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In 1923, at the very height of the hyperinflation, Weimar Germany watched in horror as the mark rose to 4.2 trillion to the dollar (Feldman vii), the price of bread to 399 billion marks (Eiland 174), and average family spending to 91.6% of household budget on food alone (Widdig 47). These numbers are hard to fathom. “[At] the end of the Great War one could in theory have bought 500,000,000,000 eggs for the same price as that for which, five years later, only a single egg was procurable”, writes Adam Fergusson, “when stability returned, the sum of paper marks needed to buy a gold mark was precisely equal to the quantity of square millimetres in a square kilometre” (iii). Whether or not these heuristics help make sense of its scope, most of us are familiar with the images of men carrying German marks in wheelbarrows, women using notes as wallpaper, vaults partitioned by bricks of paper currency, or children using wads of money for the purposes of play (building kites, forts, and so on). Recently, Franco Berardi has coined the term “semio-inflation” to designate a society that has allowed inflation to infiltrate the cultural and linguistic sphere: “when you need more signs, words, and information to buy less meaning. It is a problem of acceleration” (96). Semio-inflation for Berardi plagues societies that have dispensed with the concrete altogether: “signs produce signs without any longer passing through the flesh” (Berardi 86). Yet one of the most crucial enigmas of the 1923 Hyperinflation—one that not only casts serious doubt on Berardi’s hypothesis, but has also yet to receive due attention from scholars of Weimar—is its association with shame. It is as if the spectacular abstraction of a banknote printed en masse, and on which is inscribed values so large it defies comprehension, does not simply abandon “flesh”. On the contrary, inflating money somehow intervenes in that physical realm through (if we are to believe the story of Genesis) the original experience of the Fall: shame. This chapter attempts to think through this structure.

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Mark of Shame: On the Surface of the Weimar Hyperinflation

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Kieran Brown

摘要

In 1923, at the very height of the hyperinflation, Weimar Germany watched in horror as the mark rose to 4.2 trillion to the dollar (Feldman vii), the price of bread to 399 billion marks (Eiland 174), and average family spending to 91.6% of household budget on food alone (Widdig 47). These numbers are hard to fathom. “[At] the end of the Great War one could in theory have bought 500,000,000,000 eggs for the same price as that for which, five years later, only a single egg was procurable”, writes Adam Fergusson, “when stability returned, the sum of paper marks needed to buy a gold mark was precisely equal to the quantity of square millimetres in a square kilometre” (iii). Whether or not these heuristics help make sense of its scope, most of us are familiar with the images of men carrying German marks in wheelbarrows, women using notes as wallpaper, vaults partitioned by bricks of paper currency, or children using wads of money for the purposes of play (building kites, forts, and so on). Recently, Franco Berardi has coined the term “semio-inflation” to designate a society that has allowed inflation to infiltrate the cultural and linguistic sphere: “when you need more signs, words, and information to buy less meaning. It is a problem of acceleration” (96). Semio-inflation for Berardi plagues societies that have dispensed with the concrete altogether: “signs produce signs without any longer passing through the flesh” (Berardi 86). Yet one of the most crucial enigmas of the 1923 Hyperinflation—one that not only casts serious doubt on Berardi’s hypothesis, but has also yet to receive due attention from scholars of Weimar—is its association with shame. It is as if the spectacular abstraction of a banknote printed en masse, and on which is inscribed values so large it defies comprehension, does not simply abandon “flesh”. On the contrary, inflating money somehow intervenes in that physical realm through (if we are to believe the story of Genesis) the original experience of the Fall: shame. This chapter attempts to think through this structure.