German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918-1933

Larry Eugene Jones

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807865507, 9780807817643
• eBook ISBN: 9781469619682
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Jones offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of the development and decline of the German Democratic party and the German People's party from 1918 to 1933. In tracing the impact of World War I, the runaway inflation to the 1920s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s upon Germany's middle-class electorate, the study demonstrates why the forces of liberalism were ineffective in preventing the rise of nazism and the establishment of the Third Reich.

Originally published in 1988.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

PART ONE
A New Beginning 1918–1920

CHAPTER ONE
Revolution and Realignment

THE END OF WORLD WAR I and the collapse of the Second Empire marked the beginning of a critical new era in the history of the German liberal movement. To Progressives and National Liberals alike, the outbreak of the November Revolution and the abdication of the Kaiser threatened to sweep away much of what they had managed to achieve over the course of the previous half-century. Not only was the monarchy a symbol of power and stability to which all but a few of their number felt a certain emotional attachment, but the spectre of Bolshevism injected a note of increasing urgency into the more generalized uncertainty with which the leaders of the German liberal establishment greeted their country’s military defeat. Their uneasiness was compounded by the fact that the war had also done much to radicalize the social strata from which the two liberal parties had traditionally recruited the bulk of their electoral support.¹ Yet for all of the apprehension that Germany’s liberal leadership may have felt about the fate of liberal institutions and values in the postwar period, the collapse of the Second Empire also created a moment of unprecedented opportunity for those liberals who hoped to put an end to the schism that had developed within their ranks during the course of the previous century. At no point after the constitutional conflict of the mid-i86os were conditions for the creation of a united liberal party more favorable than in the fall and winter of 1918–19.

From the elections of 1912 until the final days of World War I, the movement for liberal unity had made little, if any, progress. The defeat of the Young Liberals within the NLP had virtually paralyzed Progressive efforts to found a united liberal party, and with the outbreak of the war and the proclamation of the Burgfriede by Kaiser Wilhelm II in his speech from the throne on 4 August 1914, all domestic political issues, including that of liberal unity, had receded into the background. It was not until the spring and summer of 1917, when the Burgfriede collapsed in the altercation over electoral reform and war aims, that the two liberal parties began to emerge from the political limbo in which the outbreak of the war had placed them. Still, the divisions that had separated the two liberal parties before the war persisted with undiminished intensity. Whereas the Progressives had long endorsed the introduction of direct and equal suffrage in Prussia as the first step toward a genuine democratization of the Second Empire,² the leaders of the NLP’s right wing feared that abolition of the three-class franchise would mean the end of bourgeois supremacy in Germany and consistently blocked the overtures of those on the party’s left wing who advocated a reform of the Prussian electoral law as a way of rewarding the German working class for its loyalty during the war.³ No less disturbing was the split that had developed between the Progressives and the National Liberals on the question of German war aims. For while the Progressives joined the Center and the Majority Socialists (Mehrheits-Sozialdemokra-tische Partei Deutschlands or MSPD) in sponsoring the Peace Resolution of 19 July 1917, the National Liberals continued to insist upon territorial annexations as a conditio sine qua non for the conclusion of hostilities and refused to support the resolution on the grounds that it might be interpreted as a sign of German weakness.⁴

With the collapse of the Ludendorff offensive in the summer of 1918 and the subsequent installation of Prince Max von Baden as chancellor in early October, the cleavages that had existed within the German liberal movement seemed suddenly superfluous. The appointment of Prince Max represented a major triumph for the Progressives, and his political program fulfilled virtually every objective for which they, along with the Center and Majority Socialists, had been working since the July crisis of 1917.⁵ While the National Liberals were admittedly less enthusiastic than the Progressives about the changes that Prince Max had instituted in Germany’s political system, whatever reservations they may have had about his constitutional experiment became academic in the wake of the revolution that spread throughout Germany from the port city of Kiel in the first week of November. The immediate effect of the outbreak of the revolution was to renew interest on the part of Germany’s liberal leadership in the establishment of closer ties between the two liberal parties. Representatives from the Progressive and National Liberal delegations to the Reichstag had already met in early November to discuss the conclusion of an alliance for the national elections that they expected to take place following the conclusion of hostilities. These discussions were resumed immediately after the abdication of the Kaiser and resulted in a general consensus that the deteriorating domestic situation made a merger of the two liberal parties imperative. Acting on their own initiative, the negotiators proceeded to constitute themselves as a provisional executive committee for the purpose of exploring the possibility of such a merger and drafted a joint political program as the basis upon which the founding of a united liberal party was to take place.⁶

