Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916–1936 9781849662604, 9780340731901

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For W.L., as ever and for Nick (1950–2013) in memoriam

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List of Tables Table 3.1 Votes (percentages) and seats (number) in Reichstag, 1919–24 Table 3.2 Reichstag/Landtag elections in the Rhineland, 1928–1933 Table 3.3 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4 Table 7.5 Table 8.1 Table 8.2

(main parties) Reichstag elections in the Palatinate, 1928–1932 (main parties) Distribution of taxpayers 1913–1926/36 Monthly household budgets (1927/28–1930) Distribution of unemployed by support 1930–33 Father’s occupation of judges, prosecutors, civil servant graduates and law trainees in Prussia, 15 December 1927 Murder and manslaughter by gender with convictions, 1924–1930 Deaths resulting from political violence in Prussia 1 February to 10 August by party affiliation Death sentences and executions, 1913–1938 Distribution of seats Kreistage, Gumbinnen district, 1919 by political party Elections Pomerania Landtag 1919–1933 Distribution of seats Pomerania Provincial Landtag, 1925–1933, by political party Distribution of seats Kreistage Stettin district 1929 by political party Political parties in Regenwalde Kreistag, 1919–1933 Age profile of Reichstag deputies, 1919–1933 Age profile of the NSDAP, SPD and KPD: Reichstag and party compared to the German population

50 60 60 76 84 92 102 119 121 125 167 171 171 173 174 200 201

List of Maps Map 2.1 Map 3.1 Map 3.2

Map 7.1

The spread of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, 4–10 November 1918 Germany after the Treaty of Versailles, 1919. Used by kind permission Oxford University Press Occupied zones of Rhineland, 1920–1935. Reprinted by permission of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, (Vol. 4, No. 1, October 1925). Copyright 2014 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. www.ForeignAffairs.com Pomerania 1900–1936

27 36

56 170

Acknowledgements The origins of this book are to be found in a suggestion by Christopher Wheeler to write the prequel to Ian Kershaw’s Nazi Dictatorship. That was nearly two decades ago, and not only have I taken a long time to produce something but also the result as presented here is somewhat off that particular track. The journey has also seen a number of editors come and go – all of them benevolent towards a notoriously slow producer. It is something of a feat therefore that my current editors at Bloomsbury, Emily Drew and Frances Arnold, patiently nudged me towards delivering the manuscript. I only hope the result is adequate payment for their patience. The book has strayed radically from the original commission. Rather than a straightforward historiography intended to guide students through the different approaches to and contested perspectives on the Weimar Republic, I have combined original research and synthesis spanning the World War I to the early years of the Third Reich, thus also departing from the usual chronological parameters. Some chapters are more archive based than others and use hitherto little or unknown sources; I hope that even those chapters where I have relied on printed sources and the secondary literature have something original to say. I am grateful to the staffs of the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin-Dahlem, Staatsarchiv Munich, Staatsarchiv Bremen, Staatsarchiv Hamburg Landesarchiv Schleswig, Landesarchiv Berlin, and at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin (Unten den Linden), Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm Universitätsbibliothek Humboldt University, Berlin and the library of the London School of Economics, for their friendly cooperation. Different chapters have been read to different audiences at different times: in particular, I should like to thank Jill Lewis at Swansea, Maiken Umbach and Jeif Lerram at Manchester University, John Horne, Anne Dolan and Alan Kramer at Trinity College, Dublin, and Vincent Comerford at Maynooth and Marc Caball at the Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, for kindly allowing me to test some of the ideas of the book on the participants at their lively research seminars. As well as benefiting from the helpful and encouraging reports of two anonymous reviewers, I am deeply indebted to three friends who read either parts or entire drafts of the book at various stages: Moritz Föllmer, Tim Kirk and Alan Kramer. Conversations and collaboration with them over the years and with Elizabeth Harvey, Barry Doyle, Nadine Rossol, Adelheid von Saldern, Jane Caplan, John O’Brennan, Klaus Weinhauer and Kathleen Canning have sharpened my thinking; Hsiu-ling Kuo has for many years engaged with me in a stimulating and ongoing discussion on Weimar, modernity and life in general. If the Weimar Republic lies in any way in the shadow of the Third Reich, it is only in the sense of the intellectual debt I continue to owe to Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans. Needless to say, none of those mentioned here are responsible for either error of fact or idiosyncrasies in my interpretation of the Weimar Republic.

Acknowledgements

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As all authors know, the act of writing can bring moments of despondency. At these times loved ones and friends put everything into proper perspective. I could not wish for better and more interesting children than Anna, Sophie and Max and their partners: Gavin, Sergio and Marie; or the joy of an important new addition in our midst: Amelia Rose. In London, Jordan Goodman and Dallas Sealy are my second family and know this book only too well; in Hamburg, Ecki Schweppe (fellow ‘bad boy’ from the Hospitalstrasse era) and his partner Claudia Unruh and their children constitute my other close family; also in Hamburg, Dieter Putzier – the historian’s perfect reader – has faithfully followed my progress and read my work for nearly three decades, as too have Margaret Degenhardt and her late husband Franz-Josef (‘Karatsch’); in Berlin, Frauke and Sebastian Tedsen-Ufer, Tina Dingel and Diane Bartoszyk, not only on occasion feed me, they also have introduced me into their circles of wonderful friends; Steffi Grau generously lent me her wonderful house in Mallorca where I was able to both write and relax. In a small way, this book is my small ‘Dankeschön’ to all of them for the years of friendship. Finally, it is the two persons who have known me (and this book) longest, my wife Wiltrud and my oldest friend Nick, the partner of Geraldine and father of Jack and Fin, to whom this book is dedicated.

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1

Introduction: A Republic without Authority?

