History
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic refers to the democratic government established in Germany after World War I, lasting from 1919 to 1933. It faced significant challenges, including economic instability, political extremism, and social unrest. Despite its efforts to promote democracy and modernization, the Weimar Republic ultimately succumbed to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
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eBook - ePub- Tim Kirk(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
SECTION IPolitics and the State: the Weimar Republic and the Rise of Nazism
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1. Weimar Republic: Introduction
In 1918 Germany was in a state of considerable upheaval. The war had been lost, and although the country was not occupied, as in 1945, peace terms were to be imposed by the Entente: territory would be lost, and reparations demanded. In addition, the strains of war had led to industrial unrest and, eventually, to a political revolution which would bring about the internal collapse of the German Empire.The informal domestic peace (Burgfrieden ) agreed in 1914 between the labour movement and Germany's ruling class had been eroded by the cumulative effects of material deprivation on the morale of the German population during the war. The divergent expectations of the parties involved in the ‘truce’ were exposed: the left had agreed to the truce in the expectation of internal political reform; the nationalist and conservative right hoped for a victorious peace which would obviate the need to reform the domestic political system. In July 1917 the increasing political polarisation within Germany was formalised when the left of centre parties (who supported transformation of the empire into a parliamentary constitutional monarchy) tabled a resolution in the Reichstag demanding peace without annexations. These parties were to form the political nucleus of ‘Weimar’ or ‘republican’ parties after the end of the war. On the other hand, the Fatherland Party, supported by Hindenburg, Ludendorff, army and industry had over a million members by 1918. This political grouping would form the nucleus of the nationalist and conservative opponents of the republic.The dismissal of the Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, and his replacement by a civil servant, Georg Michaelis, also in July 1917 strengthened the quasi-dictatorial power of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. At the same time, however, industrial unrest and political disaffection were intensifying. In April 1917 there were mass strikes across Germany, and the labour movement split when Hugo Haase left the SPD to form the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). Further mass strikes broke out in January 1918, within weeks of the October revolution in Petrograd. It was the Bolshevik revolution, however, and the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, which helped to contain the situation, albeit temporarily. Troops were transferred from the eastern front to France, but the Allies too had reinforcements (from the United States) and the new German offensive was repulsed and the tide of the war turned decisively against Germany by September.
eBook - ePub- Mark Allinson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
3 Weimar – a scapegoat republic 1918–33 DOI: 10.4324/9780203784938-3Timeline9 November 1918 Germany declared a republic 11 November 1918 Armistice ends the First World War 28 June 1919 Versailles Treaty signed 11 August 1919 Weimar constitution takes force March 1920 Kapp-Putsch 1923 Hyperinflation crisis 8–9 November 1923 Hitler’s ‘beer hall’ putsch attempt 26 April 1925 Hindenburg elected Reichspräsident October 1929 Wall Street Crash 29 March 1930 Collapse of parliamentary-based government 21 August 1930 Young Plan ratified to regulate Germany’s war reparations payments until 1988 30 January 1933 Hindenburg appoints Hitler as Reichskanzler The shock of the First World War transformed politics and society in the defeated countries. The fall of ancient dynasties left a vacuum, enabling those spearheading the new ideologies which had developed in the preceding decades to strive for power. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks began building a new Russia on the basis of Marxist socialism – an experiment which inspired the left throughout Europe, but initially failed to put down roots outside the old tsarist empire. Conversely, ‘anti-modern’ and nationalist, anti-Marxist visions of community brought fascists to power in Italy under Benito Mussolini by 1922 and inspired similar movements throughout the continent, some (as in Germany) with expansionist aims and strong overtones of racial superiority. Political radicalism was encouraged by democracy’s failure to master the difficult postwar economic conditions, particularly after the collapse of the American Wall Street markets in October 1929, which sparked a general recession.In 1918, Germany’s defeat in the First World War gave the country its first opportunity since 1848 to devise a democratic system for a national state unencumbered by Prussian dominance and the Kleinstaaterei of the old monarchical system. This vision proved unattractive to the many Germans who resented what appeared to be the imposition of democracy as the price of peace by a victorious foe (the United States of America), and particularly to the many who had prospered under the Kaiserreich
