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

INTRODUCTION

The Liberal Legacy of Imperial Germany

MUCH OF THE TRADITIONAL literature on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history has attributed the failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism to certain deformities in Germany’s social, economic, and political development.¹ This argument, which received its classical formulations in the writings of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Thorstein Veblen, maintained that the central feature of Germany’s historical development since the end of the Napoleonic Wars was her failure to achieve a social and political revolution comparable to those experienced by England and then France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This, in turn, meant that the rapid economic modernization that Germany experienced in the second half of the nineteenth century took place within the framework of a social system that was still essentially feudal, thereby producing an anomaly which Ralf Dahrendorf has conveniently labeled the feudal-industrial society.² Elevated to the status of what one distinguished historian of nineteenth-century German liberalism has called the new orthodoxy,³ the emphasis upon the discrepancy between Germany’s economic modernization and her political retardation has served as the conceptual paradigm for an entire school of recent German historians, the principal representatives of which are Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka, and Hans-Jürgen Puhle. The implications of this approach for an understanding of Weimar liberalism are, however, both profound and misleading. For not only does the preoccupation with the failure of Germany’s bourgeois revolution belittle the actual accomplishments of the German liberal movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, it also seeks to explain the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship as the inescapable consequence of long-range historical processes that had been set in motion well before the republic itself had come into existence. The practical consequence of this has been to absolve the historian of any responsibility for explaining the weakness of Weimar liberalism and the collapse of the Weimar Republic in terms of the specific crises, both economic and political, that gripped Germany between 1918 and 1933.⁴

Recently, however, the new orthodoxy of Wehler, Kocka, and Puhle has come under increasingly heavy criticism from a brace of British historians, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, who have challenged many of its essential assumptions. Specifically, Blackbourn and Eley have argued that the notion of Germany’s abortive bourgeois revolution rests upon assumptions about the nature of the revolutionary experience in England and France that students of those countries’ political traditions have become increasingly reluctant to accept. At the same time, they have also stressed the extent to which the German bourgeoisie was able to achieve many of its most important objectives with the creation of the Second Empire, albeit not in the heroic fashion of those who had failed at the barricades in 1848 and 1849.⁵ As Blackbourn has persuasively argued in an essay entitled The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the 1860s and 1870s witnessed a silent bourgeois revolution from above during which the German bourgeoisie was able to realize many of its most cherished goals in the social and economic sphere. Not only the definitive triumph of the capitalist mode of production but also the establishment of equality before the law, the creation of a rich and variegated associational life, and the rise of a public sector based upon the principle of equal accessibility all bore subtle testimony to the way in which the German bourgeoisie had begun to remold society in accordance with its own interests, values, and aspirations. That these accomplishments were not accompanied by similar success in the political sphere should not, argues Blackbourn, be allowed to obscure the very real gains that the German bourgeoisie recorded in the social and economic.⁶

In challenging the new orthodoxy of Wehler and his associates, the new revisionism of Blackbourn and Eley has raised questions of profound significance for the history of German liberalism in the twentieth century. For while Blackbourn and Eley do not deny the role of continuity in modern German history, they are extremely critical of the teleological blandness that preoccupation with the notion of Germany’s abortive bourgeois revolution and her subsequent deviation from the path that England and France took to the promised land of political modernity has produced in the historiography of the Second Empire and the Weimar Republic. Seeking to restore a sense of contingency to the study of German history between 1880 and 1933, Blackbourn and Eley have sharply criticized the tendency of Wehler and his followers to dismiss the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism as the inescapable consequence of the general course of historical development that Germany had followed since the middle of the nineteenth century.⁷ By ascribing, as Kocka has done, causal primacy to the persistence of pre-industrial—in other words, antimodern and antiliberal—traditions within influential sectors of German society, the disciples of the new orthodoxy have obscured an understanding of National Socialism in terms of the specific social, economic, and political crises that produced it.⁸

This criticism is particularly well taken with respect to the emphasis that not only Dahrendorf but an entire legion of German historians has placed upon the supposedly illiberal character of German social and intellectual life. Originally a term used to describe certain features of Germany’s political culture in the nineteenth century, illiberalism has assumed almost causal primacy at the hands of Dahrendorf and his followers. As Dahrendorf himself writes: Because the new illiberalism of the National Socialists fell on the soil of an illiberal, namely an authoritarian rather than a liberal tradition, it succeeded in seizing the power in Germany that it failed to achieve in more liberal countries.⁹ But while use of the term by Dahrendorf, Fritz Stern, and others is helpful in illuminating a particular aspect of the German political tradition, it fails to carry the interpretational burden assigned to it for several crucial reasons. In the first place, the concept of illiberalism remains necessarily vague, referring at some times to a particular cast of mind and at others to institutionalized patterns of social and political behavior. At the same time, the concept has been transferred from the late nineteenth century, where it is useful in describing the general reaction against liberalism that took place in Germany after 1880, to a later temporal context in which its validity is far less apparent. Not only has this resulted in a skewed view of German history that selectively highlights particular aspects of the country’s political tradition at the expense of others, but it overlooks contrary evidence that might suggest that German society was actually more liberal than it appears through the prism of illiberalism.¹⁰

