Hyperinflation (1921 – 1923)

By its financial obduracy, Germany proves that it has exceedingly falling memory.

A well-known photo shows children playing with worthless Germany money. At inflation's peak, 1 dollar traded at 4.2 trillion Deutsche Marks.

While it is often said that the German attitude to fiscal responsibility could be traced back to hyperinflation of 1921-3, it appears that Berlin has missed the big picture that emerged from that national nightmare. There are many differences, of course, but the parallels are also uncanny.

War reparations saddled Germany with huge external debt, just as the Euro has done today in southern European countries. Exporting was the only way out, although Germany had to do it without its main industrial centres in the east and the west, and the southern countries without a flexible exchange rate.

Like Germany today, France was reluctant to help; in Britain, a German bailout was political unpopular. Instead, international creditors demanded public sector cuts; they directed at the military rather than the civil service, but the deflationary effect was no different. The Weimar Government’s later tax increases were as unrealistic as those imposed upon many debtor nations by Germany currently.

The percentage of government spending covered by taxes rapidly decreased from not-too-spectacular 15% in 1914 to just 0.8% in 1923. This disastrous fall had two causes, both familiar to a modern reader.

Firstly, there was a rampant tax avoidance. Germans evaded taxes in the 1920s, as much as Greeks do today. And as with America today, the war was financed not through tax hikes, but through increased borrowing from international creditors. Therefore, in Germany it almost become a patriotic duty to avoid taxes, which would have gone straight out of the country.

Secondly, successive socialist governments in Germany created a runaway welfare state. Like Greeks, Germans were paid even when they were not working. Although reparations never accounted for more than a third of Germany’s deficit, the government pointed it out as a convenient scapegoat. As always, social ills were blamed on external bogeymen: creditors, speculators and bankers, mostly foreign, mostly Jewish.

By the time the inflation was stalled in November 1923 with an introduction of a new Mark, the trends were inexorably leading to two seminal events. The German hyper-inflation and the European governments’ inability to deter it was almost a dress rehearsal for the Great Depression. And anxieties and uncertainties these twin disasters unleashed made it easier for the National Socialists to seize power.

 

American Girl in Italy

It is almost a cliché to say that when Jinx walked across a different world when she traversed the Piazza della Republica in Florence on that August day exactly sixty years ago. But that world was truly different — in a sense, unfathomably different — to someone born in the 1980s. Even today, after all advances in modern communications, online bookings and airtravel, travelling alone can be daunting. But imagine doing exactly that sixty years ago, when the world was a more intolerant place — which was what Jinx and her photographer did.

In 1951, Ninalee “Jinx” Allen Craig was a 23 year old student who had recently quit her job in New York to embark on her own grand tour of Europe. In Florence, while lodging at a cheap hostel overlooking the Arno, she met another American girl who was also travelling solo — the 29-year old aspiring photojournalist named Ruth Orkin.

Together, they decided that they would do a photoessay documenting what it was like to be a woman travelling alone in Europe in the 1950s. In Don’t be Afraid to Travel Alone, Orkin photographed Criag shopping in the markets, crossing traffic, riding a carriage and flirting at a cafe. The photos were powerful, but one photograph stood head and shoulders above the others — and it made Orkin famous.

On August 22nd 1951, Orkin saw Jinx walking through a crowd on the Piazza della Republica, and being ogled. She turned and took one shot, and asked Jinx to walk through again. Orkin also asked the man on motorcycle to tell the other men not to look at the camera. For these reasons, the photo was considered to have been “staged” but contact sheets reveal that Orkin took only two frames.

The image of a young woman walking unaccompanied through a thicket of leering men was provocative; the figure of the whistling young man grabbing his crotch was considered to have extremely obscene and was airbrushed out for years to come. But the photo nonetheless became a bestselling poster. But Jinx does not believe it was exploitative:

It’s not a symbol of harassment. It’s a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!

I clutched my shawl to me because that sheaths the body. It was my protection, my shield. I was walking through a sea of men. I was enjoying every minute of it. They were Italian and I love Italians.

Indeed, she returned to New York and later married an Italian widower. As for Orkin, she would go on to have a productive career, but the above photo forever remained her only masterpiece.

