Upswing and stability – that’s what the Germans associate with their currency. The D-Mark has been history for more than 20 years. But it is still present in the minds of many people today.
“The D-Mark is something that some Germans love more than their own wife” – this is how the then Federal Finance Minister Theo Waigel (CSU) summed up the close relationship many Germans have with their currency in October 1997. People have had the euro in their wallets for more than 20 years, but many people still have the D-Mark in their heads: Did the ice cream ball, for which you have to pay up to 2 euros today, not even cost 30 pfennigs? The D-Mark, a symbol of Germany’s economic recovery after World War II, has become a myth.
When the D-Mark was introduced in the western occupation zones on June 21, 1948, store shelves filled up overnight. Traders fetched the goods from the warehouses that they had hoarded because they no longer trusted the previous currency, the Reichsmark. Over time, the D-Mark developed into the world’s second most important reserve and trading currency after the US dollar. The D-Mark is a “symbol of a time when we built our own little house,” said Hamburg behavior therapist Iver Hand in May 2002, a few months after the introduction of euro cash.
However, the hard cut of the currency reform in 1948 was also a shock. The balances of small savers purred together, 100 Reichsmarks in the savings book became 6.50 Deutschmarks. In contrast, wages, rents and taxes were converted at a ratio of 1:1. Each citizen received 40 marks “bounty” and another 20 marks a month later. Ultimately, the shortage of money was the basis of a stable currency, barter and “cigarette currency” on the black market disappeared.
From the GDR mark to the D mark
Decades later, the biggest test for the D-Mark came completely unexpectedly: “If the D-Mark comes, we’ll stay; if it doesn’t, let’s go to it!”, people in East Germany cried out in the autumn of 1989. Even before the political one unit, the D-Mark replaced the DDR-Mark on July 1, 1990, exchange rate: 1:1. Above all, the then Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) pushed for a speedy economic and monetary union – despite warnings from the Bundesbank. The problem: With the introduction of the D-Mark, the planned economy of the dying GDR found itself in the harsh competition of the market economy overnight.
A good eleven years later, at the turn of the year 2001/2002, the euro replaced the D-Mark, Franc, Lira, Schilling and Co. in bills and coins. Euphoria was quickly followed by disillusionment in this country: Many people experienced the euro as “expensive”. Statisticians and economists could argue so strongly: When shopping, in the pub or at the hairdresser’s, consumers could not shake the feeling that D-Mark prices had been converted 1:1 into euros in the course of the currency conversion. The play on words became so popular that “Teuro” became Germany’s “Word of the Year” the very year euro cash was introduced.
Should evil tongues also be right that a common currency with Italians and Greeks, among others, inevitably had to become a soft currency? The then Chancellor Kohl knew about the concerns, as he later openly admitted in an interview: “We would very likely have lost a referendum on the introduction of the euro and the abolition of the D-Mark.”
A comma of great importance
Which currency is the harder: D-Mark or Euro? The last Bundesbank President of the D-Mark era, Hans Tietmeyer, who died in 2016, related the anecdote that at the end of the 1990s, on the occasion of the introduction of the euro, he asked the oracle of Delphi which currency would be more stable in the long term: the D -mark or the euro. He received the answer: “The mark, not the euro.” He didn’t find out where the comma was in the sentence, whether before or after the “not”.
In fact, the euro has proven to be a stable currency. In the 25 years of its existence, the European Central Bank (ECB) has achieved its target of an average annual inflation rate of two percent. According to surveys by the European Union, the euro has broad approval: more than 80 percent of Germans and more than 70 percent of Europeans support the common currency.
But euro skepticism and a longing for the D-Mark have by no means disappeared. However, the former ECB chief economist Otmar Issing considers the desire for the return of the D-Mark to be nostalgia, as he said in 2018: “It is sparked by the price of the Maß beer at the Oktoberfest in Munich, and people then forget that D -Mark times this price has been increasing year after year.”
The explanation for what at first glance appears to be an outrageously high price for a scoop of ice cream is complex: higher wages and thus higher purchasing power, higher raw material and energy prices for manufacturers, more bureaucracy.
Anyone who still has old stocks of D-Marks or finds them by accident – for example in the case of an inheritance – can usually no longer buy anything with them anyway. However, the exchange into euros is possible at the Bundesbank for an unlimited period.
Source: Stern
