Germany’s Weimar Republic: A narrative of ambiguity

Gustav Stresemann in his speech before the General Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

Or so it seemed. Certainly Albert Einstein attended the premiere as an invited guest. On the other hand, the Nazi tabloid Der Angriff (Attack) saw reason to applaud the engineers constructing the film’s rocket as “eternal seekers from Faustian heritage”. Small wonder: The major figures’ attitudes and comportment in the film amounted to what Thomas Mann would come to identify as robust technical progressivism combined with dreams of a romanticised past (“people which no longer exist put into machines that almost exist already”, according to a contemporary film critic). A past imagined as a harmonious premodern community, implying repudiation of modernity’s – consequently the republic’s – conflict-torn society. “Reactionary modernism”, according to Jeffrey Herf’s apt depiction of technological advance reconciled with retreat from reason.

Uncertainties and anxieties

Woman in the Moon and the rocket fever accompanying it symbolised the enthusiasm about modern technological achievements that gripped large segments of the Weimar Republic. In contrast, changes in cultural patterns, social standing and professional positions, also products of that rapid modernisation which impacted the republic’s society, elicited more ambiguous responses. They triggered uncertainties and anxieties, not least because they coincided with severe economic crises. As German historian Detlev Peukert wrote, first hyperinflation, subsequently the Great Depression worked to “destroy every meaningful biographical perspective for millions of individuals”. With its rejection of modernity’s rational attributes, reactionary modernism – the ideological appeal to the “upright-musical German soul in modern-mechanical mould” (Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain) – offered ways of consolation and self-deception.

The longing for community combined into a potent mixture with an overemphasis on leadership informed by the Bismarck and Hindenburg myths (the latter dating from the Great War) and building on earlier acquiescence in Imperial Germany’s authoritarian system. When the supposedly republican German School of Politics (Deutsche Hochschule für Politik) opened its doors in 1920, its operators placed the education of political leaders on par with the goal of contributing to Germany’s “struggle for liberation” from the fetters of the Versailles Peace Treaty. During the 1920s, the “leader” ideal came to acquire almost metaphysical significance. Unsurprisingly, it gained momentum after former Field Marshal Hindenburg succeeded Friedrich Ebert as president. Even among republicans, it became intertwined with the destinies of Weimar Germany to such an extent that it did not exclude an anti-democratic backlash.

Cultural and academic ambivalences partly reflected, partly reinforced constitutional and political ambiguities – compromises with the past to the detriment of the present. Under the Weimar Republic’s mixed parliamentary and presidential system the directly elected president’s political legitimacy rivalled that of the Reichstag. The constitutional emergency powers, which he retained, might be used to sustain or to weaken the republic. After the eminently partisan Hindenburg had been voted into office, the president came to be elevated over parliament for only too transparent purposes as the supposed “guardian of the constitution”.

In terms of foreign policy, the revisionist spirit permeating Weimar Germany’s society and politics, essentially wishing to recapture the country’s pre-war position of power, created another double-edged situation. Even Gustav Stresemann, foreign minister from 1923-29, who has posthumously been judged Weimar Germany’s more ablest statesman, was far from a consistent advocate of a politics of conciliation that would have renounced any attempt at restoring German continental hegemony. Realising that Germany would have to come to terms with the victorious French, he pursued a diplomacy of offering security guarantees to France and Belgium. These efforts culminated in the Locarno Treaty by which Germany recognised its western borders drawn in Versailles, followed by Germany’s admission to the League of Nations.

The same recognition was not extended, however, to the border with Poland. Germany merely committed itself to peaceful arbitration in its continuing attempt to regain lost territory in Eastern Europe. Moreover, a clandestine system of subsidies channelled to German minorities in Poland aimed at weakening the influence of the Polish state.

Beginning of the end

These strategies merged into renewed plans for an economically and politically dependent Mitteleuropa, which first gained currency during the Great War and came to be actively pursued again by the Weimar presidential cabinets, commencing with Brüning’s administration. Preferential agreements concluded with Hungary and Romania initiated a shift of German trade to south-eastern Central Europe, prefiguring the economic dependence of that region’s agricultural countries on Germany. Unsurprisingly, the French government’s 1930 proposal to negotiate a Pan-European confederation, with its implied acceptance of the territorial status quo, was rejected.

The collapse of the Grand Coalition in early 1930 and subsequent government of the Brüning cabinet on the basis of constitutionally questionable presidential emergency decrees signalled, for all practical purposes, the beginning of the end for the Weimar Republic. Meanwhile, Woman in the Moon proved to be the most successful box office hit of the film season 1929/30. While Germany drew nearer to the abyss, tens of thousands flocked to the country’s cinemas to witness the romantically coated technical vision of a German spaceship flying to the moon.

