[The following is taken from a memoir of Irmgard A. Hunt, who grew up in the mountains under Hitler’s Eagles Nest during the Second World War. In this excerpt, she outlines her mother’s experiences during the hyper-inflation of German currency in 1920s Weimar Germany.]
As soon as she graduated from grade school, Mutti [German: “Mom”] began to work six days a week in a small factory that made bed and table linens, She was barely tall enough to reach the sewing machines.
Inflation grew worse by the hour. When she received her week’s pay in the morning, she had to wait until her lunch break to run with her wad of paper money to the nearest bakery. But by that time the Reichsmark, the German currency of the time, had fallen so far that she could not buy a single load of bread with her six days’ wages. The large, rectangular bills were stamped with a staggering number of zeroes; Mutti could not even puzzle out the denominations: millions, billions, more? By November 15, 1923, the high point of the inflation, one U.S. dollar equaled 4,200,000,000,000 reichsmarks.
On days when Mutti was not able to buy bread she searched through the garbage cans outside wealthy people’s homes for potato peels and other scraps. During the worst of times my grandmother tied a small blue-and-white-freckled enamel pot with strings around her waist and hid it beneath her long, dark skirt so she could fill it with kitchen scraps and leftovers from the dining rooms of the houses where she ironed laundry. Her family would eagerly wait for her to come home and put the meager offering on the table. Neither woman would ever forget the humiliation of those days, and while my grandmother never talked about these hardships, much of her bitterness must have stemmed from that time.
Source:
Hunt, Irmgard A. “In Search of a Future.” On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005. 21-22. Print.
Further Reading:
Hunger can be horrifying.
I used to work with a Russian guy that I became friends with. He brought me to his place for dinner once, and I noticed his grandparents doing something odd.
When they had finished eating, they cleaned every speck of food off their plates until they looked clean again. Then lifted the plates and swept the few crumbs into a hand, and ate them too.
The grandparents didn't speak English, but I asked my friend about it later.
"Once you survive a great famine, you will never again throw out even the smallest amount of food", he said.
That stuck with me. We waste food every day, because it means nothing to us.