The Weimar Republic ran from 1919 to 1933 and was Germany’s first attempt at parliamentary democracy. It is often described as a doomed regime that lurched from crisis to crisis. That is half right. Weimar did face a remarkable run of crises, any one of which would have tested an established democracy, and it was made to face most of them within its first decade. But it was also, for several years, a functioning constitutional state that produced some of the most adventurous art, science and social policy in Europe. The story of why it failed is the story of how Hitler became Chancellor.
The founding
The Kaiser abdicated on 9 November 1918, two days before the armistice, and fled to the Netherlands. The new German republic was declared from a window of the Reichstag building in Berlin by the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann. Within a few weeks Germany was being run by a coalition of moderate socialists and centrist parties under Friedrich Ebert, who had to negotiate with the army on one side and with revolutionary communists on the other. In January 1919 the communist Spartacist uprising in Berlin was crushed by the Freikorps, who murdered the leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In the same month a national assembly was elected in Weimar, the small city in central Germany chosen because Berlin was thought too dangerous. The Weimar Constitution that emerged from that assembly came into force in August 1919.
The constitution was, on paper, a fine document. It guaranteed civil liberties, established universal suffrage including for women, set up proportional representation, and created a federal system that balanced the powers of the central state and the regional governments. It also contained, in Article 48, an emergency provision allowing the President to govern by decree in a national emergency. That article would later be used to dismantle the constitution from within.
The first crisis years, 1919 to 1923
The young republic had to absorb the consequences of the First World War in real time. The peace terms imposed at Versailles in June 1919 were widely rejected as unjust. Reparations were set at sums the German economy could not pay. Right-wing assassins murdered the Centre Party politician Matthias Erzberger in 1921 for having signed the armistice, and the Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in 1922 for being a Jewish republican. The Kapp Putsch of March 1920 saw a far-right paramilitary force briefly take Berlin before being defeated by a general strike of the working class.
The hyperinflation of 1923 was the moment that destroyed the trust of the German middle class in the new republic. The price of a loaf of bread, which had been one mark before the war, reached 200 billion marks by November 1923. Workers were paid twice a day so they could spend their wages before the value collapsed. Pensioners and savers lost everything. The Reich finally stabilised the currency by the end of the year, but the political damage was permanent. Many of the men and women who voted for the Nazi Party a decade later were people who had had their savings wiped out in 1923 and never forgave the republic for it.
It was in the middle of the hyperinflation, in November 1923, that Adolf Hitler tried to seize power in Munich in the Beer Hall Putsch. The attempt failed and Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison. He served less than nine months. He used the time to dictate Mein Kampf. He was released in December 1924 and resumed his political career. The republic’s mistake was not so much that it had imprisoned him as that it had let him out and not banned him from political activity afterwards.
The good years, 1924 to 1929
From 1924 to 1929 the Weimar Republic stabilised. American loans under the Dawes Plan put the German economy back on its feet. The currency held. Industrial production recovered. Mainstream centrist parties governed in coalition. The political extremes, on both right and left, lost ground. The Nazi Party received only 2.6 per cent of the vote in the 1928 federal election. Some commentators were prepared to write off the radical right as a Bavarian eccentricity that had had its day.
These were also the years that produced the Weimar most often remembered today. The Bauhaus school of design, founded in 1919, did its most influential work in this period. Berlin became the cultural capital of central Europe, with cabarets, jazz clubs, expressionist cinema, the new science of psychoanalysis, and an openly gay subculture that was the most visible in any European capital. German universities were the leading institutions in physics and chemistry. The republic’s social welfare system, including unemployment insurance from 1927, was the most generous in Europe. None of this was wasted. None of it stopped what came next.
The collapse, 1929 to 1933
The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 ended the period of stability immediately. American banks recalled their loans to Germany. German industry collapsed. Unemployment rose from 1.3 million in 1929 to over 6 million by 1932, around a third of the working population. The mainstream centrist coalition that had been governing the country broke up over how to respond. From 1930 onwards Germany was governed by emergency presidential decrees under Article 48 of the constitution, because the Reichstag could no longer produce a working majority.
The Nazi vote climbed in step with the unemployment figures. 18.3 per cent in September 1930. 37.4 per cent in July 1932. The Communist vote also rose. The mainstream parties were squeezed between them. By the end of 1932 the Nazi Party had two hundred and thirty seats in the Reichstag, more than any other party, but still well short of a majority. President Hindenburg, an 85-year-old former field marshal, refused for several months to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. The conservative establishment around Hindenburg, led by the former Chancellor Franz von Papen, finally talked him round on the argument that they could control Hitler in a coalition government. Hitler was sworn in on 30 January 1933. Within seven weeks the Reichstag had passed the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler the power to govern by decree without Parliament. The republic was finished.
What it tells us
Weimar did not fail because Germans were uniquely susceptible to authoritarianism. It failed because of a specific run of crises that no government could have managed entirely well: a humiliating peace, a paramilitary right wing, a violent revolutionary left, hyperinflation, the world’s worst depression, and a constitutional escape clause that turned out to be a back door for dictatorship. The conservative elites who decided to do business with Hitler in January 1933 were not Nazis. They were respectable politicians who thought they could use a movement they considered crude and disposable. Within a year they had been reduced to spectators in their own country. By the end of the decade most of them were dead, in exile, or had become collaborators. The Weimar lesson is that democracy does not die only at the hands of its enemies. It dies when its supposed friends decide they can do without it.
See also
Sources
- Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, Penguin, 2003
- Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Princeton University Press, 2007
- Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, Hill and Wang, 1992
- USHMM: The Weimar Republic