Moonshine

Berlin in 1920s
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed his first glass-walled skyscraper in postwar Berlin, Yehudi Menuhin made his precocious debut, with Einstein in the audience to applaud him. George Grosz sorted among his years of savage observation on Berlin's wide boulevards and published Ecce Homo. Vladimir Nabokov was there, observing an elderly, rosy-faced beggar woman with legs cut off at the pelvis..set down like a bust at the foot of a wall and...selling paradoxical shoelaces. " Fyodor Vin berg, one of the Czars departed officers, was there, publishing a shoddy newspaper promoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he had personally introduced into Germany from Russia-a new German edition of that pseudo-machiavellian, patently fraudulent fantasy of world conquest sold more than 100,000 copies-and openly advocating the violent destruction of the Jews. Hitler was not there until the end, because he was barred from northern Germany after his release from prison in 1924, but he sent rumpelstiltskin Joseph Goebbels to stand in for him
In the summer of 1922 the rate of exchange in Germany sank to 400 marks to the dollar. It fell to 7,000 to the dollar at the beginning of January 1923, the truly terrible year. One hundred sixty thousand in July. One million in August and 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar on November 23, 1923, when adjustment finally began. Banks advertised for bookkeepers good with zeros and paid out cash withdrawals by weight. Antique stores filled to the ceiling with the pawned treasures of the bankrupt middle class. A theater seat sold for an egg. Only those with hard currency-mostly foreigners-thrived at a time when it was possible to cross Germany by first-class railroad carriage for pennies, but they also earned the enmity of starving Germans.
He was convinced in the mid-1920s chat "the parliamentary form of democracy would not have a very long life in Germany" but he "thought that it might survive one or two generations." Within five years he understood otherwise. I reached the conclusion something would go wrong in Germany in 1930.” Hjalmar Schacht, the president of the German Reichsbank, meeting in Paris that year with a committee of economists called to decide how much Germany could pay in war reparations, announced that Germany could pay none at all unless its former colonies, stripped from it after the war, were returned. this was such a striking statement to make that it caught my attention, and I concluded that if Hjalmar Schacht believed he could get away with this, things must be rather bad. I was so impressed by this that I wrote a letter to my bank and transferred every single penny I had out of Germany to Switzerland
Michael Polanyi, a chemist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes with a family to consider-viewed the German political scene optimistically, like many others in Germany at the time. They all thought that civilized Germans would not stand for anything really rough happening, "Szilard held no such sanguine view, noting that the Germans themselves were paralyzed with cynicism, one of the uglier effects on morals of losing a major war
Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. On the night of February 27 a Nazi gang directed by the head of the Berlin SA, Hitler's private army, set fire to the imposing chambers of the Reichstag. The building was totally destroyed. Hitler blamed the arson onthe Communists and bullied a stunned Reichstag into awarding him emergency powers. Szilard found Polanyi still unconvinced after the fire. He looked at me and said, Do you really mean to say that you think that minister of the Interior (Hermann Goring) had anything to do with this? and I said, Yes, this is precisely what I mean. He just looked at me with incredulous eyes. "In late March, Jewish judges and lawyers in Prussia and Bavaria were dismissed from practice. On the weekend of April 1, Julius Streicher directed a national boycott of Jewish businesses and Jews were beaten in the streets. I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April 1933, " Szilard writes. "The train was empty. The same train the next day was overcrowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don't have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier