There is not much to add.  It pounds daily on the nerves:  the insanity of numbers, the uncertain future, today, and tomorrow become doubtful once more overnight.  An epidemic of fear, naked need:  lines of shoppers, long since an unaccustomed sight, once more form in frontof shops, first in front of one, then in front of all.  No disease is as contagious as this one.  The lines have something suggestive about them:  the women’s glances, their hastily donned kitchen dresses, their careworn, patient faces.  The lines always send the same signal:  the city, the big stone city will be shopped empty again.  Rice, 80,000 marks a pound yesterday, costs 160,000 marks today, and tomorrow perhaps twice as much; the day after, the man behind the counter will shrug his shoulders, “No more rice.” Well then, noodles!  “No more noodles.”  Barley, groats, beans, lentils—always the same, buy buy, buy.  The piece of paper, the spanking brand-new bank note, still moist from the printers, paid out today as a weekly wage, shrinks in value on the way to the grocer’s shop.   The zeros, the multiplying zeros!  Well, zero, zero ain’t nothing.”

They rise with the dollar, the, desperation, and need—daily emotions like daily rates of exchange.  The , just 1,400,000 marks.”  This is no joke; this is reality written seriously with a pencil, hungrising dollar beings mockery and laughter:  “Cheaper butter!  Instead of 1,600,000 marks in the shop window, and seriously read.
 

Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994, p. 63.