German Democratic Party

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 16th of November 1918, one week after the November Revolution, an appeal for a new democratic party circulated in Germany. It was signed by 60 people. Among them was Albert Einstein. The German Democratic Party, known by its German initials DDP, had just been born into a country that had never before been governed along pluralist-democratic lines. Within two months it claimed over one million members. Within fifteen years it would dissolve itself under Nazi pressure. How did a party that drew Nobel laureates, leading newspapers, and the architects of a new constitution fall from 75 seats to almost none? Why was it falsely branded the party of big capital, then defamed as the Jewish party? And how did its people quietly hold the new republic together even as the party shrank around them? The answers run through Germany's brief liberal experiment between 1918 and 1933.

• 2. A Liberal Lineage

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  The German Empire had a series of major liberal parties, and the DDP was assembled from their fragments. It grew out of the Progressive People's Party and the liberal wing of the National Liberal Party, both active under the Empire. The Progressive People's Party itself had formed in 1910, after earlier left-liberal groups merged. Theodor Barth and his supporters had broken away into the Democratic Union back in 1908. They kept their independence until folding into the DDP in 1918. Friedrich Naumann's National-Social Association had merged into the Free-minded Union in 1903, threading another strand into the same liberal weave. The Progressive People's Party received 1.5 million votes in the 1912 election. That was the last vote before World War I broke out, and it measured the strength liberalism could still muster before the war reshaped everything.

• 3. Born In Revolution

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  A proposal to merge the National Liberal Party and the Progressive People's Party arose in the waning days of World War I. It met resistance from the National Liberals' right wing and the Progressives' left wing. The founders contacted Theodor Wolff, editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt, about how to organize the new party. It was named the Democratic Party at Wolff's insistence. Richard Witting, Hjalmar Schacht, and Kurt von Kleefeld were among the founding members. An almost identical founding statement appeared at the same time in the Vossische Zeitung. On the 20th of November 1918 the Progressives, the left wing of the National Liberals, and the new party merged together. The right-wing National Liberals went their own way and formed the German People's Party, the DVP. Where the older Progressive People's Party had raised 26,000 Reichsmarks in 1911 and counted 1,054 contributors in 1912, the DDP raised millions before the 1919 election. By January 1919 it had over one million members, a surge that would soon be tested at the ballot box.

• 4. Architects Of A Republic

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  The DDP won 75 seats in the 1919 election and became the third-largest party in the Weimar National Assembly. It was heavily involved in creating the Weimar Constitution. Hugo Preuß drafted the document. Max Weber influenced the section covering the presidency, and Erich Koch-Weser wrote the section on referendums. Friedrich Naumann served as the party's first chair until his death in 1919. His faction included Gertrud Bäumer, Theodor Heuss, Carl Wilhelm Petersen, and Gustav Stolper, and this group held high leadership for the party's entire life. The DDP joined the Scheidemann cabinet but left in June 1919 in response to the Treaty of Versailles, returning to the coalition that October. Friedrich von Payer resigned as chair of the legislative caucus after voting in favor of the treaty. From 1919 to 1932 the party took part in almost all Weimar cabinets through varying coalitions, supplying the personnel a young democracy badly needed.

• 5. The Quiet Backbone

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  By 1927 the DDP had shrunk to 117,000 members, down from around 800,000 a year after its founding. Yet its weight in government outran its size. Positioned between the Social Democrats and the Centre Party, it helped stabilize the Weimar Coalition nationwide, and especially in Prussia. Wilhelm Abegg, state secretary in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, reorganized and modernized the Prussian police. The party also supplied a reservoir of civil servants for high administrative posts. No other party offered, to a similar extent, officials who were both professionally trained and loyal to the democratic system. That mattered in a state still staffed by monarchist and anti-democratic civil servants inherited from the Empire. The contrast made the DDP's small but steady corps of loyal administrators one of the republic's underappreciated supports.

• 6. Why It Faded

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  In 1920 the DDP's support halved and its seat total fell from 75 to 39. Votes drained to the German People's Party, the German National People's Party, and single-issue parties. The split over how to handle the Versailles treaty, which some deputies approved, drove much of the loss. The bleeding of votes came with a loss of members, finances, and journalistic support. The Berliner Tageblatt, the Frankfurter Zeitung, and the Vossische Zeitung held views close to the party's, yet the DDP never built an important paper of its own, unlike the Social Democrats' Vorwärts. A prejudice took hold that the DDP was the party of big capital, a claim that was factually false and charged with anti-Semitism. The Nazi Party later exploited it by defaming the DDP as the Jewish party. The party's own program added to the trouble. Its idea of social capitalism, in which workers and owners mutually recognized duty, right, performance, and profit, sounded out of touch amid rising unemployment and economic strain. As support eroded, the backing of those friendly newspapers waned while the party drifted rightward.

• 7. The Jewish Party

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  More Jews voted for the DDP than for any other party, which earned it the nickname the party of Jews and professors. Its program was a synthesis of liberal and social ideas, a fusion Naumann had attempted before the war. Members and supporters came mainly from the educated middle class, the Bildungsbürgertum, alongside executives, civil servants, industrialists from the chemical and electrical industries, and liberal Jews. The party also held sharp internal arguments. Weber and Preuß wanted a centralized state and the breakup of Prussia, while Otto Fischbeck, Conrad Haußmann, and Payer wanted Prussia preserved. A fight over the national flag split north from south, and the deputies voted 43-14 against the new flag. On foreign policy the party never accepted Weimar Germany's eastern borders. It wanted the Free City of Danzig returned to Germany and Germany united with Austria, and its early support for the League of Nations cooled after rulings that did not benefit Germany. That blend of liberal principle, social vision, and national grievance defined a party whose intellectual credentials were unusually high; 40 percent of those at its December 1919 conference held a doctorate.

• 8. Renaming And Ruin

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  In July 1930 the DDP united with the People's National Reich Association to form the German State Party, the DStP, at first only for the coming Reichstag elections. The merger sparked fierce conflict, since the Reich Association was the political arm of Artur Mahraun's national liberal Young German Order. Left-wing members including Ludwig Quidde and Hellmut von Gerlach left and founded the Radical Democratic Party in 1930, which went nowhere politically. The Young German Order broke away right after the election, but the party formally reorganized as the German State Party on the 8th of November 1930. The decline only deepened. The party held 20 seats in 1930, fell to a far smaller total after July 1932 with 371,000 votes, then dropped to two seats after November 1932. It gained three seats in the March 1933 election, taking five in all only through a combined list with the Social Democrats. Then came the decisive vote. The DStP deputies, unlike the Social Democrats, backed the Nazi-sponsored Enabling Act that gutted the Reichstag. Reinhold Maier justified the yes, closing his speech: "In the interest of the people and the Fatherland and in the expectation of lawful developments, we will put aside our serious misgivings and agree to the Enabling Act." The self-dissolution of the German State Party, forced by the Nazis, took place on the 28th of June 1933. Some former members later resisted the regime through the Robinsohn-Strassmann group and the Sperr Circle, and Fritz Elsas was among those murdered. Yet the line did not end there. After the war, former DDP figures such as Theodor Heuss and Reinhold Maier helped found the Free Democratic Party, while Wilhelm Külz and others built the East German Liberal Democratic Party, carrying a dissolved party's people into Germany's next republic.