In Europe

that anyone might still be a virgin at the age of sixteen would have been considered ridiculous.’
    The American composer Nicolas Nabokov described an evening's carousal with the exotic dancer Isadora Duncan and her brand-new husband, the brilliant and thoroughly unbalanced Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, seventeen years her junior. They ran into Count Kessler, ‘accompanied by a dark-haired girl by the name of Judith or Ruth or something, wearing only a dinner jacket, a starched shirt and a top hat, leaving the extremely seductive parts below her waist covered only most imperfectly.’ At the party the next evening at Kessler's home, the guests couldadmire a young black exotic dancer just in from Paris: Josephine Baker. Yesenin would commit suicide in 1925, Duncan was strangled two years later on the French Riviera, when her scarf became tangled in the wheels of her sports car.
    ‘The near future has determined that I am to be ground to sausage meat,’ sighed Stephen Labude, one of the main characters of Erich Kästner's novel
Fabian
(1931), during one such wild evening. ‘What shall I do in the meantime? Read books? Chip away at my character? Make money? I was sitting in a huge waiting room, and it was called Europe. The train would be leaving in eight days, I knew that. But where it was going and what would become of me, no one knew. And now we are back in the waiting room again, and again it is called Europe! And again we have no idea what is going to happen. We live from day to day, the crisis knows no end.’
    That was indeed the crux of it: day by day. Day by day, because every day the country's politics could change, day by day too because every vestige of economic stability was disappearing. In September 1922, Käthe Kollwitz complained for the first time in her diary about inflation and financial difficulties. ‘How unbelievably expensive things are. This year Karl will earn approximately 300,000 marks, less than half of what we need. If I did not earn the other half, we would also go under, like countless others. So many are becoming impoverished.’
    The figures on German hyperinflation are well known: in 1918, the rate was 4 marks to the dollar; in 1922, 400 marks; after the assassination of Rathenau that quickly became 1,000 marks; and by late November 1923 you could get 4,210,500,000,000 marks for a dollar. The Berlin daily newspaper the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
cost 30 pfennigs in May 1921; in December 1922, 50 marks; on 1 February, 1923, 100 marks; on 1 June, 300 marks; on 1 July, 1,500 marks; on 1 August, 5,000 marks; on 15 August, 20,000 marks; on 29 August, 60,000 marks; on 12 September, 300,000 marks; and on 19 September, 800,000 marks. The million-mark mark was reached on Thursday, 20 September. The next day it was 1.5 million. The Sunday edition on 28 October cost 2.5 billion marks. The paper of Friday, 9 November, bearing news of Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, cost 60 billion marks.
    The key effect of this inflation was the disappearance of every sense of value. Musicians and performers were paid after the show with suitcases full of banknotes. They took them to a shop right away to buy the most necessary items, for by morning the money would be worthless.
    The Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, living in Berlin at the time, was dragged along one evening ‘to an interesting place’. He arrived in a neat and tidy middle-class apartment, with paintings of family members in uniform on the walls. ‘We were given lemon phosphates with a shot of alcohol in them. Then the host's two daughters came in – naked. They started dancing. One of them began talking about Dostoyevsky's novels. The mother looked hopefully at the foreign guests: perhaps they would let themselves be seduced by their daughters and pay for it, in dollars, of course.’
    At the same time, many people became exceedingly rich during this same period, particularly if they were young and good at playing the money markets. Part of the city's youth lived in a world that somewhat resembles that of the New Economy bubble of the late 1990s; school parties flooded with champagne, twenty-year-old millionaires supporting their parents. While the ‘old rich’ had saved their money, the ‘new rich’ spent theirs as fast as possible. That turned the world completely upside down. The old Germany, after all, had been a culture of the frugal.
    What was the economic background to these odd times, when everything – including