The "mark" was originally a unit of weight. It first entered coinage history around 1500, when it became the basic unit of weight for coins in northern Germany. Those coins were then called "mark" as well. That was how the venerable German mark came into circulation and rose to prominence during the succeeding centuries. But in 1923 not much "prominence" was left – after the First World War, between 1920 and 1923, the German currency collapsed in the famous Great Inflation. In 1922, one dollar was worth over 500 marks already; in the fall of 1923, however, it had risen to 4.2 trillion marks…