When Ufa released Woman in the Moon, control of the film company had already passed into the hands of the rabidly nationalistic newspaper tycoon Alfred Hugenberg, after the exorbitant production costs of Lang’s previous film Metropolis had brought Ufa to the brink of bankruptcy. One of the most fatal strands of militant hatred directed at liberalism, democracy, and socialism had originated in 1890 when Hugenberg played a leading role in founding the aggressively imperialist Pan-German League. Employed as Krupp director for a decade, Hugenberg became a key player in several Ruhr-based pressure groups connected to mining companies during the Great War. Funds from heavy industry allowed him to build his own syndicate of newspaper publishing corporations and news distribution agencies. Supplying the regional press with prefabricated moulds to be used as printing plates introduced local editors to the most modern printing methods and established Hugenberg’s influence on public opinion.

Joining the radical nationalist German National People’s Party (DNVP), Hugenberg remained an intransigent enemy of the republic. His press viciously attacked Chancellor Gustav Stresemann’s Locarno politics; later, it would also repudiate Brüning’s government. In 1928, his Pan-German allies in the party pushed through Hugenberg’s election as DNVP Chair. Subsequently forming the Reich Committee Against the Young (Reparations Payment) Plan, he invited Adolf Hitler to join, providing the Nazis with a national platform. Films with titles such as The Foreign Fist and Burden of Tribute were produced by Ufa to be used at rallies. In addition to pamphlets and press articles, Hugenberg made use of airplane advertising. However, the seeds sown by his propaganda were reaped by the Nazis. The brown-shirts were more successful in conveying an impression of dynamic modernity. “Hitler over Germany” trumpeted the party, when the Nazi demagogue conducted his 1932 election campaigns by plane, flying from rally to rally.

Printing presses, film screenings, airplanes: Combined with fear-mongering messages, spiteful falsehoods, venomous conspiracy theories, these most advanced technical means available were used to destroy the republic by the uneasy, but destructively effective, Hugenberg-Hitler alliance. Masses of voters responded. Modernisation appeared to spell economic deprivation. Citizens felt threatened by uncertainty – hopes and expectations were severely disrupted. Public aggression turned against democratic institutions and minority groups, such as Germany’s Jews, which were depicted by both radical nationalists and Nazis, as scapegoats. Landed, military, industrial elites were already bent on destroying the democratic achievements of 1918/19. Eventually, a growing number of voters joined them in abandoning the republic.

Anxieties return

The failure of Germany’s first democracy haunted the framers of the country’s Western zones’ Basic Law after the Second World War. The arrangements which were built into the constitution to enhance the effectiveness of the new political machinery and to avoid another anti-democratic assault included: exemption of fundamental principles from constitutional amendment; power of the Constitutional Court to ban political parties ruled anti-democratic (“militant democracy”); a limited role for an indirectly elected president; and a strengthened chancellor who may only be ousted by “constructive” vote of no confidence, i. e. election of a successor by absolute parliamentary majority. Severely circumscribed governmental emergency powers were added later.

No influential political players emerged indicating they would, even in a rudimentary way, try to pursue the Mitteleuropa concept. Neither did an ideological background for such a venture evolve. In the 1970s, a coalition of Social and Free Democrats, led by Willy Brandt and Walter Scheel, concluded treaties with Moscow, Warsaw and Prague which accepted the integrity of existing Eastern borders. Reconciliation with France remained a consistently pursued goal; European (initially West European) unification developed into another aim, from the Coal and Steel Community of the early 1950s through the Common Market to the present problem-ridden European Union.

Americanisation, Europeanisation and “coming to terms” with the Nazi past contributed, over four decades, to gradually shaping a more democratic West German culture. The evolution of catch-all parties (which find themselves presently weakened) and the “economic miracle”, both contrasting with the Weimar period, certainly helped. Due, however, to the very different experiences of former GDR citizens, reunification produced a country which remains unified, but not quite united – “one people in two cultures”.

The consequences of another wave of modernisation – labelled globalisation – and of the accompanying neo-liberal policies, from increased migratory movements to curbs on the scope and quality of social benefits, were more strongly felt in the new East-German states. They triggered a resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia strongly reminiscent of the 1920s. Exemplified by PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) rallies and the electoral successes of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), these responses, once again, point to a sense of anxious insecurity. In a social environment perceived by many to be increasingly threatening, professional and private futures seem incalculable. There is a dire need, in Germany and every other European country, for politicians, media commentators and educators who, rather than fuelling anxieties by inflammatory rhetoric and hyperbole, assist citizen to make informed choices without anger or fear, but guided by the norms of equity and social justice.

Rainer Eisfeld taught political science at Osnabrück University, Germany, and was a visiting professor at UCLA. For over two decades, he belonged to the Board of Trustees of Concentration Camp Memorials Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. From 2006 to 2012 he was a member of the International Political Science Association’s Executive Committee.

Further Reading

Herf, Jeffrey: Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge/London: Cambridge University Press

Leopold, John A.: Alfred Hugenberg. The Radical Nationalist Campaign Against the Weimar Republic. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.

Neumann, Franz Leopold: Behemoth. Introductory Chapter: “The Collapse of the Weimar Republic”. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee

Peukert, Detlev J. K.: The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, New York: Hill and Wang

Wright, Jonathan: Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Germany, populism, Second World War, Weimar Republic