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(See here for more in-depth interview with Jinx Allan).

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Bangladesh, Rashid Talukdar

When Mohammed Ali Jinnah became the Prime Minister of Pakistan in 1947, he bemoaned that he inherited a “mutilated, truncated, moth-eaten Pakistan”. The British partition of her Indian possession created two countries, secular India, and two predominantly-Moslem areas — East and West Pakistans — that sandwiched it. Apart from religion, two areas had very little in common, in geography, in language, and in culture. Although over-populated East Pakistan had more people, West Pakistan held the lion’s share of power, and government subsidies.

Equally vexing to East Pakistanis was the issue of who minority Hindus, who were marginalized. All these grievances exploded in December 1970, when poor government response to a cyclone triggered civil unrest. In March 1971, West Pakistan responded by launching a military operation in against Bengali civilians, students, intelligentsia, and armed personnel who were finally demanding separation of the East from West Pakistan. A guerrilla war that claimed as many as 3 million — one of the bloodiest in modern history — unfolded for next 266 days, with East Pakistanis being supported by India.

On December 3rd, in a severely miscalculated move, West Pakistan began a pre-emptive attack on the western border of India. India promptly declared war on Pakistan, and came to the defense of the Bengali separatists. In one of the shortest wars in history, West Pakistan surrendered in the east 12 days later. West Pakistan became just Pakistan; the new nation of Bangladesh was born.

In the days immediately preceding their surrender, the West Pakistanis either ordered or led the extermination of a large section of the intellectual community of Bangladesh in a last ditch effort to wreck the new country. The worst were the horrors of Rayerbazar killing fields (14 December 1971) which were later captured by Rashid Talukdar. The above picture appeared to be a marble sculpture among rocks but was in fact a dismembered head.

Jack Hill, Libya

For a certain Arab dictator, endgame could not come soon enough. 

Earlier this year, Jack Hill covered the attacks on Benghazi

Yesterday’s fall of the crucial city of Zawiya to the Libyan rebels is a symbolic blow against the regime; one of the first towns to rise up, Zawiya was the scene of bitter fighting and brutal crackdown by the government during the early months of the Libya uprising. Control of the town will be huge boost to the rebels, many residents of the town who fled when it fell. It is also a signal that after the murder of the rebels’ army chief two weeks ago and fractional struggles and Islamic bedlam among the rebels in the East, the future of Libya will finally be decided in the west of the country.

Jack Hill, The Times‘ photographer, followed the rebels into Zawiya. Here he recounts an unusual predicament he often encounters in photographing the Libyan rebels:

We persuaded our guides to get up early and make the journey from the Nafusa mountains into Zawiya.

The rebels had made a breakthrough and we’d seen dramatic footage. Passing checkpoints on the road, I was encouraged by assertions that it was safe all the way to the bridge, an overpass on the Tripoli-Tunisia road that was a lifeline for the regime. We stopped and I began taking pictures. You have to be quick to get a photo of a fighter before you get the V for victory sign.

We got to the bridge, but we were advised against going further. A mournful prayer came from a mosque up the road, an an ambulance shot past. As I got closer I could see there were two dead fighters. We pulled back for several hours. Then an RPG exploded. The crowd seemed momentarily tense, but I raised my camera and up came the ubiquitous V-signs again.

If you google “Jack Hill, Libya”, there are only several hits — one of which is this blog’s earlier coverage of his work. All of his work is behind the solid paywall of The Times, and I think this put Hill at a disadvantage — although his photos from Libya are as good as, if not better than, others.

As paywalls thicken over the next few years, it is something photographers will need to ponder — paywall exclusivity or widespread publicity?

 

 

V J Day Kiss

Here are three frames from Eisenstaedt’s set of the sailor kissing the nurse. In the book Eisenstaedt on Eisentstaedt, the photographer wrote:

I saw a sailor running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight. Whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, didn’t make a difference. I was running ahead of him with my Leica looking back over my shoulder but none of the pictures that were possible pleased me. Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse…. It was done within a few seconds.”

