The poor state of history education in our primary and secondary schools has left many of my college students seeing history as nothing but distinct facts to be memorized, often in list form. I know I had to repeatedly memorize the major battles of the Revolutionary War and their dates. How does that help me understand the war overall? It doesn’t. Not in the least. Also, I don’t remember a damn one of them besides Lexington and Concord precisely because the information was presented in such an irrelevant format.
At least I didn’t have to memorize all the Presidents. I did have to memorize all from 1920 forward including their middle names. You know what that taught me?
- Richard Nixon’s middle name is Milhous
- Harry S. Truman’s middle name is S. He inserted it to sound more presidential.
- High schools’ concept of history sucks
From day one, I try to get my students to understand that history is about context, cause and effect. Things don’t just randomly happen. Other things led to that point, and that point will further influence future things. For example, Hitler didn’t just show up one day and convince a country to hate Jews. He built upon centuries of stereotypes and persecution as well as a suffering country’s need for scapegoats.
Which brings us to this:
Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil would be so happy with this one MILLION mark stamp. What the hell do you mail with a stamp this big? A battleship?
Nowhere close.
This is exactly where historical context makes this very odd object make sense.
The Folly of the Treaty of Versailles
World War I ended with the Treaty of Versailles where the winning side pretty much dictated what the losers would suffer. Much of the blame was put on Germany. It lost territory and the people living in that territory, shrinking the workforce. It had to limit its military to 100,000 soldiers, and it had to remove all military presence from the territory bordering France. It was also required to pay huge amounts of reparations to Britain and France.
Germany’s infrastructure had been annihilated in the war. Huge numbers of people were starving, yet the government continued to send reparation money out of the country, further disrupting its ability to rebuild.
The solution was to just keep printing more money. The result in 1923 was spectacular inflation. People were going to grocery stores with wheelbarrows full of money.
Read more: Another tale of 1923 economic insanity.
The Stamps
These stamps are called overprints. The colored portion was the original print, and the numbers were added later. I am guessing because prices were rising so quickly they needed to be versatile. Thus, these:
Value
So how much are they worth now? Nothing. The government’s next move was to invalidate the money altogether and issue new currency with an exchange rate of 1 trillion to 1. So while I have over one billion 1923 marks, I could have only exchanged them for less than one new mark.
It’s exactly this kind of insanity that made the German people embrace the Nazi party in the 1930s. Among other things, the Nazis stopped acknowledging the Treaty of Versailles, more effectively rebuilt Germany, and appealed to wounded pride.
As a collectable item, the prices for these stamps are unusual. Generally, new stamps are worth more than used ones. With these, used stamps are worth more than unused ones. I presume it’s because lots of these stamps were printed, but many of them were never used as rising prices quickly rendered them useless, and then the currency was cancelled altogether, making the stamps unusable.