As you read this passage, think about how Ostwald is reacting to social change and what values underlie his characterization of life in the early 1920s.

http://www.indiana.edu/~pb20s/german/week8/morals.htm

Thinking back on the inflationary years an extravagant image of a hellish carnival appears before the eyes:  plunderings and riots, demonstrations and confrontations, profiteering and smuggling, agonizing hunger and gluttonous feasts, sudden impoverishment and rapid enrichment, debauched, maniacal dancing, the horrific misery of children, naked dances, currency conjurers, hoarders of real value, amusement ecstasy—indulgence, materialist worldviews and religious decline, flourishing occultism and clairvoyance—gambling passion, speculation frenzy, an epidemic of divorce, women’s independence, the early maturity of youth, Quaker food, student aid, raids and profiteering trials, jazz bancs, narcotics.

Otto Griebel, Ein Stück europäischer Kulturaufschnitt (A "Slice" of European Culture), 1922

  Truly a dazzling colorful country fair of life!

  One could probably list more catchwords and facts, happenings and circumstances.  What novelty failed to appear!  What a loud, boisterous battle for attention!

   It was a time of intense revaluation—in the economy and culture, in material as well as psychological things.  Rich people who could have afforded all the pleasure in the world were suddenly glad to have someone hand them a bowl of warm soup.  Overnight little apprentices became powerful bank directors and possessed seemingly inexhaustible funds.   Foreigners, some the most impoverished of pensioners at home, could suddenly step out in Germany like princes.

   Everything seemed reversed.

   The family, too, seemed to be in rapid decline.  An ecstasy of eroticism cast the world into chaos.  Many things that otherwise took place in secret appeared openly in the bright light of the public stage.  Above all it was the women who in many respects completely transformed themselves.   They asserted their demands, particularly their sexual demands, much more clearly.  In every conceivable way they intensified their claim to the rights of life and a full range of experience.  Amorous scandals came much more strongly to light.  Some of them served as symbols of the time.  Nudism was no longer confined to specific circles and to theatrical revues and cabarets.  It permeated fashion throughout society:  the pretty leg was discovered and gladly put on display.  Beauty aids were everywhere.  Developments continued.  If during the war women were forced to take over many male jobs, they did not allow themselves afterward to be pushed quite all the way back into the home.  That had its effect on relations between the sexes as well.  And, as the last stage of development, there arose the female bachelor, the woman in charge of her own life, whether unmarried, divorced, or widowed.

  To that was added our experience of the remarkable juvenescence of the woman’s world.  Grandmama, in a practically knee-length skirt and a bobbed hairdo, danced with young men in the clubs, hotels, and cafés—wherever the opportunity presented itself.  And mama danced with friends.  And youthful mademoiselles took the opportunity to dance along—and the children suffered their fears alone at home.