In the autumn of 1923, a German banknote was worth less than the paper it was printed on. People used marks to light stoves, to paper walls, to fold into toy boats for children who would never in their lives own a savings account. This is the image everyone remembers, and it is the least interesting thing about hyperinflation. Here are two facts usually told apart. While Germany starved, a small number of men built the largest private fortunes the country had ever seen, and broke no law doing it. And the whole catastrophe stopped in a matter of days, without new gold, without foreign rescue, because somebody credible finally said a sentence out loud. Put those facts together and hyperinflation stops being a freak show and becomes something colder: a pyramid scheme with conscription. Participation is compulsory, because the state will accept nothing else in payment of tax. The contribution is deducted every second, invisibly, without a signature. Nobody chooses a date of entry; the year of your birth chooses it for you. And the exits are real, but they open by rank. Peter Kriger tells the story through the people who lived inside it - the industrialist borrowing millions he knew he would repay in confetti, the judge ruling that a mark is a mark while the mark evaporated in the plaintiff's hand, the Hungarian treasury quietly inventing a second currency for itself, the Bolivian official who ended the worst inflation in the hemisphere in a single week. It is a book about money dying, about who profits when it does, and about the uncomfortable discovery waiting at the end: the currency in your own pocket is built exactly the same way. Only the speed is different, and the speed is not a law of nature. Keywords: hyperinflation, monetary history, Weimar Germany, inflation, economic collapse, central banking, financial crisis