Prompted in large measure by the fear of social revolution, the rapprochement between the two liberal parties in the stormy days of November 1918 represented a first, tentative step toward the creation of a united liberal party. But before these developments could reach a conclusion, they were undercut by the emergence of a third and more radical group under the leadership of newspaper editor Theodor Wolff and university professor Alfred Weber. On 10 November a number of prominent personalities from all walks of German life had met in the home of Berlin industrialist Theodor Vogelstein to discuss the founding of an entirely new political party as an alternative to the “broken” and “morally bankrupt” parties that still claimed to represent Germany’s liberal bourgeoisie. Later that afternoon a delegation from the Vogelstein group met with Wolff, who agreed to place his influential Berliner Tageblatt at the disposal of the new party. On the following morning Wolff received a visit from Weber, an impulsive young intellectual whose enthusiasm for the idea of a new party was sustained by a mixture of democratic idealism and apocalyptic fervor. Neither Wolff nor Weber harbored much sympathy for the idea of a united liberal party as envisaged by the Progressives and National Liberals. On the contrary, both men regarded the existing liberal parties as hopelessly compromised by their uncritical support of the German war effort and sought the creation of an entirely new party that would, at least in the eyes of the Francophile Wolff, serve as a German counterpart to the Radical Socialists in France.⁷

Having assured themselves of Wolff’s cooperation, Vogelstein and his associates set out to secure the support of prominent Progressives such as Georg Gothein and Otto Fischbeck. The situation in which the Progressives found themselves was particularly desperate in light of the radicalizing effect that the war had had upon their party’s middle-class electorate. Though deeply suspicious of the political naivete of Wolff and his entourage, Gothein and Fisch-beck were fearful that the creation of a new bourgeois party to the left of the FVP would result in their own party’s annihilation at the polls and therefore saw no alternative to an accommodation with the Wolff-Vogelstein faction.⁸ On 13 November Gothein wrote to twenty-one members of the FVP Reichstag delegation and urged them to attach their signatures to an appeal for the founding of a comprehensive democratic party that Wolff and his associates were in the process of drafting.⁹ Gothein’s initiative, however, met with a cool response in traditional liberal strongholds such as Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria, where the local leadership of the two liberal parties had already begun negotiations between themselves in the absence of any sort of clear signal from their superiors in Berlin.¹⁰ Consequently, when the appeal appeared in Wolff’s Berliner Tageblatt on 16 November, it carried the signatures of only two Progressive deputies in addition to those of Gothein and Fischbeck.¹¹

The immediate effect of Wolff’s appeal for a new democratic party un-compromised by the sins of the past was to sabotage the negotiations that the leaders of the Progressive and National Liberal parties had been conducting on behalf of an alliance for the upcoming national elections. This turn of events was particularly distressing to Gustav Stresemann, the thirty-nine-year-old chairman of the NLP Reichstag delegation and the driving force within the party ever since Bassermann’s death a few years earlier. At the urging of the Young Liberals and the leaders of the NLP’s left wing,¹² Stresemann had met with representatives from the FVP on 15 and 16 November in hopes of arranging an alliance for the national elections that were expected to take place in the first month or so after the end of the war. To be sure, Stresemann had deep personal reservations about an accommodation with the Progressives, but in light of the NLP’s organizational collapse throughout much of the country, he saw no alternative to an alliance with the FVP and was even prepared to go along with a merger of the two parties after the elections had taken place.¹³ With the emergence of the group around Wolff and Weber, however, Stresemann’s own role in the movement for liberal unity became increasingly problematic, particularly in view of the deep-seated antipathy that he and the Berliner Tageblatt faction harbored toward each other.¹⁴ Moreover, the industrial interests that had traditionally formed the nucleus of the NLP’s right wing were adamantly opposed to any accommodation with the Progressives or any other political group that might hamper the effectiveness of their party’s campaign against the Social Democrats.¹⁵ But as local party leaders from one part of the country after another began to deluge Stresemann with reports of the NLP’s organizational demise and pleas for an alliance with other liberal groups, Stresemann had no choice but to set aside his personal hostility to the Tageblatt faction and join the Progressives in their search for an accord with the Wolff-Weber group.¹⁶

