Tragedy and Hope
A History of the World in Our Time
By Carroll Quigley
PART NINE
Part Nine: Germany from Kaiser to Hitler: 1913-1945
Chapter 26: Introduction
The fate of Germany is one of the most tragic in all human history, for seldom has a people of such talent and accomplishment brought such disasters on themselves and on others. The explanation of how Germany came to such straits cannot be found by examining the history of the twentieth century alone. Germany came to the disaster of 1945 by a path whose beginnings lie in the distant past, in the whole pattern of German history from the days of the Germanic tribes to the present. That Germany had a tribal and not a civilized origin and was outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire and of the Latin language were two of the factors which led Germany ultimately to 1945. The Germanic tribe gave security and meaning to each individual's life to a degree where it almost absorbed the individual in the group, as tribes usually do. It gave security because it protected the individual in a social status of known and relatively stable social relationships with his fellows; it gave meaning because it was all-absorbing— totalitarian, if you will, in that it satisfied almost all an individual's needs in a single system.
The shattering of the Germanic tribe in the period of the migrations, fifteen hundred years ago, and the exposure of its members to a higher, but equally total ... social structure—the Roman imperial system; and the subsequent, almost immediately subsequent, shattering of that Roman system caused a double trauma from which the Germans have not recovered even today. The shattering of the tribe left the individual German, as a similar experience today has left many Africans, in a chaos of unfamiliar experiences in which there was neither security nor meaning. When all other relationships had been destroyed, the German was left with only one human relationship on which he turned all his energy—loyalty to his immediate companions. But this could not carry all his life's energy or satisfy all of life's needs—no single human relationship ever can—and the effort to make it do so can only turn it into a monstrosity. But the German tribesman of the sixth century, when all else was shattered, made such an effort and tried to build all security and all meaning on personal loyalty. Any violence, any criminal act, any bestiality was justified for the sake of the allegiance of personal loyalty. The result is to be seen in the earliest work of Germanic literature—the Niebelungenlied, a madhouse dominated by this one mood, in a situation not totally unlike the Germany of 1945.
Into the insanity of monomania created by the shattering of the Germanic tribes came the sudden recognition of a better system, which could be, they thought, equally secure, equally meaningful, because equally total. This was symbolized by the word Rome. It is almost impossible for us, of the West and of today, imbued as we are with historical perspective and individualism, to see what Classical culture was like, and why it appealed to the Germans. Both may be summed up in the word "total." The Greek polis, like the Roman imperium, was total. We in the West have escaped the fascination of totalitarianism because we have in our tradition other elements—the refusal of the Hebrews to confuse God with the world, or religion with the state, and the realization that God is transcendental, and, accordingly, all other things must be, in some degree, incomplete and thus imperfect. We also have, in our tradition, Christ, who stood apart from the state and told his followers to "Render to Caesar the things which are Caesar's." And we have in our tradition the church of the catacombs, where clearly human values were neither united nor total, and were opposed to the state. The Germans, as later the Russians, escaped the full influence of these elements in the tradition of the West. The Germans and the Russians knew Rome only in its post-Constantine phase when the Christian emperors were seeking to preserve the totalitarian system of Dioclesian, but in a Christian rather than a pagan totalitarianism. This was the system the detribalized Germans glimpsed just before it also was shattered. They saw it as a greater, larger, more powerful entity than the tribe but with the same elements which they wanted to preserve from their tribal past. They yearned to become part of that imperial totalitarianism. They still yearn for it. Theodoric, the Ostrogoth (Roman Emperor, 489-526), saw himself as a Germanic Constantine. The Germans continued their refusal to accept this second loss, as the Latins and the Celts were prepared to do, and for the next thousand years the Germans made every effort to reconstruct the Christian imperium, under Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor, 1519-1555) as under Theodoric. The German continued to dream of that glimpse he had had of the imperial system before it sank—one, universal, total, holy, eternal, imperial, Roman. He refused to accept that it was gone, hating the small group who opposed its revival and despising the great mass who did not care, while regarding himself as the sole defender of values and righteousness who was prepared to sacrifice anything to restore that dream on earth. Only Charlemagne (died 814) came close to achieving that dream, Barbarossa, Charles V, William II, or even Hitler being but pale imitations. After Charlemagne, the state and public authority vanished in the Dark Ages, while society and the Church survived. When the state began to revive at the end of the tenth century, it was obviously a separate entity from the Church or society. The totalitarian imperium had been permanently broken in the West into two, and later many, allegiances. During the split in the Dark Ages of the single entity which was simultaneously Holy Roman, Catholic, Universal, and Imperial, the adjectives became displaced from the nouns to leave a Universal Catholic Church and a Holy Roman Empire. The former still survives, but the latter was ended by Napoleon in 1806, a thousand years after Charlemagne.
During that thousand years, the West developed a pluralistic system in which the individual was the ultimate good (and the ultimate philosophic reality), faced with the need to choose among many conflicting allegiances. Germany was dragged along in the same process, but unwillingly, and continued to yearn for a single allegiance which would be totally absorbing. This desire appeared in many Germanic traits, of which one was a continued love affair with Greece and Rome. Even today a Classical scholar does more of his reading in German than in any other language, although he rarely recognizes that he does so because the appeal of Classical culture to the Germans rested on its totalitarian nature, recognized by Germans but generally ignored by Westerners.
