Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities Page 10

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 with 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.

  And then they inched into view—the lame, the blind, the damaged, dismembered, demented, and disfigured tatterdemalions of two wars: The few remaining veterans of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—stooped, wizened figures in their seventies and eighties who had besieged Paris and proclaimed Wilhelm of Prussia as Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—were leading the far larger body of pathetic survivors from the disastrous Great War, the War to End All Wars, the valiant men whose defeated leaders five years ago had abjectly agreed to impossible reparations in that same Hall of Mirrors.

  Karl watched aghast as a young man with one arm passed within a few meters of him dragging a wheeled platform on which lay a limbless man, hardly more than a head with a torso. Neither was much older than he. The Grand Guignol parade was full of these fractions of men and their blind, deaf, limping, stumbling, hopping, staggering companions. Karl knew he might well be among them had he been born a year or two earlier.

  Some carried signs begging, pleading, demanding higher pensions and disability allowances; they all looked worn and defeated, but mostly hungry. Here were the most pitiful victims of the runaway inflation.

  Karl fell into line with them and pulled Ernst along.

  “Really,” Ernst said, “this is hardly my idea of an entertaining afternoon.”

  “We need to show them that they’re not alone, that we haven’t forgotten them. We need to show the government that we support them.”

  “It will do no good,” Ernst said, grudgingly falling into step beside him. “It takes time for the government to authorize a pension increase. And even if it
is approved, by the time it goes into effect, the increase will be meaningless.”

  “This can’t go on! Someone has got to do something about this chaos!”

  Ernst pointed ahead with his black cane. “There’s a suggestion.”

  At the corner stood two brown-shirted men in paramilitary gear and caps. On their left upper arms were red bands emblazoned with a strange black twisted cross inside a white circle. Between them they held a banner:

  COME TO US, COMRADES!

  ADOLF HITLER WILL HELP YOU!

  “Hitler,” Karl said slowly. “You mentioned him before, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. The Austrian Gefreiter. He’ll be at that big fascist rally in Nuremberg tomorrow to commemorate something or other. I hope to get to hear him again. Marvelous speaker. Want to come along?”

  Karl had heard about the rally—so had all the rest of Germany. Upward of two hundred thousand veterans and members of every right-wing volkisch paramilitary group in the country were expected in the Bavarian town to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t like big crowds. Especially a big crowd of fascists.”

  “Some other time, then. I’ll call you when he’s going to address one of the beer hall meetings in Munich. He does that a lot. That way you’ll get the full impact of his speaking voice. Most entertaining.”

  Adolf Hitler, Karl thought as he passed the brown-shirted men with the strange armbands. Could he be the man to save Germany?

  “Yes, Ernst. Do call me. I wish to hear this man.”

  Today it takes 200 billion marks to buy a single US dollar.

  —Volkischer Beobachter, October 22, 1923

  “It’s like entering another country,” Karl murmured as he stood on the platform of the Munich train station.

  Ernst stood beside him as they waited for a porter to take his bags.

  “Not another country at all. Merely an armed camp filled with people as German as the rest of us. Perhaps more so.”

  “People in love with uniforms.”

  “And what could be more German than that?”

  Ernst had sent him a message last week, scrawled in his reverse-slanted script on the blank back of a 100-million-mark note. Even with all its overworked presses running at full speed, the Reichsbank found itself limited to printing the new marks on only one side in order to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for currency. Ernst seemed to find it amusing to use the blank sides of the smaller denominations as stationery. And this note had invited Karl south to hear Herr Hitler.

  Karl now wished he’d ignored the invitation. A chill had come over him as the train crossed into Bavaria; it began in the pit of his stomach, then encircled his chest and crept up his spine to his neck where it now insinuated icy fingers around his throat. Uniforms…military uniforms everywhere, lolling about the train station, marching in the streets, standing on the corners, and none of them sporting the comfortably familiar field gray of regular Reichswehr troops. Young men, middle-aged men, dressed in brown, black, blue, and green, all with watchful, suspicious eyes and tight, hostile faces.

  Something sinister was growing here in the south, something unclean, something dangerous.

  It’s the times, he told himself. Just another facet of the chaotic zeitgeist.

  No surprise that Bavaria was like an armed camp. Less than three weeks ago its cabinet, aghast at what it saw as Berlin’s cowardly submission to the continuing Franco-Belgian presence in the Ruhr Valley, had declared a state of emergency and suspended the Weimar Constitution within its borders. Gustav von Kahr had been declared Generalstaatskommissar of Bavaria with dictatorial powers. Berlin had blustered threats but so far had made no move against the belligerent southern state, preferring diplomatic avenues for the moment.

  But how long would that last? The communists in the north were trying to ignite a revolution in Saxony, calling for a “German October,” and the more radical Bavarians here in the south were calling for a march on Berlin because of the government’s impotence in foreign and domestic affairs, especially in finance and currency.

  Currency…when the mark had sunk to five billion to the dollar two weeks ago, Karl had paid off the mortgage on the estate plus the loans against his mother’s jewelry with a US ten-cent piece—what the Americans called a “dime.”

  Something had to happen. The charges were set, the fuse was lit. Where would the explosion occur? And when?

