White clouds are surging, and the red sun is in the sky. The blazing afternoon sun envelops the city of Berlin like a flame, and the cicadas chirp sharply in the green street trees, as if they can't stand the scorching heat of late June. The open streets are sparsely populated, and these people are in a hurry; Most of the shops lining the streets are closed, and I wonder if it's because of the current heat, or because the petty bourgeoisie who run the shops have gone bankrupt and closed down in the midst of this year's looting inflation, and can no longer afford to make ends meet?

In the midst of a closed door, a café more than three times the size of an ordinary store is still open; Its exterior signage and décor are clearly high-end and affluent, and the interior furnishings that can be seen through the glass doors are all exquisite and neat. However, it seems to have been affected by hyperinflation, and at the moment there are only a few tables of customers in this huge café, which seems quite deserted; And the things they ordered were also rare and ordinary, and there was no such exuberant consumption as before.

Colin, the proprietor in his fifties, stood behind the counter of his shop, his face with conspicuous bags under his eyes a little bitter and gloomy; He sighed slightly, and closed the pages of the account book in front of him. Judging by the current hot weather, there will be no more guests coming all afternoon today. Although his café is a great place for people to escape the summer heat by putting ice cubes around it to cool off, how many people can still sit in this upscale clubhouse for an afternoon? With the exchange rate of the mark falling below 400 million to 1 against the dollar, tens of millions of Germans are starving, and there are very few people who can afford this ordinary expense!

As he gritted his teeth and cursed the Weimar government and the greedy and brutal Allied bandits, a figure suddenly pushed open the door of the café and walked in. He was overjoyed, and hurriedly raised his head to greet the visitor, and when his gaze met the visitor, Colin couldn't help but lose his mind for a moment.

This is a tall young man, with a face as delicate as the glazed diamond jade in the royal palace of the church; The neat and tidy outfit with a slightly wheat-colored fair skin makes the whole person look like a piece of warm jade, which makes people feel sincere envy and praise at first glance. And the most striking thing is not his handsome and elegant appearance: in his bright blue star eyes, there is a calmness and maturity that is quite inconsistent with his age, so that people no longer pay attention to his childish and youthful face in scrutiny.

"What type of coffee do you need?" The young waitress standing behind the counter with the boss Colin asked with a polite smile, and his eyes couldn't help but look at the young man's body a few more times. The other party held a rather thick book in his hand, as if he was ready to spend a long time here. Seeing this, the young waiter's brows furrowed imperceptibly.

The young man smiled, and his clear voice was like a dingdong mountain spring flowing through the bluestone: "Please bring me a cup of Grant black coffee, plus a bacon patty and potato soup, and I will have lunch here." He looked at the blackboard next to the counter with a long list of zeros on the menu price, and a look of gloom and loss flashed in his eyes; After a few moments, he pulled a silver coin out of his pocket and placed it on the counter in front of him.

"What is this?" The waiter looked at the coin the size of a pigeon's egg, and did not react for a while, but the boss next to him, Colin, was ecstatic, staring at the English letters on it without blinking, and said in a trembling voice: "This is a 10 cent, 10 cent coin!" He reached out and gently rubbed the portrait of Jefferson on the front of the coin, and his face was full of smirks of joy and excitement; It wasn't until the boy let out a low cough that Colin reacted and said to Fang Yan in an extremely deferential tone: "Guest, please rest assured, we are a 50-year-old restaurant, and our food service will definitely satisfy you." With that, he carefully put the coin into his underwear pocket, and then led the boy himself to an ideal seat by the window. When Colin returned to the back of the counter, it was clear to the boy that the elderly shopkeeper had turned a 360-degree ballet step because he was so excited.

Naturally, Boss Colin's unusual behavior also fell into the eyes of the other tables in the store. In the face of the astonished or admiring gazes that were thrown at him, the young man just calmly opened the book he was carrying, and after a moment of silence, he finally let out a long sigh, and there was no trace of joy on his handsome face.

This young man is naturally Fang Yan.