The purpose of the following study is to take a fresh look at the history of German liberalism during the Weimar Republic, unhampered by the tyranny of historical hindsight, by placing the successes and failures of Weimar liberals against the background of the specific problems with which they were forced to deal. It aims to supplement the excellent monographs that Lothar Albertin, Jürgen Hess, and a host of others have produced on specific aspects of the history of Weimar liberalism¹¹ with a comprehensive history of the German liberal movement from the founding of the Weimar Republic in 1918 until its eventual destruction in 1933. Its principal focus will be the two liberal parties—the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei or DDP) and the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei or DVP)—to whose success or failure the fate of Germany’s short-lived experiment in democracy was so closely tied. The central assumption upon which this study rests is that the collapse of the Second Empire and the founding of the Weimar Republic marked the beginning of a bold new era in the history of the German liberal movement and that the checkered fate of Weimar liberalism is therefore best understood not by reciting the all too familiar litany of failure that inscribed the history of German liberalism in the nineteenth century but by examining the specific factors that did so much to rob liberalism of its vitality and promise between 1918 and 1933. In this respect, it seeks to relate the specific crises experienced by the German liberal parties in the Weimar Republic first to the more general crisis and dissolution of the Weimar party system and second to the general course of German social and economic development in the first third of the twentieth century.¹²

The history of Weimar liberalism was marked by several distinct phases. The first years of the Weimar Republic were marked by a bitter fratricidal conflict between the two liberal parties, as each tried to justify its existence at the expense of the other. Throughout this period it was the DDP’s inability to pursue a consistent course of action with respect to the two questions that dominated the republic’s political agenda—economic reconstruction and the Versailles peace settlement—that provided the DVP with the opening it needed to transform middle-class dissatisfaction with the DDP’s performance as a member of the Weimar Coalition into a stunning victory at the polls in the 1920 Reichstag elections. Although the two liberal parties had begun to draw closer together by the middle of 1922, the benefits of such a rapprochement were all but nullified by the onset of the hyperinflation in 1922 and 1923. Not only did the runaway inflation of the early 1920s leave both the finances and organizations of the two liberal parties in a complete shambles; more important, it traumatized those social strata upon which the German liberal movement had traditionally depended for the bulk of its popular and electoral support. Moreover, the authoritarian manner in which the mark was stabilized at the end of 1923 and the beginning of 1924 severely compromised the legitimacy of the two liberal parties at the same time that the government’s stabilization program inflicted further economic hardship upon those elements that constituted the social backbone of the German liberal movement. This, in turn, marked the beginning of an ever deepening legitimacy crisis, the most tangible manifestations of which were the continued decline of the two liberal parties, the emergence of middle-class splinter parties that addressed themselves to specific sectors of Germany’s middle-class electorate, the increasingly prominent role of organized economic interests in the legislative process, and widespread appeals for a reform and reorganization of the German party system. These appeals, which reached a crescendo following the defeat of the two liberal parties in the 1928 Reichstag elections, drew much of their impetus from the idealism of the younger generation and were accompanied by a vigorous effort on the part of Germany’s liberal leadership to unite the German bourgeoisie into a truly comprehensive liberal party. If the existence of such a party might have helped stem the rise of National Socialism, the failure of these efforts only dramatized the ineffectiveness of Germany’s liberal leadership, undermined established patterns of voter identification within Germany’s middle-class electorate, and facilitated Nazi penetration into the ranks of Germany’s more moderate bourgeois parties. With the outbreak of the world economic crisis at the beginning of the 1930s and the turn to government by decree under the mantle of Reich President Paul von Hinden-burg, the fate of the German liberal parties—as well as that of the Weimar Republic—was effectively sealed. In the final analysis, only the NSDAP was able to overcome the social and economic cleavages that had become so deeply entrenched within the German middle class and thus to satisfy the deep seated psychological longing for bourgeois solidarity to which both the increasing fragmentation of the German party system and the deepening economic crisis had given rise.¹³

