In the scorching summer of 1990, seven months after they toppled the Berlin Wall, 16 million East Germans took a crash course in capitalism.
German unification, set for October 3rd, was still three months away when the day of currency union arrived on July 1st.
East Germans were allowed swap their cash 1:1 for West German Deutschmarks, a generous exchange rate that came with two conditions. First: they had had only a week to do so, after which their cash would be worthless. Second: amounts over 6,000 eastern marks would be exchanged at 2:1.
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That is the starting point for Zwei zu Eins (Two to One), a summer comedy hit film starring German Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller.
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Six months after playing a callous death camp commander’s wife in The Zone of Interest, East German-born Hüller plays Maren, a cheery easterner who stumbles into an unusual heist.
When she and her neighbours notice trucks passing nightly through their hometown of Halberstadt, they decide to investigate. In an underground shaft they find East Germany’s defunct cash cache – and decide to take away as much as they can carry. But is it theft? The cash will cease to be legal tender in a few days – and the issuing state will cease to exist three months later.
As Maren worries, her neighbour Kate mixes Aristotelian logic with Marxist doctrine: “What belonged to the state belonged to us, ours was an economy that belonged to the people. And because we are the people, it belongs to us.”
With touches of the Ealing comedy Whiskey Galore and Ireland’s Waking Ned, Two to One recaptures the madness of East Germany in the summer of 1990: the queues in banks, the run in the shops and the dreams of easterners of a better life.
At the heart of the fictional film is a real, expensive problem facing the East German state bank in 1990. As cash-strapped as East Germany itself, the bank was expected to eliminate an estimated 3,000 tonnes of useless banknotes. The cost-effective solution it found was to bunker the money instead in an underground shaft in Halberstadt.
A decade later Germany’s state-owned KfW bank, now responsible for the shaft and its contents, learned from collectors that pristine 200 and 500 mark GDR banknotes were in circulation. As these denominations had been stored in East Berlin vaults, and rarely put into circulation, the KfW realised the notes could only have come from Halberstadt.
An inspection of the site revealed holes in the walls. Inside, instead of rotting as expected, the bank notes were in pristine condition thanks to the cool vault atmosphere.
The KfW state moved in to retrieve the GDR bank notes. In early 2002, 298 truckloads’ worth were removed, shredded and finally burnt at 1,200 degrees: two to one to nothing.
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