“Born in defeat, humiliated by Versailles, mocked and violated by its irreconcilable enemies at home, the Weimar Republic never gained the popular acceptance which alone could have given its parliamentary system permanence, even in crisis.”1 Thus goes the familiar narrative of the Weimar Republic from one of the doyens of post-war German history. Fritz Stern’s verdict is typical of the judgement made by émigré historians in the 1950s, as well as by those who remained within Germany.2 This generation of historians held a mirror to the young Bonn Republic in order to show that it did not reflect its ‘failed’ predecessor.3 Lacking in legitimacy and destined to find an early grave, the liberal first republic, these historians tells us, staggered from crisis to crisis before finally succumbing to the machinations of its enemies. From its earliest days, the republic was subjected to a negative discourse that is almost unparalleled for any polity in modern times. Contemporaries whether on the right or left, or in the middle of politics found it easier to critique the republic’s shortcomings than to praise its achievements.4 The discursive assault upon the Weimar Republic from the right of its political spectrum got going even before the ink on the Constitution had dried. Its tenor can be gauged in an essay published in1924 by Oswald Spengler, in which he dismissed the republic as the birthchild of the narrow party interests that had brought down the German state.5 A few years later, August Winnig, the former Social Democrat and briefly Oberpräsident of Mecklenburg who had thrown in his lot with the Kapp Putsch, damned the republic as a failed state.6 The realm of discourse was not disconnected to the practice of politics as we shall see in the examples of Carl Goerdeler, the conservative lord mayor of Leipzig and the constitutional legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Their authoritarian ideas on authority reflected conservative thinking on the alleged bolshevism and chaos of the Weimar Republic and paved the way for dictatorship in 1933.7 The perception of the republic as lacking authority was not the sole preserve of the right. Looking back on the Weimar experience and the years of catastrophe that followed, Friedrich Meinecke, one of the republic’s earliest historians, described it as an ‘emergency construction’ (Notbau)8; his younger colleague, Theodor Eschenburg

2

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

saw it as ‘improvised’.9 Not surprisingly, a polity that was seen as an ad hoc contingency could hardly be expected to inspire authority of trust and confidence among the population. Others laid the supposed failure of republican democracy to entrench itself with the people themselves. In a flood of articles in the 1940s, North American social psychologists posited theories of a déclassé society that was gripped by mass hysteria of leader adulation to explain the republic’s fall (and Hitler’s rise to power).10 Writing in this period, the renowned German psychologist Felix Schottlaender attributed the woes of the republic and the horror of Hitler to a collective insecurity or ‘fear of freedom’ (incidentally, an observation made in the first week of the revolution by no other than Hugo Preuss).11 None of these early critics of Weimar was necessarily anti-democratic. Meinecke, as is well known, soon reconciled himself to the republic, becoming in his words a Vernunftrepublikaner, a ‘republican of the head’ if not of the heart. As a young man, Eschenburg had served as state secretary in Gustav Stresemann’s office and was closely linked to the liberal German Democratic Party and from July 1930, its right-leaning successor, the German State Party.12 Schottlaender too was a progressive liberal.13 These writers were not alone in establishing the paradigm of a failed or doomed republic; further to their left, a number of Weimar’s leading political protagonists depicted the republic as a sickly patient with little hope of survival in their memoirs.14 Nor was such a bleak reading restricted to this generation. A decade later, Karl Dietrich Bracher, in what is still an influential and unsurpassed structural analysis of Weimar politics, focused on a combination of constitutional mechanisms (notably Article 48), weak leadership, vested interests and political atavism, to explain the republic’s dissolution.15 In a publication from the mid-1980s, Walter Ganßer, the then director of the Bavarian state agency for civic education, concluded that Weimar’s supposed constitutional flaws made it a ‘disposable democracy’.16 The title of an influential study by Hans Mommsen published at the end of that decade suggested the republic had been a gamble which its supporters lost.17 Twenty years later, Ursula Büttner saw a republic that was simply ‘overwhelmed’ by the sheer weight of the forces ranged against it.18 Meanwhile, in his popular history, Hendrik Thoß reverts to the (somewhat clichéd) idea of the republic as a ‘democracy without democrats’ – a ship of state without a crew lurching rudderless towards its inevitable fate.19 The supposed failings and weaknesses of the republic’s institutions that made its end inevitable have provided generations of scholars with a seductive meta-narrative that is only now undergoing revision.20 Today, rather than viewing the republic as weak, compromised, fragmented and lacking in political authority21, a new generation of historians have begun to liberate themselves from the old Weimar paradigm of failed politics offset by cultural experimentalism.22 Instead, it sees a polity whose parliamentary institutions were resilient; its republican culture assertive; its civic identity robust; and whose social policy was not simply an expression of benign welfarism, but also contained a strain of liberal authoritarianism.23 According to the late Detlev Peukert, Weimar’s dilemma lies in its inability to both reconcile and overcome the inherent contradictions of ‘classical modernity’.24 Nevertheless, few would quibble over the proposition that the republican project in its totality was by any reckoning in the vanguard of early twentieth-century European

Introduction: A Republic without Authority?

3

modernization and modernity. The question then is what constituted modernity in this period? At the very moment the political storm clouds were gathering over Germany, the so-called red count Harry von Kessler noted in his diary: We have, and that is almost a miracle, in the twelve years since the revolution created a new beauty, which in tune with the democracy of work, has brought forth even nicer, finer, slimmer, brighter people; . . . Never has it been so clear to me that the previous period is over with and has become impossible. The revolution has been not only external, but really is the result of an epochal upheaval, is the result of an irreversible overturning of basic conditions of life. The political part is only its surface; the real revolution goes far deeper.25

