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.
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.
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.
Send comments and questions to Professor
Gerhard Rempel, Western New England College.