All the subsequent experiences of the German people, from the failure of Otto the Great in the tenth century to the failure of Hitler in the twentieth century, have served to perpetuate and perhaps to intensify the German thirst for the coziness of a totalitarian way of life. This is the key to German national character: in spite of all their talk of heroic behavior, what they have really wanted has been coziness, freedom from the need to make decisions which require an independent, self-reliant individual constantly exposed to the chilling breeze of numerous alternatives. Franz Grillparzer, the Austrian playwright, spoke like a true German when he said, a century ago, "The most difficult thing in the world is to make up one's mind." Decision, which requires the evaluation of alternatives, drives man to individualism, self-reliance, and rationalism, all hateful qualities to Germanism.
In spite of these desires of the Germans for the coziness of totalitarian oneness, they have been forced as part, even if a relatively peripheral part, of the West to live otherwise. Looking hack, it seemed to Wagner that Germany came closest to its desires in the guild-dominated life of late medieval Augsburg; this is why his only happy opera was placed in that setting. But if Wagner is correct, the situation was achieved only briefly. The shift of world trade from Mediterranean and Baltic to the Atlantic destroyed the trans-Germanic commercial basis of German municipal guild life—a fact which Thomas Mann still mourned in our own day. Almost immediately the spiritual unity of the Germans was shattered by the Protestant Reformation. When it became clear that no degree of violence could restore the old religious unity, the Germans, in the settlement of Augsburg (1555), came up with a typically German solution: individuals would be saved from the painful need to make a decision in religious belief by leaving the choice to the prince in each principality. This solution and the almost contemporary reception of the Roman Law were significant indications of the process by which the German municipalism of the late medieval period was replaced by the Germany of principalities (Lไnder) of modern times.
As a result of the loss of religious unity, the Germanies became divided into a Protestant northeast, increasingly dominated by the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg-Prussia, and a Catholic southwest, increasingly dominated by the Habsburgs of Austria. Significantly enough, both of these began their dynastic rise as "marks," that is, frontier military outposts of Christian Germanism against pagan Slavdom of the East. Even when the Slav East became Christianized and, by copying Byzantium, obtained a society closer to the Germanic heart's desire than the West, the Germans could neither copy nor join the Slavs, because the Slavs, as outlanders from the tribe, were inferiors and hardly human beings at all. Even the Poles, who were more fully part of the West than the Germans, were regarded by the Germans as part of the outer darkness of Slavdom, and thus a threat to the still nonexistent Germanic tribal empire.
Germany's misfortunes culminated in the disasters of the seventeenth century when Richelieu, on behalf of France, used the internal problems of Germany in the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) to play off one group against another, ensuring that the Habsburgs would never unify Germany, and dooming the Germanies to another two hundred years of disunity. Hitler, Bismarck, and even Kaiser William II could well be regarded as Germany's revenge on France for Richelieu, Louis XIV, and Napoleon. In an exposed position in central Europe, Germany found herself trapped between France, Russia, and the Habsburg dominions and was unable to deal with her basic problems in her own fashion and on their merits. Accordingly, Germany obtained national unity only late and "by blood and iron," and never obtained democracy at all. It might be added that she also failed to achieve laissez faire or liberalism for the same reasons. In most countries democracy was achieved by the middle classes, supported by peasants and workers, in an attack on the monarchy supported by the bureaucracy and landed aristocracy. In Germany this combination never quite came off, because these various groups were reluctant to clash with one another in the face of their threatening neighbors. Instead, Germany's exposed frontiers made it necessary for the various groups to subordinate their mutual antagonisms and obtain unification at the price of a sacrifice of democracy, laissez faire, liberalism, and nonmaterial values. Unification for Germany was achieved in the nineteenth century, not by embracing but by repudiating the typical nineteenth-century values. Starting as a reaction against the assault of Napoleon in 1806, and repudiating the rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and humanitarianism of the Enlightenment, Germany achieved unity only by the following processes:
1. by strengthening the monarchy and its bureaucracy;
2. by strengthening the permanent, professional army;
3. by preserving the landlord class (the Junkers) as a source of personnel for both bureaucracy and army;
4. by strengthening the industrial class through direct and indirect state subsidy, but never giving it a vital voice in state policy;
5. by appeasing the peasants and workers through paternalistic economic and social grants rather than by the extension of political rights which would allow these groups to assist themselves.
The long series of failures hy the Germans to obtain the society they wanted served only to intensify their desire for it. They wanted a cozy society with both security and meaning, a totalitarian structure which would be at the same time universal and ultimate, and which would so absorb the individual in its structure that he would never need to make significant decisions for himself. Held in a framework of known, satisfying, personal relationships, such an individual would be safe because he would be surrounded by fellows equally satisfied with their own positions, each feeling important from his membership in the greater whole.
Although this social structure was never achieved in Germany, and never could he achieved, in view of the dynamic nature of Western Civilization in which the Germans were a part, each German over the centuries has tried to create such a situation for himself in his immediate environment (at the minimum in his family or beer garden) or, failing that, has created German literature, music, drama, and art as vehicles of his protests at this lack. This desire has been evident in the Germans' thirst for status (which establishes his relationship with the whole) and for the absolute (which gives unchanging meaning to the whole).
The German thirst for status is entirely different from the American desire for status. The American is driven by the desire to get ahead, that is, to change his status; he wants status and status symbols to exist as clear evidence or even measures of the speed with which he is changing his status. The German wants status as a nexus of obvious relationships around himself so there will never be doubt in anyone's mind where he stands, stationary, in the system. He wants status because he dislikes changes, because he abhors the need to make decisions. The American thrives on change, novelty, and decisions. Strangely enough, both react in this opposite fashion for somewhat similar reasons based on the inadequate maturation and integration of the individual's personality. The American seeks change, as the German seeks external fixed relationships, as a distraction from the lack of integration, self-sufficiency, and internal resources of the individual himself.
