ABSTRACT
Source: Bella Fromm (1943) Blood and Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary (Geoffrey Bles, London), p. 20. (Fromm was a high-society journalist in Berlin who fled to America in the
1930s because she was Jewish.)
b) The printing presses of the government could no longer keep pace. They were still printing ten-thousand-mark bills when one dollar had gone into the millions of marks. You could see mail carriers on the streets with sacks on their backs or pushing baby carriages before them, loaded with paper money that would be devaluated [sic] the next day. Life was madness, nightmare, desperation, chaos . . . The Middle Ages came back. Communities printed their own money, based on goods, on a certain amount of potatoes, or rye, for instance. Shoe factories paid their workers in bonds for shoes which they could exchange at the bakery for bread or the meat market for meat . . .
