The Weimar Republic in its last days as seen and remembered by a five-year-old English boy. A long-standing member of the Historical Association remembers an experience from eighty years ago.

As Mrs Merkel is well aware, the fear of inflation is deeply embedded in the German folk memory. Eighty years ago, in the summer of 1932, I saw for myself some of the poverty and unrest which  marked the decades after the Great War - as we called the First World War.

I was only five years old but the contrast between life in a quiet London suburb and what I saw and heard in Germany was memorable. I was staying with my parents in Bad Homburg, a handsome and once prosperous watering place which would come into its own again. My father was teaching at the old-established Kaiserin-Friedrich-Gymnasium on an exchange with a German schoolmaster.

The "K.F.G.", as it is now known, was then in the centre of town and our lodgings were just across the street in an apartment block. I could watch all the comings and goings from the window. It was high summer and the school day started in the cool of the early morning, with a break for breakfast, and it was all finished by one o'clock in the afternoon. This was just as well because in 1932 there was a heat wave and sunbathing was all the rage...