The Weimar Republic was proclaimed on November 9, 1918, by the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann. It followed upon more than four years of bloody war, with German troops, though still on foreign soil, in disarray, the General Staff frantic for peace, and the imperial administration demoralized. Reversing German advances on the Western front in the spring of 1918, the Allies had gone on the offensive in the summer, and kept the initiative. Germany’s allies—Turkey, Bulgaria, and the Hapsburg monarchy—were already in a state of collapse. On September 30 Chancellor Herting resigned and gave way, on October 4, to Prince Max von Baden, known as a liberal monarchist inclined to domestic reforms and international understanding. Prince Max appealed to President Wilson for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points. The country was exhausted, weary to death of the adventure it had welcomed in August 1914 as a relief from petty civilian cares. Germany had lost 1.8 million dead and over 4 million wounded; the cost in matériel, wasted talents, maimed minds, sheer despair, was incalculable. Since the early summer of 1917, when the Reichstag had passed a resolution calling for a peace of understanding, it had been obvious that the old regime would never survive unchanged. On October 28, 1918, sailors at the Kiel Naval Base mutinied; by the first week in November some kind of revolution seemed inescapable. On November 8 the idealistic Independent Socialist Kurt Eisner proclaimed a republic in Bavaria and made himself Prime Minister; other cities and Länder joined his lead. On the same day, Chancellor Max von Baden firmly called for the abdication of the Emperor. The workers of Berlin were in the streets, Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s successor Groener joined the Chancellor’s plea. William II temporized, insisting at least on the Prussian throne, but he was asking too much, and Prince Max took what his chief was unwilling to give. He made the Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert his successor and announced the Emperor’s abdication. Some thought Scheidemann’s proclamation of the Republic hasty; from Scheidemann’s point of view it was barely in time—it anticipated the Spartacists, who were ready to proclaim a Soviet republic. That night, William II fled to Holland.
The Emperor and his partisans were discredited; leadership would have to come from Socialists. But what kind of Socialists? The Social Democratic party had long been a major party, but even before 1914 it had been a tense coalition, divided among radicals who took revolutionary Marxism seriously, trade unionists who wanted to forget about ideology and seek higher standards of living for the working classes, and functionaries who compromised by talking like revolutionaries and acting like parliamentarians. The decision of the party’s delegation to the Reichstag on August 4, 1914, to vote for the war credits in violation of their time-honored principles, had torn this fabric apart beyond repair. By early 1917 the dissidents in the Social Democratic Party formed their own party, the Independent Social Democratic Party, and pressed emphatically for peace and socialism. They were joined in this by a small determined group of Marxist revolutionaries, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—the Spartacists. As victory on the battlefield became more elusive and domestic discontent mounted, the Spartacists found increased support among the radicalized workers, especially the shop stewards in the factories, a tough-minded, pragmatic group set for revolution. They led strikes and, in early November 1918, founded Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils on the Soviet model. And so, when Ebert found himself with a republic on his hands, he put together a temporary government of six on November 10, three from the Social Democrats and three Independents. The provisional government actually held intact for almost two months.
Since November 8 a German armistice commission had been negotiating with the Allies under the leadership of the prominent Catholic Center Party deputy Matthias Erzberger, an annexationist converted to peace. And on November 11 the war was over, even if peace had not been made. It was a promising beginning for the new regime, but the day before, Ebert had concluded another agreement that was to have fateful consequences for the young Republic. In the evening of November 10, General Groener had called Ebert, put the army “at the disposal of his government,” and asked, in return, “the support of the government in the maintenance of order and discipline in the army. The officer corps expected the government to fight against Bolshevism and was ready for the struggles. Ebert accepted the offer of an alliance.”1 Groener was, by comparison with others, moderate and responsible, but this arrangement gave the army a new entry to power and prestige, and opportunities for darker types than Groener.
The six-man government broke apart on December 27, when the Independents marched out after inconclusive arguments within the cabinet, in public meetings, and in the streets, over the future of Germany. The left wanted all power to the soviets and a complete reconstruction of society. The Social Democrats wanted a parliamentary regime and a waiting policy on social and economic transformation. There was fighting in the streets in December, and there were some dead—bitterly remembered. But on the whole the country supported the parliamentarianism of the majority Socialists. Accordingly on January 19, 1919, there was a national election for deputies to a constitutional convention to be held at Weimar; despite a Communist boycott, over thirty million Germans turned out to vote. Four hundred twenty-one seats were at stake. The Social Democratic Party led the poll with 11½ million votes and 163 seats; the Catholic Center Party, an amalgam of monarchists and mild republicans, got below 6 million votes and 89 seats; the newly founded Democratic Party, rich in distinguished bourgeois intellectuals and progressive industrialists, did extraordinarily well, totaling about 5½ million votes and 75 seats—it was this party, abundant in talent, decent in campaign methods, rational in its program, that turned out to be “the only party that lost in each election”;2 the National People’s Party, the Conservatives of the Empire, unchanged in all but name, got 3 million votes and 42 seats; the Independent Socialists disappointed their following with fewer that 2½ million votes and 22 seats; while the newly founded People’s Party, the party of Stresemann, big business, and right-wing leanings, got 21 seats on only 1½ million votes. The Weimar coalition had received a strong mandate.
