Dusseldorf Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was rarely speechless. In 1956 that was the case. He looked perplexed at Karl Bernard, President of the Central Bank Council of the Bank deutscher Länder, the predecessor of the Bundesbank.
The Chancellor and one of Germany’s top central bankers, along with Wilhelm Vocke, exchanged blows. Because the “gentlemen”, as Adenauer put it, “often lacked the necessary sensitivity”.
The Bank deutscher Länder had increased the discount rate. And that’s exactly what made the Chancellor fear, of all things, in the primary campaign that the economy could lose momentum.
“Are you of the opinion that you are on an equal footing with the federal government?” he turned to the central bankers who had been summoned, only to receive an answer that he had probably not expected. “Yes,” Bernard let him know. So much demonstrated self-confidence even impressed the chancellor, who contemporary witnesses are happy to certify as having a tendency towards authoritarianism.
In his current book “The German Mark – How a Currency Became a Myth”, economic expert and historian Frank Stocker describes everyday monetary life from the end of the Second World War to the introduction of euro cash in 2002 in an entertaining and informative manner.
Billions of Deutschmarks are still in circulation
It has been 75 years since the Deutsche Mark (D-Mark) was introduced as the official currency in the western zones in June 1948. The green twenties, brown fifties and blue hundreds have long been part of history. But even at the end of 2022, according to the Bundesbank, there were still D-Mark coins and banknotes worth around 12.3 billion in circulation – an astonishing sum.
German drawers and caskets contain what stands for “the replacement of poverty and hunger by consumption and prosperity” after two world wars and “for the beginning of the economic miracle”.
The car has become Germany’s most important symbol of prosperity and accelerates the economic miracle.
(Photo: imago/United Archives)
All of this justifies the myth of the D-Mark. And it fits the picture that, in retrospect, the associated currency watchdogs are, of course, more than just bankers. You are the much-quoted “Wacht am Main” – defensive, independent, undeterred.
Yes, that’s how the old days are, one might think. But anyone who now also wants the D-Mark back should perhaps first check the historical facts to see whether, in retrospect, they are not nostalgically exaggerating the history of the currency. Maybe he just longs for what a current movie title sums up so wonderfully: “When will it finally be like it never was?”
Knowledge of the D-Mark fades
With his current book, author Stocker, a journalist with the “Welt”, is trying to counteract a development that he sees critically. Because the D-Mark myth lives on, while “the knowledge of history” fades.
Captivating and full of facts at the same time, Stocker also makes his readers aware of stories that are all too forgotten. For example, that the much vaunted stable currency D-Mark almost failed shortly after it was launched – if the European partners had not granted generous loans in the winter of 1950/51.
With the D-Mark, the shop windows also filled up. Finally there were goods for money again.
(Photo: dpa)
It is also a little part of the disenchantment drink that the Bundesbank, undisputedly successful, resilient and independent, was of course not free from errors. In 1966, for example, it brought about a recession that ultimately brought down Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of all people.
Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, the business world had changed fundamentally. The Bundesbank’s decisions on German monetary stability “have long since had Europe-wide, if not global, effects”.
Anything but a dust-dry history tome
And in the opinion of the book author, the German currency guardians not only lacked vision, but also “diplomatic behavior and empathy”. In short: nobody likes the know-it-all class geek.
With all this happening around the German monetary policy, a dust-dry history tome could have emerged. Numerous experience reports give the reading, however, plenty of life and color. Above all, the story of three little girls from Frankfurt is remembered, who rode the carousel 25 times in a row – until the money was gone and the doctor had to come.
>> Read also: Ludwig Erhard’s popularity remains a mystery
The little story happened one day before the currency reform of 1948. The Germans were frantically trying to exchange their Reichsmarks, which nobody wanted to accept, for goods that nobody wanted to hand out anymore. More relaxed contemporaries would rather throw their money into the Main or light their cigarettes with rolled banknotes. Three little girls rode a carousel.
Author Stocker writes that he is not the “father of the D-Mark” as he is often referred to. But its part in the economic upswing is undisputed.
(Photo: imago images/United Archives)
The feelings of the readers in the anecdotes about the “big names” of the time may range from reading pleasure to sheer horror. There is, for example, Federal President Theodor Heuss, who, as Germany’s supreme statesman, wrote a letter to Chancellor Adenauer on the “issuance of the second banknote series of the Bank deutscher Länder”.
In it he denounced a “crime against humanity” – and that seriously less than five years after the worst crimes against humanity that had ever happened.
It was the bare-breasted Europa on the newly issued five-mark bill that led to his uncontrolled anger being written down. Other hot-tempered people, often from conservative circles, also filed criminal charges against the bank for “spreading indecent allegations”.
But Chancellor Adenauer preferred not to get involved in the five-mark fare. So the Germans initially went about their business “lewdly”.
Euro cash was introduced on January 1, 2002 and replaced the notes and coins of national currencies such as the Belgian franc or the German mark at fixed conversion rates.
(Photo: picture alliance / dpa)
In the final chapter “D-Mark – a balance sheet” a message from the author emerges clearly. He concedes that many things were clearer, fairer, more harmonious in the days of the D-Mark. The times of the euro, on the other hand, were “more complicated, rougher, more unfair”. But: “That would not be changed by a return to the D-Mark.”
The Germans, he recommends, should help to shape European monetary policy in the spirit of stability. Because nostalgic indulgence in glorified past does not help when the world has changed completely in the meantime.
So it is helpful to put the currency history of the D-Mark in a factual light. Because nothing, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote, shows “as clearly what a people is made of as what it does in terms of monetary policy”.
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