Germany’s postwar financial crisis culminated in the autumn of 1923 in the worst case of hyperinflation that the world had yet seen. Few Germans could understand what was happening around them that year, but the currency chaos that had upended their lives actually had its roots nine years earlier, at the start of the war, when Germany decided to pay for a large part of its ballooning military budget by printing more money. Those printing presses continued to run after the war, as the public made new demands on the government to support war widows, orphans, and disabled veterans. In January 1923, a new expense prompted the government to shift those presses into overdrive, which shifted inflation into overdrive along with them. That month, French and Belgian troops occupied the industrial heartland of western Germany in an effort to compel German payment of war reparations. The German government responded instead by calling on its citizens in that region to engage in passive resistance—essentially to stop working altogether—and it promised to pay them for doing so. Inflation skyrocketed, reaching its peak in November, when prices often rose several times in a single day, and some places had, in desperation, turned to barter or alternative currencies.

The artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) mentioned skyrocketing prices only a few times in her diary entries for 1923. She witnessed the devastating toll that the financial crisis was taking on struggling families all around her, however. Kollwitz lived in a working-class neighborhood of Berlin with her husband Karl, who served as a physician for people on restricted incomes. These few, brief passages show Kollwitz confronting a hyperinflation whose sheer incomprehensibility seemed to defy words, and so she often resorted instead to italics, exclamation points, and the listing of categories of suffering that the economic catastrophe had unleashed. She also shared a couple of anecdotes that illustrated how adults’ ubiquitous talk of the German mark’s value against the dollar had already shaped children’s imaginations. Amidst it all, too, Kollwitz marked the October anniversary of the date on which her youngest son Peter was killed in battle in 1914.