It had all started with the assassination of minister Walther Rathenau, a famous Jewish industrialist. The desperation into which Germany sank between 1922 and 1923, when two generations saw their values overturned completely, had begun one morning when three students drew up alongside Rathenau’s car, peppered him with machine gun bullets, and threw a grenade at him. On June 24, 1922, the terrible seed was sewn; more than two decades later, it would result in more than fifty million dead.
Until that day, the Germans had thought that things were already going badly. But from that day onward, with the whole country transformed into a madhouse, all they wanted was to go back to the way things were before. Rathenau had been in charge of the foreign ministry. At that turbulent time, when Germany was in the hands of its creditors, it was a job that was even more important than the presidency of the republic.
The day Rathenau was killed, Paul wondered whether the students had done it because he was Jewish, because he was a politician, or to try to help Germany come to terms with the disaster of Versailles. The impossible reparation the country would have to pay-until 1984!-was plunging the population into destitution, and Rathenau was the last bastion of common sense.
After his death, the country started printing money simply in order to pay their debts. Did those responsible realize that every mark they printed devalued the rest? They probably did, but what else could they have done?
In June 1922, one mark could buy you two cigarettes; two hundred and seventy-two marks equaled one U.S. dollar. By March 1923, on the same day that Paul carelessly put an extra potato in Frau Schmidt’s bag, five thousand marks were needed to buy a cigarette, and twenty thousand to go into a bank and come out with a crisp dollar bill.
Families struggled to keep up as the insanity spiraled. Each Friday, which was payday, the women would be waiting for their husbands at the factory doors. Then, all at once, they’d besiege the shops and grocery stores, they’d flood the Viktualienmarkt on Marienplatz, they’d spend the last pfennig of the salary on absolute essentials. They’d return home laden with food and try to eke it out for the rest of the week. Not a lot of business was done in Germany on the other days of the week. Pockets were empty. And on a Thursday night, a BMW production supervisor had the same purchasing power as an old tramp dragging his stumps through the mud under the bridges of the Isar.
There were many who could not bear it.
Those who were old, who lacked imagination, who took too much for granted, they were the ones who suffered the most. Their minds could not cope with all these changes, with this back-to-front world. Many committed suicide. Others wallowed in their poverty.
Others changed.
Paul was one of those who changed.
After Herr Graf dismissed him, Paul had a terrible month. He barely had time to overcome his anger at Jurgen’s attack and the revelation of Alys’s fate, or to devote more than a fleeting thought to the mystery of his father’s death. Yet again, the need for survival was so acute that he had to suppress his own emotions. But the burning pain often flared at night, populating his dreams with ghosts. He often could not sleep, and on many mornings, as he tramped through the Munich streets in shabby, snow-filled shoes, he thought about dying.
Sometimes, when he returned to the boardinghouse with no job, he’d catch himself looking at the Isar from Ludwigsbrucke, his eyes empty. He wanted to throw himself into the icy waters, to allow the current to drag his body down to the Danube, and from there to the sea. That fantastical expanse of water, which he’d never seen, but where he’d always thought his father had met his end.
On these occasions he had to find a reason not to climb up on the wall and jump. The image of his mother, waiting for him every night at the boardinghouse, and the certainty that she wouldn’t survive without him prevented him from extinguishing the fire in his belly once and for all. At other times it was the fire itself, and the reasons for it, that held him back.
Until at last there was a glimmer of hope. Although it resulted through death.
One morning a deliveryman collapsed at Paul’s feet in the middle of the road. The empty wheelbarrow he’d been pushing tipped over onto its side. The wheels were still spinning as Paul crouched down and tried to help the man up, but he couldn’t move. He gasped desperately for air, and his eyes were glassy. Another passerby approached. He was wearing dark clothes and carried a leather case.
“Make way! I’m a doctor!”
For a while the doctor tried to revive the fallen man, but with no success. Finally he stood up, shaking his head.
“A heart attack or an embolism. Hard to believe, in someone so young.”
Paul was looking at the dead man’s face. He must have been only nineteen years old, maybe less.
Like me, thought Paul.
“Doctor, will you take care of the body?”
“I can’t, we have to wait for the police.”
When the officers arrived, Paul patiently described what had happened. The doctor corroborated his report.
“Would you mind if I took the wheelbarrow back to its owner?”
The officer glanced at the empty wheelbarrow, then looked at Paul long and hard. He didn’t like the idea of dragging the cart back to the police station.
“What’s your name, pal?”
“Paul Reiner.”
“And why should I trust you, Paul Reiner?”
“Because I’ve got more to gain by taking this to the owner of the shop than if I try to sell these bits of badly nailed wood on the black market,” said Paul with absolute honesty.
“Very well. Tell him to get in touch with the police station. We’ll need to know the next of kin. If he hasn’t called on us in three hours, you’ll answer to me.”