While historians should be careful to avoid the fallacy of misplaced con-creteness that has characterized so much of the traditional literature on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history, it would be no less imprudent to disregard the role of continuity altogether. The student of modern German history needs to strike a delicate balance between the concepts of continuity and contingency in his explanation of what happened to Germany between 1870 and 1933, a balance combining an appreciation of the role that long-range historical forces have played in modern German history with careful attention to the specific social, economic, and political conditions under which those forces became manifest. Of the long-range historical forces that helped shape the fate of German liberalism in the Weimar Republic, none was more important than the social and political fragmentation of those elements from which the German liberal movement traditionally recruited the bulk of its popular support. Although German liberalism derived its intellectual inspiration from the philosophical revolution that took place in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century and that was associated with the names of men like Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb von Fichte, and G. W. F. Hegel,¹⁴ it is not as an intellectual but as a social movement that German liberalism is to be understood.¹⁵ Not only was the development of German liberalism during the course of the nineteenth century closely tied to the social and political emancipation of the German bourgeoisie,¹⁶ but the extremely rapid and uneven pace of industrialization that Germany experienced from the founding of the Second Empire to the outbreak of World War I threatened German liberalism with the disintegration of the social milieu out of which it had originally emerged.¹⁷ By the outbreak of World War I the German Mittelstand no longer represented a homogeneous social unit but consisted of at least five separate subgroups: the small business sector, the liberal professions, civil servants, white-collar employees, and the peasantry, or rural middle class. With little in common save their intermediary position between the extremes of big business and organized labor, these elements did not constitute a Stand or corporate estate in any sense of the word. On the contrary, their material interests were often so discordant that it is more appropriate to speak of them as the German middle strata than as a class, with all that implies in terms of social, economic, and ideological cohesiveness.¹⁸

The social and economic fragmentation of Germany’s middle-class interest structure was paralleled by the political fragmentation of the German liberal movement. Almost from the moment of its inception, German liberalism was fraught with internal divisions over its relationship to the state, the economy, and the Volk.¹⁹ Above all else, the fact that the struggle for political emancipation was to become closely, if not inseparably, linked with the quest for national unification produced a curious synthesis of liberalism and nationalism that tended to obscure the more illiberal impulses at work within the German national movement. The tension between these two concepts of emancipation did not become fully apparent until the Prussian constitutional conflict of 1862–66, when Bismarck succeeded in driving a permanent political wedge into the ranks of his liberal opponents. At the heart of Bismarck’s success lay his ability to mobilize the strong national feeling that had played such a prominent role in the early history of the German liberal movement against those liberal parliamentarians who were unwilling to pay for national unification by sanctioning Bismarck’s repeated violations of the Prussian Constitution. The resulting split in the vote on the Indemnity Bill that Bismarck presented to the Landtag in the fall of 1866 was destined to become a permanent feature of Germany’s political landscape when, over the course of the next nine months, Bismarck’s supporters in the German Progressive Party (Deutsche Fortschrittspartei or DFP) seceded from that party to found a new organization of their own entitled the National Liberal Party (Nationalliberale Partei or NLP).²⁰

The years from 1866 to 1879 marked the zenith of liberal influence in the Second Empire and witnessed a series of major legislative accomplishments that not even the sweeping realignment of political forces initiated by Bismarck at the end of the 1870s could erase.²¹ Still, Bismarck’s break with the National Liberals in 1878–79 marked the end of the liberal ascendancy in Prusso-German affairs and ushered in a period of liberal decline that was to continue until the end of the century. This decline was accompanied by the further fragmentation of Germany’s liberal forces and a series of liberal reversals at the polls. Between 1871 and 1890 the liberal portion of the national popular vote fell from 46.6 percent to 34.9 percent. By 1912 this figure had fallen to 26.5 percent, thereby consigning the German liberal movement to the status of a permanent minority in the political culture of Wilhelmine Germany. The fact, however, that the number of votes received by the various liberal parties from 1890 to 1912 remained relatively constant suggests that the decline of the German liberal movement should be seen in relative rather than absolute terms and that the German liberal parties had effectively exhausted their electoral potential at a time when their principal rivals on the German political scene—namely the German Center Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei), the Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD), and the German Conservative Party (Deutschkonservative Partei or DKP)—had just begun to mobilize theirs.²² At the heart of this problem lay the archaic form of party organization that existed in liberal circles before the outbreak of World War I. In terms of their underlying organizational structure, all of the German liberal parties, including the NLP, were essentially Honoratiorenparteien, or loose associations of politically like-minded dignitaries that functioned only at the time of elections but otherwise maintained a shadow existence without benefit of a permanent national organization, membership dues, or even a comprehensive party program.²³