The Assembly was solemnly opened on February 9, 1919; two days later, it elected Ebert President, and Ebert, in turn, asked Scheidemann to form a cabinet. This first full-fledged cabinet drew from the three leading parties, the Social Democrats, the Center, and the Democrats—the Weimar coalition. But the work of the Assembly was marred, though not interrupted, by disorders at home and peacemaking abroad. In Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been murdered on January 15 under revolting circumstances; in Bavaria, Kurt Eisner was murdered on February 28; by March the Social Democrat Noske, in charge of restoring order, was aided rather doubtfully by the fanatical Freikorps—hastily formed paramilitary organizations of ex-officers, unemployed drifters, and youthful adventurers eager to kill. The murder of Eisner produced further violence in Bavaria, then a general strike and the proclamation of a Socialist Councils’ Republic; this republic was, in turn, overthrown at the end of April and the beginning of May by government troops, with savage brutality. One of the victims was the writer Gustav Landauer, a high-minded idealist and Communist, beaten to death in prison by soldiers.
In Versailles, meanwhile, a German delegation, disdainfully invited in April to accept peace terms, sought to ameliorate slightly what they could not significantly improve. Germans fulminated at the news from France; on June 20 the Scheidemann government resigned and was replaced the next day by a cabinet headed by another Social Democrat, Gustav Bauer. The new cabinet balked at only a few provisions, but the Allies were firm: the losers must sign without reservations. Faced with an ultimatum, the German Government yielded, and, on June 28, a new delegation, headed by the Social Democratic Foreign Minister Hermann Müller, signed the Diktat. No other course was feasible. But inescapable as it was, submission left scars that never healed.
The Versailles Treaty imposed heavy economic, political, and psychological burdens on defeated Germany. It returned Alsace-Lorraine to France, split off East Prussia from the heart of Germany by turning over West Prussia, Upper Silesia, and Posen to Poland, made Danzig a Free City, gave Belgium some small districts, left open the disposition of other border areas to later plebiscites, deprived Germany of her colonies, forbade the union of Austria with Germany, imposed military occupation on the left bank of the Rhine, reduced the German Army to 100,000 men, put an end to the General Staff, and in other ways attempted to control German militarism. Most unacceptable—certainly most inflammatory—of all the provisions were articles that deprived the Germans of that intangible thing, “honor.” The treaty called for the Germans to turn over their “war criminals,” including the former Emperor, for trial for “atrocities,” and article 231 insisted that “Germany and her allies” accept “responsibility” for “causing all the loss and damage” to which the Allied powers had been exposed “by the aggression of her allies.” And a still undisclosed amount of reparations was to be paid. The clause did not use the word “guilt,” but it was quickly stigmatized as the “war guilt clause.” While practically all Germans hoped for repeal, some hoped for revenge.
Despite all this, the Weimar Assembly agreed on a constitution in relatively short time—it was adopted on July 31, 1919, and became law on August 11. It enshrined a set of compromises that antagonized many and delighted few. In some respects, though, it was a perfectly straightforward document. Germany became a democratic republic; elections to the Reichstag, the national legislative body, was by universal suffrage starting at age twenty, Germany remained a federal state, though the powers of the various Länder were much curtailed. The chief executive body, the cabinet, was responsible to the Reichstag. But Germany did not become a purely parliamentary regime: the Constitution gave it a strong president, elected for a seven-year term by popular elections; he was symbol at home and representative abroad, could dissolve the Reichstag, choose and dismiss the chancellor, and take charge if “public security and order are seriously disrupted or endangered.” This was the notorious Article 48. In its use of devices like proportional representation, initiative and referendum, the Constitution was as modern as its democratic electorate. In the fields of economic legislation and social transformation, from which so many had expected so much, it was rather vague. It laid down fundamental rights and duties of Germans, and promised the possibility of a kind of economic parliament. But little was eventually done; the compromise between bourgeoisie and proletariat ended with a victory of the former over the latter. Still, much was done; over much protest, Germany even adopted a new flag—black, red, gold, the flag of 1848. When the delegates came home from Weimar, their Germany was in deep trouble, but the Republic was launched.
The events of the first year of the Republic did not predetermine the fate of Weimar, but they did set its general course. The next four years stood under the signs of domestic violence and foreign intransigence, the two interacting and, to Germany’s misfortune, reinforcing one another.
