Germany, now in a commanding position financially, has, it will be remembered, also known, twice in this century, the consequences of financial collapse. In the 1920s there was the inflation, where, and it's probably not much exaggeration, it is said you would need a barrow-full of marks to do your week's shopping - that is, if the shops had anything to sell. And after 1945, when the country was divided into four zones, British, American, Soviet and French, the lack of food, lack of housing and general moral disarray was such that it would have been hard to foresee the country rising again and taking over such a prominent place in the new Europe.
A file of press cuttings and photographs just come to hand, from the years 1946 and 1947, paints a picture of wrecked cities, dirt, disarray, and above all hunger. Barter became a way of life for those who had some material goods: silver, articles of good china, almost anything portable and worthwhile. So, in autumn particularly, the trains out of the cities would be crowded with people bearing rucksacks and hoping to come back with food collected from the farmers. The rations permitted were believed by the authorities in the zones to be sufficient to maintain life. Not everybody agreed.
Currency? In the American-occupied zone, the outstanding item of currency was the cigarette. And the Americans were rich in this through their PX's - forgotten what that's short for, but it was the supermarket, as we'd say today, where food, liquor, cigarettes and, well almost anything, could be bought. There may have been great fluctuations in the currency valuation, but at one time, it is written here, one cigarette could be worth seven marks. And that was, according to the cutting, in Frankfurt on the Main, now a powerful city for finance. But there were operators who dealt only in packets of the same or in cartons of 10 packets. Or 12. You could become a cigarette millionaire; and that wasn't confined to the troops.
One thing you didn't easily let go of to the farmers was heavy clothing. Winter in Germany can be very severe. A cutting here of a journey in southern Bavaria has an Irishman, temporarily in the area, remarking: "For the first time in my life I realised what I've owed to the Gulf Stream all these years for keeping me warm." What about the starvation in, say, Poland under German occupation? These cuttings concerned only Germany. We have seen, too, more gruesome things under German rule. Y