Political Instability 985

Table 24.2. The Mark and the Dollar, 1914-1923

Date

July 1914

January 1919

July 1919

January 1920

July 1920

January 1921

July 1921

January 1922

July 1922

January 1923

July 1923

August 1923

September 1923

October 1923

November 15, 1923

Source: Gordon Craig, Germany 1866—

1978), p. 450.

Rate: 1 dollar =

4.2 marks

8.9

14.0

64.8

39.5

64.9

76.7

191.8

493.2

17,972.0

353,412.0

4,620,455.0

98,860,000.0

25,260,208,000.0

4,200,000,000,000.0

(New York: Oxford University Press,

apples went for 300 billion marks. Employees asked to be paid their wages
each morning so that they could shop at noon before merchants posted the
afternoon price rises. Spiraling inflation wiped out people with fixed incomes
and small savings they had put aside for retirement. Many of those who
believed that they had done their patriotic duty by buying war bonds during
the war now blamed the Weimar Republic when those bonds became worth­
less. The poor found staples and other goods not only ridiculously expensive
but often unavailable at the market as farmers hoarded produce. Nonethe­
less, those people who were able to pay off bank loans with wildly inflated
currency or to invest in property did well. The rich got richer. In such an
atmosphere, the German Communist Party attracted bitter, discouraged
workers in great numbers, undercutting the Social Democrats.
In August 1923, Ebert turned to Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929) to
form a government. Stresemann, a former monarchist converted by right­
wing violence to the republic, governed by decree with the support of the
Social Democrats. He convinced miners to go back to work and to cease
their passive resistance in the Ruhr Valley. France and Belgium ended the
occupation after a nine-month period that had been as financially damag­
ing to those nations as it was ruinous to Germany. Government printing
presses stopped cranking out billion-mark notes and issued a new mark.
The hyperinflation in Germany ended.
Stresemann hoped to meet the Allied demands as much as possible, and in
doing so, open the way for Germany’s return to respectability as a European