The German wants status reflected in obvious external symbols so that his nexus of personal relationships will be clear to everyone he meets and so that he will be treated accordingly, and almost automatically (without need for painful decisions). He wants titles, uniforms, nameplates, flags, buttons, anything which will make his position clear to all. In every German organization, be it business, school, army, church, social club, or family, there are ranks, gradations, and titles. No German could be satisfied with just his name on a calling card or on the nameplate of his doorway. His calling card must also have his address, his titles, and his educational achievements. The great anthropologist Robert H. Lowie tells of men with two doctorate degrees whose nameplates have "Professor Dr. Dr. So-and-So," for all the world to see their double academic status. The emphasis on minor gradations of rank and class, with titles, is a reflection of Germanic particularism, just as the verbal insistence on the absolute is a reflection of German universalism which must give meaning to the system as a whole.
In this system the German feels it necessary to proclaim his position by verbal loudness which may seem boastful to outsiders, just as his behavior toward his superiors and inferiors in his personal relationships seems to an Englishman to be either fawning or bullying. All three of these are acceptable to his fellow Germans, who are as eager to see these indications of his status as he is to show them. All these reactions, criticized by German thinkers like Kant as craving for precedence, and satirized in German literature for the last two centuries, have been the essential tissue of the personal relationships which make up German life. The correct superscription on an envelope, we are told, would be "Herrn Hofrat Professor Dr. Siegfried Harnischfeger." These pomposities are used in speech as well as in writing, and are applied to the individual's wife as well as to himself.
Such emphasis on position, precedence, titles, gradations, and fixed relationships, especially up and down, are so typically German that the German is most at home in hierarchical situations such as a military, ecclesiastical, or educational organization, and is often ill at ease in business or politics where status is less easy to establish and make obvious.
With this kind of nature and such neurological systems, Germans are ill at ease with equality, democracy, individualism, freedom, and other features of modern life. Their neurological systems were a consequence of the coziness of German childhood, which, contrary to popular impression, was not a condition of misery and personal cruelty (as it often is in England), but a warm, affectionate, and externally disciplined situation of secure relationships. After all, Santa Claus and the child-centered Christmas is Germanic. This is the situation the adult German, face to face with what seems an alien world, is constantly seeking to recapture. To the German it is Gemtlichkeit; but to outsiders it may be suffocating. In any case it gives rise among adult Germans to two additional traits of German character: the need for external discipline and the quality of egocentricity.
The Englishman is disciplined from within so that he takes his self-discipline, embedded in his neurological system, with him wherever he goes, even to situations where all the external forms of discipline are lacking. As a consequence the Englishman is the most completely socialized of Europeans, as the Frenchman is the most completely civilized, the Italian most completely gregarious, or the Spaniard most completely individualistic. But the German by seeking external discipline shows his unconscious desire to recapture the externally disciplined world of his childhood. With such discipline he may be the best behaved of citizens, but without it he may be a beast.
A second notable carryover from childhood to adult German life was egocentricity. The whole world seems to any child to revolve around it, and most societies have provided ways in which the adolescent is disabused of this error. The German leaves childhood so abruptly that he rarely learns this fact of the universe, and spends the rest of his life creating a network of established relationships centering on himself. Since this is his aim in life, he sees no need to make any effort to see anything from any point of view other than his own. The consequence is a most damaging inability to do this. Each class or group is totally unsympathetic to any point of view except the egocentric one of the viewer himself. His union, his company, his composer, his poet, his party, his neighborhood are the best, almost the only acceptable, examples of the class, and all others must be denigrated. As part of this process a German usually chooses for himself his favorite flower, musical composition, beer, club, painting, or opera, and sees little value or merit in any other. Yet at the same time he insists that his myopic or narrow-angled vision of the universe must be universalized, because no people are more insistent on the role of the absolute or the universal as the framework of their own egocentricity. One deplorable consequence of this has been the social animosities rampant in a Germany which has loudly proclaimed its rigid solidarity.
With an individual personality structure such as this, the German was painfully uncomfortable in the totally different, and to him totally unfriendly, world of nineteenth-century individualism, liberalism, competitive atomism, democratic equality, and self-reliant dynamicism. And the German was doubly uncomfortable and embittered by 1860 to see the power, wealth, and national unity which these nineteenth-century traits had brought to Britain and France. The late arrival of these achievements, especially national unity and industrialism, in Germany left the average German with a feeling of inferiority in respect to England. Few Germans were willing to compete as individuals with British businessmen. Accordingly, the newly unified German government was expected to help German industrialists with tariffs, credit, price and production controls, cheaper labor costs, and such. As a consequence Germany never had a clearly competitive, liberal economy like the western Powers.
The failure to achieve democracy was reflected in public law. The German Parliament was more of an advisory than a legislative body; the judiciary was not under popular control; and the executive (the chancellor and the Cabinet) were responsible to the emperor rather than to Parliament. Moreover, the constitution, because of a peculiar suffrage system, was weighted to give undue importance to Prussia (which was the stronghold of the army, the landlords, the bureaucracy, and the industrialists). Within Prussia the elections were weighted to give undue influence to these same groups. Above all, the army was subject to no democratic or even governmental control, but was dominated by the Prussian Officers' Corps whose members were recruited by regimental election. This Officers' Corps thus came to resemble a fraternity rather than an administrative or professional organization.