Although the National Liberals launched a vigorous effort to modernize their party organization following their defeat in the 1890 Reichstag elections, it was only with the emergence of special interest organizations in the last decades of the twentieth century that the structure of the German party system began to change. The founding of the Central Association of German Industrialists (Centralverband deutscher Industrieller) in 1876 marked the appearance of a new type of economic interest organization that sought to influence the legislative process by bringing pressure to bear not only upon the governmental bureaucracy but upon the political parties themselves. The emergence of such organizations reached a climax in the 1890s with the creation of the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte or BdL), the League of Industrialists (Bund der Industriellen), and a host of middle-class interest organizations such as the German National Union of Commercial Employees (Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband or DHV), the German Middle-Class Association (Deutsche Mittelstands Vereinigung), the Bavarian Peasants’ League (Bayerischer Bauernbund or BBB), and the Association of Christian Peasant Unions (Vereinigung der christlichen Bauernvereine).²⁴ Not only did these developments underscore the increasing fragmentation of Germany’s middle-class interest structure, but the situation in which these elements found themselves was further complicated by the rapid rise of the industrial working class in the period following Bismarck’s dismissal from office. What resulted was a curious dialectic in which the impulse to unite in the face of increased working-class pressure was subverted by the disintegrative impact of economic modernization on the structure of Germany’s middle-class interests.²⁵

Just as the German liberal movement had split some thirty years before over the terms of national unification, it was destined to split once again in the face of what one renowned German historian has called the Gretchenfrage of German liberalism, that is, its attitude toward Social Democracy.²⁶ The National Liberals hoped to contain the threat that the rise of Social Democracy posed to the existing social order by establishing closer ties with other bourgeois parties. Johannes Miquel’s campaign in 1897 for the consolidation of all state-supporting bourgeois forces was essentially an attempt to resurrect the old agrarian-industrial cartel which, after having dominated German politics since the middle of the 1870s, had collapsed in the wake of Caprivi’s tariff policy.²⁷ Miquel’s initiative paralleled a similar effort by Navy Secretary Alfred von Tirpitz to unite the German nation behind a program of naval construction aimed at securing German supremacy on the seas. Whereas the integrative component of Miquel’s initiative lay in its antisocialism, in Tirpitz’s case it was imperialism colored by the promise of expanded economic activity that served as the ideological axis around which the German nation, including the more nationalistic elements of the German working class, were to unite.²⁸ To Germany’s left liberals, however, appeals such as these represented little more than ill-disguised attempts to promote the vested interests of the propertied bourgeoisie at the expense of the industrial working class. For them the task lay not in suppressing the working class as the National Liberals had proposed but in building a bridge between the bourgeoisie and industrial proletariat so that they might cooperate in those areas where their goals were compatible.

The principal architect of this strategy was Friedrich Naumann, who in 1899, as chairman of the short-lived National Social Union (Nationalsozialer Verein), intoned what was to become the rallying cry of Germany’s moderate Left by calling for the creation of a united political front from Bebel to Bassermann.²⁹ A former Christian-social, who under the influence of the famous German sociologist Max Weber had moved from a Christian to a more nationalistic brand of socialism, Naumann was emphatic that the optimum development of German national power presupposed the full integration of the German working class into the social and political fabric of the nation. His ultimate objective, outlined in his classic work, Demokratie und Kaisertum (1900), was to reconcile the forces of German nationalism with the German working class in a process that simultaneously involved the democratization of the German Empire and the nationalization of the Social Democrats.³⁰ Following the demise of the National Social Union in 1903, Naumann and most of his followers went over to the Radical Association (Freisinnige Vereinigung), where they joined forces with Theodor Barth in a determined campaign to bring about a regeneration of German liberalism. At the heart of their campaign lay an impassioned appeal for the consolidation of the various liberal groups that stood to the left of the National Liberals into a united liberal party. Only through the creation of such a party, argued Naumann and Barth, would it be possible for the German bourgeoisie to survive the two-front war it was currently waging against political reaction and Social Democracy.³¹ Not only should such a party possess a mass political organization similar to that of the Social Democrats, but it should also identify itself as unequivocally as possible with the social and economic interests of the German bourgeoisie. In the broadest sense of the word, wrote Naumann in 1904, the entire future of liberalism depends upon the free and open recognition of its class character. For only a liberalism that is class conscious has the strength to hold its own in the universal class struggle that exists today.³²

