German currency reform

The German currency reform of June 20, 1948 marks a sharp economic reversal in the narrator’s postwar account: a change of banknotes helped end an economy organized around scarcity and exchange, and introduced a free market without rationing or price controls. Its significance is presented through the contrast between two periods of monetary collapse—and through the narrator’s concise judgment that the new system worked.

Background: Two Different Worthless Currencies

The narrator compares the reform with the hyperinflation of his adolescence, when money retained its value for only a few hours. On payday, people rushed to complete their weekly or monthly shopping immediately, before their wages lost purchasing power. The postwar crisis differed in a telling way: money was already worthless at the outset. The account therefore distinguishes rapid depreciation from the prior collapse of value, rather than treating both periods as the same kind of inflation.

The Reform and Its Effects

The narrator describes the answer as a change of banknote. The June 20 reform ended the cigarette-based economy, in which a Lucky Strike had become too valuable to smoke, and brought in the Soziale Marktwirtschaft: a free market without rationing or price controls. The change is presented not as a partial adjustment but as a transition out of an economy where cigarettes functioned as valuable exchange goods and ordinary money could not reliably serve its purpose.

Place in the Postwar Narrative

The reform appears in the narrator’s account of September 1948, as he sets out on a journey through a Germany trying to recover from war. Its brisk conclusion—that the new system worked—stands beside his more troubled account of personal recovery: outward life could resume, while an inner life remained difficult to construct. The economic change thus supplies a concrete measure of postwar transformation without implying that material recovery resolved the narrator’s private estrangement.