eBook - ePub- Robert Cole(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Interlink Books(Publisher)
CHAPTER TENThe Weimar Republic, 1919-1933‘The Weimar Republic, Germany’s first bid for democracy, failed,’ wrote Holger Herwig. Why? Because the military and bureaucracy remained unchanged from the Second Empire, class interest and factionalism took precedence over national interest in both the political process and Reichstag proceedings, divisive economic issues were never fully resolved, and resentment over the Versailles Treaty, the ‘Germany was stabbed in the back by traitors at home’ argument, was never laid to rest. In the end, Weimar Germany accepted an Austrian, Adolf Hitler, as its leader.Making the Republic Wilhelm II abdicated on 9 November 1918. Chancellor Prince Max von Baden handed his office over to Majority Socialist leader Friedrich Ebert, and the Weimar Republic was born. CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLYEighty-three per cent of eligible voters turned out for the general election on 19 January 1919. The object was creation of a constituent assembly to both make a new constitution and govern the new Republic. The results revealed a divided Germany. No single party or even a coalition emerged with a majority: Majority Socialists won 165 seats, Independents 22, German Democrats (for which Albert Einstein voted) 75, the Centre 91, German Nationalists 44, and Populists (National Liberals) 19. Even so, on 10 February the assembly gave Ebert the presidency ofthe Republic by a margin of277 to 51. He then formed the ‘Weimar Coalition’ by assembling a government with members from left and centre.Making a constitution was the first item on the constituent assembly agenda. Law professor and liberal Hugo Preuss was assigned to get things started. He did, emphasizing democracy and parliamentary representation ‘with a high degree of centralization.’ This did not suit everyone, and the debates were fierce and divisive. The particularism that had been part of German history for more than a thousand years was far from dead, and the constitution finally agreed upon and ratified on 11 August 1919 combined a unitary state with recognition of at least the existence of individual states. The unitary principle was central to the first clause, titled ‘Reich and States,’ which opened with a line that to Herwig sounded like ‘a formula worthy of Alice in Wonderland’ It read: ‘The German Reich is a Republic. Political authority emanates from the people.’ The clause went on to specify that the German States (twenty-five in number and referred to as Länder) were required to submit to the authority of the Reich , to institute republican state governments, to recognize that sovereignty was concentrated in the nationally elected parliament, and to accept direct taxation being in the hands of the Reich.
eBook - ePubWeimar Thought
A Contested Legacy
- Peter E. Gordon, John P. McCormick, Peter E. Gordon, John P. McCormick, Peter Gordon, John McCormick(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
As Heinrich August Winkler observed in his monumental history of the Weimar Republic, the collapse of Germany’s first experiment with democracy is also the first chapter in the catastrophe of world history; no treatment of the period 1918–33 can entirely ignore our knowledge of its aftermath. Although the Weimar era should not be seen as a mere antechamber to the violent age that followed, the historical study of the Weimar era is itself, inevitably “a work of mourning.” 6 We have tried in this book to recognize this tragic dimension even while we also want to resist the teleological impulse that would emphasize only those aspects of Weimar thought that seem to forecast the rise of National Socialism. _________ The essays included in this volume are presented in four parts. The essays comprising Part I focus on law, politics, and society in the Weimar Republic, or, more specifically, on intellectual engagements with these topics during the interwar era. David Kettler and Colin Loader examine the status of the fledgling but burgeoning field of sociology from the waning days of the Kaiserreich through the last moments of the Republic. Two intellectual giants who did not live very long into the Republic’s founding, Max Weber and Georg Simmel, set the agenda for the study of society in Weimar. Indeed, as Kettler and Loader suggest, it was the early demise of Weber and Simmel that permitted their heirs, most prominently Karl Mannheim, to render their writings canonical and to pursue the questions of modernity, rationalization, capitalism and the relationship of ideas and ideology to those phenomena with something like a common language—if not a language that facilitated intellectual consensus on any of these themes
eBook - ePubWeimar Publics/Weimar Subjects
Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s
- Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, Kristin McGuire, Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, Kristin McGuire(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Berghahn Books(Publisher)
104Notes