Naumann’s appeal for the creation of a united liberal party inspired by a new vision of Germany’s national mission and prepared to cooperate with the Social Democrats in the democratization of German political life had an electric effect upon an entire generation of German liberals and initiated a dramatic revival of German liberalism that was to continue for the better part of the next two decades. The effects of Naumann’s appeal could be seen almost immediately in Hamburg, where in 1906 thirteen deputies in the Hamburg city council seceded from their respective delegations to reconstitute themselves as the United Liberals (Vereinigte Liberalen) in protest against the way in which a recent change in the local electoral law had discriminated against the lower classes.³³ In a similar vein, representatives from the various factions of the Bavarian liberal movement came together the following year to form the National Association for Liberal Germany (Nationalverein für das liberale Deutschland) in an attempt to lay the foundation for the eventual creation of a united liberal party.³⁴ The most important indication of Naumann’s influence, however, could be seen in the progress that leaders of Germany’s left-wing liberal parties began to make toward a resolution of their differences. In the spring of 1906 the first tangible step in the direction of a united liberal party was taken with the adoption of a common political platform by the Radical Association and a regional liberal party from southwest Germany known as the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei). The following November the Radical People’s Party (Freisinnige Volkspartei) lent its name to the cause of liberal unity by joining the other two left-wing parties in a joint party congress in Frankfurt. Yet in spite of the widespread support for the idea of a united liberal party that existed among influential sectors of Germany’s liberal elite, the refusal of Eugen Richter’s followers in the Radical People’s Party—Richter himself had died in 1906—to compromise their laissez-faire social and economic policies continued to stand in the way of an accommodation with the more social-minded liberals around Naumann and Barth. It was only when Naumann began to retreat from many of his earlier positions on social and economic reform that the last obstacles to a merger of the three left-wing liberal parties were removed. In the summer of 1909 a special four-man committee was created to negotiate the outlines of an agreement that was ratified by the German People’s Party in February 1910 and by the two radical parties at a joint convention in Berlin on 5 March. On the following day the three left-wing liberal parties formally dissolved their separate organizations and merged to found the Progressive People’s Party (Fortschrittliche Volkspartei or FVP).³⁵

All of this—and particularly the founding of the Progressive People’s Party —pointed to the reemergence of a viable liberal infrastructure among the more progressive sectors of the German bourgeoisie and bore dramatic testimony to the renewed vitality that the German liberal movement began to show in the first decades of the twentieth century. Still, Naumann did not look upon the merger of the three left-wing liberal parties as an end in itself but as the prelude to their eventual fusion with the progressive elements on the left wing of the NLP.³⁶ In this respect Naumann could only have been heartened by developments within the NLP itself. At the turn of the century the leaders of the NLP had created the Reich Association of National Liberal Youth (Reichsverband der nationalliberalen Jugend) in an attempt to enhance their party’s image with the younger generation. Regarding themselves as the pioneers of liberal unity, the Young Liberals had dedicated themselves to the regeneration of the NLP so that it might serve as the crystallization point around which the great liberal party of the future could form.³⁷ Although the Young Liberals were repeatedly frustrated in their efforts to reform the NLP by the intransigence of the heavy industrial interests that sat on the party’s right wing,³⁸ the crusade for a united liberal party received new impetus from the founding of the Hansa-Bund for Commerce, Trade, and Industry (Hansa-Bund für Gewerbe, Handel und Industrie or HB) and the German Peasants’ League (Deutscher Bauernbund or DBB) in the summer of 1909. Closely tied to Germany’s commercial and financial elites, the Hansa-Bund combined its demands for a more equitable system of taxation and tariffs with an impassioned appeal for greater political involvement on the part of Germany’s liberal bourgeoisie. In this respect the Hansa-Bund’s ultimate objective was to consolidate the arti-sanry, small business sector, and newly emergent white-collar class into a united political force capable of challenging the hegemony that the reactionary social forces currently represented by the Agrarian League had exercised over German political life for nearly half a century.³⁹ In a similar vein, the German Peasants’ League had been founded by liberal farm leaders with close ties to the NLP in an attempt to organize peasant opposition to the tariff policies of the Agrarian League and the conservative grain-producing interests that controlled it.⁴⁰

Like the creation of the Progressive People’s Party, the agitation of the Young Liberals for a reform of the NLP and the formation of the Hansa-Bund and German Peasants’ League reflected the renewed vitality that surged through the German liberal movement in the last years of the Second Empire. Still, the forces with which Wilhelmine liberalism had to contend remained formidable, and it is by no means certain that the leaders of the German liberal movement would have been able to accomplish their objectives had not the outbreak of World War I intervened to bring about the demise of the Second Empire. Moreover, the divisions that had historically plagued the German liberal movement still possessed considerable potential for frustrating the process of liberal renewal. At no point was this more apparent than in the Reichstag elections of January 1912. For although the Hansa-Bund, the Young Liberal League, and a host of other liberal organizations prevailed upon the two liberal parties to set aside their differences for the sake of a common crusade against the forces of political reaction in the first trip to the polls on 12 January, the will to cooperate all but evaporated in the wake of the Social Democratic landslide that characterized the outcome of the elections. The Progressives, for example, were so impressed by the SPD’s performance in the preliminary elections that they proceeded to conclude an agreement to support each other’s candidates in face-to-face contests with conservative opponents, while the National Liberals were so frightened by the spectre of Social Democracy that they concluded a similar agreement with the parties of the German Right.⁴¹

