雅思阅读材料：德国人喜欢回忆_雅思英语阅读

雅思阅读材料：德国人喜欢回忆

　　He might get a shock if the entire nation took up his offer: according to the central bank, there are currently some 13.45 billion marks, the equivalent of roughly $8.7 billion, still to be handed in, squirreled away presumably under mattresses or in drawers, wallets or safety deposit boxes. Thats about 110 marks, or $70, for every one of Germanys 80 million people.

　　Currencies, of course, are not just about money and, far more than in many lands, a chunk of recent German history has been inscribed on its bank notes.

　　In 1948, currency reform replaced the reichsmark, or imperial mark, with new marks, not once, but twice over one for the Allied-occupied West and one for the Soviet-dominated East.

　　As the two Germanies grew ever more estranged, their bank notes mirrored their distinctions, reflecting what was called the abgrenzungspolitik, whereby East Germans laid claim to all that was good in Germanys tortured history and ascribed the bad to the capitalist West.

　　Though technically worthless in the West as the inconvertible currency of a state-controlled economy, so-called Ost-marks proudly bore the portraits of Goethe and Schiller along with those of Marx and Engels.

　　Across Europe, indeed, bank notes offered microcosms of national self-image. Symbols of inventiveness and lan, French banknotes portrayed the Curies, even though Marie Curie was Polish by birth, and the aviator Antoine de St. Exupry. Printed in fine shadings of blue, green and brown, Portuguese escudo bills celebrated the navigators who plied the oceans in their wooden ships, making landfall in Africa, India and the Americas.