1 . Peter Gay, Weimar Culture (Middlesex, UK, 1968), xi–xiii; Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History (London, 1974); and John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety 1917–1933 (New York, 1978).2 . The term “born with a hole in its heart” is from Arthur Rosenberg’s Entstehung der Weimarer Republik and Geschichte der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt a.M., 1955).3 . The German “special path” is best presented by Hans-Ulich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich (Göttingen, 1973), and Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (Garden City, NY, 1967). The first collection of studies critical of Wehler’s argument was published in the essay collection edited by Richard J. Evans, Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978). Influential monographs that followed include: Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, CT, 1980), and David Blackbourn, Class, Religion, and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Württemberg Before 1914 (New Haven, CT, 1980).4 . Also see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984).5 . Detlef J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic , trans. Richard Deveson (New York, 1989), xiii. Peukert’s study was published in German in 1987. For an excellent essay on Peukert’s notions of both modernity and crisis, see David F. Crew, “The Pathologies of Modernity: Detlev Peukert on Germany’s Twentieth Century,” Social History 17, no. 2 (May 1992): 319–28.6 . Peukert, Weimar Republic , 273–82.7 . Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 2001 [1968]).8 . On the place of the Weimar Republic in Germany’s twentieth century, see Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories
eBook - ePub- Frank McDonough(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
This deeply unstable politically diffuse political environment might have been compensated for by the support of the judiciary and the army for democracy. Yet the judges of Weimar, drawn from the old Conservative upper class, were anti-democratic in outlook almost without exception. They punished the communist left harshly, but offered lenient sentences for the crimes and street violence of right-wing Nationalist extremists. After the ‘Kapp Putsch’ in 1920 the government charged 705 people with ‘high treason’ but only one, the police chief in Berlin, received a prison sentence. In comparison, hundreds of socialists received punitive sentences for engaging in anti-government demonstrations. The leading army officers were also drawn from the upper echelons of German society. As we have seen, the army saved democracy from the twin threats of the extreme right and the left in the early years of Weimar, but it remained a law unto itself and was more preoccupied with shaking off the military restrictions placed upon it by the Versailles Treaty than upholding democracy. Repeated involvement of army officers in intrigues and plots designed to bring about authoritarian rule boded ill for the survival of democracy. Many leading army officers longed for a return of pre-1914 authoritarian military rule. The army could be relied upon to crush left-wing revolt, but was reluctant to deal with right-wing street violence. The army could have been subordinated to the Cabinet and Parliament, but it never was. Operating as a state within a state, the army was able to maintain its total independence of national government. In 1932 the army produced a secret report for President Hindenburg in which it advised that it could protect the Reich from communist violence and Nazi violence separately, but could not deal with both factions in the event of a civil war. The clear implication was that one of these groups needed to be suppressed and the army – like the Nazis – favoured cracking down on the communists.Economic Difficulties
Another fact of life in Weimar Germany was constant economic difficulty. Germany was in a chronic state of economic recession between 1918 and 1924 and once again between 1929 and 1933. In 1923, a loaf of bread cost a wheelbarrow full of marks. The ‘great inflation’ was blamed on the Allies’ attempt to obtain reparations payments, especially during the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr between 1923 and 1924. In order to prevent a complete economic meltdown, a new currency, the rentenmark, was introduced and loans from the USA via the Dawes Plan (1924) and the Young Plan (1929) allowed reparations to be paid with borrowed money. The ‘great inflation’ was a deeply traumatic episode, especially for the middle classes who saw their savings wiped out. In the period 1924–1929, known as the ‘golden years’ of Weimar, the German economy underwent a recovery, primarily due to loans from the USA. Wages rose to pre-war levels and new roads, schools and hospitals were built. Yet the extent of recovery was sluggish. Even in 1928, unemployment stood at 1.8 million.In October 1929, when the US stock market collapsed, the German economy went into a meltdown. Of all the major European powers, Germany was most badly hit by the ‘Great Depression’, with unemployment soaring to a staggering six million of insured workers by 1932, but affecting up to 20 million people. Industrial production fell by 42 per cent. Agricultural prices fell dramatically and starvation was rife in rural areas. There is little doubt the economic collapse that occurred in Germany after 1929 intensified feelings against the Weimar Republic more sharply than ever before. Many Germans were looking for some way out of what seemed never-ending misery and perpetual crisis. Patience with democracy was running out. One party leader claimed to have the solution to all Germany’s mounting problems. His name was Adolf Hitler.