The two parties paid for their folly with one of the most puzzling defeats in the annals of German liberalism. For although the Progressives polled 260,000 more votes than the three left-wing liberal parties had received in 1907, they elected six fewer deputies, while the NLP saw its number of parliamentary seats reduced by nine in spite of the fact that it had improved upon its performance in the 1907 elections by more than 26,000 votes.⁴² For the leaders of the German liberal movement the results of the 1912 Reichstag elections were both frustrating and ambiguous. At no point in the history of the Second Empire had the German liberal parties received more votes than in 1912. And yet their share of the popular vote had fallen to 26.5 percent and their combined parliamentary strength to 87 deputies. Moreover, the outcome of the elections had all but paralyzed the movement for liberal unity at a time when the need for some sort of accommodation between the two liberal parties seemed stronger than ever. Not only were the two liberal parties profoundly estranged from each other as a result of the conflicting strategies they had pursued in the runoff elections on 19 January 1912, but the fact that the Social Democrats had received more than a third of all votes cast sent shock waves through the National Liberal organization that had the advocates of liberal unity—and particularly the Young Liberals—running for cover. For the next six years the NLP was caught in the grip of a bitter internal crisis that both neutralized the crusade for a reform of the existing political order and foreshadowed the party’s eventual demise in the fall of 1918. Meanwhile, Naumann and his associates were left with no alternative but to bide their time and wait for a more auspicious moment to resume their efforts on behalf of a united liberal party capable of cooperating with the Social Democrats in the creation of a viable parliamentary democracy.⁴³

By no means, however, were the forces of liberal regeneration dead. To be sure, the last years of the Second Empire were characterized by a political stalemate that neither the champions nor the opponents of reform were able to turn to their advantage.⁴⁴ Moreover, the German Right had begun to show new signs of life, recovering from the devastating defeat it had suffered in the 1912 Reichstag elections by adopting techniques of political agitation and mobilization that were actually more in tune with the exigencies of mass politics than those of the two liberal parties.⁴⁵ Still, in many essential respects the German liberal movement—and this is particularly true of the more progressive elements on its left wing—was more vibrant than at any time since Bismarck’s break with the National Liberals in 1878–79. Above all else, the forces around Naumann and the Progressive People’s Party were in the process of breaking out of the political isolation in which Germany’s left-wing liberal parties had found themselves ever since the founding of the Second Empire. Though the forces arrayed against it remained formidable, Naumann’s appeal for the creation of a grand bloc from Bebel to Bassermann contained the seeds of an alliance that would eventually secure passage of the peace resolution in the summer of 1917, assume the reins of power with Prince Max von Baden’s appointment as chancellor in the fall of 1918, and found the Weimar Republic a half-year later. While it is not at all certain—and indeed the preponderance of evidence seems to suggest otherwise—that these forces would have triumphed on their own had not the war intervened to hasten the collapse of the Second Empire, the fact nevertheless remains that the potential for democratic reform was greater on the eve of World War I than at any time since the emergence of the German liberal movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. Far from being an aberration in Germany’s historical development, the founding of the Weimar Republic represented the culmination of a democratic and liberal revival that had been underway since the beginning of the twentieth century.

PART ONE

A New Beginning 1918–1920

CHAPTER ONE

Revolution and Realignment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stresemann’s decision to found the German People’s Party ran strongly counter to the express wishes of many of his closest associates. This was particularly true of the Young Liberals, who at a meeting with Stresemann, Otto Hugo, and other party leaders on 23 November pressed their case for a united liberal party.²⁶ At the same time, both Stresemann and the founders of the DDP found themselves under increasingly heavy pressure from influential middle-class interest organizations to resume negotiations between their respective parties. On 28 November over 120 representatives from more than twenty special-interest organizations such as the Hansa-Bund, the German National Union of Commercial Employees, and the German Middle-Class Association met in Berlin to petition the leaders of the DDP and DVP for a resumption of efforts on behalf of a united liberal party, stipulating in particular that Stresemann as well as a sizable number from their own ranks should be accepted into the leadership of the new party.²⁷ Although Stresemann himself refused to become involved in further negotiations with the likes of Wolff and Weber, he could hardly ignore what amounted to a virtual ground swell of popular sentiment in favor of a merger between the DDP and DVP, with the result that he reluctantly agreed to meet with delegates from the newly founded DDP.