Originally, this most famous of World War II photos did not make the cover of Life magazine in which it first appeared; it showed up on page 27, full-page, but amid a whole series of somewhat similar pictures from across the country under the headline, “The Men of War Kiss From Coast to Coast.” The photo didn’t appear on a Life cover until 2005.

However, in October 1980, Life did run a special spread entitled “Who Is the Kissing Sailor?” Ten sailors wrote to the magazine, each one insisting with convincing evidence — a distinctive hairline, a signature vein on the right hand, a newly acquired Quartermaster 1st Class patch — that he was the “kissing sailor”. Three women also wrote in and claimed to be the nurse.

Anarchy in the UK

These days, every major news story comes with a single iconic photograph. For the riots in Britain, that photo was not that of looting hooligans, burning centuries-old buildings or clean-up afterwards; instead, it captured a human tragedy of one Polish émigré, who has been in the UK for only five months.

On Monday night, 32-year old Monika Konczyk, had chosen to stay inside her one-bedroom flat above a row of shops because of rioting and looting outside. She did not have any possessions with her when she jumped, and her flat has been completely destroyed.

Amy Weston, a photographer with London’s WENN photo agency, captured this iconic moment on the Church Street, Croydon. She remembers the chaotic times:

By the time I drove toward it, I could already see the fires from my windscreen. There were six or seven people screaming and crying outside, and they looked like they lived at the flats that were burning. A man in a white shirt was screaming that a girl was at the window and that she was ready to jump. He ran toward her, but riot police had appeared and pulled him back, and they went to her instead.

As soon as she dropped, the crowds pushed back and there was no way to see what happened to her. I remember hearing people screaming that there were more people in the building. The crowds started getting angry with each other, with one group blaming another group for starting the fire. I couldn’t get to my car, so I had to walk, wrapping my camera in my clothes to avoid being mugged.”

The photograph quickly went viral on Twitter and was featured on the front pages of many British newspapers, including the Times, the Sun and the Daily Telegraph.

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Anatomy of A Jump

Hug A Hoody

Hug it or hate it, hoody remains a potent and divisive symbol 

In 2007, David Cameron, then the opposition leader, was visiting one of the most deprived estates in Manchester when a teenager ran up behind him and made a hand gesture to shoot him to impress his friends (more on that story). The photo of 17-year old Ryan Florence in a hoodie was reprinted on many frontpages — all the more ironic because only a year before, Cameron had made his famous speeches arguing that hoodies were “more defensive than offensive”.  “Hug A Hoody” — to use Labour’s then dismissive view — was a defining moment of his journey towards a softer liberalism.

But in the last few days, we have come very far from those heady days; we need to reexamine hoodies and their status in the ganglands. When the history of the last few days is debated, written, and analysed, understanding gangland culture will be more important than prejudicial fingering the usual suspects of unemployment, disenfranchisement, poverty, materialism, and racial tensions.

Of over a thousand people arrested, many were in their early teens and the youngest was 11. They stood for nothing; like Florence, they view hooliganism as a rite of passage, a youthful act of rebellion, a snub towards authorities. Sooner or later, most of them grow out of this phase. A handful, however, fails to reform. They becomes hardened gangmembers and anarchists who in turn recruit another generation of impressionable teens as their foot soldiers. Through promises of drugs, social acceptance and protection, they manipulate others, and this weekend, they have shown their power once again by outmanoeuvring police with their urban guerrilla tactics. Their symbol? Hoodies.

Yesterday, in a speech that echoed the sentiments towards kilts after the Jacobin Rebellion, the former Deputy PM John Prescott entertained a hoodie ban. Defensive, offensive or not, hoodies are oppressive. In Hood Rat, a haunting expose of London’s gang culture by Gavin Knight wrote, “Not everyone in a hoody is a gang member, some are just teenagers wearing hoodies, but the line is deliberately kept blurred”. In many inner-cities, teenagers feel they have to wear one for their own survival. They are terrified, trapped, intimidated by older gang members. Hoodies have such cultural power that they become their own unique kind of weapon.

 And for this reason alone, this house believes that they should be banned.

