I’m a high school student currently taking a 20th Century World History class and today we discussed the hyperinflation that Weimar Republic experienced in 1923 and Stresemann’s solutions.
We were told that Stresemann changed the currency, stopped printing paper money and managed to expel the French from the Ruhr area which drastically reduced hyperinflation.
However, how is it possible that by just changing the currency hyperinflation was reduced? Especially since the Weimar economy was barely changed so wouldn’t that mean that the factors that caused hyperinflation in the first place were still at play even after changing currency?
Although popular conventions call the interwar German currency Marks, there were different types of currencies at work here. The hyperinflation of 1923 involved a currency called the Papiermark. This was a form of currency that had no real concrete backing such as gold to prop up its value. The complex fiscal situation of the Weimar Republic in which both the legacy wartime fiscal decisions as well as Allied demands from the Versailles Treaty and the German government's reaction to them led to Papiermark losing its actual value. This led to the period of hyperinflation in which the government printed out Papiermarks of insane values, such as the 5 billion Mark. This created a period of acute political crisis as savings were wiped out and radical outliers to the postwar political scene gained in prominence. Among the latter groups was a hitherto marginal Bavarian far right group, the NSDAP which launched its failed takeover of Bavaria, the Beer Hall Putsch, in this period.
The way out of this "witch's sabbath," as one German economic historian put it, was through a new currency to be put into circulation. The Papiermark was replaced by the Rentenmark and the older currency could be exchanged at a rate of 1 Rentenmark for 1 Trillion (!) Papiermark. The Rentenmark was backed by a hypothetical mortgage on German agricultural and industrial property and limited to 3.2 billion Rentenmarks. The Rentenmark was only an interim currency; it could not be circulated out of Germany and its main purpose was to drive out the Papiermark and restore fiscal sanity. This took a little bit of time, but by 1924, the Reichsmark (RM) replaced the Rentenmark as the national currency of Germany.
The RM remained the main currency of Germany through the Republic and Third Reich. The Nazis' economic policies which prioritized rearmament at insane levels for a peacetime economy potentially could have resurrected the specter of hyperinflation, but Hitler was very keen on placating public expectations for a sound currency. Thus the dictatorship adapted various schemes such as MEFO bills (a shell game with the Reichsbank to pay for rearmament), wage freezes, and other schemes that gave the appearance of stability. The reality was the RM had become hostage to German militarism and expansionism once the balloon went up in 1939. It held value only if Germany was winning the war. The Allied occupation continued to print RM in their occupation zones after 1945, but some (although not all) of the same factors of the early 1920s were at play in the post-1945 period and the solution to the danger of a valueless currency was replacement by a new one. Cooperation between the Anglo-American zones and the emerging West German government led to the creation of the Deutsche Mark in 1948 while the Soviet controlled Eastern zone followed suit with what became popularly known as the Ost-Mark.
Another reason is that no, the factors causing the hyperinflation weren't at play anymore. The immediate crisis was created by reckless increases of the money supply to pay striking Ruhr workers, so in ceasing this and coming with an accommodation with the French and Belgians to end the occupation, the government and Reichsbank were able to begin the processes that u/kieslowskifan outlined. Hyperinflation is also something that is self-perpetuating in that people believe the currency has little to no value, and will quickly lose whatever value it has, so quickly spend it which in turn fuels even more inflation. Taking drastic steps is a way of shocking things out of that feedback loop.
Another factor is that the end of the hyperinflation crisis was also accompanied by a revision of the Treaty reparations settlement and its payments, and connected to this a new flood of (largely US) capital into the German economy through loans. Hyperinflation in this case (and generally) is never simply a currency crisis, but a wider economic and political crisis. While the introduction of the Rentenmark helped solve the specific currency problems, it wouldn't have meant a thing if the wider economic and political crises also were not dealt with.