By 1890, when he retired from office, Bismarck had built up an unstable balance of forces within Germany similar to the unstable balance of powers which he had established in Europe as a whole. His cynical and materialistic view of human motivations had driven all idealistic and humanitarian forces from the German political scene and had remodeled the political parties almost completely into economic and social pressure groups which he played off, one against another. The chief of these forces were the landlords (Conservative Party), the industrialists (National Liberal Party), the Catholics (Center Party), and the workers (Social Democratic Party). In addition, the army and the bureaucracy were expected to be politically neutral, but they did not hesitate to exert pressures on the government without the intermediary of any political party. Thus there existed a precarious and dangerous balance of forces which only a genius could manipulate. Bismarck was followed by no genius. The Kaiser, William II (1888-1918), was an incapable neurotic, and the system of recruitment to government service was such as to exclude any but mediocrities. As a result, the precarious structure left by Bismarck was not managed but was merely hidden from public view by a facade of nationalistic, anti-foreign, anti-Semitic, imperialistic, and chauvinistic propaganda of which the emperor was the center.
The dichotomy in Germany between appearance and reality, between propaganda and structure, between economic prosperity and political and social weakness was put to the test in World War I, and failed completely. The events of 1914-1919 revealed that Germany was not a democracy in which all men were legally equal. Instead, the ruling groups formed some strange animal fording it over a host of lesser animals. In this strange creature the monarchy represented the body, which was supported by four legs: the army, the landlords, the bureaucracy, and the industrialists.
This glimpse of reality was not welcome to any important group in Germany, with the result that it was covered over, almost at once, by another misleading facade: the "revolution" of 1918 was not really a revolution at all, because it did not radically change this situation; it removed the monarchy, but it left the quartet of legs.
This Quartet was not the creation of a moment, rather it was the result of a long process of development whose last stages were reached only in the twentieth century. In these last stages the industrialists were adopted into the ruling clique by conscious acts of agreement. These acts culminated in the years 1898-1905 in a deal by which the Junkers accepted the industrialists' navy-building program (which they detested) in return for the industrialists' acceptance of the Junkers' high tariff on grains. The Junkers were anti-navy because they, with their few numbers and close alliance with the army, were opposed to any venture into the fields of colonialism or overseas imperialism, and were determined not to jeopardize Germany's continental position by alienating England. In fact, the policy of the Junkers was not only a continental one; on the Continent it was klein-deutsch. This expression meant that they were not eager to include the Germans of Austria within Germany because such an increment of Germans would dilute the power of the small group of Junkers inside Germany. Instead, the Junkers would have preferred to annex the non-German areas to the east in order to obtain additional land and a supply of cheap Slav agricultural labor. The Junkers wanted agricultural tariffs to raise the prices of their crops, especially rye and, later, sugar beets. The industrialists objected to tariffs on food because high food prices made necessary high wages, which they opposed. On the other hand, the industrialists wanted high industrial prices and a market for the products of heavy industry. The former they obtained by the creation of cartels after 1888; the latter they obtained by the naval-building program and armaments expansion after 1898. The Junkers agreed to these only in return for a tariff on food which eventually, through "import certificates," became a subsidy for growing rye. This alliance, of which Blow was the creator, was agreed on in May 1900, and consummated in December 1902. The tariff of 1902, which gave Germany one of the most protected agricultures in the world, was the price paid by industry for the Navy bill of 1900, and, symbolically enough, could be passed through the Reichstag only after the rules of procedure were violated to gag the opposition.
The Quartet was not Conservative but, potentially at least, revolutionary reactionaries. This is true at least of the landlords and industrialists, somewhat less true of the bureaucracy, and least true of the army. The landlords were revolutionary because they were driven to desperation by the persistent agricultural crisis which made it difficult for a high-cost area like eastern Germany to compete with a low-cost area like the Ukraine or high-productivity areas like Canada, Argentina, or the United States. Even in isolated Germany they had difficulty in keeping down the wages of German agricultural labor or in obtaining agricultural credit. The former problem rose from the need to compete with the industrial wages of West Germany. The credit problem rose because of the endemic lack of capital in Germany, the need to compete with industry for the available supply of capital, and the impossibility of raising capital by mortgages where estates were entailed. As a result of these influences, the landlords, overburdened with debts, in great jeopardy from any price decline, and importers of unorganized Slav laborers, dreamed of conquests of lands and labor in eastern Europe. The industrialists were in a similar plight, caught between the high wages of unionized German labor and the limited market for industrial products. To increase the supply of both labor and markets, they hoped for an active foreign policy which would bring into one unit a Pan-German bloc, if not a Mittel-europa. The bureaucracy, for ideological, especially nationalist, reasons, shared these dreams of conquest. Only the army hung back under the influence of the Junkers, who saw how easily they, as a limited political and social power, could be overwhelmed in a Mittel-europa or even a Pan-Germania. Accordingly, the Prussian Officers' Corps had little interest in these Germanic dreams, and looked with favor on the conquest of Slav areas only if this could be accomplished without undue expansion of the army itself.
Chapter 27: The Weimar Republic, 1918-1933
The essence of German history from 1918 to 1933 can be found in the statement There was no revolution in 1918. For there to have been a revolution it would have been necessary to liquidate the Quartet or, at least, subject them to democratic control. The Quartet represented the real power in Germany society because they represented the forces of public order (army and bureaucracy) and of economic production (landlords and industrialists). Even without a liquidation of this Quartet, it might have been possible for democracy to function in the interstices between them if they had quarreled among themselves. They did not quarrel, because they had an esprit de corps bred by years of service to a common system (the monarchy) and because, in many cases, the same individuals were to be found in two or even more of the four groups. Franz von Papen, for example, was a Westphalian noble, a colonel in the army, an ambassador, and a man with extensive industrial holdings, derived from his wife, in the Saarland..
