LETTER FROM BERLIN
The year 1923 hardly marked the memory of the French. It is quite different in Germany, as evidenced by the profusion of publications and demonstrations which return, a century later, to this vintage associated with three painful memories: the occupation of the Ruhr, hyperinflation and its dramatic social consequences. , and Adolf Hitler’s failed putsch in Munich, ten years before he came to power.
On the editorial front, eight books have already been released on the occasion of this centenary, and four more are due to appear in the coming months. Their titles are eloquent. 1923. Ein deutsches Trauma (“1923, a German trauma”, by Mark Jones, ed. Ullstein), Ausser Kontrolle. Germany 1923 (“Out of control. Germany 1923”, by Peter Longerich, ed. Molden), Deutschland 1923. Das Jahr am Abgrund (“Germany 1923. The year on the brink”, by Volker Ullrich, ed. Beck), Totentanz. 1923 und seine Folgen (“Danse macabre. 1923 et sequels”, by Jutta Hoffritz, ed. Harper Collins), to name but a few.
What are these books a symptom of? In an article published on 1er January under the title “The worrying news of the year 1923”, the daily Die Welt advanced a double explanation. The first is commercial: since the huge success of the book 1913, The Sommer of the Jahrhunderts (“1913, the summer of the century”), by Florian Illies (S. Fischer Verlag, 2012), which sold more than 500,000 copies, history book publishers increasingly tend to stick to the commemorative calendar.
“The 1920s, a hermeneutical master key”
The second reason is linked to current political events: over the past ten years, the reappearance of a major far-right party in Germany, the AfD, created in 2013 and which in 2017 became the leading opposition force in Bundestag, a phenomenon unseen since the Second World War, has sparked renewed interest in the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), with the decade before the Nazis coming to power again appearing horribly topical in a country who believed himself to be definitively mithridatized against the brown plague. “The 1920s became a kind of hermeneutic master key to question everything related to the notion of crisis”summarized Die Welt.
More than any other year of the first decade of the interwar period, 1923 was indeed that of all the crises
In this context, the retrospective interest in 1923 is easily explained. More than any other year of the first decade of the interwar period, this was indeed the year of all crises. National crisis, with the occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium in January 1923, in response to Germany’s delay in paying war reparations imposed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Monetary crisis, with inflation which got out of control after the occupation of the Ruhr: in January 1923, one American dollar was worth 17,000 marks; in July, 350,000; in December, 4,200 billion!
You have 59.2% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.