Chancellor Bauer gave way to his fellow Social Democrat Müller in March 1920, after the frightening but unsuccessful Kapp Putsch, and Müller then held the coalition together until June. The Kapp Putsch was the first serious attempt at a general counterrevolution. Since the acceptance of the Versailles Treaty, irreconcilables had made propaganda against the Republic and plotted for a restoration of the monarchy. On March 13, 1920, the plotters struck. A naval brigade marched on Berlin, greeted there by Ludendorff, and Dr. Wolfgang Kapp, the leader of the putsch—an East Prussian bureaucrat, significantly a civilian—appeared in the city to claim the chancellorship. Troops refused to shoot at the rebels—their fellows—and the government prudently fled. But the conspirators were inexperienced and foolish, civilian officials would not join them, and a general strike paralyzed the “new regime.” After four days, Kapp and his colleagues “resigned,” surrendering what they had never held. Except for Bavaria, where reactionaries kept control, the old government reasserted itself. Noske, deemed too indulgent to the military, was dropped from the cabinet, but Kapp was allowed to escape abroad, and the great purge for which Scheidemann had rightly called never took place.
On June 6, 1920, there were elections to the Reichstag; they were disastrous for republicans. The German National Party and Stresemann’s People’s Party emerged strong, adding millions of votes and dozens of deputies; the Democratic Party declined spectacularly, dropping to almost a third of its earlier voting strength, the Social Democratic Party polled only 5½ million votes, while the Independent Socialists showed great new strength. Another ominous development was the burgeoning of splinter parties. The Weimar coalition with 11 million votes and 225 deputies had lost control of the Reichstag; it confronted 14½ million votes and 241 seats held by a variety of other parties. Not every right- or left-wing deputy was a mortal enemy of the Republic; few of them were dependable friends. The politics of militarism, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary slogans, and direct action was on the ascendant.
After long negotiations, Konstantin Fehrenbach of the Center Party formed a cabinet, succeeded a year later, on May 10, 1921, by the first cabinet of Joseph Wirth, another Centrist, and then, late in October of that year, by Wirth’s second cabinet, which survived until November 22, 1922. But problems remained intractable. In late April 1921 the Allies let it be known that German reparation payments, though sizable, were gravely in arrears, and they fixed the total sum at 132 billion gold marks, of which over 8 billion had so far been paid. The Wirth ministry, committed to fulfillment of Germany’s obligations, delivered one more billion in gold. But now inflation, caused by a shortage of gold, adverse balance of payments, and the flight of capital, became worrisome. In January 1921 the German mark had stood at 45 to the dollar, through the spring and summer it had remained stable at 60, in September it had reached 100, and by the end of the year it took over 160 marks to purchase one dollar. Before that, another disaster: Matthias Erzberger was shot to death by two ex-officers. The murderers fled to Hungary, which refused to extradite them; their accomplices at home were left unmolested or acquitted. Thousands celebrated openly, shamelessly. In October the Allies, following up the plebiscite of March, and after intermittent military imbroglios, drew the new frontiers for Upper Silesia. No good solution was possible, but the solution the Allies adopted caused a cabinet crisis from which Wirth emerged to succeed himself. In his new cabinet, Walther Rathenau, that enigmatic mixture of dreamer and politician, Jew with a penchant for blond Nordics, who had been Minister for Reconstruction in Wirth’s first administration, took a more prominent place. On January 31, 1922, Wirth made Rathenau his Foreign Minister. The appointment, made to prevent disasters, only caused further disasters.
Germany’s foreign relations remained in a delicate condition; German failures to pay reparations on time strengthened anti-German politicians in France and England. In January 1922 the good European Aristide Briand was toppled by Raymond Poincaré, known as an inflexible advocate of the enforcement of Versailles. Rathenau’s path was difficult. His domestic enemies did not help. A couplet made the rounds of right-wing meetings and student taverns: “Knallt ab den Walther Rathenau/ Die gottverfluchte Judensau—Shoot down that Walther Rathenau/ That cursed, Goddamned Jewish sow.” Soon poetry became reality: on June 24, 1922, Rathenau was shot to death by young right-wing militants. Pursued by the police, one of the assassins was killed, a second killed himself, the third received a prison sentence of fifteen years but spent only seven years in prison—the Republic was always generous with its enemies. Some hesitant republicans now repudiated their nationalist, militarist allies—“The enemy,” Chancellor Wirth exclaimed, “is on the right”—but the right, unrepentant, continued its campaign of vilification and terror. And big industry, led by the ruthless magnate, Hugo Stinnes, was regaining self-confidence; there was talk that the eight-hour day should be replaced by the ten-hour day.