Although there was no revolution—that is, no real shift in the control of power in Germany in 1919—there was a legal change. In law, a democratic system was set up. As a result, by the late 1920's there had appeared an obvious discrepancy between law and fact—the regime, according to the law, being controlled by the people, while in fact it was controlled by the Quartet. The reasons for this situation are important.
The Quartet, with the monarchy, made the war of 1914-1918, and were incapable of winning it. As a result, they were completely discredited and deserted by the soldiers and workers. Thus, the masses of the people completely renounced the old system in November 1918. The Quartet, however, was not liquidated, for several reasons:
1. They were able to place the blame for the disaster on the monarchy. and jettisoned this to save themselves;
2. most Germans accepted this as an adequate revolution;
3. the Germans hesitated to make a real revolution for fear it would lead to an invasion of Germany by the French, the Poles, or others;
4. many Germans were satisfied with the creation of a government which was democratic in form and made little effort to examine the underlying reality;
5. the only political party capable of directing a real revolution was the Social Democrats, who had opposed the Quartet system and the war itself, at least in theory; but this party was incapable of doing anything in the crisis of 1918 because it was hopelessly divided into doctrinaire cliques, was horrified at the danger of Soviet Bolshevism, and was satisfied that order, trade-unionism, and a "democratic" regime were more important than Socialism, humanitarian welfare, or consistency between theory and action.
Before 1914 there were two parties which stood outside the Quartet system: the Social Democrats and the Center (Catholic) Party. The former was doctrinaire in its attitude, being anticapitalist, pledged to the international brotherhood of labor, pacifist, democratic, and Marxist in an evolutionary, but not revolutionary, sense. The Center Party, like the Catholics who made it up' came from all levels of society and all the Catholics who made it up, came from all levels of society and all shades of ideology, but in practice were frequently opposed to the Quartet on specific issues.
These two opposition parties underwent considerable change during the war. The Social Democrats always opposed the war in theory, but supported it on patriotic grounds by voting for credits to finance the war. Its minute Left wing refused to support the war even in this fashion as early as 1914. This extremist group, under Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, became known as the Spartacist Union and (after 1919) as the Communists. These extremists wanted an immediate and complete Socialist revolution with a soviet form of government. More moderate than the Spartacists was another group calling itself Independent Socialists. These voted war credits until 1917 when they refused to continue to do so and broke from the Social Democratic Party. The rest of the Social Democrats supported the war and the old monarchial system until November 1918 in fact, but in theory embraced an extreme type of evolutionary Socialism.
The Center Party was aggressive and nationalist until 1917 when it became pacifist. Under Matthias Erzberger it allied with the Social Democrats to push through the Reichstag Peace Resolution of July 1917. The position of these various groups on the issue of aggressive nationalism was sharply revealed in the voting to ratify the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed by the militarists, Junkers, and industrialists on a prostrate Russia. The Center Party voted to ratify; the Social Democrats abstained from voting; the Independents voted No.
The "revolution" of November 1918 would have been a real revolution except for the opposition of the Social Democrats and the Center Party, for the Quartet in the crucial days of November and December 1918 were discouraged, discredited, and helpless. Outside the Quartet itself there w as, at that time and even later, only two small groups which could possibly have been used by the Quartet as rallying points about which could have been formed some mass support for the Quartet. These two small groups were the "indiscriminate nationalists" and the "mercenaries." The indiscriminate nationalists were those men, like Hitler, who were not able to distinguish between the German nation and the old monarchial system. These persons, because of their loyalty to the nation, were eager to rally to the support of the Quartet, which they regarded as identical with the nation. The mercenaries were a larger group who had no particular loyalty to anyone or to any idea but were willing to serve any group which could pay for such service. The only groups able to pay were two of the Quartet—the Officers' Corps and the industrialists—who organized many mercenaries into reactionary armed bands or "Free Corps" in 1918-1923.
Instead of working for a revolution in 1918-1919, the two parties which dominated the situation—the Social Democrats and the Centrists— did all they could to prevent a revolution. They not only left the Quartet in their positions of responsibility and power—the landlords on their estates, the officers in their commands, the industrialists in control of their factories, and the bureaucracy in control of the police, the courts, and the administration—but they increased the influence of these groups because the actions of the Quartet were not restrained under the republic by that sense of honor or loyalty to the system which had restrained the use of their power under the monarchy.
As early as November 10,1918, Friedrich Ebert, chief figure of the Social Democratic Party, made an agreement with the Officers' Corps in which he promised not to use the power of the new government to democratize the army if the officers would support the new government against the threat of the Independents and the Spartacists to establish a soviet system. As a consequence of this agreement Ebert kept a private telephone line from his office in the Chancellery to General Wilhelm Groener's office at the army's headquarters and consulted with the army on many critical political issues. As another consequence, Ebert and his Minister of War Gustav Noske, also a Social Democrat, used the army under its old monarchist officers to destroy the workers and radicals who sought to challenge the existing situation. This was done in Berlin in December 1918, in January 1919, and again in March 1919, and in other cities at other times. In these assaults the army had the pleasure of killing several thousand of the detested radicals..
A somewhat similar anti-revolutionary agreement was made between heavy industry and the Socialist trade unions on November 11, 1918. On that day Hugo Stinnes, Albert V๖gler, and Alfred Hugenberg, representing industry, and Carl Legien, Otto Hue, and Hermann Mller representing the unions, signed an agreement to support each other in order to keep the factories functioning. Although this agreement was justified on opportunist grounds, it clearly showed that the so-called Socialists were not interested in economic or social reform but were merely interested in the narrow trade-union objectives of wages, hours, and working conditions. It was this narrow range of interests which ultimately destroyed the average German's faith in the Socialists or their unions.