  “Think of them as human birds,” Ernst said, pointing to their left at two groups in different uniforms. “You can tell who’s who by their plumage. The gray are soldaten…regular Reichswehr soldiers, of course. The green are Bavarian State Police. And as we move through Munich you’ll see the city’s regular police force, dressed in blue.”

  “Gray, green, blue,” Karl murmured.

  “Right. Those are the official colors. The unofficial colors are brown and black. They belong in varying mixes to the Nazi SA—their so-called storm troopers—and the Reichskriegsflagge and Bund Oberland units.”

  “So confusing.”

  “It is. Bavaria has been a hotbed of fascism since the war, but mostly it was a fragmented thing—more feisty little paramilitary groups than you could count. But things are different these days. The groups have been coalescing, and now the three major factions have allied themselves into something called the Kampfbund.”

  “The ‘Battle Group’?”

  “Precisely. And they’re quite ready for battle. There are more caches of rifles and machine guns and grenades hidden in cellars or buried in and around Munich than Berlin could imagine in its worst nightmares. Hitler’s Nazis are the leading faction of the Kampfbund, and right now he and the Bavarian government are at odds. Hitler wants to march on Berlin, General Commissioner Kahr does not. At the moment, Kahr has the upper hand. He’s got the Green Police, the Blue Police, and the Reichswehr regulars to keep the Kampfbund in line. The question is, how long can he hold their loyalty when the hearts of many of his troops are in the Nazi camp, and Hitler’s speeches stir more and more to the Nazi cause?”

  Karl felt the chill tighten around his throat. He wished Ernst hadn’t invited him to Munich. He wished he hadn’t accepted.

  “Maybe now is not a good time to be here.”

  “Nonsense! It’s the best time! Can’t you feel the excitement in the air? Don’t you sense the huge forces at work around us? Stop and listen and you’ll hear the teeth of cosmic gears grinding into motion. The clouds have gathered and are storing their charges. The lightning of history is about to strike and we are near the ground point. I know it as surely as I know my name.”

  “Lightning can be deadly.”

  Ernst smiled. “Which makes it all the more entertaining.”

  “Why a beer hall?” Karl asked as they sat in the huge main room of the Burgerbraukeller.

  A buxom waitress set a fresh pair of liter steins of lager on the rough planked table before them.

  Ernst waved a hand around. “Because Munich is the heart of beer-drinking country. If you want to reach these people, you speak to them where they drink their beer.”

  The Burgerbraukeller was huge, squatting on a sizable plot of land on the east side of the Isar River that cut the city in two. After the Zirkus Krone, it was the largest meeting place in Munich. Scattered inside its vast complex were numerous separate bars and dining halls, but the centerpiece was the main hall. All its 3,000 seats were filled tonight, with latecomers standing in the aisles and crowded at the rear.

  Karl quaffed a few ounces of lager to wash down a mouthful of sausage. All around him were men in black and various shades of brown, all impatient for the arrival of their Führer. He saw some in business suits, and even a few in traditional Bavarian lederhosen and Tyrolean hats. Karl and Ernst had made instant friends with their table neighbors by sharing the huge platter of cheese, bread, and sausage they had ordered from the bustling kitchen. Even though they were not in uniform, not alig
ned with any Kampfbund organization, and wore no armbands, the two Berlin newcomers were now considered komraden by the locals who shared their long table. They were even more welcome when Ernst mentioned that Karl was the son of Colonel Stehr who’d fought and died at Argonne.

  Far better to be welcomed here as comrades, Karl thought, than the opposite. He’d been listening to the table talk, the repeated references to Adolf Hitler in reverent tones as the man who would rescue Germany from all its enemies, both within and without, and lead the Fatherland back to the glory it deserved. Karl sensed that even the power of God might not be enough to save a man in this crowd who had something to say against Herr Hitler.

  The hazy air was ripe with the effluvia of any beer hall: spilled hops and malt, tobacco smoke, the garlicky tang of steaming sausage, sharp cheese, sweaty bodies, and restless anticipation. Karl was finishing off his latest stein when he heard a stir run through the crowd. Someone with a scarred face had arrived at the rostrum on the bandstand. He spoke a few words into the increasing noise and ended by introducing Herr Adolf Hitler.

  With a thunderous roar the crowd was on its feet and shouting “Heil! Heil!” as a thin man, about five-nine or so, who could have been anywhere from mid-thirties to mid-forties in age, ascended the steps to the rostrum. He was dressed in a brown wool jacket, a white shirt with a stiff collar, a narrow tie, with brown knickers and stockings on his short, bandy legs. Straight brown hair parted on the right and combed across his upper forehead; sallow complexion, almost yellow; thin lips under a narrow brush of a mustache. He walked stooped slightly forward with his head canted to the left and his hands stuffed into his jacket pockets.

  Karl could hardly believe his eyes.

  This is the man they call Führer? He looks like a shopkeeper, or a government clerk. This is the man they think is going to save Germany? Are they all mad or drunk…or both?

  Hitler reached the rostrum and gazed out over the cheering audience, and it was then that Karl had his first glimpse of the man’s unforgettable eyes. They shone like beacons from their sockets, piercing the room, staggering Karl with their startling pale blue fire. Flashing, hypnotic, gleaming with fanaticism, they ranged the room, quieting it, challenging another voice to interrupt his.