How Death Creates Icons

They uncovered his face, now clear and serene, and bared the chest wracked by 40 years of asthma and months of hunger in the wilds of the Bolivian southeast. Then they laid him out in the laundry room at the hospital of Nuestra Señora de Malta, raising his head so all could look upon the fallen prey. As they placed him on the concrete slab, they … asked the nurse to wash him, comb his hair, and trim the sparse beard. By the time journalists and curious townspeople began to file past, the metamorphosis was complete: the dejected, angry and disheveled man of the day before was now the Christ of Vallegrande … The Bolivian army had made its only field error after capturing its greatest war trophy. It had transformed the resigned and cornered revolutionary … into the magical image of life beyond death. His executioners had bestowed a human face upon the myth that would circle the world.”

Thus began Jorge Castañeda’s touching biography, “Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara“. After Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of the U.S. Marines on May 2nd, Time magazine invited him to write an essay on iconicity of death (link), which concludes:

We do know a lesson we learned nearly half a century ago, that the best way to avoid an effigy of martyrdom is to dispose of the material basis for it. But there is a downside to no face, no body and no picture: in the eyes of many, insufficient proof of death. Skepticism vs. glorification — not an easy choice.”

The Great Dismissal

David Smith reads the Governor’s message as stoney-faced Whitlam (left) looks on

In 1972, after 23 years of rule by conservative Liberal Party, Australia elected a Labor government under the leadership of the dashing and urbane Gough Whitlam. At once Whitlam’s government embarked on a programme of ambitious reforms – it gave Aborigines rights they had not previously enjoyed, began to disengage Australian troops from Vietnam, made university education free, and much more. But, the government gradually lost its majority and by 1975, the parliament was in a deadlock from which neither Whitlam nor Malcolm Fraser, the leader of the opposition, would budge.

Into this impasse entered Sir John Kerr, the Governor General. Using an obscure privilege previously not invoked, he dissolved the government, placed Fraser in control and ordered a general election. What happened on that evening of 11th November 1975 was perhaps the most memorable political event in Australia. An angry crowd of Labor supporters filled the steps and halls of the Parliament House as the news of the dismissal became publicly known; David Smith, Kerr’s Secretary, who was given the thankless job of announcing the dismissal to the public, had to enter Parliament House through a side door and make his way to the parliament’s steps from the inside. Smith read the proclamation, as the boos of the crowd drowned him out; after he concluded the short statement with the traditional “God save the Queen“, Whitlam began his address to the crowd with now immortal words:

Well may we say “God save the Queen” because nothing will save the Governor-General. The proclamation you have just heard read by the Governor-General’s Official Secretary was countersigned “Malcolm Fraser”, who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr’s Cur.

Although Whitlam may have won the war of words, he lost the general elections to Fraser, who would lead the Liberal Party to three electoral victories. Thus ended one of the most intriguing episodes of political theatre. Despite their outrage, indignation and resentment at the governor general’s high-handed interference before they had had any real chance to sort out their differences themselves, the Australian electorate calmly endorsed the action that had so incensed it only a month before. As for Labor, the episode became a humiliating reminder that Australia was still at root a colony, constitutionally subordinated to the United Kingdom, and an unelected representative of a government on the other side of the planet.

Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?

Even the Dead Have Not Seen the End of Folly

In June 1967, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, was sentenced to three months in prison for possession of a few amphetamine tablets. Jagger was a first-time offender caught with French seasickness pills, which are openly sold in France but required a prescription in England. On July 1st 1967, The Times, and its new editor, William Rees-Mogg invoked Pope and denounced the excessive sentence in “Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?” Rees-Mogg criticized the judge for undue severity in a minor drugs case, while arguing that justice ought to be the same for the rich and the poor, for the famous and the unknown. It was an editorial where the establishment and the counter-culture came together.

We are at similar crossroads again. Last month, Charlie Gilmour, the stepson of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, pled guilty to violent disorder exhibited during the student riots over tuition fee increases last December. Gilmour was a male model who was as the Independent put it, “more Beau Brummel than Che Guevara”. As he infamously climbed up the Cenotaph, the Cambridge history student, was oblivious to what the Cenotaph symbolized. (David Gilmour who once famously sang, “We don’t need no education” could probably see some irony here.)

