'The Memory of a Wild, Hellish Carnival'

Reading history can resemble that moment in a horror movie when a knife-wielding maniac stands behind the door our hero is about to open. We know it. He doesn’t. He’s a fool for doing something we would be smart enough never to do. At the same time, he is our surrogate and we don’t want to be eviscerated. Ours is the self-congratulatory arrogance of the safely retrospective. Take this:

 

“Whoever thinks back to the inflation years conjures up the memory of a wild, hellish carnival: plundering and riots, demonstrations and clashes, graft and illicit trade, agonizing hunger and wasteful gluttony, rapid impoverishment and sudden wealth, a debauched craze for dancing, the awful suffering of children, strip teases, currency scams, the hoarding of goods, a frenzy of pleasure . . .”

 

Those are the opening words of Hans Ostwald’s A Moral History of the Inflation: Germany During the Weimar Republic (1931), translated from the German this year by my Canadian friend Andrew Rickard for his Obolus Press. When Andrew first told me about the book, I mistook it for an economic history, the dreary sort of volume I would probably never read. Ostwald’s book is more difficult to describe, more journalistic and anecdotal than academic. It feels stitched together from many sources, including interviews and first-hand observation. The structure is episodic. Andrew wrote to me in March, before I’d even seen a copy of the book:

 

“When I started on Ostwald’s moral history I believed I was doing something really worthwhile. Now I think I’ve just translated a haphazard collection of anecdotes. Ah well, you'll find a few snippets from Alfred Polgar’s Hinterland inside. There are also some pictures of bare-breasted women. The rest may serve as a powerful sleeping aid.”

 

Andrew is being unfairly hard on himself and on Ostwald (1873-1940). I couldn’t help reading the volume through a twenty-first-century lens. The much-romanticized Weimar Republic existed from 1918 to 1933 (annus horribilis – the first of many), bracketed by the end of World War I and Hitler coming to power. By war’s end, twenty million, military and civilian, were dead. That number includes more than two million German soldiers and more than half a million German civilians. It was a time of hyperinflation and political extremes, with Communists and nascent Nazis vying for dominance. Hitler was an opportunist of genius, exploiting the Germans' humiliation for their defeat in the war, economic distress and, of course, anti-Semitism. His imminence shadows the entire book, published as it was two years before he became chancellor. A nagging voice in the reader's mind keeps asking: Can't you see, Herr Ostwald and the rest of you fellow Germans, what is about to happen? 

 

Some of the scenes Ostwald recounts might be lifted from a contemporary American newspaper or magazine. Here, he sits in a night club near the Zoologischer Garten subway station. First he speaks with a young Russian émigré (an acquaintance of Nabokov?), who buys some opium-laced cigarettes. Ostwald writes:

 

“A young man who already seemed to be acquainted with the cocaine dealer came over from the next table. He was wearing makeup, and was nervous and fidgety in his movements. He winked and held out a banknote to the dealer who, without a word, reached into his pocket and gave him a little packet of white stuff.”

 

Ostwald watches as the young man places a pocket mirror on the next table: “He snorted up some of the white powder, and then sat looking contented and calm.”

 

In a chapter titled “Psychics, Occultism, and Magic,” Ostwald describes a decadent, post-religious culture that recalls a well-known observation attributed, doubtfully, to G.K. Chesterton: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Ostwald writes:

 

“It was not only silly, lovelorn girls and lonely mothers who found their way to these clairvoyants; many serious businessmen, white collar workers, and senior civil servants consulted them as well. In the case of one famous man who lived on Bülowstraße in Berlin, visitors would sometimes have to queue up on the front steps—just as if they were waiting for butter rations.”

 

Admittedly, the literary worth of A Moral History of the Inflation is modest. It’s best read as a documentary account of an era with uncanny resemblances to our own. Andrew wrote to me:

 

“Still, for a potboiler it has its moments. I'm quite fond of the bit about city escapees and riverbank camping that starts on page 219, but perhaps that's because it reminds me of my own summer in Germany (and because I have a weakness for schmaltzy stuff like Guter Mond, du gehst so stille, [“Good moon, you walk so silently” – a children’s song] sung by the Comedian Harmonists). Well, as clunky as it may be, I hope it’s a useful primary source.”

 

The scene recounted on page 219 is prefaced by Ostwald:

 

"There was also a fashion for canoes and kayaks, for strange little row boats and folding boats, and a number of touching friendships and communities developed around boating. The girlfriend who was a model, artisan, or secretary and who never so much as touched a dirty dish during the week used to play at being a good housewife on Sunday. She would help scrub the deck, cook, and do the washing up, thrilled to participate in domestic tasks that were usually regarded with disdain. The weekend had arrived.

 

“In the past they called them amorous excursions.”

 

Ostwald is redeemed, on occasion, by a sense of humor, so unexpected in a German.