Carl Weirich bound books and sold pens in Weimar. He opened his shop just before the First World War. In 1918 he lost his daughter. In 1920 his wife died of tuberculosis. Prices were climbing that year, and the city's suicide rate hit twice the national rate. In 1923 he bought his new wife a bicycle. Dominic Green reviews Katja Hoyer's Weimar in the Weekend Journal, Oct. 17–18.
The book, from Basic at 496 pages and $35, tells a republic's story through one city and one ordinary man. Hoyer is a German-British historian. She skips the famous names for the diary of a shopkeeper. Weirich wrote in 1925 that “faced with the great developments of world history, the individual is powerless.” Green praises it as powerful and detailed. It shows one city losing its moral bearings as the republic fell.
Weimar was two towns at once. Walter Gropius opened the Bauhaus there in 1919. The city hosted a Nazi rally in 1926 that drew some 8,000 people. Thuringia, with Weimar as its capital, became the first German state to appoint a Nazi minister, in 1930. In the 1928 elections the party took 2.6% of the national vote and 3.7% across Thuringia. In Weimar it took 11%. Then came the 1929 economic crisis, which Green says deepened the republic's weaknesses. Weirich, by Hoyer's account, wasn't much for art or politics. He was “unperturbed by the seismic historical shifts underneath the surface of German society.”
What the diary missed
By January 1935 Thuringia had nearly 100,000 party members. Buchenwald opened on a hill 5 miles from the city in 1937. Weimar's businesses sold the camp electricity, water, meat and timber. Bookbinders made the boxes that carried victims' urns home to their families, for a fee. Weirich had a good year in 1937. Germany was arming, and everyone needed paper to black out their windows. His doubts started in May 1938, when he learned his house would be leveled for a Nazi remodel of the city. In November, Kristallnacht confirmed them. American bombs damaged his shop in 1945. His son survived the army, was arrested under Soviet control and died in a camp in 1947. Weirich rebuilt again. A neighbor called him the “kindest man.” Green's closing judgment is that Hoyer finds a city where cowardice ran even with kindness.
Our read
We file this under Behavioral, with a note on the history of money. Strip out the politics and a money story remains. Prices climbed in 1920, the year a city's suicide rate hit twice the country's. A reparations default in 1923. A crash in 1929. Each one hit a shopkeeper who was busy minding his shop. Hoyer's point, as Green reads it, is that Weirich wasn't watching. Business was fine, so the ground felt solid. The ground wasn't solid. This is history, and we leave it there. A good year at the register tells you about the register. It tells you nothing about the ground.
Here's the connection to your own plan. Weimar's savers learned that money in a drawer is only worth what prices let it buy. Your plan's safe money carries the same question. Some of it may sit in a fixed-rate CD or an old bond that pays the same no matter what prices do. Some may sit in short Treasury bills, which roll over at current rates every few months, or in inflation-protected bonds. The house holds gold as insurance in 46 of its 81 model books, at weight, and nothing was added. This week, list your safe money and mark each piece fixed or resetting. If almost all of it is fixed, that's the line to bring to your next review. The umbrella gets bought on a dry day.