The notion of a nation-specific inflation trauma among the German
population is ubiquitous in the public debate in Germany and beyond.
Because of its experience with hyperinflation in 1923, the German
population not only fears rising prices but favors a stability-oriented
monetary and fiscal policy. The historical origins of this contemporary
understanding of the German inflation trauma are controversial. The
majority of the literature presumes that a specific traumatic disposition
persists since 1923, and as communicative memory has been transposed
intergenerationally (persistence thesis). Others, however, point to a posthoc
reconstruction of past experiences, explaining it as a distinctly
cultural memory that is largely detached from the first-hand experiences
of 1923 (reconstruction thesis). By drawing on both methods of history
and political sciences, we provide new insights on the question of origin.
Specifically, we examine the remembrance of hyperinflation in personal
memoirs and German Bundestag debates. Doing so, we find plausible
support for the logic of reconstruction. We show that individual memories
of the hyperinflation were ambiguous and hardly ever provided
explanations or specific policy lessons. Thus, personal memoirs do not
provide any manifest testament for a communicative memory of the
German inflation as understood by the persistence thesis. Bundestag
speeches in the first decades of the Federal Republic indicate a contested
communicative memory of 1923 with conflicting political lessons drawn
from historical experiences. As the Weimar memory transcended into the
cultural realm from the 1980s onwards, a process of discursive alignment
occurred resulting in the contemporary understanding of the inflation
trauma. These findings rebut the persistence thesis and underscore the
logic of reconstruction.