In a context where modernization brought about rapid change arising from technological advances, conflicts derived from monetary/fiscal adjustments, political realignments and mobilization with the advent of mass democracy, coupled with the upheaval following the war, a key aspect of modernity was the greater emphasis on systems of rational management.26 The war itself wrought and deepened internal and international changes that were destabilizing to the order of things. The Weimar dilemma, such as it was, had to do with meeting these fundamental challenges. One can qualify Peukert’s reading of the Weimar Republic by stating that it was the repeated attempts to find a total solution to the negative potentials of modernity that led to its transformation from an aspirational liberal–democratic polity in 1918 into an authoritarian dictatorship by 1933. The republic was as much a cultural project as it was a political one, and not just in the hackneyed sense of the glitter of an epoch of cultural experimentation, but, as we shall see in Chapter 6, in seeking to re-forge national society into a moral entity encapsulated in Siegfried Kracauer’s idea of the ‘mass ornament’. The tensions underlying the republic thus had less to do with an oversimplified left/liberal/right political triangulation, frequently found in the literature, than with asserting competing visions of the politics required for the management of modern society. This is not to dispute the divisive political ideologies underpinning this competition, but to argue that there were frequent points of convergence between the various factions ideas if not the politics where the question of the authority of the state was concerned. * Kessler’s observation in the above quote provides a useful starting point for rethinking the Weimar Republic. It implies that conventional political and cultural chronologies (i.e. 1918–33 and 1900–30) are inadequate time frames for comprehending the broader transformation that formed the backdrop to the republic. Thus, rethinking the Weimar Republic entails jettisoning the conventional chronology that begins the story with the revolution in 1918 and ends with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933. Social histories of the republic have long argued that the phenomena subsumed under the rubric of ‘Weimar Culture’ precede the republic, at least extending to the Jahrhundertwende27; and these phenomena also continued to work their way well into the 1930s and beyond as I have argued elsewhere.28 However, in terms of tackling the

4

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

critical issues of state that were to plague the republic, and in which its authority was always a central issue, the chronology can be recalibrated to the two decades between 1916/17 and 1936/37. These were roughly the start and end dates of much that lay at the root of Weimar as a contested polity. The republic itself was the product of a crisis of political authority originating in  1915/16 with the emergence of the military–civilian dualism of HindenburgLudendorff on the one hand and on the other hand, the cabinet of Bethmann-Hollweg and an increasingly vocally critical Reichstag. Looking beyond the surface of conflicted relations between the military and civilian administration, this dualism represented at its core two very different visions of government: namely that of the people and that by the people; one signified the Obrigkeitsstaat and the other, democracy. Combined, they characterized modern authoritarianism in the form of plebiscitary rule. These differing visions of authority are examined in Chapter 8. The crisis of Wilhelmine authority carried over into the republic, but underwent a strange transmogrification: it became revivified. After the shock of defeat in 1918, and the failure of the right’s attempts to usurp the republican state by 1924, conservatives soon realized that the republic in fact offered opportunities whereby it could be simply bypassed or ignored. John Wheeler Bennett wrote of the republic being ‘savaged from within’, which conveys a rather dramatic image  akin to a Roman amphitheatre with democracy thrown to the lions.29 More typical were the everyday minor but corrosive strategies of denying the republic its legitimacy, examples of which can be found in the mundane practices of the field administration here embodied by the Landrat, the county manager in Germany’s eastern provinces, and examined in Chapter 7. Far away (or so one thought) from the central authorities in the provincial backwater, a parallel authority could be discerned that offered an antipode to ‘red’ Berlin. Here, authority was contested on a symbolic plane. As indeed, it was in the everyday practices of the courts, especially where defendants were brought before the bench on charges relating to attacks on the integrity and reputation of the republic. But the challenge to republican authority in the courts came not only in handling such cases but was also starkly in evidence in the discussion on the nature of ‘soft’ law versus ‘hard law’, a surrogate discourse (like so much else) that depicted the republic as weak on authority. Its antidote, authoritarian law, would restore the majesty of the state. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the practice of authoritarian law associated with the Third Reich up to 1936 had its origins in World War I. But it was as much a feature of the democratic republic as it was of the dictatorships of the wartime military and Hitler’s early years. Germany’s defeat in 1918 not only signalled political collapse, but also signified a moral disintegration on the ‘home front’. The impact of war, as discussed in Chapter 2, severely tested the nation under arms. In spite of the social peace implied by the Burgfrieden below, the surface tensions and conflicts seethed as groups competed for material security. The response of the wartime authorities was Janus-faced: it oscillated between integrative measures and punitive authoritarian controls. It failed nonetheless. By 1917/18, the Wilhelmine state had lost its credibility not just as a war state, but as a cultural nation. The disintegration of authority in the late autumn of 1918 posed challenge to liberals and Social Democrats; it was the key lesson of the war that can be

Introduction: A Republic without Authority?

