The crude and cyclical reality, no matter how better told, is less harsh or less revisited. But what about the luxury of reading it, as a warning, with the prose of Josep Pla? These weeks of triumph of the most radical and denialist postulates of dictatorships like that of Argentina, in a country with skyrocketing inflation, vindicate the need to understand the contexts that, cyclically, sink collective morality (after the economy) in the hands of the ultras.
Pla lived on the ground the German hyperinflation of the 1920s, and that dramatic moment that mortally wounded the Weimar Republic was the historical event that had the greatest impact on him in his entire life. It is at that moment that he became a convinced conservative who would forever value order and stability above all else.
He saw, and collected in these agile chronicles, what happens when monetary value sinks, and how, from there, moral values also tremble. This is how he narrates it in his Notes disperses, volume 12 of the Complete Works. And now the Destino publishing house reissues those articles with a very refined title that, a century later, does not sound extravagant to us: German inflation.
That young Josep Pla portrays here one of those great social and political upheavals that the world has suffered in moments where the instability of horizons becomes unsustainable. But how to draw it in the minds of citizen-readers beyond the macro figures that escape most of us. “It's life, stupid!” Pla tells us. Life in the cities. The everyday.
With his humanistic background, he synthesizes, interprets, at times he becomes lyrical, at times he unleashes his irony, and all this in a few scattered notes that at the time he did not publish in a single volume, as he did when he returned from his trip to Moscow, with the book Russia. USSR News. (A journalistic inquiry) (1925).
However, those German texts have a common thread not only geographical, but also of vital learning. Pla creates his own idea of the city as a literary motif and turns it into a privileged observatory of what was happening in Germany as a whole and in post-war Europe. It becomes impossible, reading it, not to want to be part of the vital and literary route that Pla undertakes in this stage of his life where, in addition, in Berlin, he reunites with his friend Eugeni Xammar, another Catalan cosmopolitan, who was the correspondent of La Veu de Catalunya.
Eugeni Xammar, who in 1923 was already halfway between thirty and forty, was a great support for Pla ten years younger and for whom he acted as an interpreter. Of his chronicles of those years, and of his warnings, also deeply full of good reasons and concern, we have testimony in The Serpent's Egg (Acantilado, 2005).
With similar texts by Pla in hand, it is inevitable to think about it and feel like revisiting this other compilation with all the articles that Xammar published in La Veu de Catalunya and La Publicitat between 1922 and 1925. He also left us masterfully written how that Germany that had to pay an astronomical debt dictated by the Treaty of Versailles was the prelude to the rise of Nazism.
And it is because we have short memories that this book is prescriptive in these times. Because just as we are now experiencing a rise in inflation that we thought would not return, but which has had much worse precedents, Josep Pla's text reminds us of monetary lessons from the 20th century that are more than a question of numbers.
Josep Pla Xavier Pla (ed.) German inflation. Chronicles 1923-1924 / German inflation. Chronicles 1923-1924 Trans. in Spanish by Victoria Pradilla Destino 400 pages 22.90 euros
