Warburg Director's Seminar & Book Launch - 'Emergency Money: Notgeld of the German Inflation 1914-1923'

Tom Wilkinson (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Respondent: Jenny Nachtigall (University College London)

The German inflation of 1914-1923 was not just an economic crisis: it was also a crisis of culture. In his new book, Emergency Money: Notgeld in the Image Economy of the German Inflation (MIT, 2024), Tom Wilkinson uses one particular – and very peculiar – object to open a window onto this nexus. From the start of WWI, emergency money or Notgeld was printed by towns all over Germany to compensate for a lack of small change. As inflation took hold, it was issued in increasingly vast quantities and denominations. Designed by local artists (some of them prominent figures), Notgeld looked strikingly unlike conventional money: local landscapes and landmarks adorn these notes, as do witches and devils, humorous and violent scenes, and anti-Semitic caricatures. There are also examples referring explicitly to the inflation, with figures staring into empty purses, charts representing rising infant mortality, and animals and humans defecating coins, making the status of money in this period very clear. Beyond its historical significance, emergency money opens the door to a much bigger question, that of the relationship between visual culture and economics. This was thrown into stark relief in what has been called ‘the crisis of classical modernity’, when old cultural values seemed to plummet just as rapidly as the Reichsmark. These notes are sites in which artists and designers attempted to renegotiate the relationship between aesthetic value and exchange value, which was not just a theoretical concern preoccupying thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno in this period – as these notes show, it was deeply entwined in the business of everyday life. 

Tom Wilkinson is an art historian specialising in German visual culture and modern architecture. Currently a research associate at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, he has previously been a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute and at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Warburg Institute. 

Jenny Nachtigall is a lecturer in History of Art, Modernity and its Critical Histories at University College London. She specialises in modern and contemporary art in its global contexts with a focus on the German interwar period. Her monograph Form as Contradiction is forthcoming with Brill.

This event is part of the Warburg Director's Seminar series, which brings leading scholars and writers to the Institute to share new work and fresh perspectives on key issues in their fields.

ATTENDANCE FREE WITH ADVANCE BOOKING