The disaster unleashed by a weak Government turning to the money printing to fund World War One war reparations has lodged a “race memory” of inflation wariness, according to Frederick Taylor, author of The Downfall of Money.

Whereas the very rich had access to foreign currency and could profit from hyperinflation by buying up swathes of the economy, it had a “particular toxicity” for the middle classes without that advantage. Traumatic defeat, the fall of the Kaiser and the advent of a socialist republic upset decades of pre-war stability between the professional classes and the aristocracy, widening the economic gap. 

He says: “Certainly talking to various German academics and middle class folk, often there’s family legends, going back two or three generations into the era of the hyperinflation talking about the terrific misfortune to the family which only just survived sufficiently to rebound once the inflation was over.

“These are the sorts of people who go to universities, who get doctorates, and who write for newspapers,” Taylor says. 

The attacks on the ECB for slamming German savers are in a similar vein to the tone of the Eurozone crisis a decade ago, the author adds – the attitude that “we are supporting all these dodgy unstable countries with our money”. 

Inflation fears started with Weimar, but did not finish there. Other episodes include the 1948 post-Second World War currency reforms which introduced the Deutsche Mark but initially triggered a burst of inflation. The reunification of Germany in 1990 prompted a flood of cash from east to west, and rising prices, which prompted a nervous Bundesbank to raise interest rates sharply.

Albrecht Ritschel, a professor of economic history at the LSE, says the nation’s dependence on banks and ultra safe bonds heightens the inflation phobia as most older Germans – more typical newspaper buyers – would regard investing in stocks, exchange traded funds or cryptocurrencies as “the devil’s work”.

“Germans of an older generation are very risk averse and not very literate financially. The typical German couple rents their apartment, or has a 25 year fixed mortgage, puts all their savings into bank accounts, and expects the state to shelter them from financial risks,” he says.

“All this has historical reasons. The public was made to believe that only bank accounts and treasury bonds are the right way to invest. Civil servants, of which there are many, were for a long time even banned from holding stock.”