5

traced in the entirety of republican policy. Moreover, the challenge of the state’s defeat and its moral bankruptcy was a lesson not lost on Hitler after 1933.30 Scholars often overlook the cultural/pedagogical aspect of the republican project that sought to establish a new republican citizenry.31 Quite apart from the extensive municipal housing and welfare programmes on the ground, the Reichstag expended a great deal of time and energy on debating the best course of action needed to establish a cultural spirit as part of Germany’s regeneration. But the attempt to assert cultural authority frequently led both the debate and resulting legislation into the choppy waters of cultural authoritarianism. Given the conflicted origins of the republic, the strong centrifugal tendencies of its federal structure, the challenge for the government was that of how to forge a national cultural community from its disparate parts. One means was to appropriate historical events and symbols and to actuate them in the service of the republic. The republic’s cultural policy was in fact civic pedagogy. Hence, the decision not to celebrate 9 November as the republic’s foundational moment, but instead to celebrate its Constitution of 11 August was guided by the idea that republican authority had to be learnt or imbibed in order to achieve legitimacy. Denying the revolution of 1918, emphasizing continuity of institutions and foregrounding the republic as a set of written principles meant that its legitimacy was perhaps more cerebral than emotional. How aware of or interested in was the average citizen of the republic of her or his citizenship? True, electoral participation was the highest in Europe and Britain at the time. But examples that are suggestive of a deeper apoliticism can be found in brief scenes  taken from two seminal films of the period: that of Robert Siodmak’s People on Sunday (1931), celebrating youth cultures of leisure and consumption, and ­Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe, oder Wem gehört die Welt? (1932) a left-wing critique of ­Weimar. The scenes I am thinking of are those in which one of the male protagonists in each film sits down to read the newspaper, but discards the main part containing the political content in favour of the illustrated supplement with its gossipy chit-chat about society ‘stars’. Both films were made at a point of crisis in authority and offer a tantalizing commentary on Weimar as a pedagogic moment. As Chapters 6 and 8 show, mythologies are important in forging national identity. It is instructive that the Weimar Republic arguably has no equivalent of Eisenstein’s myth of the storming of the Winter Palace as a foundational moment of the Bolshevik state, nor indeed, of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will that visually achieved the propagandistic myth of a reborn Germany. Political legitimacy is difficult to achieve when both the extraneous and the endo­ genous factors needed to underpin it are either perceived to be or experienced as absent. Notable in this instance is the question of national sovereignty. With the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Republic was made to literally pay for the sins of its imperial father, its assets were forfeited, its borders changed, its national pride diminished as a result of occupation and supervisory oversight by its former (and in the case of France continuing) enemies. Meanwhile, both war and defeat not only destroyed its monetary system, but also created a topsy-turvy world were the value of life appeared to count for little. For some scholars, the experience of these early chaotic conditions explains the inevitable estrangement from the republic.32 The experience of material insecurity clashed with end-of-war expectations (and these were by no means exclusive to

6

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

Germany). Certainly, the republic’s authority, as with any political system, depended a great deal on a well functioning economy.33 The war had drawn all belligerent states into the management of their national economies. In democratic states, authority rested not only on creating the framework for growth but also on providing for an equitable distribution of the fruits of that growth. As Eric Weitz reminds us in his recent study, Weimar’s ‘tragedy’ lay in its inability to fulfil the ‘promise’ of a new start for ordinary Germans.34 For those for whom there was not enough money to go around, there were others – notably business interests – for whom the republic had given away too much. Similarly, German resentment at the lost war and the alleged weakness of the republic’s political leaders exposed by the settlement at Versailles contributed ultimately to a heightened desire especially among youth for a ‘strong leader’.35 As we shall see in Chapters 3 and 4, the path to reasserting national authority through international reconciliation and economic rehabilitation also led the republic back to World War I aims for hegemony in Mitteleuropa that necessitated the authoritarian reconstruction of the body politic. Both projects, as I argue in Chapter 8, could only be achieved under a dictator. * The Weimar Republic has long been portrayed as the hapless victim besieged by extreme forces on the right and left. In this narrative, the republic appears as a passive construct with little agency. This book, in keeping with a new wave of revisionist scholarship, argues for a more assertive republic in which its many political currents might at times cross the ideologically devoid no-man’s land, to fuse its own brand of ‘democratic illiberalism’.36 Nor, as I argue in Chapter 8, was the republic through its constitutional provisions for a strong executive (Articles 41 and 48 of the Constitution) necessarily a ‘flawed’ construction. These articles of the Constitution have either been misunderstood or misrepresented in the literature, and when even unintentionally, nonetheless echo the hostile contemporary attempts to delegitimize the authority of the republic.37 Communists, Nationalists and Nazis reduced the Weimar Republic to the status of historical interlude and a ‘pseudo state’.38 After 1933, the republic was depicted as representing little more than a ‘system era’ (Systemszeit) based on party-machines in contrast to the ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) based on a fusion of Volk and Führer. The first post-1945 histories were themselves written by contemporaries, frequently tainted with the prejudices arising from earlier struggles. In some respects, these accounts suffered from myopia not least because they sought to vindicate personal histories or were limited by a teleology that read the republic through the lens of Hitler’s dictatorship.39 This ‘long shadow’ (Mommsen) is now beginning to lift.40 Today, twenty years after the re-unification of the two Germanies, there is less concern with the question of Weimar’s reputed failure than with its granular complexity.41 Moreover, recent work reveals a willingness to rework chronologies based on factors other than formal political caesura. Thus, ‘1933’ loses its significance as a ‘vanishing point’ in German history, in much the same way that ‘1918’ is no longer viewed as a tabula rasa upon which the republic inscribed itself.42

Introduction: A Republic without Authority?

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My choice of 1916 and 1936 as markers for rethinking the Weimar Republic has been governed primarily by the fact that during this period, the question of authority in relation to the state and its political institutions was being reformulated in both liberal and authoritarian terms in much of the developed world, and in particular in Germany. In the two decades after 1918, authoritarian government based on a mobilized mass was not necessarily viewed negatively; nor outside the left was it necessarily seen as a direct contradiction to constitutionalism.43 The boundaries between liberal and conservative visions of authority were highly fluid, often converging in consensus, particularly in the early years of the republic and even in 1933. This can be seen in the discussion on the nature and form of leadership after 1918 where party was pitted against personality; the liberal–social democratic approach to this issue, while critical in part, was also ambivalent; meanwhile, conservatives alleged the parliamentary party system had produced both stasis and a crisis of trust, the result of which was that the nation was incapable of renewing itself.44 The issue of authority remained unresolved throughout the 1920s, and nor was it resolved after 1933, in spite of Nazi claims that Hitler would overcome national disunity. In the early spring of 1933, there was a brief moment when conservative ideas on the authoritarian state seemed to coalesce with those of Hitler, Goering and Frick. Indeed, to understand the transition to Hitler in 1933, we must look to the entire decade and half before his dictatorship but not from a crude ‘Weimar in the shadow of the Third Reich’ perspective. For example, the Enabling Law, with its roots in the Constitution and in Weimar political practice, shows that Weimar’s political elites and the Nazi leadership were a lot closer than is sometimes portrayed. Certainly, as I argue in conclusion to Chapter 9, the Enabling Law inaugurating the era of authoritarian dictatorship was not so much a ‘surrender’ of Weimar democracy, as the logical conclusion to the practice and debates on authority that went back to the war years and which were continuously reworked during the 1920s. This platform was shared only briefly, and it wobbled slightly after the violence of June 1934, but it did not collapse; indeed, for the three years after 1933, the faltering search for authority since 1916 finally found its fullest expression in Hitler’s plebiscitary state, laying the foundations for its radicalization from the later 1930s.