In this atmosphere, Ebert sought a broadly based government, but the Social Democrats refused to countenance a cabinet that included Stresemann’s conservative People’s Party in it. Chancellor Wirth resigned on November 14, 1922; he was succeeded on November 22 by Wilhelm Cuno, head of the Hamburg American Line; his cabinet contained no Social Democrats. In France Poincaré continued his hard anti-German line; in England the conciliatory David Lloyd George had been succeeded in mid-October by Bonar Law; while in Italy Mussolini seized power on October 30. It was not a favorable constellation. Poincaré pressed for the occupation of the Ruhr. The facts were clear: the Germans were not paying their reparations on time, a delay the French interpreted as deliberate sabotage. Late in December 1922 the Reparations Commission officially declared that Germany had failed to meet her obligations, and on January 11, 1923, a French-Belgian contingent occupied the Ruhr to operate the mines and the industries in behalf of the victorious powers. The French fostered separatism; the occupying troops acted with a high hand and open brutality. There were bloody clashes. The German Government counseled passive resistance. Production came to a standstill. And inflation, already a grave threat, now got out of control altogether; the disruption of trade, the disastrous decline in tax payments, all consequences of the Ruhr occupation, were more than the mark could stand. The Reichsbank tried to help, but its reserves were near depletion, and in April 1923 the dam burst: the currency dropped daily, and inflation reached fantastic dimensions—by October 1923 not millions, or billions, but trillions of marks were needed to buy a loaf of bread or mail a letter. Farmers refused to ship produce, manufacturing reached an all-time low, there were food riots, workers hovered near starvation, millions of bourgeois lost all their savings, while speculators grew rich. The resulting economic dislocation and psychological upheaval only strengthened the already pervasive distrust of the Weimar Republic.
Early in August 1923 the Social Democrats declared the need for a national coalition and, at the same time, their lack of confidence in Cuno. Cuno resigned and Ebert called upon Stresemann to form a cabinet; the first Stresemann government lasted until early October, followed by a second, which survived until the end of November. It ended passive resistance, to get production started again; and in November, under the direction of Hjalmar Schacht, the government ended the printing of money, began a ruthless economy drive, and proclaimed a new mark, the Rentenmark, which was “secured” by Germany’s total resources. Schacht was rewarded; he became president of the Reichsbank. Stability returned, though hardships did not end.
Stresemann’s conciliatory policy exasperated the right, already embittered and emboldened by French violence, local successes in Bavaria, and the general uncertainty. On the night of November 8, 1923, and the morning of November 9, Hitler, Göring, Ludendorff, and a handful of others staged a putsch in Munich. It failed; some of the conspirators were captured and tried. Ludendorff was, of course, acquitted; Hitler was convicted of high treason, but permitted to convert the trial into a propaganda feast against the Republic. His sentence was the minimum possible—five years—of which, in any event, he spent only about eight months in confinement, to emerge a significant political figure. Adolf Hitler had joined an obscure right-wing group—a small cluster of anti-Semitic, antirepublican, vaguely Socialist fanatics—in July 1919, and witnessed its gradual growth in Bavaria. By April 1920 it had formulated a program and taken a name, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, a name not without significance. For three years the Nazis fomented disorder, gave inflammatory speeches against the Republic, preached violence against Jews, and enlisted some sympathizers in high positions. When Hitler’s rebellion in November 1923 collapsed, and when financial stability gradually returned, republicans breathed easier; was Hitler not, after all, just another crank? It took years before they were proved wrong.
The assertion that happy ages have no history is a myth, and in any event the middle years of the Weimar Republic were far from happy; still the political events of this comparatively tranquil time can be rapidly summarized. Sanity seemed to be returning at home and abroad. In November 1923 the Social Democrats overthrew the Stresemann cabinet, charging that it had been gentle with right-wing subversion while acting briskly against left-wing radicalism, but the six cabinets that were to govern Germany between December 1923 and the end of June 1928 showed sturdy continuity: each had Stresemann as its Foreign Minister; four of them were led by Wilhelm Marx, the Centrist leader, as Chancellor, and two by Hans Luther, a nonpartisan public servant with conservative leanings. If it was a relatively stable period, it was also a conservative one: though they repeatedly saved it with their votes, the Social Democrats were out of the government for almost five years. Meanwhile, Poincaré was defeated in elections in May 1924, and succeeded by Édouard Herriot, another good European, sympathetic to Germany’s plight. His hand was strengthened by the “Dawes Plan,” named after the American banker and statesman Charles G. Dawes, which proposed the evacuation of the Ruhr, considerable reductions in reparations payments, and loans to Germany.