The history of the period from 1918 to 1933 cannot be understood without some knowledge of the chief political parties. There were almost forty parties, but only seven or eight were important. These were, from extreme Left to extreme Right, as follows:
1. Spartacist Union (or Communist—KPD)
2. Independent Socialist (USPD)
3. Social Democrats (SPD)
4. Democratic
5. Center (including Bavarian People's Party)
6. People's Party
7. Nationalists
8. "Racists" (including Nazis)
Of these parties only the Democrats had any sincere and consistent belief in the democratic Republic. On the other hand the Communists, Independents, and many of the Social Democrats on the Left, as well as the "Racists," Nationalists, and many of the People's Party on the Right, were adverse to the Republic, or at best ambivalent. The Catholic Center Party, being formed on a religious rather than on a social basis, had members from all areas of the political and social spectrum.
The political history of Germany from the armistice of 1918 to the arrival of Hitler to the chancellorship in January 1933 can be divided into three periods, thus:
Period of Turmoil 1918-1924
Period of Fulfillment 1924-1930
Period of Disintegration 1930-1933
During this span of over fourteen years, there were eight elections, in none of which did a single party obtain a majority of the seats in the Reichstag. Accordingly, every German Cabinet of the period was a coalition. The following table gives the results of these eight elections:
Jan. June May Dec. May July Sept. Nov.March
Party 1919 1920 1924 1924 1928 1930 1932 19321933
Communist 0 4 62 45 54 77 89 10081
Independent
Socialist 22 84
Social
Democrats 163 102 100 131 153 143 133 121120
Democrats 75 39 28 32 25 20 4 2 5
Center 91 64 65 69 62 68 75 70 74
Bavarian
People’s 21 16 19 16 19 22 20 18
Economic
Party 4 4 10 17 25 2 2 0 0
German
People’s
Party 19 65 45 51 45 30 7 11 2
Nationalists 44 71 95 103 73 41 37 52 52
Nazis 0 0 32 14 12 107 230 196288
On the basis of these elections Germany had twenty major Cabinet changes from 1919 to 1933. Generally these Cabinets were constructed about the Center and Democratic parties with the addition of representatives from either the Social Democrats or the People’s Party. On only two occasions (Gustav Stresemann in 1923 and Hermann Mller in 1928-1930) was it possible to obtain a Cabinet broad enough to include all four of these parties. Moreover, the second of these broad-front Cabinets was the only Cabinet after 1923 to include the Socialists and the only Cabinet after 1925 which did not include the Nationalists. This indicates clearly the drift to the Right in the German government after the resignation of Joseph Wirth in November 1922. This drift, as we shall see, was delayed by only two influences: the need for foreign loans and political concessions from the Western Powers and the recognition that both of these could be obtained better by a government which seemed to be republican and democratic in inclination than by a government which was obviously hand in glove with the Quartet.
At the end of the war in 1918 the Socialists were in control, not because the Germans were Socialistic (for the party was not really Socialist) but because this was the only party which had been traditionally in opposition to the imperial system. A committee of six men was set up: three from the Social Democrats (Ebert, Philip Scheidemann, and Otto Landsberg) and three from the Independent Socialists (Hugo Haase, Wilhelm Dittman, and Emil Barth). This group ruled as a sort of combined emperor and chancellor and had the regular secretaries of state as their subordinates. These men did nothing to consolidate the republic or democracy and were opposed to any effort to take any steps toward Socialism. They even refused to nationalize the coal industry, something which was generally expected. Instead they wasted the opportunity by busying themselves with typical trade-union problems such as the eight-hour day (November 12, 1918) and collective bargaining methods (December 23, 1918).
The critical problem was the form of government, with the choice resting between workers' and peasants' councils (soviets), already widely established, and a national assembly to set up an ordinary parliamentary system. The Socialist group preferred the latter, and were willing to use the regular army to enforce this choice. On this basis a counterrevolutionary agreement was made between Ebert and the General Staff. As a consequence of this agreement, the army attacked a Spartacist parade in Berlin on December 6, 1918, and liquidated the rebellious People's Naval Division on December 24, 1918. In protest at this violence the three Independent members of the government resigned. Their example was followed by other Independents throughout Germany, with the exception of Kurt Eisner in Munich. The next day the Spartacists formed the German Communist Party with a non-revolutionary program. Their declaration read, in part: "The Spartacist Union will never assume governmental power except in response to the plain and unmistakable wish of the great majority of the proletarian masses in Germany; and only as a result of a definite agreement of these masses with the aims and methods of the Spartacist Union."
This pious expression, however, was the program of the leaders; the masses of the new party, and possibly the members of the Independent Socialist group as well, were enraged at the conservatism of the Social Democrats and began to get out of hand. The issue was joined on the question of councils versus National Assembly. The government, under Noske's direction, used regular troops in a bloody suppression of the Left (January 5-15), ending up with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the Communist leaders. The result was exactly as the Quartet wanted: the Communists and many non-Communist workers were permanently alienated from the Socialists and from the parliamentary republic. The Communist Party, deprived of leaders of its own, became a tool of Russian Communism. As a result of this repression, the army was able to disarm the workers at the very moment when it was beginning to arm reactionary private bands (Free Corps) of the Right. Both of these developments were encouraged by Ebert and Noske.
