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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Weimar Republic

~8 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
6 sections
  • The Weimar Republic was born on the 9th of November 1918 from the ruins of a war that had killed more than 20 million people, among them over 2 million German soldiers. A republic was proclaimed that day at the Reichstag building in Berlin by a Social Democrat named Philipp Scheidemann. He had not consulted his party's leader Friedrich Ebert before making the announcement, and Ebert was furious. Two hours after Scheidemann spoke, a second republic was proclaimed at the Berlin Palace by Karl Liebknecht, co-leader of the communist Spartacus League. Germany's new political order had not even taken its first breath before it was splitting in two.

    The name Weimar Republic is itself a curiosity. The state was officially the German Reich, and the informal term "Weimar Republic" was coined not by its founders but by Adolf Hitler, who used it for the first time at a Nazi Party rally in Munich on the 24th of February 1929. In English, people simply called the place Germany. Yet within the span of fourteen years, this constitutional experiment would encompass hyperinflation that erased lifetimes of savings, a cultural renaissance that electrified Europe, a fragile era of relative peace, and finally the dismantling of democratic governance by legal manipulation. How a republic survived so much, and why it ultimately could not, is the story ahead.

  • On the 29th of October 1918, sailors at Wilhelmshaven refused orders. Their rebellion spread, and by the 3rd of November it had ignited the Kiel mutiny. Sailors, soldiers and workers began forming councils modelled on the soviets of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and power changed hands across German cities with, as the source records, little or no violence.

    The socialist movement driving these events was divided between two major parties with incompatible visions. The Majority Social Democratic Party, the MSPD, wanted a parliamentary system. The Independent Social Democratic Party, the USPD, wanted immediate peace and a soviet-style economy. When the MSPD decided to ride the wave of popular unrest rather than be swept under it, they pushed for Kaiser Wilhelm II to abdicate. When he refused, Chancellor Maximilian of Baden simply announced that the abdication had already happened.

    The armistice was signed on the 11th of November 1918 at Compiègne. It amounted, the source notes, to a German capitulation with no concessions by the Allies; the naval blockade would continue until full peace terms were settled. To avoid the street violence still consuming Berlin, the new National Assembly convened in Weimar, in central Germany, and it was that choice of location that eventually gave the Republic its unofficial name.

    On the 15th of January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were summarily killed by members of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division following their arrests after the failed Spartacist uprising. The military trial of the perpetrators was presided over by Wilhelm Canaris, a friend of the commander who ordered the killings. The main instigator and the alleged shooter were never charged. That impunity, visible so early, would prove to be a pattern.

  • On the 28th of June 1919, Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles and lost roughly 13 percent of its former territory, including 48 percent of its iron resources and 10 percent of its coal. Seven million people, about 12 percent of the population, were transferred to other states or territories. The Saarland went under League of Nations control for 15 years, with its coal output going to France. Alsace-Lorraine returned to France, the northern part of Schleswig-Holstein went to Denmark, and the Polish Corridor left East Prussia physically severed from the rest of Germany.

    The treaty's disarmament clauses reduced the German army to 100,000 men and prohibited an air force, tanks, submarines and poison gas. The so-called War Guilt Clause, Article 231, never actually used the word "guilt"; it stated that Germany accepted responsibility for losses caused by the aggression of Germany and its allies. The distinction hardly mattered. German minister president Philipp Scheidemann told the Weimar National Assembly on the 12th of May 1919: "What hand should not wither that puts this fetter on itself and on us?" He resigned rather than sign the document. The Assembly approved it anyway on the 23rd of June, under Allied threat to resume hostilities.

    The German government's official response was to fight the treaty's narrative from within. The War Guilt Department financed a "Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War" whose purpose was to provide scientific-seeming support for a campaign of German innocence abroad. A parliamentary inquiry into the war's causes met from 1919 to 1932 but produced results of what the source calls "questionable value" due to obstruction from the civil service and military. The stab-in-the-back myth, propagated by Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg, blamed Germany's defeat on civilian defeatism and was spread by the right throughout the 1920s.

  • Between the end of the war and the signing of Versailles, an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 German civilians died of disease or starvation. By 1922, meat consumption stood at 22 kilograms per person per year, less than half the 52 kilograms consumed in 1913. Industrial output had fallen to the levels of the 1880s, or 57 percent of its 1913 value.

    In May 1921, Germany's total reparations obligation was fixed at 132 billion Reichsmarks, payable in gold or commodities. Chancellor Joseph Wirth accepted but began a strategy of "fulfilment," attempting to demonstrate to the Allies that the payments were beyond Germany's economic means. When France declared Germany in default in January 1923, French and Belgian troops marched into the Rhineland on the 11th of January to take control of its mines and factories. The German government paid striking workers to stay home and printed money to cover the cost.

    The result was the hyperinflation of 1923. A loaf of bread that cost 3 Reichsmarks in 1922 cost 80 billion Reichsmarks by November 1923. People rushed to spend their wages at lunchtime before the money lost further value. The industrialist Hugo Stinnes exploited the chaos so effectively that by 1924 he held controlling interests in 1,535 businesses with 2,890 different plants, earning him the title of Inflation King. His empire collapsed almost immediately when the government introduced the Rentenmark on the 15th of November 1923, pegged at one trillion paper marks to one Rentenmark, and backed in part by a 3.2 billion Rentenmark mortgage on German land holdings. Stabilization, when it came, happened fast.