In July, the middle school in Berlin has already given all teachers and students a month-long vacation, but this time, Fang Yan does not plan to return to his home in Hamburg. Today, he has only his last year of secondary school left, and he is not far from graduating. Although education in Germany did not require only one crucial college entrance examination, as in later days, it was not easy for him to get into the Milvik School, which specialized in training naval officers. You must know that under the strict restrictions of the "Treaty of Versailles", the German Navy, with a total number of only 15,000 officers, had only 1,500 officers, and the number of places reserved for cadets and new ensigns was even rarer.

In addition, another reason why he is not ready to go home as usual is that his cheap daddy Rudolph is so busy that he can hardly be seen at home. The current severe inflation in Germany, although it has caused a devastating disaster for more than 99% of the people, is a great opportunity for the Brom family to expand their power. For no other reason, with the reduction of the mark to waste paper, currencies such as the US dollar with gold protection have become absolutely transcendent; They do not depreciate with the frenzy of the German government's printing press, and the weight and significance of this in the transaction is self-evident.

Since the second half of 1920, Rudolph, who had received a large injection of dollars, was at home in Germany, where the mark was rapidly depreciating; This year's mark has depreciated 100 times faster than before, and Rudolph, who relied on Walter's Ponzi scheme in North America, has entered a treasure trove of gold. At a very small cost, he was able to merge powerful small and medium-sized enterprises, and at the same time buy a large number of shares in those industrial giants, so that the family power under his control expanded dramatically. Fang Yan's visit to this café is the best illustration of the dollar's transcendent status in a country where the monetary system has collapsed: he paid less than a tenth of the peacetime price to make the owner, who had been ravaged by inflation, offer him like a god!

For this monetary disaster, which looted almost all Germans' life savings, Fang Yan from later generations is also clear about the reasons for its occurrence. In addition to the French and Belgian seizures of the Ruhr industrial area, which led to the massive loss of German wealth, the main culprits lie with the Weimar government and a group of domestic industrial giants.

In the First World War, which lasted more than four years, the German government spent a total of 164 billion marks on the war; With the exception of the 29 billion marks of gold collateral, the rest was financed by the issuance of wartime bonds and the issuance of additional banknotes. By the end of the war, the German government owed the population a public debt of 93 billion marks, more than 70% of the total reparations in the Treaty of Versailles. However, due to the weakness of its own ruling base, the new Weimar Republic did not dare to raise taxes on the domestic industrial giants to balance the budget; So starting the printing press became the only "good strategy" they could take since 1919.

Thereafter, at the instigation of the big industrialists and the big landowners, the government deliberately allowed the mark to collapse, in order to enable the country to escape the 93 billion marks of the internal public debt, and at the same time to plunder the wealth from the population in order to support the "passive resistance" of the Ruhr region and the French mischief. The collapse of the mark was also a good thing for the big industrialists and big landowners: after the war they had taken a lot of loans from the state and the banks for the reconstruction of their enterprises, and they were also heavily indebted on their books, and if the mark depreciated significantly, they would be able to pay off the debts with waste paper-like money. The collapse of the Mark was equally beneficial to the Army, another pillar of the German government in addition to the big industrialists; In this way, the government will be able to clear its public debt to the country and devote itself to the preparations for the next war in the best possible condition without any involvement, and the appropriations for the army will inevitably be unusually generous in the future because of a debt-free and light government.

However, at the same time that these top leaders benefited, the German population was economically destroyed. Countless families have gone bankrupt and fallen into abject poverty, and hungry people are wailing and struggling; At the same time, foreigners flocked to Germany and looted their art, treasures and other wealth at staggering prices. A few dozen dollars can lead to a king's life in Germany. As for the greed and insensitivity of the Republic and the industrialists, Fang Yan, who is also the profiteer and even the biggest profiteer in this monetary disaster, cannot do anything to prevent or reveal the dirty background of this, and the only thing he can do is to push Rudolph to eat as much profit as possible, so as to gain the strength to overthrow these big industrialists one day.