The decisive meeting took place on the afternoon of 2 December. The People’s Party was represented by Friedberg and Eugen Leidig, both high-ranking members of the National Liberal delegation to the Prussian Landtag. The Democrats, on the other hand, were represented by Otto Fischbeck, a former Progressive parliamentarian who was strongly critical of the Berliner Tageblatt faction, and Hjalmar Schacht, a prominent Young Liberal who had been actively involved in the series of events leading to the founding of the DDP. While the founders of the DDP were resolutely opposed to any agreement that might make it possible for Stresemann to secure a position of influence within the new party,²⁸ Stresemann was prepared to go along with an accommodation with the Democrats, provided that his colleagues from the NLP received the measure of influence over the policies of the new party to which he thought they were entitled.²⁹ With this in mind, Stresemann provided Friedberg and Leidig with a set of specific instructions outlining the conditions under which a merger with the DDP would be acceptable to himself and the National Liberal leadership. But at the decisive meeting on 2 December Friedberg completely ignored the instructions he had received from Stresemann and proceeded, over Leidig’s vigorous protests, to accept a merger with the DDP on terms that included the co-optation of himself and two other representatives from the DVP into the DDP executive committee. At the conclusion of the meeting Friedberg issued a statement that confirmed the unification of the two liberal parties and called for the creation of a united front of the liberal and democratic bourgeoisie on the basis of the Democratic Party.³⁰

When Stresemann returned to Berlin on the following day, he immediately denounced Friedberg’s action as a complete capitulation to the Democrats and tried desperately to counter the effect that it had had upon the National Liberal organization throughout the country.³¹ In one part of the country after another Friedberg’s declaration of support for the DDP had destroyed what still remained of National Liberal resistance to the founding of a united liberal party. The entire National Liberal organization had already defected to the DDP in southern and southwestern Germany, and similar signs of the party’s organizational collapse could be seen in Saxony, Silesia, and West Prussia.³² At the same time, the leaders of the Young Liberal movement had come out in public support of the DDP in hopes that this might force Stresemann into joining the party.³³ But Stresemann, deeply embittered by what he regarded as Friedberg’s betrayal of the National Liberal cause, remained unshaken in his determination to rally what still remained of the NLP organization to the support of the German People’s Party. In this respect, Stresemann scored a critical victory when on 6 December the party organization in Hanover voted to repudiate Friedberg’s merger with the DDP and called for an emergency session of the NLP central executive committee to determine the fate of the party.³⁴ The meeting took place in Berlin on 15 December in the midst of a fierce winter snowstorm that prevented more than two-thirds of the committee members from attending. Hopeful that his might work in their favor, those National Liberals who favored a merger with the DDP refused to consider a postponement of the meeting so that party members from outside of Berlin could attend. The subsequent debate centered around two resolutions, one introduced by former NLP Reichstag deputy August Weber that called for the dissolution of the National Liberal organization and its absorption into the DDP, and the other by Paul Vogel and his associates that proposed that the party organization be kept intact and placed at the service of the German People’s Party. In the decisive vote Vogel’s resolution on behalf of the DVP passed by a 33–28 margin, thus clearing the way for the official founding of the DVP at a demonstration later that afternoon in Berlin’s fashionable Hotel Savoy.³⁵ And with that fateful decision, wrote the DDP’s Otto Nuschke a decade later, the historic moment for the creation of a united liberal-democratic party had passed.³⁶

In the polemics that followed the founding of the German People’s Party, the Democrats tried to saddle Stresemann with the blame for the failure to achieve liberal unity in November and December 1918 and for the perpetuation of the historic schism within the ranks of the German liberal movement.³⁷ In point of fact, however, ultimate responsibility for the failure of efforts to create a united liberal party in the days following the collapse of the Second Empire rested not so much with Stresemann as with the Democrats around Wolff, Weber, and the Berliner Tageblatt. For Stresemann, as a careful reading of the historical record will reveal, was fully prepared not only to enter into a far-reaching alliance with the Progressives before the founding of the DDP ever took place but also to retire from active political life so as not to stand in the way of an accommodation with the Democrats. Two developments, however, prevented Stresemann from following through on this resolve. In the first place, the emergence of the Democrats in the second week of November and their appeal for the creation of a new political party unencumbered by the sins of the past effectively sabotaged whatever progress Stresemann and the Progressives had been making toward a resolution of their differences and left the latter with no alternative but to reach an accord with the Wolff-Weber faction. Secondly, the faction from the Berliner Tageblatt was adamantly opposed to any involvement on the part of Stresemann in the leadership of the new party—a point that Weber made manifestly clear with his attack against Anne-xationspolitiker at the meeting on 18 November—and consequently refused to grant even the minimal concessions that might have made it possible for him to join the DDP. Even then, Stresemann was still willing to step aside for the sake of a united liberal party until Friedberg’s capitulation to the Democrats in the first week of December.

