TL;DR
It was not the casualties of the First World War but the humiliation and ruin of hyperinflation that pushed Germans into Hitler's arms.
The author's parents spent their whole lives waiting for the next Great Depression. They had survived the last one, barely, and the deprivations of their childhood left them unable to be optimistic. Dinner-table conversation kept returning to one question: would the next collapse be inflationary or deflationary.
As a carefree teenager the author ignored it. Now he reads books about societies coming apart, which proves that sooner or later you turn into your own parents.
A shoelace cost more than a shoe
His most recent find is Stefan Zweig. Today Zweig is best known as the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel, a debt the director has admitted is basically plagiarism. What deserves remembering is his writing.
Zweig lived through two currency collapses, first in Austria, then in Germany. In the morning a newspaper cost fifty thousand marks; by evening, a hundred thousand. Anyone changing foreign money spread the business over hours, because at four o'clock they got several times what they got at three.
He saw hundred-thousand-mark notes lying in the gutter, thrown away by a beggar who could not be bothered with them.
Inflation cleaned out the honest
What mattered more than the numbers was who won and who lost. Under hyperinflation the ruthless and the rule-breakers got richer, while the decent found themselves wiped out. The speculator Hugo Stinnes used cash that would soon be worthless to buy factories, mines and ships, then newspapers, to control opinion.
At his death he owned 4,500 companies and 3,000 factories. That media empire later helped clear the ground for Hitler.
Zweig insists it was this inflation, not the war, that made Germans bitter and ripe for Hitler. War at least came with victory fanfares. Inflation only made people feel soiled, cheated and humiliated.
Germans did not blame the leaders who started the war. They blamed the politicians who brought them democracy and peace, and demanded the return of the butchers who solved every problem with escalating violence.
A lesson nobody remembers
History repeats about every hundred years, not because of fate but because the witnesses die. You cannot hear their warnings or inherit their experience, so the mistakes get made again.
The day after finishing his memoir Zweig mailed the manuscript to a publisher, then killed himself in Brazil. He feared Hitler would win.
In one line: a society falls apart not when it gets hit, but when, afterwards, its people decide that keeping the rules is for suckers.
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