  • From 1924 to 1929, real wages grew faster than the cost of living, and one study found that by 1928-29 they had reached or exceeded their pre-war level. Unemployment insurance was introduced in 1927. Over 2 million new homes were constructed between 1924 and 1931, with a further 195,000 modernized. Public spending rose from an annual average of 6.8 billion Marks in the years 1909-1913 to 13.7 billion Marks in the decade from 1919 to 1929.

    Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, who described himself as a "monarchist of the heart" turned "republican of reason," steered Germany back into the international community. The Locarno Treaties of 1925 settled Germany's western borders, Germany joined the League of Nations in 1926, and in 1928 Stresemann helped broker the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Three years after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926, he died of a heart attack at age 51.

    Berlin in these years was alive with cultural energy. Josephine Baker was declared an "erotic goddess" and drawn into the city's "ultramodern" excitement. The Bauhaus Building by Gropius, the Grosses Schauspielhaus and the Einstein Tower stood as examples of a geometric new architecture. George Grosz was fined for defaming the military and for blasphemy. Cabaret and jazz flourished. Records, film and radio created a mass consumer culture that crossed class lines, softening what the source calls "a class society in transition." Conservatives read this as intellectual decline and a betrayal of German values.

    The stability rested on borrowed American capital. When the New York Stock Exchange crashed in October 1929, the loans dried up.

  • On the 29th of March 1930, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Heinrich Brüning as chancellor after the five-party coalition of Hermann Müller collapsed over how to fund unemployment compensation. Brüning governed by presidential decree under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, becoming the first chancellor to operate entirely outside normal parliamentary procedure.

    His response to the Depression was deflation: cuts to state expenditure, wage reductions in public and private sectors, credit restrictions, and a forced reduction of prices, rents, salaries and wages by 20 percent. He halted all obligatory payments to the unemployment insurance programme, cutting benefits for workers, the sick, invalids and pensioners. Unemployment reached 4 million in 1930. In the Reichstag election of September 1930, the Nazi Party won 18.3 percent of the vote, five times its 1928 share, becoming Germany's second largest party.

    On the 30th of January 1933, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor to head a coalition government. Hitler's Nazi Party held two out of ten cabinet seats. Franz von Papen, as vice-chancellor, was expected to serve as an informal check on Hitler; these expectations, the source notes, severely underestimated Hitler's political ambitions. By the end of March 1933, the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act granted the new chancellor broad power to act outside parliamentary control. There was never an attempt to replace or substantially amend the Weimar Constitution; the Nazis simply governed under the pretense that every extraordinary measure was constitutional. The principle Hitler imposed, Führerprinzip, held that the Führer's word stood above all written law. The black-red-gold flag the Republic had adopted from the 1848 revolutions was abolished, and both it and the Weimar Constitution would not be recovered until after 1945.

Common questions

What was the Weimar Republic and when did it exist?

The Weimar Republic was the constitutional republic that governed Germany from the 9th of November 1918 to the 23rd of March 1933, the first time Germany had operated as a republic in its history. Its informal name comes from the city of Weimar, where the constituent National Assembly convened from the 6th of February to the 11th of August 1919. The official name of the state throughout this period remained the German Reich.

Who coined the term Weimar Republic?

Adolf Hitler first used the term "Republik von Weimar" in a speech at a Nazi Party rally in Munich on the 24th of February 1929. A few weeks later he used the term "Weimarer Republik" in a newspaper article. The phrase did not become mainstream inside or outside Germany until the 1950s.

How bad was the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic?

Hyperinflation peaked in late 1923, when a loaf of bread that cost 3 Reichsmarks in 1922 had risen to 80 billion Reichsmarks by November 1923. The government introduced the Rentenmark on the 15th of November 1923 at an exchange rate of one Rentenmark to one trillion paper marks, which stabilized the currency.

What were the terms of the Treaty of Versailles for Germany?

Germany lost approximately 13 percent of its former territory under the Treaty of Versailles, signed on the 28th of June 1919, including 48 percent of its iron resources and 10 percent of its coal. The German army was limited to 100,000 men, and Germany was prohibited from having an air force, tanks, submarines or poison gas. Total reparations were later fixed at 132 billion Reichsmarks, with Germany making payments from 1920 until 1931, when they were suspended indefinitely.

Why did the Weimar Republic collapse and how did Hitler come to power?

The Great Depression after 1929 drove unemployment to 4 million by 1930 and fractured the coalition politics on which the Republic depended. President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor on the 30th of January 1933. By the end of March 1933, the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act granted Hitler powers outside parliamentary control, effectively ending constitutional governance without ever formally abolishing the Weimar Constitution.

What was the Golden Twenties period in the Weimar Republic?

The Golden Twenties, known in Germany as the Goldene Zwanziger, refers to the years 1924-1929 when the Weimar Republic experienced relative political and economic stability. Real wages grew faster than the cost of living, unemployment insurance was introduced in 1927, and more than 2 million new homes were built between 1924 and 1931. Berlin became a centre of cultural innovation in literature, cinema, theatre, cabaret, and architecture, though the stability depended heavily on American loans that vanished when the New York Stock Exchange crashed in October 1929.

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