8

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1916/19: The Antinomies of Authority

One told me that in the age of the machine gun, there will not be revolutions. I don’t believe in that. I believe it even less since the events in Petersburg. That a ­ruling dynasty, and especially in Russia, could disappear so easily without a prince or soldier even lifting a hand [in defence], gives us a lot to think about. (Albert Ballin, 4 April 1917)1

Introduction In the early hours of Sunday, 10 November, the German emperor Wilhelm II, accompanied by a small retinue of ten loyal officers, passed the border from Belgium into Holland. Wilhelm’s departure from Supreme Army Headquarters (Oberste Heeresleitung – OHL) at Spa that Sunday morning signalled the end of princely rule in Germany at whose apex he had stood. By Tuesday, seven kings, princes, archdukes and dukes had departed their capitals; and on 30 November – just two days after Wilhelm and his son, the Crown Prince, formally relinquished the Hohenzollern right to the Prussian and imperial thrones – the last of imperial Germany’s twenty-two dynastic rulers, Wilhelm II of Württemberg, renounced his family’s claim to hereditary rule.2 The previous day, Philip Scheidemann, the leader of the parliamentary group of Majority Social Democrats, had been forced to interrupt his lunch at the Reichstag to address a crowd gathering outside. Scheidemann had been informed that Karl Liebknecht, the radical Spartacist leader, was on his way to the nearby palace of the Hohenzollerns (Stadtschloß) to proclaim a ‘free socialist republic’. Without consulting his fellow leaders, Scheidemann rushed to an open window of the Reichstag from where he declared to the crowd below: ‘The Hohenzollerns have abdicated. Take care not to allow anything to mar this proud day. It will be a proud day for ever in the history of Germany. Long live the German Republic!’3 The streets of Berlin and those of other cities filled with crowds, some revolutionary, some not, and from all classes. The scenes were reminiscent of early August 1914; only the grounds for euphoria were different. Meanwhile, three hundred kilometres away in the naval port of Kiel, Scheidemann’s party colleague Gustav Noske, who had been sent to Kiel to calm the situation there, told mutinous sailors that with the Kaiser’s departure the revolution had been completed.4

10

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

Barely ten days had elapsed between the events in Kiel, when stokers had defied their officers’ orders to make ready to sail, the Kaiser’s flight and the declaration of the republic. The speed with which the empire collapsed shocked many Germans, especially those from within the nationalist camp and among the middle classes who had trusted the reports of German successes in the field and who had thus clung to the hope of a ‘victory peace’ (Siegfrieden).5 The head of the army Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg too seems to have believed the propaganda. At a meeting of the army high command on 14 August, barely six days after the Battle of Amiens, which his right-hand man General Erich Ludendorff had described as a ‘black day’ for the German army, when it had failed to halt the Allied offensive thus marking the onset of the turn in Germany’s fortunes, Hindenburg told the Kaiser that the army would still be victorious as long as the front line held its ground and the home front kept its nerve.6 The German press continued to print dispatches that German troops were holding firm against the Entente’s counteroffensive through to the end of September and into October, when it was clear to most intelligent observers that the war was a lost cause.7 When the Council of People’s Deputies, which had replaced Prince Max von Baden’s government on 9 November, agreed an armistice on 11 November, the realization that there would not be a German ‘victory peace’ nor even a ‘peace of reconciliation’ produced a wave of blind emotion and despair. The Times reported how a retired general and veteran of the Franco-Prussian war, on hearing the news, committed suicide in front of the statue of Frederick the Great in his local park. There were other incidents of this nature: the shipping magnate Albert Ballin, a confidant of Wilhelm II who nonetheless was deeply unhappy with aspects of the war, also took his own life on 9 November.8 According to the German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, the shock of defeat plunged the country into a trauma from which it never fully recovered until the nationalist resurgence from 1929 that culminated in Hitler’s chancellorship in 1933.9 But while the collapse of the old order signalled the end of monarchy, it did not mean the end of the state’s authority. The entire administrative apparatus of government continued to function more or less as before, operating alongside the revolutionary councils that sprang up everywhere.10 At the national level, one of Friedrich Ebert’s first announcements as leader of the Council of People’s Deputies was to call upon Reich civil servants to remain at their posts.11 Similar calls for collaboration with the new authorities occurred at provincial level too. In Hamburg, there was agreement that the revolutionary Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council would act jointly with the Mayor Arnold Diestel and the Senate of the city-state, and importantly, that the civilian police would control security. Here, in Germany’s second city, as elsewhere, it was ‘business as usual’.12 In Stuttgart, the Lord Mayor Karl Lautenschlager called upon the population to remain calm: Fellow Citizens! This afternoon Stuttgart’s working class will gather before the palace to listen to the news of the political events from their appointed leaders. This meeting will serve to transfer calmly and orderly to other legal (staatsrechtliche) conditions. I appeal to the entire population [of the city] to keep order and calm. In this way, each serves our city and the Fatherland.13

1916/19: The Antinomies of Authority

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Lautenschlager remained at his post and loyally served the republic until he was removed by the Nazis in  1933. His experience was typical of the way authority was transferred from the monarchical system to the republic in 1918, with public officials providing a bridgehead between the old and the new order.14 Nonetheless, the transfer was not universally smooth. In Bavaria, which was to remain a breeding ground of violent anti-democratic forces until 1924, Kurt Eisner’s provisional government initially found civil servants unwilling to swear an oath of allegiance to the new authorities, until a compromise was struck in which civil servants undertook to remain loyal to their duties, if not to the revolution.15 As we shall see below, commentators at the time and historians since have been divided on the issue of the revolution in 1918 and its role in the birth of the republic.16 Our focus in this chapter is on the nature of authority in the context of war: from the failure to forge an authoritarian executive state under the military in 1916, to its transformation ‘from above’ into a democratic parliamentary polity in late October 1918, to the revolutionary challenge ‘from below’ that lasted until the end of December.