eBook - ePubConstitutional Dictatorship
Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies
- Clinton Rossiter(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
3It was under these conditions that the German National Assembly, chosen by the most democratic suffrage the world had ever known, met in Weimar on February 6, 1919.4 One of the chief reasons for the selection of the town of Goethe and Schiller was the comparative quiet which it offered, in contrast to the turbulent extremities into which other and larger German cities had been plunged. Like the American fathers of 1787, the German fathers of 1919 did their work in peace, but it was the peace that exists in the middle of the maelstrom. The country was in an uproar, and it was thus inevitable that the problem of emergency powers should have received particular attention in the Assembly. The keynote of the debates was the hazardous state of the times, and therewith the necessity of government not only democratic, but strong. Not the least element of this democratic strength was to be a powerful executive. From the revolution of November 1918 until the establishment of the provisional constitution on February 11, 1919, Fritz Ebert and a small coterie of Social Democrats, attempting to fill the political vacuum left by the departure of the imperial government, had been forced in crisis situations to exercise dictatorial power without firm basis in the law. Now it became the purpose of the delegates at Weimar to provide a crisis dictatorship of a legal nature, and this was to be done in behalf of democracy and the Constitution. Despite the embittered opposition of the extreme left wing, a presidency was instituted which, although not the equal of the office of President of the United States, outstripped the French presidency in prestige and competence.5
eBook - ePubThe Scholems
A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction
- Jay Howard Geller(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cornell University Press(Publisher)
35With Berlin still in the throes of unrest, the National Assembly met from February to July 1919 in the city of Weimar. The new constitution that the parliamentarians produced laid the groundwork for what came to be called the Weimar Republic. Signed into effect by the German president Friedrich Ebert on 11 August, the constitution proclaimed, “The German Reich is a republic. The authority of the state comes from the people.”36 This new state also considerably improved the legal basis for the Jews’ life in Germany. While previous German laws had guaranteed basic freedom of religion, the Weimar constitution stipulated: “Civil and civic rights and obligations are neither dependent upon nor limited by the exercise of freedom of religion. The enjoyment of civil and civic rights, as well as the admittance to public offices, is independent of religious confession.” The republican German state would not sanction discrimination based on religious affiliation. In practical terms, this meant that, in contrast to the state of affairs under the German Empire, Jews would no longer face the de facto discrimination that had precluded them from becoming judges, military officers, and professors at state universities. The new constitution abolished a state church but preserved the rights of religious organizations and guaranteed tax-funded support for religious communities.37While Betty Scholem expressed her concern about the atmosphere of feverish politics and societal uncertainty of early 1919, her son Werner thrived in these conditions. He worked for the Braunschweiger Volksfreund , the official newspaper of the Independent Social Democrats in Braunschweig. When the newspaper expanded into Hanover, Werner became local editor. He definitively put his university studies on hold in favor of remunerative employment and politics. As he put it, he worked as a reporter in the morning, as an editor in the afternoon, and as a political speaker in the evening. He bemoaned the lack of cooperation between the Communists and the Independent Social Democrats in Hanover, while they worked “hand in hand” in Braunschweig. He hoped for a united front among the radical Left. Meanwhile, he successfully campaigned for a seat on the Linden city council, where he was the leader of the Independent Social Democratic caucus. It was also his job to organize those “elements disposed to revolution in the city and province of Hanover.” He boasted to his brother Gershom about how successful he had been and how annoyed the mainstream Social Democrats were with him.38 He was the “Independent [Social Democratic] screaming lion of the whole province.”39
eBook - ePub- Stephen J. Lee(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
According to Snyder, the new regime was seen as a ‘stopgap’ and ‘from the days of its origin the Weimar Republic was unwanted and unloved’. Theodor Heuss, the first President of West Germany, maintained that ‘Germany never conquered democracy for herself.’ 