The German Government accepted the plan, over fierce right-wing opposition. It was always the same story: the concessions that seemed to implacable Frenchmen too great, seemed too small to irreconcilable Germans. In July 1924 the Allies met in London; in August they invited the Germans to join them, and the French reluctantly agreed to begin to evacuate some troops. After venomous Reichstag debates, Germany accepted the Dawes Plan, French troops moved out of the Ruhr—they were gone by July 1925—Germany received foreign loans, and the Rentenmark was replaced by the Reichsmark. By mid-1925 the “golden twenties” had arrived.
But then President Ebert died on February 28, 1925, and the elections for his successor brought out all the old divisions. On the first run no one received the required majority of all the votes cast; on the second run a plurality would be sufficient. And after prolonged maneuvering among the parties, after some old candidates had been dropped and new candidates brought forward, it was the aged hero of World War I, Hindenburg, who received the largest vote—14½ million, or 48 percent. His main opponent, the Centrist leader Marx, got nearly 14 million votes. It seemed a grave setback to the Republic, but Hindenburg acted quite scrupulously and, until overtaken by senility, effectively as a loyal chief executive.
As the fears of German republicans about Hindenburg waned, they waned abroad as well. Germany’s isolation gradually ended. Since early 1925 Stresemann had been making overtures to the Allies, and in October France, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, and Germany signed a treaty at Locarno, which settled the western frontiers, and called for the peaceful settlement of all further disputes. Like every other step toward fraternity, Locarno was denounced by the right in Germany, but the treaty was adopted by a narrow margin. For several years the “spirit of Locarno” guided European diplomacy. In June 1926 Germany concluded a treaty of friendship with Soviet Russia; in September Germany entered the League of Nations. Stresemann followed up these triumphs by discussions with Briand on international peace which eventuated, in 1928, in the Kellogg-Briand treaty condemning war as an instrument of national policy. It was like a handsome screen concealing unpleasant realities.
There was something masklike about German internal prosperity as well. The prosperity was real enough; German industry was modernizing its plant, business was stable, wages were relatively high, unemployment was low—it fell below three-quarters of a million in 1928. But there were hidden ominous developments: industries and businesses were merging on an unprecedented scale; governments, both federal and state, were wasting funds; the powerful industrial magnate Alfred Hugenberg, who had grown rich in the inflation, was gaining control of the opinion industries; and much of the basis of the prosperity was, after all, foreign money pumped into Germany—a source that might dry up. Reparations remained an issue. The Communists continued to refuse cooperation with “Social Fascists”—that is, Social Democrats. The new army retained its old ideas: it wanted political influence, nationalist policies, and secret rearmament. And right-wing fanatics never weakened in their determination to overthrow a regime that was being almost suicidally indulgent with them. In September 1928 the Brandenburg section of the Stahlhelm, an extreme anti-Weimar group of veterans founded in 1918 and swollen to great size in the following years, candidly proclaimed: “We hate the present regime”; it has “made it impossible for us to liberate our enslaved Fatherland, destroy the war-guilt lie and win needed Lebensraum in the east. We declare war against the system which today rules the state and against all those who support this system by a policy of compromise.”3 It would be wrong to say that no one listened, but things were going too well to make such threats really terrifying.
Indeed, while the Nazis and their allies floundered and fumed—peace and prosperity were never their best times—and the Communists continued their opposition, the Social Democrats gained strength. In the last general elections to the Reichstag, in December 1924, the Socialists had held 131 seats; in the new elections, of May 1928, they raised their representation to 152. In contrast, the German Nationalists were reduced from 103 seats to 78; and the Nazis from 14 to only 12. Other right-wing and center parties lost seats as well; the time for the Socialists’ return to a leading rather than supporting role had come. On June 28, 1928, Hermann Müller formed a cabinet of “personalities,” distinguished individuals speaking only for themselves; most were Social Democrats. But not all: Stresemann, the indispensable man, after some hesitation agreed to serve as Foreign Minister once more. The enemies of Weimar, needless to say, did not remain silent. The sinister Hugenberg took over the leadership of the German National Party and soon made overtures to Hitler, still the pariah of German politics; among the crowd of self-appointed gravediggers to the Republic, Hugenberg has undisputed claim to front rank. The Nazis had held their first Nuremberg party rally in August 1927, spouting their racial theories and calling for a general purge of the German body politic and the German soul. But they did not merely rave; more and more the Nazi leadership found connections in respectable circles, among military men who despised the Republic, agrarians longing for a Restoration, and industrialists anxious to protect their trusts and cripple Socialist trade unions.