War authoritarianism and the erosion of authority In spite of disagreements over the character of the revolution, historians broadly agree that the path to ‘1918’ was laid in World War I.17 Initially, the outbreak of war in August seemed to reconcile the socially divided empire in a wave of patriotism and unity that was hailed at the time by Walther Rathenau as a re-founding of the German empire.18 The reasserted authority of the state and nation was encapsulated in the idea of Burgfrieden or ‘civil peace’ that demanded casting aside the ideological shibboleths that had divided German society under the empire. The Kaiser’s wellknown declaration that he no longer saw divisive parties but only Germans captured the mood of euphoria, the so-called Augusterlebnis, and was given credence by the Social Democratic Party’s almost overwhelming support for war credits on 4 August.19 However, this Burgfrieden barely papered over the deep-rooted class hostilities that characterized Wilhelmine society.20 Indeed the war, rather than unifying a fragmented nation, accentuated its divisions. The idea had invoked a ‘contract of expectation’ that national unity would mean equal sacrifice in the fatherland’s hour of need.21 But this never materialized. The realization that the Burgfrieden had limitations was not long in coming. Within the first year of war, the two dozen regional military authorities (into which the country had been divided) had to concede (sometimes angrily) that the home front was deeply divided between a largely impoverished mass and a class of people for whom the war had brought great dividends and who displayed their wealth in conspicuous consumption.22 This acknowledgement was coupled to a second realization, namely that the state was ill-prepared to wage a protracted war, and utterly incapable of regulating needs in wartime. The expectation that the military campaign would be ‘over by Christmas’ meant that little had been done in terms of planning the war effort. The result was that problems relating to munitions production and material distribution were already

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present by the spring of 1915 and were to become critical in the next two years.23 Output in mining, iron and steel production and in metal manufacturing (i.e. armamentsrelated industries) fell sharply in the first year of the war. Overall, gross domestic product fell by 60 per cent of its 1913 level. The implication of falling production in a war whose outcome would be decided by logistics rather than strategy was not lost on the government and the military authorities. After the Battle of the Somme, it was estimated that Germany would have to produce somewhere in the region of 10,000 tons of gunpowder per month and a commensurate amount of munitions and artillery shells in order to face off its enemies. And attempts to redress the problem by setting targets, especially the unrealistic levels demanded under the Hindenburg Programme (more of which below), failed. Meanwhile, reports of absenteeism among munitions workers became more frequent, especially during 1916/17, which not only reflected malingering and a deepening alienation among workers from the wartime state but also mirrored the deterioration in workers’ health.24 In spite of the creation of a central food distribution agency, the Reichsernährungsamt, the attempt from 1915 to regulate the market through price controls and food rationing remained at best ad hoc and left largely to local authorities to organize.25 Moreover, controls remained inadequate because of the lack of an effective means of enforcement (from 1917 the authorities began to get tough in this regard, though this proved too little too late).26 Within a few months of the start of the war, there were complaints of bottlenecks in food distribution; and many households faced a dramatic fall in their consumption of basic foodstuffs (fats in particular). By mid-1917, there were effectively two food distribution systems in operation: one based on the official rationing system and the other based on the black market. The former supplied only around half the daily calorific needs of most Germans by 1917, which meant that consumers either were thrown upon the clandestine system with all its inequalities or went without. In order to circumvent price and distribution controls, food producers and middlemen hoarded goods, resulting in widespread ‘under the counter’ sales; inevitably, prices soared as artificial shortages resulted (compounded by poor harvests in  1917/18). Whereas before the war a person might have expected to consume on average around 3,400 calories, by 1915/16 this had fallen to a third of that level, while the calorific intake of city populations had been halved. By the end of the war, weekly average consumption of fats had also fallen by a third of levels in 1916, particularly in the big cities.27 While the cost of living rose threefold over the period of the war, average real incomes sank by around a third and, in some cases, such as that of higher civil servants, by twice that level. In particular families where the male breadwinner had been mobilized, or worse: killed in action, suffered acute poverty over time as the household income fell sharply, and was barely compensated by ‘war welfare’.28 The level of material crisis is mirrored in the proliferation of soup kitchens in the latter two years of the war, initially intended for the urban poor but increasingly utilized by wide sections of ‘middling’ society where impoverishment was rife.29 For example, in Hamburg the volume of food provided by the city’s soup kitchens in the first four months of 1917 doubled dramatically from 3 million litres to over 6 million.30 Not surprisingly health suffered, with rising levels of mortality in evidence among the most

