The provisional government
left the scene three months after its inauguration. On February 10, 1919,
the constituent national assembly which had convened in Weimar four days
earlier promulgated an emergency constitution. The revolutionary period was
over. This assembly had been elected in January (while the army repressed
KPD rioting) and showed a significant increase in SPD seats over the last
imperial Reichstag. The three parties of the Peace Resolution of 1917 - SPD,
Center, and Progressives (now Democrats) - had a large majority and formed
the pro-republican "Weimar Coalition.''
I. The New Constitution
The emergency constitution was modeled on the imperial constitution, with a
president elected by the assembly in place of the emperor. The president
nominated ministers, who were responsible to the assembly. He did not have
power to dissolve the assembly, which was sovereign except for the rights of
the states. The federal principle was expressed in an upper house, whose
assent was required for legislation. In case of disagreement between the two
chambers, the issue was to be decided by referendum. For the constitution
the assembly alone was responsible, but territorial boundaries could be
changed only with the consent of the states concerned.
The assembly set about its constitution-making with speed. Indeed, a draft
of a constitution was ready for its consideration as soon as it met. This
had been drawn up by Hugo Preuss, a left-of-center liberal imbued with the
ideas of Stein, Weber, and Naumann. In his draft constitution he attempted
to distill a conception of the state in which this German liberal tradition
would be harmonized with western parliamentary democracy.
Two characteristics stand out: his solution to the new problem of democratic
leadership and his solution to the old problem of German unity. Preuss
believed that the obstacle to a unitary, as opposed to a federal, state had
disappeared with the removal of the princes, especially since the
revolutionary government had had no connection with the states. He therefore
proposed to reduce the states to merely administrative autonomy and to give
the central government much wider powers. In particular, he was anxious that
Prussia should lose her independence and be divided up into provinces.
But this unitarism was unacceptable to many of the state governments, to
which Preuss's draft was submitted for consideration. Many politicians in
Prussia objected and the middle states objected even more strongly. A more
general consideration was the desirability of keeping the door open for a
subsequent accession of Austria, which would be far easier if Germany
remained federal. With Ebert's support, therefore, Preuss's draft was
amended, even before it went to the constituent assembly, to retain from the
imperial constitution the federal principle and some of the specific
reservations in favor of the states.
The assembly itself took most of the latter out again, but kept the federal
principle. Prussia was preserved intact, but half of her representatives in
the new Federal Council (Reichsrat) were to be elected by provinces. Federal
legislation was extended to certain areas formerly reserved to the states.
Amendments to the constitution could be made by federal legislation or by a
referendum.
Certain restrictions were imposed on the constitutions to be adopted by the
states (now called Länder). In the Reichsrat each Land had votes
proportionate to its population, with the exception of Prussia which was
allowed a maximum of two fifths of the total. The members of the delegations
from each state, unlike those in the old Bundesrat, were not required to
vote as a unit. Legislation rejected by the Reichsrat could be passed by a
two-thirds majority in the Reichstag (the Bundesrat had had an absolute
veto).
Federalism, though reduced, had been preserved. This proved to be a source
of strength, not of weakness, for the Weimar Republic. Preuss probably
failed to appreciate the extent to which the degree and the character of
Prussian hegemony in imperial Germany had depended on the monarchy and on
the three-class suffrage. It turned out that a republican Prussian
government, elected on equal suffrage, was one of the firmest pillars of the
Weimar constitution.
The Prussian government from 1920 to 1932 was in the hands of a Center-SPD
coalition. The SPD, the major partner, was under the leadership of Otto
Braun, the prime minister. Braun appears in retrospect as one of the very
few real statesmen of the Weimar Republic. He was utterly devoted to the
ideal of democratic socialism, but pursued the reformist policy of the SPD
with greater tactical skill than most of his party colleagues in federal
politics. The Center Party contributed to the stability of the Prussian
government by abandoning its former states' rights attitude. Separatism
became a serious problem under the Weimar Republic not in Prussia, but in
Bavaria.