Only in Bavaria was the alienation of Communist and Socialist and the disarmament of the former not carried out; Kurt Eisner, the Independent Socialist minister-president in Munich, prevented it. Accordingly, Eisner was murdered by Count Anton von Arco-Valley on February Zl, 1919. When the workers of Munich revolted, they were crushed by a combination of regular army and Free Corps amid scenes of horrible violence from both sides. Eisner was replaced as premier by a Social Democrat, Adolph Hoffman. Hoffman, on the night of March 13, 1920, was thrown out by a military coup which replaced him by a government of the Right under Gustav von Kahr.
In the meantime, the National Assembly elected on June 19, 1919, drew up a parliamentary constitution under the guidance of Professor Hugo Preuss. This constitution provided for a president elected for seven years to be head of the state, a bicameral legislature, and a Cabinet responsible to the lower house of the legislature. The upper house, or Reichsrat, consisted of representatives of eighteen German states and had, in legislative matters, a suspensive veto which could be overcome by a two-thirds vote of the lower chamber. This lower chamber, or Reichstag, had 608 members, elected by a system of proportional representation on a party basis. The head of the government, to whom the president gave a mandate to form a Cabinet, was called the chancellor. The chief weaknesses of the constitution were the provisions for proportional representation and other provisions, by articles 25 and 48, which allowed the president to suspend constitutional guarantees and rule by decree, in periods of "national emergency." As early as 1925 the parties of the Right were planning to destroy the republic by the use of these powers.
A direct challenge to the republic from the Right came in March 1920, when Captain Ehrhardt’s Brigade of the Free Corps marched into Berlin, forced the government to flee to Dresden, and set up a government under Wolfgang Kapp, an ultra-nationalist. Kapp was supported by the army commander in the Berlin area, Baron Walther von Lttwitz, who became Reichswehr minister in Kapp's government. Since General Hans von Seeckt, chief of staff, refused to support the legal government, it was helpless, and was saved only by a general strike of the workers in Berlin and a great proletarian rising in the industrial regions of western Germany. The Kapp government was unable to function, and collapsed, while the army proceeded to violate the territorial disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles by invading the Ruhr in order to crush the workers' uprising in that area. Seeckt was rewarded for his non-cooperation by being appointed commander in chief in May 1920.
As a consequence of these disturbances, the general election of July 1920 went against the "Weimar Coalition." A new government came in which was completely middle-class in its alignment, the Socialists of the Weimar Coalition being replaced by the party of big business, the German People's Party. Noske was replaced as Reichswehr minister by Otto Gessler, a willing tool of the Officers' Corps. Gessler, who held this critical position from March 1920 to January 1928, made no effort to subject the army to democratic, or even civilian, control, but cooperated in every way with Seeckt's secret efforts to evade the disarmament provisions of the peace treaties. German armaments factories were moved to Turkey, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. German officers were drilled in prohibited weapons in Russia and China. Inside Germany, secret armaments were prepared on a considerable scale, and troops in excess of the treaty limits were organized in a "Black Reichswehr" which was supported by secret funds of the regular Reichswehr. The Reichstag had no control over either organization. When the Western Powers in 1920 demanded that the Free Corps be disbanded, these groups went underground and formed a parallel organization to the Black Reichswehr, being supplied with protection, funds, information, and arms from the Reichswehr and Conservatives. In return the Free Corps engaged in large-scale conspiracy and murder on behalf of the Conservatives. According to The Times of London, the Free Corps murdered four hundred victims of the Left and Center in one year.
The middle-class Cabinet of Konstantin Fehrenbach resigned on May 4, 1921 and allowed the Weimar Coalition of Socialists, Democrats, and Center to take office to receive the reparations ultimatum of the Allied governments on May 5th. Thus, the democratic regime was further discredited in the eyes of Germans as an instrument of weakness, hardship, and shame. As soon as the job was done, the Socialists were replaced by the People's Party, and the Wirth Cabinet was succeeded by a purely middle-class government under Wilhelm Cuno, general manager of the Hamburg-American Steamship Line. It was this government which "managed" the hyperinflation of 1923 and the passive resistance against the French forces in the Ruhr. The inflation, which was a great benefit to the Quartet, destroyed the economic position of the middle classes and o\ver middle classes and permanently alienated them from the republic.
The Cuno government was ended by a deal between Stresemann and the Socialists. The former, on behalf of the People's Party, which had hitherto been resolutely anti-republican, accepted the republic; the Socialists agreed to support a Stresemann Cabinet; and a broad coalition was formed for a policy of fulfillment of the Treaty of Versailles. This ended the Period of Turmoil (August 1923).
The Period of Fulfillment (1923-1930) is associated with the name of Gustav Stresemann, who was in every Cabinet until his death in October 1929. A reactionary Pan-German and economic imperialist in the period before 1919, Stresemann was always a supporter of the Quartet, and the chief creator of the German People's Party, the party of heavy industry. In 1923, while still keeping his previous convictions, he decided that it would be good policy to reverse them publicly and adopt a program of support for the republic and fulfillment of treaty obligations. He did this because he realized that Germany was too weak to do anything else and that she could get stronger only by obtaining release from the more stringent treaty restrictions, by foreign loans from sympathetic British and American financiers, and by secret consolidation of the Quartet. All these things could be achieved more easily by a policy of fulfillment than by a policy of resistance like Cuno's.