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vulnerable in society, notably among small children and the elderly.31 Meanwhile, the allied blockade of Germany began to exert dire and fatal consequences on the civilian population, with deaths totalling about three-quarters of a million by 1918 or around 37 per cent of deaths in 1913.32 The poor and uneven distribution of food was often the source of friction between social groups and individuals. But it also led to widespread conflict between consumers and local bureaucracies as these tried to enforce – sometimes too eagerly – regulations regarding rationing.33 Traders responded by evading or simply flouting the decrees, and some consumers resorted to petty theft and the fraudulent practice of doctoring ration cards. The result was that there was a criminalization of everyday strategies for survival that brought groups of people who otherwise would have had little direct contact with the state into conflict with it.34 As both Ute Daniel and Belinda Davis have argued, such developments also account for the growing alienation among consumers from the wartime state over its failure to adequately regulate the market, with resulting demonstrations and food protests. Already as early as June 1915 in Hamburg and in Munich complaints were being aired in a nascent protest literature.35 The situation had worsened by 1916 when the Price Control Office in Munich reported that the civilian population was ‘periodically extremely agitated’. In Cologne, Stettin, Frankfurt and Leipzig, city officials faced a barrage of threats in pamphlets and leaflets.36 The failure of the authorities in Leipzig to ensure the regular provision of food and essential goods led to angry scenes as local women, like their counterparts in Berlin, Breslau, Stuttgart and Hamburg, took to the streets to press home their complaints more forcefully. In Hamburg in August 1916, the Federation of North-West Consumer Associations hosted a mass meeting to debate the food situation. But there were noisy scenes as the main speaker, Dr August Müller, who also happened to be a leading Social Democrat as well as the chairman of the Consumer Cooperative and a member of Hamburg’s wartime food office (Kriegsernährungsamt), was heckled when he attempted to justify the poor performance in managing the city’s food distribution. Appeals for calm failed and the meeting broke up in chaos as the crowd formed a demonstration.37 That winter crowds spilled onto the streets in a number of cities and towns across the Reich to protest against food shortages and rising prices, demanding ‘bread and peace’.38 And it was not just the large cities that were affected. The local press in Paderborn attacked the council for its incompetence and its inertia in the face of difficult conditions. In Ludwigshafen, enforcing wartime price controls appeared to have failed from the outset allegedly because police officials charged with overseeing controlled prices at the weekly markets, ‘did not bother themselves in the least’, while ‘a number of them were not even informed as to the statutory price ceiling’.39 Meanwhile, protesters quickly learnt how to use the wartime government’s fear of negative news reaching soldiers at the front. This was well understood by ‘several Magdeburg citizens’ who wrote to individual councillors in September 1916 after the failure of the city administration to adequately provision the population, especially with fats. The protestors followed the conventions of polite letter-writing (addressing ‘Dear Councillor’) but cleverly referred to the recent wave of unrest in Munich and Hamburg, the unreliability of locally billeted soldiers in Leipzig to maintain order and

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importantly to the anger of soldiers on furlough who found their families struggling. In conclusion, the anonymous authors noted . . . If these sad conditions are not quickly overcome and the population not given what it is entitled to . . . then we have no other option than to inform our brave soldiers in field grey in the trenches how their wives and children have to starve here and how they have to beg in order to receive a little fat. And you are at fault here. We will print at least 500 flysheets and send these to every Magdeburg reserve unit and regiment, to every company for distribution so that those outside [i.e. front soldiers] learn the truth about how things are here in Magdeburg. We also tell them that it cannot be worse if the Russians, French or English come here. War wives don’t need to starve as at the moment, and our brave boys don’t have to allow themselves to be killed . . . Several Magdeburg Citizens.40

Such protests reveal that by the autumn of 1916, mismanagement of the domestic market was developing into a political liability for the wartime regime.41 The call for ‘bread and peace’ was linked by the authorities to the political opponents of the war and, in particular, to those leftwing dissenters in the SPD led by Hugo Haase and Franz Mehring.42 Following the demonstrations in Hamburg, Leipzig, Berlin, Braunschweig, Magdeburg and Osnabrück, two other dissenters, Carl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, began publishing the Spartacus Letters in editions of up to six thousand copies in which they reviled the wartime government and its increasingly harsh responses to protest.43 Meanwhile, over a 100,000 copies of the Bern Congress Manifesto (1915), co-authored by the veteran socialist feminist and pacifist Clara Zetkin, which called for peace and socialist revolution, were illegally distributed throughout Germany; in addition, the Berlin-based International Socialists published its journal Lichtstrahlen in which peace was the key theme.44 The significance of this propaganda is that it not only tapped into the widespread resentment against material conditions, but that it also articulated this bitterness in a political language that directly challenged the legitimacy and authority of the Wilhelmine state. Opponents argued powerfully that the war represented the interests of the big industrialists (whose profits had risen by as much as 800 per cent in some cases) and not the hungry people whose sacrifice had brought them little in return.45 Not surprisingly, the authorities soon saw the hand of the Spartacists behind the rising tide of protests. Numerically, these radicals were but a small group of revolutionary intellectuals on the political margins. But their message resonated with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, so that very soon the slogan ‘Bread and Peace!’ became the currency of protest against the wartime state. In October 1916, officials in a number of cities braced themselves for a wave of demonstrations, behind which lay, they believed, the machinations of the eponymous ‘outside agitator’. For example, a report by the authorities in Stettin claimed The whispering campaign (Einflüsterungen) of roving agitators here and there appears to have done its work. Thus at one point a great crowd of women under the instructions of an apparently non-local and very articulate person went first to the mayor demanding bread and then to the town hall to demand potatoes.46