It was partly because of fear of Bavarian instability that Preuss wrote into
the Weimar Constitution the now famous Article 48, which gave the president
of the republic the right to govern by decree in emergencies. Before 1928,
however, nobody paid much attention to this provision. The Weimar presidency
in general was regarded as a weak (''French''), rather than a strong
(''American'') one. Preuss indeed had wanted it otherwise. He wanted a
presidency strong enough to act as a counterbalance to a dangerously
powerful parliament. Max Weber urged Preuss even further, toward a strong
presidency as a source of ''charismatic'' leadership. Very little of this
sentiment was reflected in the constitution as it was eventually
promulgated, in August 1919.
The constitution was considered to provide for parliamentary government with
some modifications: for example, the president was given the right of
dissolution of the Reichstag and appointment of the chancellor. With Ebert
as presumptive president these did not seem to anyone to be excessive
powers. More significant was the direct election of the president by the
population. This prescription introduced a plebiscitarian element into the
presidency, which could lead to an attempt, such as was later made, to
depict the president as more representative of the people than the
Reichstag. But the plebiscitarian principle was also embodied in provisions
for initiative and referendum. The importance of political parties in a mass
democracy was tacitly acknowledged in the adoption of proportional
representation.
II. Economic Problems
Economic problems were among the most pressing that the young republic had
to face. Because of the inflationary means by which the imperial government
had financed the war, the German mark in 1919 was worth less than 20 per
cent of its prewar value. Despite Erzberger's energetic financial reforms,
the state's revenues from taxation based on nominal values were hopelessly
inadequate.
Moreover, the economic impact of the Treaty of Versailles was crushing.
Germany lost 13 per cent of her territory, 10 per cent of her population, 15
per cent of arable land, 75 per cent of iron and 68 per cent of zinc ore, 26
per cent of her coal resources, the entire Alsatian potash and textile
industries, and the communications system built around Alsace-Lorraine and
Upper Silesia. Huge amounts of ships and shipping facilities and of railway
rolling-stock were delivered to the Allies.
All this was more important than the reparations payments imposed by the
treaty, although the latter attracted greater attention. This was because of
the link made in the treaty between reparations and the so-called
''war-guilt'' clause. Article 231 bothered the Germans more than any other.
The amount of reparations fixed in 1921 was estimated by J. M. Keynes to
exceed by three times Germany's ability to pay.
But the punitive aspects of the treaty in general should be compared with
the nature of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The reparations question should
be put in perspective by remember that the imperial government had proposed
to recoup Germany's financial sacrifices in the war by imposing on the
defeated Allies payments four times greater than those eventually demanded
of Germany. These considerations help to explain, rather than to excuse, the
follies of the Paris peacemakers.
Another reason for the prominence given to reparations is their alleged
contribution to the runaway inflation of the early 1920s. In fact, however,
inflation, far from being the consequence of reparations, preceded them.
Successive governments then seized on it as a means of evading reparations
payments, as well as for internal social purposes. No German government
before 1923 made any attempt to stabilize the currency, because German
industrialists worked out a system of ''inflation profiteering.'' They would
obtain short-term loans from the central bank for improvement and expansion
of their plant, and then repay the loans with inflated currency.
Similarly, the large agriculturists paid off their mortgages with virtually
worthless currency. By contrast, everybody with a fixed income-broadly
speaking, the middle class, was a victim of the inflation. Even union wages
always lagged behind prices. The dislocation caused by inflation brought
unemployment, despite the apparent industrial boom. The inflation was
obviously deeply divisive in its social effects and contributed to lack of
confidence in the fledgling republic among large groups of the population.
The industrialists, in addition to favoring inflation, which itself had the
effect of undermining reparations payments, also directly opposed any
genuine effort to meet these payments, because such an effort was likely to
involve domestic austerity and a planned economy. The SPD, which had missed
its opportunity to intervene in the economy during the period of provisional
government, was by this time no longer in power. In the elections of 1920 it
had lost sixty seats to the USPD, and the ''Weimar Coalition'' lost its
majority in the Reichstag, never to recover it. The governments of the
period of inflation were led by members of the Center Party and were open to
influence from industry.
The situation changed after the French, realizing that Germany was
deliberately evading reparations payments, decided to go and get them and
occupied the Ruhr district in January 1923. The German government tried at
first to resist and retaliate, but soon found this impossible. A new
government was installed for the purpose of appeasing the French, getting
the Ruhr cleared, and negotiating some revision of the reparations burden.