But in 1928 and 1929 the center of tension was still in foreign affairs. It was not until August 1929 that Briand promised to evacuate the last French troops from the Rhineland by the following year—the sore of occupation had continued to fester for over six decisive years. Earlier, in mid-December 1928, the French, British, and Germans had agreed to appoint a committee of experts to look, once again, into Germany’s capacity to pay reparations. The United States agreed to join, and one of its delegates, Owen D. Young, became chairman. The experts, including Hjalmar Schacht who had acquired a reputation as a financial wizard, wrangled, privately and publicly, for half a year. On June 7, 1929, they finally signed an agreement: Germany was to be complete master over its affairs, but would continue to pay reparations on a graduated scale, ranging from 1.7 billion marks the first year to about 2.5 billion in 1966 and around 1.5 billion annually thereafter until 1988. The amount, though large, was lower than any other demand made so far; the specificity, though it now seems absurd, was designed to anesthetize passions and reduce reparations to a merely technical question. The German response was quick and wholly predictable: vehement denunciations by Hitler and Hugenberg, poisonous speeches on the right, vigorous defenses by republicans, and delay. There was even a plebiscite on the Young Plan which failed, and then Schacht, one of the signers, repudiated his earlier support; on March 7 he resigned as president of the Reichsbank, and became an unexpected recruit of the extreme right. Five days later the Reichstag finally voted to adopt the Young Plan, and Hindenburg conscientiously signed it. But then, by mid-March 1930, the architect of Germany’s foreign policy, Gustav Stresemann, had been dead for over five months. In bad health for over a year, harassed by members of his own party, vilified by the Nazis and the German Nationals, he had continued to defend his policies until the end. He died on October 3, 1929, and was succeeded by Julius Curtius, a fellow member of the German People’s Party—a friend and follower, but no replacement. Stresemann should not be sentimentalized; nor should we exaggerate the power of one man in the turbulent stream of history—there were forces at work in New York and Paris and Berlin that Stresemann would have been powerless to stem. Yet his death was a grievous loss; it was, if not cause, at least sign of the beginning of the end.
Stresemann’s death dramatized the dilemma of “bourgeois, politically homeless Protestantism”4—that large number of voters mortally afraid of Communists, unwilling to join the Socialists, suspicious of the Catholic Center, disoriented by the war and its aftermath and, on the whole, unimpressed by Germany’s rapid recovery and renewed international prestige. Stresemann had taught these millions the virtues of collaborating with Social Democrats—a collaboration which, he had candidly said, was an affair not of the heart but of reason. With his death, the right wing of his People’s Party reasserted itself, and the fragmentation of the Weimar coalition—its vital political center—continued.
It would not have become dangerous if there had not been a world economic crisis. But there was. Precarious German prosperity had already been shaken early in 1929, when unemployment rose to two million and tax collections declined. The focus of political debate became unemployment insurance, admittedly a heavy and growing burden on the government; it was a principle the Social Democrats dared not touch, and a grievance to industrialists and conservatives of all kinds, inclined to make these payments the convenient scapegoat for all of Germany’s accumulating ills. Then came, late in October 1929, the stock market crash on Wall Street. Its reverberations were felt everywhere; the Great Depression was world-wide. But it was most disastrous for the least stable regime, that is, for Germany, which had lived off foreign aid far more than many Germans knew or were willing to admit. With the rush to self-protection everywhere, German exports dwindled, foreign loans to Germany were not renewed. In consequence, tax income dropped further, bankruptcies multiplied, and unemployment grew inexorably. The Social Democrats demanded an increase in unemployment premiums; the Center Party and the People’s Party, now speaking for the employers, refused to go along; and on March 27, 1930, the Müller cabinet resigned. The great coalition was dead. On the next day, Hindenburg asked Heinrich Brüning to form a cabinet of personalities. Brüning, since 1929 the chairman of the Center delegation to the Reichstag, a cool, conservative Catholic with a reputation for financial expertness and no gift for oratory, promised continuation of a conciliatory foreign policy, demanded vigorous action in the economic sphere, and called, in almost bullying tones, for cooperation from the Reichstag in this emergency. His program was agricultural tariffs, higher excise taxes, government economies—deflationary policies designed to cheer conservatives and appall the workers. Yet the Nationalists remained dissatisfied; the Nazis, who took to the streets in defiance of police orders, followed a policy of obstruction; the Social Democrats and Communists naturally opposed Brüning’s proposals. In the midst of growing misery, the final evacuation of German soil by French troops, on June 30, 1930, went almost unnoticed—an ironic commentary on the ephemeral quality of political passions. When no agreement on Brüning’s program could be reached, the Chancellor threatened to invoke Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution; then on July 16, after a defeat in the Reichstag, instead of resigning, he invoked it. Germany was now governed by presidential decree. Faced with strenuous protests, Brüning dissolved the Reichstag, and set national elections for September 14, 1930.
