Curator Robert Muschalla said he deliberately wanted to provoke with the title of the exhibition -- "Saving: History of a German virtue".

"The idea isn't to say that saving is good or bad, it's about opening a debate on a topic that is seen as self-evident in Germany... saving has become internalised into a habit," he explained.

Like neighbouring France, Prussia and other German states were roiled by emancipatory ideas spread by the Enlightenment thinkers of the time.

But "while the French carried out their Revolution [in 1789], the Germans invented saving" as the foundation of personal autonomy and a means to pay for education, Muschalla pointed out.

To a state that had asked citizens to fund its war effort against Napoleon by exchanging gold jewellery for iron rings, the savings system was a natural bulwark against enemies within and without.

And when World War I broke out in 1914, ordinary citizens' savings again helped foot the bill...

At the heart of the exhibition stands the symbol of what came next -- a replica of the wheelbarrows used to haul stacks of near-worthless banknotes through the streets during the hyperinflation of the early 1920s.

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Exhibition at German Historical Museum charts Germans' mania for saving(http://artdaily.com/news/103911/Exhibition-at-German-Historical-Museum-charts-Germans--mania-for-saving#.WtNIGojwaAs)