One essential requirement of proving German good faith to France was
stabilization of the currency, which took a certain amount of technical
financial skill and a lot of determination and nerve. These were supplied
mainly by the new chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, the first and last member
of a liberal party ever to hold that office. Before 1918 he had been on the
left wing of the National Liberal party on domestic issues, but during the
war had been an extreme annexationist and played a leading part in the
dismissal of Bethmann Hollweg. On this account he had not been admitted to
the leadership of the new Democratic Party (DDP) in 1918, whose founders
professed to aim at a united bourgeois liberal party but which turned out to
be not much more than the Progressive Party under a new name. Stresemann had
therefore founded a party of his own, as a successor to the National
Liberals, which he called the People's Party (DVP).
This failure to unite the middle class politically was not the least of the
domestic consequences of the conflict over war aims. It meant that
Stresemann led a small party which was to the right of center and to the
right of him, instead of a large party, of which he would have been more
representative and which would have given him more consistent and more
powerful support. He failed, for example, to prevent his party from
following in the footsteps of the National Liberals and regarding itself as
the political mouthpiece of German industry. Stresemann himself was not
associated with heavy industry, but came from a poor family and never forgot
the miserable district of Berlin where he was born.
In this respect he differed, for example, from the millionaire Walther
Rathenau, who had briefly played an important part in Weimar politics, just
before Stresemann became chancellor. Rathenau, however, like Erzberger, was
assassinated by right-wing nationalist fanatics, who resented his policy of
moderation. These senseless acts robbed the Weimar Republic of its two
strongest middle-class supporters and left middle-class leadership to men of
Stresemann's political stripe. Stresemann was, after all, still a
monarchist, and his party was officially a monarchist party. For all his
many fine qualities-he was a talented orator, a man of charm and
cosmopolitan culture, and one of the few statesmen who appealed to young
people-Stresemann's appointment should therefore have raised the question of
the viability of a ''Republic without republicans'' as early as 1923.
Fortunately, Stresemann was a practical man, a ''pragmatic conservative,''
which accounts not only for the not always entirely honest discrepancy
between theory and practice, but also for his flowering when given office
and his relative success as a statesman and politician. He needed an
immediate practical problem. Without one, he tended to lose himself in
romantic and irrational meandering. This dichotomy in his nature goes far to
explain the contrast between the nationalist extremist of 1917 and the
responsible chancellor and foreign minister of the 1920s, who even dropped
his monarchism when he found it obsolete.
III. Political Problems
Probably his hundred days as chancellor contained Stresemann's greatest
achievement, greater than that of his subsequent years as foreign minister.
He had the courage and the self confidence to take office under
unprecedentedly bad conditions, an act of statesmanship to be compared with
that of the Weimar Coalition in voting to accept the Treaty of Versailles
(which he had opposed). Both were steps which preserved the very existence
of Germany. On the other hand, by no means the whole credit for securing the
evacuation of the Ruhr and overcoming the inflation belongs to Stresemann
alone.
The government over which he presided for the first sixty of his hundred
days was a so-called "Great Coalition" government, that is to say, a cabinet
which contained members of the three parties of the Weimar Coalition plus
his one, the DVP. Since from 1920 on neither the Weimar Coalition alone nor
the parties of the Right alone could muster a majority in the Reichstag,
owing to the strength of the USPD and KPD, the great parliamentary problem
of the Weimar Republic was the relationship between the SPD and the DVP.
This relationship determined the possibility, at any given time, of carrying
on government at all, either through a minority government of the bourgeois
parties tolerated by the SPD or through a Great Coalition. The difficulty
was that the SPD was the party of the workers and the DVP the party of the
employers. Stresemann's struggle to change his party's character in this
respect was therefore, among other things, a struggle to make it more
amenable to collaboration with the SPD, and ultimately a struggle for the
survival of the Republic itself.