Through the summer, responsible bourgeois and Socialist politicians, far from blind to the pressures exerted by the extremists, sought for some accommodation. In vain. The campaign plumbed new depths of demagogy and sheer violence, and voting on September 14 was heavy: there were 35 million voters in 1930 whereas there had been only 30 million two years before. Many of these new voters were the hitherto apathetic, brought to the polls by the general distress and the militant parties, and the young, who had turned to the right in the universities and in the streets, before their elders turned in the same direction. The Social Democrats held firm; they lost a half-million votes and 10 seats, but this still meant a parliamentary delegation of 132. The Center picked up a half-million votes and increased its seats from 78 to 87. The other parties lost disastrously, both in votes and in seats. The Communists gained over a million votes and 23 seats; they were represented in the Reichstag by 77 delegates. But the real victors were the Nazis; they climbed from 800,000 votes to almost 6½ million, from 12 seats to 107. Among the extremists, it was the extreme right alone that benefited from the condition of Weimar Germany.
Brüning governed on, until May 30, 1932, amid growing unemployment, mounting misery, rising violence, and increasing signs that the Republic was dying: for many intellectuals September 14, 1930, marked the death of the Republic. Through 1931 Hindenburg signed one emergency decree after another, controlling the price of food, regulating bank payments, reducing unemployment compensation. The Nazis made no secret of their plans for the future. When in September 1930 three lieutenants were tried for treason—they had sought to enlist fellow officers in the Nazi cause—Hitler testified for the defense, in the glaring light of full publicity, and predicted that if his “movement” should be victorious, the “crimes of November” would be avenged, and then, “indeed, heads will roll in the sand.” Nazis began to commit excesses against Jewish stores; the Nazi press, skillfully led by Goebbels, preached action against republicans, democrats, Jews, Communists—“November criminals” all; Nazis interfered with the showing of Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues. Attempts to ban processions were on the whole futile, and in October 1931 the Nazis widened their hold on the right at a meeting in Harzburg attended by leading Nazis, industrialists like Thyssen and Hugenberg, military men like Seeckt, financiers like Schacht. It created a “national” front against Bolshevism—a fatal, if still rather fragile, combination uniting the power of money, political shrewdness, mob appeal, and aristocratic trimmings.
The threat was grave enough to induce the Social Democrats to support Hindenburg in the presidential elections to be held in early 1932. For the first time unemployment exceeded six million in January 1932, and anything seemed possible. But the “Harzburg Front” was not yet solid enough to unite behind Hitler’s candidacy; in the vote on March 13, Hindenburg polled 18½ million votes, Hitler almost 11½ million, the Communist candidate Thaelmann nearly 5 million, and Duesterberg, the candidate of the Nationalists, 2½ million. A runoff was needed, and on April 10, 1932, Hindenburg was re-elected President of the Republic with over 19 million votes; Hitler ran a strong second with 13½ million, Thaelmann a poor third with less than 4 million votes. Three days later, the President dissolved both Nazi paramilitary associations, the Brown Shirts (the SA) and the Black Shirts (the SS), but in a series of state elections the Nazis consolidated their strength, and on May 12 General Groener, the Defense Minister responsible for the government’s anti-Nazi move, was let go. Then, on May 30, Hindenburg dismissed the Brüning cabinet, persuaded by his friends and by his influential adviser, Kurt von Schleicher, that Brüning’s social program smacked of agrarian socialism. His successor was the smooth, gaunt, manipulative reactionary Centrist Franz von Papen. He even looked like an undertaker.
The rest is a story of fear, terrorism, irresponsibility, missed opportunities, and shameful betrayal. Von Papen’s cabinet included the ambitious Kurt von Schleicher as Defense Minister, and a collection of aristocrats—an innovation in Weimar. “The list of appointments,” S. William Halperin writes, “read so much like a page out of the German nobility’s ‘Who’s Who?’ that the public dubbed Papen and his colleagues the ‘Almanach de Gotha’ cabinet.”5 In addition to Junkers, the cabinet included prominent industrialists. It was as though the Revolution of 1918 had never taken place. On June 4, 1932, Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag and called for elections in late July; on June 16 he rescinded the ban on the SA and the SS—both decisions major victories for the Nazis. The Brown Shirts and the Black Shirts had never been dormant; now they went into action wholeheartedly, and the summer of 1932 was marked by sanguinary clashes between Communists and Nazis, and Socialists and Nazis. The Socialists called it civil war, and they were right. But the government did nothing, or aided the aggressors—the title of Franz Werfel’s Expressionist novel, Not the Murderer, the Victim Is Guilty, now took on new meaning. On July 20 von Papen, after persuading Hindenburg that the step was necessary, seized the Prussian government from the Social Democrats, and governed it as the “Commissioner of the Reich.” The Social Democrats, imbued with the myth of republican legality, challenged the action in the courts, but offered no resistance.
