12

THE GREAT COALITION AND THE DISINTEGRATION OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY

Following a series of power struggles between the Zentrum Partei (Catholic Center party), the Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP), and the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP), the Bürgerblock collapsed at the beginning of 1928. In the ensuing Reichstag elections of May 1928, the Social Democrats achieved their greatest success since 1919, attracting nine million votes and justifying the organization of a coalition cabinet under their leadership. By June the SPD’s Herman Müller had assembled a somewhat tenuous cabinet, consisting of representatives from the SPD, the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP), Catholic Center party, D VP, and the Bayrische Volkspartei (BVP). General Groener represented the military as the minister of defense.

At approximately the same time, the economy showed signs of stress. By the beginning of 1929 unemployment rose above peak jobless rates for the past four years. When the New York stock market crashed in October 1929, the bottom fell out of the German economy, and the SPD again found itself in an uncompromising position. As the leading party of the governing coalition, it appeared responsible for the nation’s crisis, just as it had been perceived to be responsible for the postwar crisis.

While the SPD’s Great Coalition worked to maintain the social status quo and reinforced the perception that its members were devoted republicans who accepted responsibility for the spreading economic crisis, an ever-growing political right dissociated itself from the republican government and advocated various forms of authoritarian rule.¹ In June of 1929 Hugenberg succeeded in expanding the antirepublican front by forming a committee in opposition to the ratification of the Young Plan. Members included representatives from the Pan-German League, the Stahlhelm, the Reichsverband der deutschen Industrie (Reich Association of German Industry), and Adolf Hitler. They condemned the SPD and its republican allies for accepting the Treaty of Versailles and refused to agree to a plan that called for reparations payments until 1988. Although their plebiscite campaign failed in the fall of 1929, it strengthened the perception that the SPD and its coalition partners had mismanaged the original peace negotiations and Germany’s economy. The campaign also defined the crisis more as a national rather than a class conflict.

Over the next three years powerful interest groups, under the leadership of Hugenberg and Fritz Thyssen (leader of the Reich Association of German Industry), strove to sustain their wealth and authority. As the economic crisis intensified, the German people, although they partially blamed the Social Democrats and the republican government, also blamed greedy speculators. They recognized that powerful industrialists and investors had maximized profits by speculating and either forming or joining national and international cartels with little concern for German workers. Now the same people were closing plants and exporting capital.² The best strategy for Germany’s capitalist elite was to support campaigns that emphasized the national character of the economic crisis and blamed the republican government. For the most part they supported the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP).³

As the antirepublican front around Hugenberg grew, the KPD returned to an ultraleftist course.⁴ Among the contributing factors were (1) during the years of relative stability, the membership of the KPD slowly decreased from 180,000 to 130,000; (2) during the same period, the German electorate shifted slowly to the left; (3) in 1928 the Comintern and the KPD anticipated that the German economy would peak and start to decline; and (4) after defeating his opposition on the political left in 1926, Stalin was initiating an attack on those to his political right in an attempt to consolidate his power in the Soviet Union and in the Comintern (Flechtheim, 248). Beginning in the summer of 1928 the triumvirate of Ernst Thälmann, Hermann Remmele, and Heinz Neumann positioned itself solidly within Stalin’s camp and moved to exclude both the so-called appeasers and the right-wing leaders in the KPD. By the end of the year they had assumed party leadership.

Toward the end of 1928 and in 1929 the developing economic crisis and the SPD’s policies intensified KPD opposition to Social Democracy. The Great Coalition’s decision to begin construction of Panzerkreuzer A motivated the Communists to organize a campaign to stop funding for the project in October 1928. In May 1929 the Communists staged their annual May Day March, despite the refusal of the Social Democratic coalition in Prussia to lift its ban on such demonstrations. The resulting confrontation between marchers and the police (who were under the direction of the SPD police chief, Karl Zörgiebel) concluded with twenty-five civilian casualties and thirty-six seriously injured. When the Prussian minister of the interior, Carl Severing, banned the Rot Frontkämpferbund throughout Prussia at the end of May, it only strengthened the perception that the SPD had united with antirepublicans in support of fascism.

In response to these developments, the KPD accused the SPD of complicity in the rise of National Socialism. Between 1929 and 1932 Communists refused to join the SPD in united actions and attempted to win support from the Social Democratic rank and file. The KPD’s approach was understandable but counterproductive. At critical points, the KPD missed opportunities to slow or stop the progress of National Socialism and occasionally even seemed willing to cooperate with the nationalist opposition.⁵

Finally in 1932 the KPD seemed to realize its mistake. In the spring and summer of that year the party gradually abandoned the theory of social fascism and proposed united actions against the nationalist opposition. However, the solidified animosity toward the KPD among SPD leaders and the KPD’s continued cynicism about the Social Democrats rendered virtually impossible any productive cooperation. Neither party was willing to make the compromises necessary to unite in what might have been a successful coalition against National Socialism.

In addition to the lack of cooperation between the SPD and KPD, various other factors contributed to the rise of National Socialism. As mentioned above, leading industrialists, agrarians, and aristocrats opportunistically supported the NSDAP. Of even greater significance was the appeal of National Socialism to large numbers of dissatisfied and disoriented civil servants, other white-collar workers, small merchants, and other petty bourgeoisie.⁶ When the economy weakened in 1929 and 1930, Germany’s middle classes once again faced the prospect of downward social mobility, unemployment, and other severe hardships. Many middle-class Germans grew skeptical of capitalism (as evidenced by the decrease in electoral support for those political parties most closely associated with German capitalism, the D VP and DNVP). For them, the Social Democratic program also was unacceptable because Social Democrats bore at least partial responsibility for economic dependence on Western banks and consequent economic instability. In addition, as the party most closely associated with the republic, the SPD appeared responsible for a government in which the polarization of special interests hindered the formation of national consensus.

At the same time, the Communists, who implied that middle-class Germans should abandon their national and class identity in favor of a more egalitarian society, posed an even greater threat. According to the KPD, Germany should become a soviet republic, and middle-class Germans should accept the dictatorship of the proletariat.⁷ For most nonproletarians, fears about losing their national and individual identities far overshadowed the potential advantages associated with the KPD plan.

Large numbers of lower-middle- and middle-class Germans searched for a third way—an anticapitalist and anti-Marxist alternative.⁸ The National Socialists provided the most attractive ideological alternative. The NSDAP advocated a strong national identity associated with precapitalist Germany.⁹ It fulfilled the middle-class need for security by positing a regressive utopia and suggesting that Germany could regain its former glory by embracing that utopia in the future.¹⁰

The National Socialist ideology galvanized the national identity by attributing blame for present social problems on dangerous “others.”¹¹ The NSDAP attracted middle-class support by shifting blame from the German people to foreign influences. The instigators of Germany’s economic crisis were not German capitalists—or even Germans: they were Bolsheviks and Jews. Such explanations confirmed middle-class fears about Marxism and capitalism without questioning the German identity. On the contrary, they united “Germans” against a common enemy. As the Weimar era drew to a close, the success of National Socialism depended to a large extent on its ability to use a nostalgic nationalism and xenophobic racism to attract and unite dissatisfied middle-class Germans. Mainstream cinema played an increasingly important role in the process.