Young Gilmour was sentenced to 16 months in jail — an abnormally harsh punishment for a first-time offender whose indiscretions, while excessive, were committed during a protest march. Twitter is abuzz with outrage, and today, the Times thundered again with indignation. I have nothing but contempt for Gilmour’s acts; I viewed them as pure hooliganism; in Gilmour, I saw a privileged scion protesting against tuition fee increases. First and foremost, it was a selfish act to preserve a broken faux-egalitarian system that handouts free rides to the rich and the privileged.

But as Rees-Mogg would say, it is possible for the guilty to be prosecuted in an entirely unfair way. And now he has. The class-conscious courts which sentence the infringers from poorer backgrounds to community service have felt that Gilmour’s celebrity status would send a strong signal.

Yes, it did. But it was a signal as misguided and disgraceful as the one Gilmour cadenced from the Cenotaph to proclaim. And equally wrong.

Three Flags of Khaldei

Yesterday I posted about Khaldei and three tableclothes-cum-flags he took from Moscow to Berlin. Here’s how they went up in Berlin:

The first flag was raised next to the Nazi Eagle at the Templehof Airport. The Eagle was dismantled at the end of the war and taken to West Point in 1960. It was quietly returned to Templehof in 1985, and has since been serving as the Berlin Airlift memorial on the airport grounds.

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The second flag was hoisted next to the destroyed Quadriga on the Brandenburg Gate. The series of photos above suggest that there was some confusion as to which side of the Quadriga should the flag go. In the third picture, we see the flag already flying (on northside), and Khaldei himself poses before the Quadriga. The gate, which was badly damaged, but miraculously still standing by the end of the war, was restored by the governments of two Berlins — although at the Communists’ insistence, stood without Iron Cross and Prussian Eagle until 1991.

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The raising of the third flag became the iconic image of Nazi Germany’s final defeat. Note two watches on the soldier supporting the flag-bearer. Despite being the primary scene of the Soviet airstrikes and the symbolic flag raising, the Reichstag was a mere symbol. It had remained unused since the Fire of 1933.

The photo here suggests that Meliton Kantaria and Mikhail Yegorov raised that flag. It remains a mystery whether the duo (along with a third man, Alexei Berest) were the first soldiers who raised the original flag 2 days earlier, or whether propaganda was given to them just because they were a Georgian and a Russian respectively, two of Stalin’s favored nationalities. (And as I noted yesterday, Yegorov died in 1946, from drunk-driving).

Raising Flag Over the Reichstag

Oganjok reprinted the photo on its cover in 1965, 1970 and 1975.

After seeing Joe Rosenthal’s photo of raising the flag on Iwo Jima, Stalin ordered the Ukrainian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei to take a similar photo that would symbolize the Soviet victory over Germany. Before flying to Berlin to capture the Nazi defeat, Yevgeni Khaldei asked a friend to create three hammer and sickle flags together from three tablecloths. Khaldei photographed the first flag being raised on a Nazi eagle at the Templehof airport, and the second flag being raised at the Brandenburg gate.

As for the third flag, he recruited three privates, Aleksei Kovalyev, Aleksei Goryachev and Abdulkhakim Ismailov, to hoist it atop the Reichstag on May 2nd — three days after the Soviets had captured the key seat of Nazi power. On April 30th 1945, a group of Soviet soldiers had previously  raised a Soviet flag over Reichstag, but it had been brought down by German snipers before any record had been made.

On close examination, the censors noticed that one of the soldiers had a wristwatch on each arm, indicating he had been looting. Khaldei not only removed the watches from the photo, but also darkened the smoke in the background (right) to make his picture more dramatic. The resulting picture was published soon after in the magazine Ogonjok to achieved worldwide fame.

As for the flag-hoister, they didn’t achieve fame and glory they deserved. The state propaganda machine took over and the KGB quietly replaced them (Ismailov was from marginalized Dagestan) with more appropriate substitutes, with a new flag-hoister hailing from Georgia, like Stalin himself. The real participants were told to keep quiet, and the impostors were awarded medals by Stalin; they were even given a new “Victory” car each, although Khaldei relished in the fact that one of them had died just a few months later from drink-driving. Ismailov didn’t received his due credits until the Soviet Union collapsed and truth came out.