The whole parliamentary life of the Weimar Republic was fundamentally
different from that of the Empire. It was a fully constitutional state, in
which political parties played a vital and active role, as distinct from the
shadow-boxing to which they had been condemned by Bismarck's sham
constitutionalism. One consequence was that the parties reorganized and
strengthened their internal machinery. The lead was taken by the successor
to the two imperial conservative parties, the National People's Party (DNVP).
By contrast with Stresemann's DVP, whose monarchism was usually passive, the
DNVP from the first campaigned militantly for the restoration of the
Hohenzollern monarchy. It took a position of outright hostility to the new
republican regime and institutions.
That such a party could even exist is again traceable to the SPD's
unwillingness to destroy the position of the Prussian Junkers during the
period of provisional government. Even apart from its generally cautious
approach, the SPD as an urban party had taken little interest in the
problems of peasants or of agriculture in general. Insofar as they had any
views on the subject, SPD leaders tended to regard large-scale agriculture
as economically sensible. They thought that because of the loss of territory
in the east and the economic damage of the war, the time was particularly
inappropriate for any radical measures of land reform.
Nevertheless, the consequences for the new republic were disastrous. Of all
the old forces from imperial Germany that survived into the Weimar Republic,
none was as dangerous as the Junkers, with their economic base in
agriculture, their prestige base in east-Elbian society, and their positions
of power in the army and the civil service. They, more than anyone else,
were responsible for the psychological incubus of monarchism weighing on the
Republic. Hugo Preuss had rightly said that no constitution would work which
was not accompanied by a positive ''national spirit.'' Instead, the regime
was the target of a constant stream of nationalistic invective and
denunciation of democracy and parliamentary government in general as
un-German and wicked. This drew strength from the Versailles treaty and the
''stab in the back'' legend. Such an assault could never have assumed the
proportions it did, if the Junker and other conservative and reactionary
forces had not been allowed to regroup in 1919 under the banner of the DNVP.
From this bastion they went over to the offensive against the Republic,
spawning various societies and para-military groups, which sponsored
attacks, both verbal and physical, upon the regime. Very few supporters of
the Weimar Republic even made any attempt to deal with this ''disloyal
opposition.'' The SPD, to whom the men of the DNVP had been wont to apply
the label ''enemy of the state'' before 1914, forbore to turn the tables
after 1918.
As a political party, the DNVP took advantage of parliamentary institutions
to undermine them. The leaders recognized that, deprived of the virtual veto
on German affairs that they had been able to exercise through the
three-class suffrage in Prussia, they must use the methods of democracy to
fight democracy. They therefore abandoned the role of an agrarian pressure
group and presented the party as a broadly comprehensive coalition of the
political Right. By this sort of appeal they captured the loyalty of many
people of merely sound patriotic feeling, as distinct from bellicose
nationalism, who were alienated from the Weimar Republic and from the system
of parliamentary government, which was its essence. Misunderstanding the
principles of the SPD, these people were unwilling to ''accept'' the state
that they considered its creature. So successful, indeed, were the leaders
that by 1924 the DNVP had become the second largest party in the Reichstag,
not far behind the SPD.
The SPD also-and, for that matter, all the parties-evolved more elaborate
and more permanent organizations, in view of the frequency of elections and
the institution of female suffrage. Party machines tended to become vested
interests, and party managers, intent upon votes and the ''party image,''
inhibited the flexibility of their Reichstag delegates, who in the thick of
parliamentary battle were more inclined to realism and compromise. This
growing control of party bureaucracies over parliamentarians was to prove
particularly ominous for the crucial relations between the SPD and the DVP.
Meanwhile it made the whole business of forming coalitions, and therefore of
governing at all, infinitely more difficult and complicated. Party leaders
in government were compelled to divert a good deal of their time and energy
to mollifying their own party organizations. At the same time this
unedifying development only served, for some people who thought of
themselves as idealists, as evidence of the uselessness or harmfulness of
political parties as such.
There were those who would have nothing to do with a system they regarded as
having been imposed on Germany by the Allies through the SPD. There were
others for whom the introduction of a fully constitutional system under
conditions of crisis obscured its rational content. The attitude of contempt
for parties and politicians, common before 1918, was still widespread
thereafter. It was not easy, even under changed conditions, for the parties
to escape from the role to which Bismarck had cast them.