La inflación alemana

"Berlin, August. The catastrophic fall of the mark really begins to give life in this place a chaotic and fantastic aspect. There is no certain price. You leave your house in the morning with the money that you approximately think will be necessary to live one day and you realize, at night, that the million or million and a half that you had reserved to pay the restaurant bill is of no use to you. The million has evaporated. One believes that it was in the pocket four duros and the stock market price tells you that you only have ten pesetas. If you're too lazy to go home and get more money, you have to settle for cutting back on dinner. This, naturally, is not pleasant at all. As a result of the reparations demanded from Germany after the First World War in the Treaty of Versailles (1919), a severe economic crisis caused the German currency to collapse just over a hundred years ago. Josep Pla, Berlin correspondent for the newspaper La Publicitat, was a privileged witness. Together with the journalist Eugeni which he sent to the newspaper. Eighty-eight of those articles are collected for the first time in this volume, which represents a first-rate contribution to the Planian bibliography. As Josep M. Fradera explains in the prologue, Pla's commitment to La Publicitat was clear: "To travel through Germany as much as possible, specifically visit the most sensitive areas, which were those occupied by the Allies. This is how he presented it the Barcelona newspaper to its readers. Unlike what was usual in the more conventional correspondents, the work of the Catalan journalist consisted of describing the situation in the country based on close observation of everyday life, not limiting himself to reporting only what that was brewing in the political institutions of the capital. It was necessary to get closer to the people and the different events that occurred in a huge space, which was immersed in a social crisis of enormous proportions. The result was chronicles of the highest quality: one of the high points reached by Josep Pla in the exercise of journalism.