On July 31, 1932, the elections took place and ended in a stunning victory for the Nazis: they got over 13½ million votes and 230 seats. The Social Democrats with 8 million votes and 133 seats held relatively firm, while the Communists with 5 million votes and 89 delegates and the Center with almost 6 million votes and 97 delegates made some gains. The other parties were nearly wiped out. The opposition to the Nazis remained numerous but disunited; the Nazi leadership was confident. Von Papen negotiated with Hitler, prepared to take Nazis into his government, but Hitler wanted the chancellorship or nothing. He got nothing—for the moment. Von Papen even acted forcefully for a while, making public his aversion to Hitler’s political tactics and support of murder. Then, after a clash with Göring, the Nazi President of the new Reichstag, von Papen dissolved the Reichstag and called for new elections.
The elections took place on November 6, 1932, and gave new hope to the few remaining optimists among republicans. The Nazis lost 2 million votes and 34 seats in the Reichstag; they were still the strongest party with a delegation of 196, as against 100 for the Communists (who again picked up strength), 121 for the Social Democrats, and 90 for the Center, who both suffered moderate losses. But there were many, including Nazis, who interpreted the results as the beginning of a real, final decline; in mid-November, in a number of local elections, this decline seemed confirmed. Nazi brutality in talk and action had alienated many. And Hitler had other troubles: in desperate need of financial backing, he had long since surrendered all claims to the socialism incorporated in the program and the very title of his party; but there were old Nazis still imbued with their “German Socialism,” their agrarian, anticapitalist, though also anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic, collectivism. In December 1932 one of the leading “Socialist” ideologists of the Nazis, Gregor Strasser, an immensely shrewd organizer, resigned all his party offices; Goebbels feared for the future and Hitler darkly hinted at suicide. He was saved by his right-wing competitors. On November 17 Hindenburg had reluctantly permitted von Papen, one of his favorities, to resign, but, unpopular as von Papen was, he continued to govern until a successor could be found. It was Schleicher who took over most of von Papen’s cabinet. But no one, left or right, trusted Schleicher, and on January 28, 1933, he resigned.
Meanwhile the dying Weimar Republic was experiencing the last and most fateful intrigue of all. Once out of office, filled with dislike of Schleicher and the desire to return to power, von Papen decided to use Hitler as a kind of stalking horse. He, too, underestimated his man. He met Hitler privately, and sought to persuade the aged Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor. “The Old Man” was reluctant, but then he trusted von Papen—a trust itself a sign of limited judgment and advanced senility—and other trusted men around him, like his secretary Otto Meissner and his son, Oskar, also advocated the appointment of Hitler. After Schleicher’s resignation, even Schleicher urged this course. All of Hindenburg’s advisers were confident: Hitler would be kept in check by Vice Chancellor von Papen and other reliable conservatives in the cabinet. The old man yielded, and on January 30, 1933, he made Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. The Republic was dead in all but name, the victim of structural flaws, reluctant defenders, unscrupulous aristocrats and industrialists, a historic legacy of authoritarianism, a disastrous world situation and deliberate murder.
Whatever the appearance of the Nazi seizure of power and the various “legal” steps taken later, it was murder and nothing less. “Stressing ‘legality,’” Karl Dietrich Bracher has written, “Hitler made his way into the government not as the leader of a working parliamentary majority coalition (as misleading apologists still suggest) but through the authoritarian gap in the Weimar Constitution, and immediately set about destroying the Constitution he had just taken an oath to defend. That formally correct oath he regarded as the symbol and end of his successful policy of legality. Now the actual seizure of power began. Now the tactics of legality had to be combined with the strategy of revolution to form the specific technique of seizing power that in a short time was to outplay, eliminate, or regiment all safeguards and counterforces, political, social, and intellectual.”6 Contrasted with its cultural history, the political history of the Weimar Republic is a depressing affair, but it is El Dorado compared to what followed, a history of degradation, corruption, the suppression of all living cultural forces, systematic lying, intimidation, political murder followed by organized mass murder. In the light of that history, it is not hyperbole but sober realism to say that the death of Weimar saw the birth of a dark age.
1 Quoted in F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 1918–1933 (1966), 11.
2 Fritz Stern, “The Political Consequences of the Unpolitical German,” History, No. 3 (1960), 130.
3 Quoted in William S. Halperin, Germany Tried Democracy: A Political History of the Reich from 1918 to 1933 (1946), 366.
4 Theodor Eschenburg, “Kurze Geschichte der Weimarer Republik,” Die Improvisierte Demokratie: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Weimarer Republik (1963), 64.
5 Halperin, Germany Tried Democracy, 486–487.
6 Karl Dietrich Bracher, “The Technique of the National Socialist Seizure of Power,” in The Path to Dictatorship, 1918–1933: Ten Essays by German Scholars, tr. John Conway (1966), 118–119.