Germany has just surrendered after four years of the most savage warfare in history. It is teetering on the brink of total social and economic collapse, and the German people now lie at the mercy of new, liberal politicians who despise everything Germany once stood for. The Communists are rioting in the streets, threatening to topple the new government in Weimar and bring about their own revolution. The frontline soldiers are returning from the hell of the war to find an unrecognizable land, the principles and traditions they had sacrificed so much to defend now the stuff of mockery. The narrator of The Outlaws, a 16-year-old military cadet, is too young to have served in the trenches, but feels the sting of this betrayal no less than they. Since Germany's armies have been all but disbanded, he joins the paramilitary Freikorps - groups of veterans who refuse to lay down their arms, and who have pledged to stop the Communists - and begins fighting, first in the streets of Germany's cities, and then in the Baltic states, defending Germany's eastern frontiers from Communist subversion while ignoring the calls to disengage by the meek politicians at home. After months of intense fighting abroad, the Freikorps soldiers return to settle scores with their enemies in Germany, dreaming of a nationalist counter-revolution, and, their trigger fingers still itchy, fix their sights on bringing down the hated new government once and for all... The Outlaws is a chronicle of the experiences of the men who fought in the Freikorps, but it is also an adventure and a war story about an entire generation of soldiers who loved their homeland more than peace and comfort, and who refused to accept defeat at any price. "What we wanted we did not know; but what we knew we did not want. To force a way through the prisoning wall of the world, to march over burning fields, to stamp over ruins and scattered ashes, to dash recklessly through wild forests, over blasted heaths, to push, conquer, eat our way through towards the East, to the white, hot, dark, cold land that stretched between ourselves and Asia - was that what we wanted? I do not know whether that was our desire, but that was what we did. And the search for reasons why was lost in the tumult of continuous fighting." - p. 65 Ernst von Salomon (1902-1972) was one of the writers of the German Conservative Revolution of the 1920s. Like the narrator of The Outlaws, he was a military cadet at the end of the First World War, and joined the Freikorps, participating in many of the events described in the book, including the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, for which he was imprisoned. He went on to write many books and film scripts.

    Continuously in print since 1932, Ortega's vision of Western culture as sinking to its lowest common denominator and drifting toward chaos brought its author international fame and has remained one of the influential books of the 20th century.

    Also, to keep him a young man instead of a doddering gray-beard. It is like reading a series of entrancing short stories with the added interest of logical sequence. Your erudition is amazing, and it is presented in a manner that lures one on and on, as well as inducing the pleasant belief that one is learning something really worth while." -- Gertrude Atherton

    This definitive, large-scale study explains the fate of business under one of the 20th century's most egregious inflations.Its history is deeply scientific. Graham covers the hyperinflation's origins in the crushing World War I reparations imposed by the Allies on Germany, the political factors that led to the choice of inflation as a way out, the regulation of business under inflation, price controls and their enforcement, the measurement of inflation, the effects on production, the devastation of national income, the gutting of genuine entrepreneurship, the losses on foreign trade, and the surprising winners from the wholesale looting, among many other considerations.This period presents a very strange paradox: business was booming during the inflation as never before. Bankruptcies were actually falling and new businesses were forming everywhere. And yet, looked at as a whole, the entire economic structure was being wiped out.Professor Graham resolves the paradox, showing how inflation creates a world in which the distinction between reality and illusion gets lost. Trading, speculation, working, and economic activity in general might have risen, but productivity, income, and economic well-being were being destroyed in the process. Economic activity was entirely diverted from production and wealth creation to consumption and speculation.Exchange, Prices, and Production in Hyper-Inflation ends with the ominous note that the main mystery yet to be decided concerned what the politics of the situation had in store. These political implications — "an inscrutable mystery" to Graham — were yet to be revealed by the time this book went to print in 1930. The mystery to be revealed in time was of course the rise of Hitler.To search for Mises Institute titles, enter a keyword and LvMI (short for Ludwig von Mises Institute); e.g., Depression LvMI