Emergency Money - Notgeld in the Image Economy of the German Inflation, 1914-1923

A landmark art historical study of German interwar period, these wildly artful banknotes featured landscapes, folk figures, scenes of violence and humor, and even inflation itself in the form of figures staring into empty purses or animals defecating coins. Until now, art historians have paid to cast new light on the Weimar Republic’s visual culture, as well as the larger relationship between art and money. As Wilkinson shows, Germany’s early twentieth-century economic crisis was also a crisis of culture. Retelling the period’s gripping story through thematic investigations into prevalent A landmark contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century Germany, a book for our own inflationary moment, as the world’s new materialisms confront the specter of this older, more fundamental materialism.

List of contents

Introduction: Full Pockets, Empty Signs 1

1 Land 23
2 Work 67
3 Spooks 115
4 Crisis 169

Epilogue: Necrometabolism 223
Acknowledgments 233
Notes 235
Bibliography 251
Image Credits 262
Index 263

About the author

Tom Wilkinson

Product details

• Authors: Tom Wilkinson, Wilkinson Tom
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 16.01.2024
• EAN: 9780262546805
• ISBN: 978-0-262-54680-5
• No. of pages: 280
• Dimensions: 159 mm x 241 mm x 14 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; HISTORY / Europe / Germany, The arts: general issues, ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945), History of Art, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Inflation