ABSTRACT
German inflation after World War I is rapidly becoming, like the French Revolution, a classic historical conundrum, useful because it allows ample scope for teaching undergraduates and training scholars in the complexity of social events, and furnishes a virtually infinite range for further monographic research and magisterial syntheses. Like British long-term lending to Canada from 1896 to 1913, the historical analysis is rewritten with each succeeding generation. If the German inflation achieves equal status in history, economic history, and economic analysis, it will be largely attributable to the entrepreneurial dynamism of Professors Feldman, Holtfrerich, Ritter, and Witt who have created a new industry around the problem, with workshops and meetings, an outpouring of articles, monographs, and books. On the economic side, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the University of Chicago economics department and Journal of Political Economy contribute to the deluge as theories of monetarism, rational expectations, bubbles, efficient markets, rigorous purchasing-power parity and the like are measured against the somewhat spotty data of the episode.
