Excuse me, but your history textbooks are farcically wrong. Or possibly your imagination is. The economy of A-H collapsed so thoroughly that there were famines

Excuse me, but your history textbooks are farcically wrong. Or possibly your imagination is. The economy of A-H collapsed so thoroughly that there were famines and bread riots. Too many men and horses were sacrificed in war and the relatively backward agriculture could not be sustained by the women, kids and the elderly who were left. Hunger was one of the immediate reasons for the collapse - it was impossible to prevent the soldiers on the frontlines from knowing that their loved ones back home were starving, and by October 1918, mutinies and mass desertions were widespread. The countries that emerged from the collapse were often hostile to one another, which not only led to border skirmishes, but to introduction of wanton tariffs and regulations that broke precisely the economic ties that you mentioned. For example, the textile industry in German-speaking Bohemian borderlands (Sudeten) used to export its products into a 55-million common market freely. Suddenly, this market shrank to 14 million (Czechoslovak population after 1918), some 30 per cent of its former size, as countries like Hungary, Poland and Romania introduced protectionist measures. The resulting unhappiness of suddenly-much-poorer Sudeten Germans was later expertly exploited by Adolf Hitler. Also, in many places, there was hyperinflation that wiped out life savings of the middle class, contributing to growth of political extremism.