’m sure, but right now we live in an inordinately proud country that lost a war and wants to blame someone. Some of the most bitter people have chosen Jews as their scapegoats. So until the country gets back on an even keel, I think it’s prudent to keep a low profile.”
Her smile was wan. “You know best, dear.”
“Good.” He opened the folder he’d brought from the bank. “And now for some paperwork. These are the final mortgage papers, ready for signing.”
Mother squeezed his hands. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?”
“Absolutely sure.”
Actually, now that the final papers were ready, he was having second thoughts.
Karl had arranged to borrow every last pfennig the bank would lend him against his mother’s estate. He remembered how uneasy he’d been at the covetous gleam in the bank officers’ eyes when he’d signed the papers. They sensed financial reverses, gambling debts, perhaps, a desperate need for cash that would inevitably lead to default and subsequent foreclosure on a prime piece of property. The bank president’s eyes had twinkled over his reading glasses; he’d all but rubbed his hands in anticipation.
Doubt and fear gripped Karl now as his mother’s pen hovered over the signature line. Was he being a fool? He was a bookseller and they were financiers. Who was he to presume to know more than men who spent every day dealing with money? He was acting on a whim, spurred on by a man he hardly knew.
But he steeled himself, remembering the research he’d done. He’d always been good at research. He knew how to ferret out information. He’d learned that Rudolf Haverstein, the Reichsbank’s president, had increased his orders of currency paper and was running the printing presses at full speed on overtime.
He watched in silence as his mother signed the mortgage papers.
He’d already taken out personal loans, using Mother’s jewelry as collateral. Counting the mortgage, he’d now accumulated 500 million marks. If he converted them immediately, he’d get 9,800 US dollars at today’s exchange rate. Ninety-eight hundred dollars for half a billion marks. It seemed absurd. He wondered who was madder—the Reichsbank or himself.
* * * *
Today it takes 500,000,000 marks to buy a single US dollar.
—Volkischer Beobachter, September 1, 1923
“To runaway inflation,” Ernst Drexler said, clinking his glass of cloudy yellow against Karl’s clear glass of schnapps.
Karl sipped a little of his drink and said nothing. He and Ernst had retreated from the heat and glare of the late summer sun on the Romanisches Cafe’s sidewalk to the cooler, darker interior.
Noon on a Saturday and the Romanisches was nearly empty. But then, who could afford to eat out these days?
Only thieves and currency speculators.
Four months ago Karl hadn’t believed it possible, but for a while they had indeed had fun with inflation.
Now it was getting scary.
Less than four months after borrowing half a billion marks, his 9,800 US dollars were worth almost five trillion marks. Five trillion. The number was meaningless. He could barely imagine even a billion marks, and he controlled five thousand times that amount.
“I realized today,” Karl said softly, “that I can pay off all of my half-billion-mark debt with a single dollar bill.”
“Don’t do it,” Ernst said quickly.
“Why not? I’d like to be debt free.”
“You will be. Just wait.”
“Until when?”
“It won’t be long before the exchange rate will be billions of marks to the dollar. Won’t it be so much more entertaining to pay off the bankers with a single American coin?”
Karl stared at his glass. This game was no longer “entertaining.” People had lost all faith in the mark. And with good reason. Its value was plummeting. In a mere thirty days it had plunged from a million to the dollar to half a billion to the dollar. Numbers crowded the borders of the notes, ever-lengthening strings of ever more meaningless zeros. Despite running twenty-four hours a day, the Reichsbank presses could not keep up with the demand. Million-mark notes were now being over-stamped with TEN MILLION in large black letters. Workers had gone from getting paid twice a month to weekly, and now to daily. Some were demanding twice-daily pay so that they could run out on their lunch hour and spend their earnings before they lost their value.
“I’m frightened, Ernst.”
“Don’t worry. You’ve insulated yourself. You’ve got nothing to fear.”
“I’m frightened for our friends and neighbors. For Germany.”
“Oh, that.”
Karl didn’t understand how Ernst could be so cavalier about the misery steadily welling up around them like a rain-engorged river. It oppressed Karl. He felt guilty, almost ashamed of being safe and secure on his high ground of foreign currency. Ernst drained his absinthe and rose, his eyes bright.
“Let’s go for a walk, shall we? Let’s see what your friends and neighbors are up to on this fine day.”
Karl left his schnapps and followed him out into the street. They strolled along Budapesterstrasse until they came upon a bakery.
“Look,” Ernst said, pointing wit
h his black cane. “A social gathering.”
Karl bristled at the sarcasm. The long line of drawn faces with anxious, hollow eyes—male, female, young, old—trailing out the door and along the sidewalk was hardly a social gathering. Lines for bread, meat, milk, any of the staples of life, had become so commonplace that they were taken for granted. The customers stood there with their paper bags, cloth sacks, and wicker baskets full of marks, shifting from one foot to the other, edging forward, staying close behind the person in front of them lest someone tried to cut into the line, constantly turning the count of their marks in their minds, hoping they’d find something left to buy when they reached the purchase counter, praying their money would not devalue too much before the price was rung up.
Karl had never stood in such a line. He didn’t have to. He needed only to call or send a note to a butcher or baker listing what he required and saying that he would be paying with American currency. Within minutes the merchant would come knocking with the order. He found no pleasure, no feeling of superiority in his ability to summon the necessities to his door, only relief that his mother would not be subject to the hunger and anxiety of these poor souls.
As Karl watched, a boy approached the center of the line where a young woman had placed a wicker basket full of marks on the sidewalk. As he passed her he bent and grabbed a handle on the basket, upended it, dumping out the marks. Then he sprinted away with the basket. The woman cried out but no one moved to stop him—no one wanted to lose his place in line.
Karl started to give chase but Ernst restrained him.
“Don’t bother. You’ll never catch him.”
Karl watched the young woman gather her scattered marks into her apron and resume her long wait in line, weeping. His heart broke for her.
“This has to stop. Someone has to do something about this.”
“Ah, yes,” Ernst said, nodding sagely. “But who?”
They walked on. As they approached a corner, Ernst suddenly raised his cane and pressed its shaft against Karl’s chest.
“Listen. What’s that noise?”
Up ahead at the intersection, traffic had stopped. Instead of the roar of internal combustion engines, Karl heard something else. Other sounds, softer, less rhythmic, swelled in the air. A chaotic tapping and a shuffling cacophony of scrapes and draggings, accompanied by a dystonic chorus of high-pitched squeaks and creaks.