The officer gave him a bill they’d found, the neat handwriting indicating the address of the grocer’s-on a street near the Isartor-with a list of the last things the dead boy had transported:? kilo of coffee 3 kilos of potatoes 1 bag of lemons 1 can of Kruntz soup? kilo of salt 2 bottles of corn spirit
When Paul arrived at the shop with the wheelbarrow and asked for the dead boy’s job, Herr Ziegler flashed him a distrustful look not unlike the one he gave Paul six months later when the young man explained his plan to save them from ruin.
“We should transform the shop into a bank.”
The shopkeeper dropped the jam jar he was cleaning, and it would have shattered on the floor if Paul hadn’t managed to catch it midflight.
“What are you talking about? Have you been drinking?” he said, staring at the huge circles under the boy’s eyes.
“No, sir,” said Paul, who had been up all night turning the plan around and around in his mind. He’d left his room at dawn and taken up position at the door of the town hall half an hour before it opened. Then he’d run from window to window collecting information about permits, taxes, and conditions. He had returned with a thick cardboard file. “I know it might seem mad, but it’s not. Right now, money has no value. Wages go up daily and we have to calculate our prices every morning.”
“Yes, and that reminds me: this morning I had to do it all on my own,” said the shopkeeper, annoyed. “You can’t imagine how hard it was. And on a Friday! Two hours from now, the shop’s going to be heaving.”
“I know, sir. And we have to do everything we can to get rid of all the stock today. This afternoon I’m going to talk to several of our customers, offering them merchandise in exchange for work, because the work has to be done on Monday. On Tuesday morning we’ll go through a municipal inspection, and on Wednesday we open.”
Ziegler looked as though Paul had asked him to smear his body with jam and walk naked across Marienplatz.
“Absolutely not. This shop has been here for seventy-three years. My great-grandfather started it, and then passed it on to my grandfather, who passed it on to my father, who eventually gave it to me.”
Paul saw the alarm in the shopkeeper’s eyes. He knew he was one step away from being fired for insubordination and insanity. So he decided to go all in.
“That’s a lovely story, sir. But regrettably, in a fortnight, when someone whose surname isn’t Ziegler gets hold of the shop at a creditors’ meeting, all that tradition will count for shit.”
The shopkeeper raised an accusing finger, ready to scold Paul for his language, but then remembered the situation he was in and collapsed into a chair. His debts had been accumulating since the beginning of the crisis-debts that, unlike so many others, hadn’t simply vanished in a puff of smoke. The positive side of all the madness-for some people-was that those with mortgages with interest rates that were calculated annually had been able to settle them quickly, given the wild fluctuation of the mark. Unfortunately, those like Ziegler who had committed a share of their income, not a fixed amount in cash, could only end up losing.
“I don’t understand, Paul. How is this going to save my business?”
The young man brought him a glass of water, then showed him an article he had torn from the previous day’s newspaper. Paul had read it so many times that the ink had become smudged in places. “It’s an article by a university professor. He says that at a time like this, when people can’t rely on money, we have to look to the past. To the time before money. To bartering.”
“But…”
“Please, sir, give me a moment. Unfortunately no one can go around trading a bedside table or three bottles of spirits for other things, and the pawnshops are overflowing. So we have to take refuge in promises. In dividends.”
“I don’t understand,” said the shopkeeper, who was beginning to feel dizzy.
“Stocks, Herr Ziegler. The stock exchange will rise out of this. Stocks will replace money. And we’ll be selling them.”
Ziegler gave in.
Paul barely slept for the next five nights. Convincing tradesmen-carpenters, plasterers, cabinetmakers-to take products away for free this Friday in exchange for working over the weekend wasn’t difficult in the least. In fact, some were so grateful that Paul had to offer his handkerchief more than once.
We must be in a real mess when a sturdy plumber bursts out crying when you offer him a sausage in exchange for an hour’s work, he thought. The main difficulty was the bureaucracy, but even in this respect Paul was lucky. He’d studied the guidelines and regulations the civil servants had brought to his attention until he had clauses coming out of his ears. His biggest fear was that he would come across some phrase that would dash all his hopes to the ground. After scribbling down pages and pages of notes in a little book in which he puzzled out the steps that needed to be taken, the requirements for the creation of Ziegler Bank had come down to two:
1) The director had to be a German citizen aged over twenty-one.
2) A guarantee of half a million German marks had to be deposited at the offices of the town hall.
The first was simple: Herr Ziegler would be the director, although it was already quite clear to Paul that he should remain closed away in the office as much as possible. As for the second… a year earlier, half a million marks would have been an astronomical sum, a way of ensuring that only people who were solvent could start a business that relied on trust. Today, half a million marks was a joke.
“Nobody has updated the figure!” cried Paul, leaping around the shop, startling the carpenters, who had already begun to tear the shelves off the walls.
I wonder whether the civil servants wouldn’t prefer a couple of hams, thought Paul, amused. At least they could put them to some use.