Describe the political and economic instability of Germany's Weimar Republic in the 1920s and contrast it with the decade's brief, fragile prosperity.
Germany's new democratic government, the Weimar Republic, was born out of defeat and saddled from the start with the Treaty of Versailles's War Guilt Clause and reparations, which many Germans saw as a national humiliation rather than a fair settlement. The republic faced attempted uprisings from both the political left and right in its early years, but the true crisis came in 1923: when Germany fell behind on reparations payments, France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland, to seize resources directly. The German government responded by printing money to pay striking Ruhr workers, triggering hyperinflation so extreme that prices could double within hours -- people famously needed wheelbarrows of cash just to buy bread, and an entire middle class watched a lifetime of savings become worthless almost overnight.
The Dawes Plan of 1924 brought a fragile stabilization: American loans helped Germany restructure its reparations payments, ushering in a few years of relative prosperity sometimes called the "Golden Twenties." Elsewhere, especially in the United States, the decade genuinely roared -- new mass culture spread through radio and film, and consumer spending boomed. But warning signs were already present beneath the surface: farmers worldwide struggled with overproduction and falling prices even during the boom, and much of the era's prosperity, especially Germany's, rested on a fragile foundation of American loans that assumed the good times would simply continue.
Mastery looks like: They can explain the causes of the 1923 hyperinflation crisis, describe how the Dawes Plan stabilized (but did not fully secure) the German economy, and name at least one underlying warning sign in the "Golden Twenties."
Common stumbles: Treating the 1920s as simply "the Roaring Twenties" everywhere, without recognizing how differently, and how fragilely, that decade played out in Weimar Germany specifically.