The Bavarian government of the Right, which had been installed under Gustav von Kahr in 1921, refused to accept Stresemann's decision to readmit the Socialists to the Reich government in Berlin. Instead, Kahr assumed dictatorial powers with the title of state commissioner of Bavaria. In reply the Stresemann Cabinet invested the executive power of the Reich in the Reichswehr minister, an act which had the effect of making von Seeckt the ruler of Germany. In terror of a rightist coup d’้tat (putsch), the Communist International decided to allow the German Communist Party to cooperate with the Socialists in an anti-Right front within the parliamentary regime. This was done at once in the states of Saxony and Thuringia. At this the Reichswehr commander in Bavaria, General Otto von Lossow, shifted his allegiance from Seeckt to Kahr. Stresemann-Seeckt in Berlin faced Kahr-Lossow in Munich with the "Red" governments of Saxony and Thuringia in between. The Reichswehr chiefly obeyed Berlin, while the Black Reichswehr and underground Free Corps (especially Ehrhardt's and Rossbach's) obeyed Munich. Kahr-Lossow, with the support of Hitler and Ludendorff, planned to invade Saxony and Thuringia, overthrow the Red governments on the pretext of suppressing Bolshevism, and then continue northward to overthrow the central government in Berlin. The Reich government headed this plot off by an illegal act: The Reichswohr forces of Seeckt overthrew the constitutional Red governments of Saxony and Thuringia to anticipate Bavaria. As a result, Lossow and Kahr gave up the plans for revolt, while Hitler and Ludendorff refused to do so. By the "Beer-Hall" Putsch of November 8, 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff tried to abduct Kahr and Lossow and force them to continue the revolt. They were overcome in a blast of gunfire. Kahr, Lossow, and Ludendorff were never punished; Hermann Goring fled the country; Hitler and Rudolf Hess were given living quarters in a fortress for a year, profiting by the occasion to write the famous volume Mein Kampf.
In order to deal with the economic crisis and the inflation, Stresemann's government was granted dictatorial powers overriding all constitutional guarantees, except that the Socialists won a promise not to touch the eight-hour day or the social-insurance system. In this way the inflation was curbed, and a new monetary system was established; incidentally, the eight-hour day was abolished by decree (1923). A reparations agreement (the Dawes Plan) was made with the Allied governments, and the Ruhr was successfully evacuated. In the course of these events the Social Democrats abandoned the Stresemann government in protest at its illegal suppression of the Red government of Saxony, but the Stresemann program continued with the support of the parties of the Center and Right, including, for the first time, the support of the anti-Republican Nationalists. Indeed, the Nationalists with three or four seats in the Cabinet in 1926-1928 were the dominant force in the government, although they continued to protest in public against the policy of fulfillment, and Stresemann continued to pretend that his administration of that policy exposed him to imminent danger of assassination at the hands of the Right extremists.
The German Cabinets from 1923 to 1930, under Wilhelm Marx, Hans Luther, Marx again, and finally Hermann Mller, were chiefly concerned with questions of foreign policy, with reparations, evacuation of the occupied areas, disarmament agitation, Locarno, and the League of Nations. On the domestic front, just as significant events were going on but with much less fanfare. Much of the industrial system, as well as many public buildings, was reconstructed by foreign loans. The Quartet were secretly strengthened and consolidated by reorganization of the tax structure, by utilization of governmental subsidies, and by the training and rearrangement of personnel. Alfred Hugenberg, the most violent and irreconcilable member of the Nationalist Party, built up a propaganda system through his ownership of scores of newspapers and a controlling interest in Ufa, the great motion-picture corporation. By such avenues as this, a pervasive propaganda campaign, based on existing German prejudices and intolerances, was put on to prepare the way for a counterrevolution by the Quartet. This campaign sought to show that all Germany's problems and misfortunes were caused by the democratic and laboring groups, by the internationalists, and by the Jews.
The Center and Left shared this nationalist poison sufficiently to abstain from any effort to give the German people the true story of Germany's responsibility for the war and for her own hardships. Thus the Right was able to spread its own story of the war, that Germany had been overcome by "a stab in the back" from "the three Internationals": the "Gold" International of the Jews, the "Red" International of the Socialists, and the "Black" International of the Catholics, an unholy triple alliance which was symbolized in the gold, red, and black flag of the Weimar Republic. In this fashion every effort was made, and with considerable success, to divert popular animosity at the defeat of 1918 and the Versailles settlement from those who were really responsible to the democratic and republican groups. At the same time, German animosity against economic exploitation was directed away from the landlords and industrialists by racist doctrines which blamed all such problems on bad Jewish international bankers and department store owners.
The general nationalism of the German people, and their willingness to accept the propaganda of the Right, succeeded in making Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg president of the republic in 1925. On the first ballot none of seven candidates received a majority of the total vote, so the issue went to the polls again. On the second ballot Hindenburg received 14,655,766 votes, Marx (of the Center Party) received 13,751,615, while the Communist Ernst Thไlmann received 1,931,151.
The victory of Hindenburg was a fatal blow to the republic. A mediocre military leader, and already on the verge of senility, the new president was a convinced anti-democrat and anti-republican. To bind his allegiance to the Quartet more closely, the landlords and industrialists took advantage of his eightieth birthday in 1927 to give him a Junker estate, Neudeck, in East Prussia. To avoid the inheritance tax, the deed to this estate was made out to the president's son, Colonel Oskar von Hindenburg. In time this estate came to be known as the "smallest concentration camp" in Germany, as the president spent his last years there cut off from the outside world by his senilities and a coterie of intriguers. These intriguers, who were able to influence the aged presidential mind in any direction they wished, consisted of Colonel Oskar, General Kurt von Schleicher, Dr. Otto Meissner, w ho remained head of the presidential office under Ebert, Hindenburg, and Hitler; and Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau who owned the estate next to Neudeck. This coterie was able to make and unseat Cabinets from 1930 to 1934, and controlled the use of the presidential power to rule by decree in that critical period.
No sooner did Hindenburg become a landlord in October 1927 than he began to mobilize government assistance for the landlords. This assistance, known as
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