That year newspaper readers could again play a variation of the exciting numbers game they had enjoyed during the war, when counts of prisoners and size of booty had dominated the headlines. This time the figures did not refer to military events, in spite of the warlike way the year had begun, but to an otherwise quite uninteresting, everyday item in the financial pages: the exchange rate of the dollar. The fluctuation of the dollar was the barometer by which, with a mixture of anxiety and excitement, we measured the fall of the mark. The higher the dollar went, the more extravagant became our
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