10 It could certainly be argued that democracy was handed down from above in 1918, without any serious attempt to change the existing civil service or the judicial and military elites. Below the surface of a democratic constitution, therefore, was a profoundly conservative base, with no commitment – emotional or intellectual – to a republic. Certain sections of the community could have become permanently reconciled to the new system – for example, the proletariat and the middle classes. These, however, were severely affected by the impact of the 1923 and 1929 economic crises. Much of the population was highly vulnerable to right-wing ideas and organizations. A strong tradition of anti-Western and anti-democratic thought was maintained by writers and activists like Moeller, van den Bruck and Junger, who induced widespread nostalgia for the Second Reich and anticipation of a Third. The response of much of the population was to criticize the Weimar politicians for their facelessness and to turn to more authoritarian figures like Hindenburg and, ultimately, Hitler. Throughout the period 1918–33, therefore, the onus was always upon democracy to show that it was a better system than the authoritarian models of the past. Many people remained highly sceptical. Unfortunately, the image of democracy was not strengthened by the performance of the political parties. According to Fraenkel, these failed to fulfil ‘the functions which devolve upon them in a constitutional pluralistic Parliamentary democracy’. 11 The traditional right – the DNVP – maintained a consistent hostility to the republic. They attacked it at every opportunity and eventually welcomed its demise
eBook - ePub- Colin Loader(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
3The Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic and Cultural Crisis
The crisis in cultivation perceived by Simmel and others was temporarily suspended with the advent of World War I. When Germany entered the war, many rejoiced that previously divisive elements in the nation had committed themselves to its spiritual unity. Convinced by the “civil peace” between the Social Democratic Party and the government1 that the war community had overcome class divisions, they echoed the Kaiser’s pronouncement: “I no longer recognize parties, I recognize only Germans.”2 Many academics seconded Johann Plenge’s description of the new spiritual unity as the “Ideas of 1914,” and parallels were drawn to the Wars of Liberation during the Humboldt era. Simmel himself maintained that the war would not only speed the end of the previous epoch but would also bring a new inner unity, a transvaluation of values. Most professors agreed that the war was a defensive struggle by the monarchical German state to preserve the humanistic ideal of culture and cultivation against the aggressive, plutocratic, and parliamentary British civilization (Lichtblau 1996: 393-404).3 Otto von Gierke spoke for many when he wrote,We do not want to sacrifice to the democratic Moloch our historically achieved lofty idea of the state, our harmonic connection of a strong monarchy with the Germanic freedom of the nation [Volk], our organization of the governmental and the social in a way that preserves unity in multiplicity. (Quoted in Böhme 1975: 26)But as the war dragged on, the national “community” proved to be only a veneer over a deeply fragmented class society. Academics were divided about how to address the disintegration of the Ideas of 1914. Moderates sought ways to reconcile the discordant social forces with their own organic aspirations.4 Conservatives sought ways to repress those same forces and rallied behind the dictatorship of General Ludendorff.5
- David Childs(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The Centre Party politician Constantin Fehrenbach now took over the government. His party had joined with the Social Democrats in coalition in February 1919 and were participants in all 17 governments to May 1932 (and even after that if one includes expelled Centre Party politicians who remained in office). Thus they, even more than the Social Democrats, could be called the classic party of Weimar.That during this period they usually had 60-odd seats out of a Reichstag of between 403 (in 1919) and 608 (in July 1932) seats indicates not only their weakness but also the weaknesses of the parliamentary system in Weimar Germany. The partners in the 17 coalition governments were usually united on very little, often carrying on contradictory policies in various ministries, and it is not surprising that by the end of 1932 the governments of the Weimar Republic had existed on average only eight months. In such circumstances interest groups and the permanent 'servants' of the state, the bureaucracy and the military, exercised far more influence than was their due.Secret rearmament and the unlikely alliance
The Wehrgesetz or Defence Law of 1921 set out the constitutional position of the armed forces in the Weimar Republic. This law paid lip-service to the Versailles Treaty, the democratic traditions of Social Democracy and the developments during the German revolution. The stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles regarding the maximum strength of the forces, their officers and organisation were duly recorded, the President was named as commander-in-chief and even the ghosts of the soldiers' councils crept in. There was an elected Heerskammer (Army Chamber) made up of officers, N C Os and other ranks with advisory functions. There were also Vertrauensträte in all units mainly concerned with the personal grievances of the ordinary soldiers. The position of the Defence Minister was not very clearly defined. He could issue orders but not commands. Servicemen were not allowed to engage in political activities and even membership of non-political clubs could be banned for reasons of military discipline. Many Social Democrats believed this would prevent soldiers being active in Right-wing parties and organisations. On the whole, however, officers clamped down on Left-wing activity in the barracks and turned a blind eye to or supported, Rightist activities. Although even on paper far from perfect, the Wehrgesetz
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