As the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig confided in his autobiography written in exile "I
have a pretty thorough knowledge of history but never to my recollection has it produced
such madness in such gigantic proportions." He was referring to the situation in Germany in
1923. It was a "year of lunacy" defined by hyperinflation a political system on the verge of
collapse and separatist movements that threatened Germany's territorial integrity. Most
significantly Adolf Hitler launched his infamous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich-a failed coup that
nonetheless drew international attention and demonstrated the Nazis' ruthless determination to
seize power. In Germany 1923 award-winning historian Volker Ullrich draws on letters
memoirs newspaper articles and other sources from the time to present a captivating new
history of those explosive twelve months. The crisis began when the French invaded the Ruhr
Valley in January to force Germany to pay the reparations it owed under the Treaty of
Versailles which had ended the Great War. For years German leaders had embraced inflationary
policies to finance the costs of defeat and as Ullrich demonstrates the invasion utterly
destroyed the value of the German mark. Before the war the exchange rate was 4.2 marks to the
dollar. By 20 November 1923 a dollar was worth an incomprehensible 4.2 trillion marks and a
loaf of bread cost 200 billion. Facing the abyss many ordinary Germans called for a national
messiah. Among the figures to vie for that role was Hitler a thirty-four-year-old veteran who
possessed a uniquely malevolent personal magnetism. Although the Nazi coup in November was put
down and Hitler arrested the putsch showed just how tenuous the first German democracy the
Weimar Republic was at its core. As Ullrich's panoramic narrative reveals other Germans
responded to the successive crises by launching a cultural revolution: 1923 witnessed the
emergence of a multitude of new movements from Dada to Bauhaus and of such iconoclasts as
Bertolt Brecht George Grosz and Franz Kafka. Yet most observers were amazed that the Weimar
Republic was able to survive and the more astute realised that the feral undercurrents
unleashed could lead to much worse. Publishing a century after that fateful year Germany 1923
is a riveting chronicle of one of the most challenging times any modern democracy has faced
one with haunting parallels to our own political moment.