In the campaign for the elections to the National Assembly on 19 January 1919, the founders of the German Democratic Party sought above all else to prevent the working-class parties on Germany’s socialist Left from capturing an absolute majority. In its official campaign appeal the DDP called for the reconstruction of the German fatherland on the basis of the republican form of government and pledged itself to the defense of private property and the free enterprise system.³⁸ While clearly dissociating themselves from socialist demands for a reorganization of the German economy, the Democrats were careful not to offend the more moderate elements within the German working class and rejected a DVP proposal for the creation of a united bourgeois front for fear that this might force the Majority and Independent Socialists closer together.³⁹ In this respect, the Democrats portrayed themselves as a bridge between the bourgeoisie and proletariat and repeatedly stressed that only the creation of a powerful bourgeois bloc willing to cooperate with the Majority Socialists on the basis of parity could prevent the state from falling under the domination of Germany’s revolutionary Left.⁴⁰ By drawing a critical distinction between the political and socioeconomic goals of the November Revolution, the Democrats were able to present themselves both as the allies and the adversaries of German Social Democracy.

From a purely tactical point of view, the DDP’s principal objective in the elections to the National Assembly was to extend its appeal beyond those social and political groups that had supported the old Progressive People’s Party in the Reichstag elections of January 1912. At that time the Progressives had scored a major victory at the polls only to be denied the full fruits of their victory by the peculiarities of the German electoral law. Now, under a system of proportional representation, the Democrats hoped to improve upon that performance with one of the most highly sophisticated and well-organized campaigns Germany had ever witnessed. In adapting their campaign to the exigencies of mass politics, the Democrats consciously imitated techniques of political agitation and mobilization that had been in use in the United States for some time. In the two months between the party’s founding and the elections to the National Assembly, the Democrats saturated the German public with nearly 20 million pieces of campaign literature, approximately a fourth of which were directly targeted at the newly enfranchised woman voter. At the same time, the Democrats also relied upon films, loudspeakers, and illustrated placards as supplemental means of carrying their message to the people. All of this represented a radical departure from the way in which the German liberal parties had traditionally conducted their campaigns and constituted part of a concerted attempt by the Democrats to transform the DDP into a mass political party fundamentally different from the liberal Honoratorienparteien of the 19th century.⁴¹

In their efforts to expand their party’s electoral base beyond those groups that had supported the Progressives in 1912, the Democrats focused their immediate attention upon former Young Liberals and members of the now-defunct NLP. On 15 December forty-one former National Liberals published an appeal characterizing the DDP as a merger of all those committed to the liberal concept of freedom and calling upon their colleagues to support it as the only alternative to a socialist dictatorship.⁴² Several days later, the executive committee of the Young Liberal League (Jungliberaler Reichsverband) issued a similar appeal in which the founders of the DVP were held responsible for the failure of liberal unity in the fall and early winter of 1918.⁴³ In a similar vein, the Democrats were able to achieve a major breakthrough into the ranks of the National Liberal electorate in the countryside. Here the principal figure was Karl Böhme, a National Liberal Reichstag deputy who had helped found the German Peasants’ League in 1909 as a liberal counterweight to the protectionist policies of Germany’s conservative rural elite. Following the collapse of the Second Empire, Böhme and the leaders of the German Peasants’ League were quick to realign themselves with the DDP on the assumption that it represented the best bulwark against the twin dangers of social revolution and feudal reaction. More specifically, Böhme hoped that the DDP would take the lead in initiating a program of rural resettlement that would put an end to the social and political hegemony of the landed aristocracy and encourage those who had left the farm since the beginning of the century to return to the countryside.⁴⁴ Gratified by Böhme’s declaration of support, the DDP reciprocated by publishing an agrarian program that underwrote the DBB’s most important objectives and placed 250,000 marks at his organization’s disposal for use in the campaign.⁴⁵

The German Peasants’ League was not the only middle-class interest organization to rally to the DDP’s support in the aftermath of the November Revolution. In urban areas throughout the country, the DDP proved remarkably successful in attracting the support of organizations representing the so-called new middle class of civil servants and white-collar employees. In December 1918 the various civil servant organizations that had been founded during the war merged to form the German Civil Servants’ Association (Deutscher Beamtenbund) under the chairmanship of Ernst Remmers. A member of the Democratic Party, Remmers was quickly co-opted into the DDP executive committee, where he served as a liaison to the civil servant movement and was nominated as a candidate for election to the National Assembly.⁴⁶ In much the same way, the Democrats also sought to establish a foothold within the German white-collar movement through the cooperation of Gustav Schneider. As it had among civil servants, the war had also done much to stimulate a