A Disordered Fortress: Passive Resistance, the Cuno Government, and the Destruction of the German Mark

Abstract The fate of the German mark in 1923 rapidly overshadowed the prolonged deterioration which it had undergone since 1914 and even its parlous condition in 1922. How, after all, can a deterioration of 1:1,500 against the dollar between 1919 and the end of 1922 compare to the 1:4,200,000,000,000 ratio of the mark to the dollar at the end of November 1923? From this perspective, it was perfectly correct for even so knowledgeable a person as Willy Prion to contrast the “small inflation” until the end of 1922 with the “big inflation” of 1923.1 And yet, the events of 1923 in major respects completed processes well under way in 1922 or before. Indeed, one can even argue that the crisis year of 1923 recapitulated in exaggerated and often grotesque form the entire range of decisions and conditions that had propelled the inflation since 1914, but did so in such a way that the ultimate delegitimation of the inflation could only be achieved by carrying the inflation to a literalized conclusion; namely, the liquidating of the mark. The “bigness” of the 1923 inflation helps to explain not only why the more positive aspects of the postwar inflation for Germany’s reconstruction were lost to collective memory but also why the preexisting condition of hyperinflation in the last half of 1922 has often been enveloped in historical consciousness by the much greater catastrophe of 1923.