TWO QUESTIONS FOR ADAM FERGUSSON
With 35 years of new intel since the publication of your brilliant book, how do you feel about the political and economic situation throughout the world?
As a democracy, the Weimar Republic surely never stood a serious chance against the vengeance of (principally) the French in the early years, the continuing machinations of the Left, and the dangerous revanchist militarism of the Right as the Great Depression loomed. It has always interested me that when the first English translation of Mein Kampf was published (October 1933), the parts that the Nazis insisted on being removed were Hitler’s fulminations against the French – considered too diplomatically unwise by then.
The early seventies in Britain were my first experience of serious inflation: that is to say, the overt erosion of capital and savings and, with it, signs of corruption in social milieux and professions that had been thought by and large beyond reproach; and I became interested (as a journalist) on the effect of monetary uncertainty on people. Of course, it got worse and worse, and by the time Margaret Thatcher was sorting out the economic mess left by the Socialists in the early ’80s inflation was up to 20 per cent per annum.
The nucleus of my book, When Money Dies, lay in two articles for The Times of London about the Weimar experience which were published in 1973, when I discovered how general the interest was in the German phenomenon. It was a Hungarian friend called Judith Listowel who, recalling what had happened to her family in Hungary (as I record in the book), then told me so perceptively, “If you get the same disease, you get the same symptoms,” i.e. suspicion, corruption, hatred, crime, and social and political instability.
Do you see parallels today with the machinations of the past?
As to lessons and parallels for today, I am cautious about drawing too many: circumstances are so different. But people don’t change much, and governments who lack political courage, or have Ministers and parties who put themselves before their country, are always liable to postpone any day of reckoning they can. Europe (and the euro) is in a terrible mess at the moment, and its Mediterranean countries scarcely have the discipline, even if they could exercise them, to put their economies straight. What When Money Dies does, I think, is explain exactly why Germany is so determined on monetary stability today, her people almost obsessed with avoiding the financing of anybody’s deficit in the order now projected. Two post-war inflations (although the second moved far faster and the installation of a new currency was much smoother, largely thanks to the US, of course) have left a permanent scar, or to put it another way, have been a long-lasting innoculation against financial excess.
Anyway, the book carried in 1975 and again carries today an urgent warning against the addictive dangers of debauching your own currency: that soft option for any government faced with unrest and unemployment. It reappears at a time when Keynes is again being held up as a model for economic management: but Keynes notoriously misinterpreted what was happening in Germany in the 1920s. It may be good practice to tighten one’s belt in boom times and loosen it in difficult times, but what is to be done if the tightening (fixing the roof when the sun is shining) has been overlooked or impossible?
Adam Fergusson
Author of When Money Dies
London, June 2010