The meeting between Stresemann, the Progressives, and the leaders of the Wolff-Weber group on the afternoon of 18 November marked a critical turning point in the efforts to create a united liberal party. While Stresemann went to the meeting hoping that a separate accommodation with the Progressives might still be possible, he was fully prepared to retire from active political life rather than stand in the way of a united liberal party.¹⁷ The meeting, however, took an entirely unexpected turn when Weber, speaking on behalf of the faction from the Berliner Tageblatt, announced that he and his colleagues had officially constituted themselves as a new political party earlier that morning and that a merger with the two liberal parties was possible only under conditions that guaranteed the dominance of the group he represented. Specifically, Weber stipulated that anyone who had compromised himself by annexationist activities during the war was to be barred from a position in the leadership of the party and demanded that the new party’s executive committee be constituted in such a way that the group from the Berliner Tageblatt receive as many seats as the two liberal parties combined.¹⁸ Not only Stresemann but the Progressives as well were outraged at the way in which Weber and his supporters had tried to usurp leadership of the movement for liberal unity and left the meeting deeply depressed over its outcome.¹⁹ But at a meeting of National Liberal and Progressive party leaders on the following day, the Progressives showed great reluctance to break off negotiations with the Wolff-Weber faction and announced that they would continue to seek a modus vivendi with the founders of the new party. Consequently, when the founding of the new party—the German Democratic Party—was officially announced on 20 November, the Progressives responded two days later with a public appeal calling upon their supporters throughout the country to place themselves at the service of the new party.²⁰

Whereas the Progressives felt that they had no choice but to go along with with Wolff and his associates, the outcome of the meeting on 18 November had only confirmed Stresemann in his conviction that an agreement with the group around the Berliner Tageblatt was impossible. Immediately after the fateful meeting on 18 November, Stresemann cabled his supporters throughout the country in a desperate attempt to prevent them from going over to the Democratic Party and to keep what still remained of the old National Liberal organization intact.²¹ At the same time, he and two other members of the NLP central executive committee, Robert Friedberg and Paul Vogel, issued a public appeal calling upon those who had remained true to the principles of the National Liberal Party to throw their support to the new German People’s Party that he and the leaders of the NLP were in the process of founding.²² Stresemann’s hopes of rallying the National Liberal faithful to the cause of the DVP, however, had already suffered a serious setback with the defection of Baron Hartmann von Richthofen and Johannes Junck, both members of the NLP Reichstag delegation, earlier in the negotiations.²³ Stresemann’s situation was further complicated by the virtual collapse of the National Liberal organization in Bavaria, Württemberg, and other parts of the country. In Württemberg, for example, local party leaders from both the FVP and NLP had already gone over to the DDP in an attempt to force the national leadership of their respective parties to resolve their differences on behalf of a united liberal party,²⁴ while in the Rhineland all but a handful of the NLP’s local leaders had come out in support of the Democrats.²⁵

Stresemann’s decision to found the German People’s Party ran strongly counter to the express wishes of many of his closest associates. This was particularly true of the Young Liberals, who at a meeting with Stresemann, Otto Hugo, and other party leaders on 23 November pressed their case for a united liberal party.²⁶ At the same time, both Stresemann and the founders of the DDP found themselves under increasingly heavy pressure from influential middle-class interest organizations to resume negotiations between their respective parties. On 28 November over 120 representatives from more than twenty special-interest organizations such as the Hansa-Bund, the German National Union of Commercial Employee...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Liberal Legacy of Imperial Germany
• Part One A New Beginning 1918–1920
• Part Two The Search for Stability 1920–1922
• Part Three Between Ruin and Reconstruction 1922–1924
• Part Four Stabilization and Fragmentation 1924–1928
• Part Five At the Crossroads 1928–1930
• Part Six In the Shadow of Nazism 1930–1933
• Final Reflections
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index