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The food queues were mostly – though not exclusively – made up of women who were a conspicuous force in the popular protests that swept across Germany’s home front from 1916.47 The authorities in Braunschweig put these protests down to personal selfishness and the inability of women to see beyond the kitchen sink.48 Moreover, it was felt that not only did women not comprehend the ‘big picture of war’ but they were also receptive to pernicious suggestion. Some effort was made by the authorities to distinguish between spontaneous protest triggered by the rumour mill and frustration of the endless queues and a planned political protest.49 But it was difficult to really separate the two. The beleaguered authorities saw a link between spontaneous protest against material conditions and political agitation against the wartime authorities. In his digest of reports, the war minister noted, ‘It had to be regretted that in the previous months mostly in larger cities, street demonstrations had taken place under the slogan of peace and bread’.50 The government paid attention to the ‘excited mood’ of the public and sought to counter this with its own counter-propaganda and by trying to gag an increasingly critical press.51 But even censorship had its limits and it certainly was futile against rumours in the food queues. * It had become clear to the civilian and military authorities by summer 1916 that the war effort was being severely hampered by bottlenecks in the supply of munitions and other essential materials. In order to restore falling production levels and so ensure the supply of war materials, and to avert a breakdown of morale at the front as well as on the ‘home front’, the wartime authorities belatedly set about reorganizing the economy in its totality from August 1916. The consequence of this was a shift in power favouring the military that began with Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg’s – unexpected – appointment as chief of supreme army command (Oberste Heeresleitung, or OHL) on 29 August, replacing the dithering General von Falkenhayn, a favourite of the Kaiser who had become unpopular with Bethmann Hollweg and senior staff members of the army.52 As the hero of Tannenberg in 1914, when the German army defeated a much larger force of Russian troops, Hindenburg enjoyed huge popularity within the country, and it was hoped that his appointment would boost morale by restoring confidence in the military leadership. At the end of October 1916, the Prussian war minister Wild von Hohenborn – who had also become an obstacle to cooperation between the war ministry and the army command – was replaced by General Hermann von Stein on Hindenburg’s recommendation.53 But probably the most important change at army supreme command was the appointment of Erich Ludendorff as army quartermaster general, who now took effective control of the economic planning of the war. Aged fifty-one when appointed, Ludendorff, like his confidante lieutenant colonel Max Bauer four years his junior and responsible for armaments and training, represented a new breed of bourgeois military technocrat with close connections to industry, and who had little time for democratic processes that might hinder their aims.54 With this change at the top, the relationship between state and society in Germany underwent a significant transformation. As too did the character of the wartime state whose authority now took an authoritarian turn. Ludendorff and Bauer envisaged

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extending military control over virtually every sphere of society in order to secure wartime production.55 The centrepiece of the militarization of the civilian front was the Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law (Gesetz über den vaterländischen Hilfsdienst) of 5 December 1916, which became known as the Hindenburg Programme.56 This law stipulated the mobilization of all males between the ages of 17 and 60 for the war economy and established a number of institutions coordinated by the recently created War Office (Kriegsamt) under General Wilhelm Groener (like Bauer, a technocrat) to implement the programme. Groener’s office took over the functions of the earlier materials procurement agency that had been led until April 1915 by Walther Rathenau, at that time well-disposed to a quasi-military dictatorship, as well as assuming responsibility for the reorganization of the Reich Food Distribution Office and the Price Control Office, neither of which up to that point had been particularly effective as we saw above.57 The law not only placed strict controls over industry but also suspended workers’ protection leading Hugo Haase to comment that it ‘confiscated workers’ labour power’ by subjecting it to draconian discipline and penalties.58 In addition to facilitating the ‘cleansing’ the workplace of politics (by conscripting uncomfortable activists), the Auxiliary Law sought to reduce the management of the economy to its technical aspects. A form of self-regulatory corporatism through the creation of works councils and joint arbitration boards comprising employers and workers’ representatives was created (both of which carried over into the republic under Art. 165 of the Constitution).59 As such, it was also a modernizing piece of legislation with an explicitly technocratic character. But its chief aim was to re-impose the authority of the state after the erosion suffered over the previous two years by substituting military for political authority.60 The Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law, long taken as evidence of Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff ’s ‘silent dictatorship’ by scholars as diverse as Ernst Rudolf Huber and Martin Kitchen,61 has been read in a radically different way. Hans Ulrich Wehler interprets the law as the triumph of centrist forces comprising the SPD, liberal Progressive Party and Centre Party, the so-called ‘July majority’ working in tandem with the military. For Wehler, the model of the historic accommodation between the new and old political elites later embodied in the Ebert-Groener pact of 9 November is to be found in this piece of legislation.62 Nonetheless, there was a strong inclination among certain circles close to both Hindenburg and particularly Ludendorff, to establish a quasi-dictatorship in the form of a Directory fronted by the charismatic leadership of Hindenburg. And even though this never really came to pass in any formal sense, by February 1917, Ludendorff was indeed the acknowledged ruler of Germany, albeit operating within the shadow of Hindenburg’s charismatic leadership and the Kaiser’s nominal authority.63 As we shall see in Chapter 8, the idea of a Directory with quasi-dictatorial powers as a counterweight to parliament surfaced intermittently throughout the Weimar years, notably at points of national crisis. The Patriotic Auxiliary Law, however, failed to overcome the logistical problems facing Germany, as Ludendorff conceded just weeks before the end of the war to Prince Max von Baden.64 Whether measured in terms of net domestic product, or the rate of industrial production, or viewed in terms of labour and civilian acquiescence, Germany compared badly to other belligerent nations (with the exception of AustroHungary and Tsarist Russia). It could not keep up production of submarines, which was

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a disaster given the centrality of submarine warfare in overall strategy from 1916/17, nor could it produce enough armoured vehicles or tanks to combat its enemies on the battlefield.65 Indeed, the contradiction between manpower needs of the war economy and fresh frontline troops was never resolved, in spite of conscripting nearly half a million Belgian, Russian and Polish prisoners of war as forced labour from November 1916 in contravention of the Hague Convention (1907) on the treatment of POWs.66 The mobilization of over five million men between the ages of sixteen and fifty for the front led to a change in the structure of the workforce. Even though industry could claim certain categories of skilled workers for ‘war duty’ on the factory floor, labour shortages ensued and led increasingly to the employment of unskilled young women and men, usually from the countryside. In particular, women flocked to the munitions factories such as those in Dresden-Neustadt and in Leipzig; many of them were taking up employment for the first time as Ute Daniel found in the case of Bavaria’s gunpowder works.67 Union membership among these workers was initially weak (union membership fell dramatically in 1915 as a consequence of mobilization, and did not rise significantly again until 1917). Given the important role ascribed to the unions in ensuring workplace discipline under the Hindenburg Programme, such weak ties were bound to impact negatively upon the authority of the factory management, as well as upon the authority of the union itself. Certainly, instances of go-slows on the factory floor, wildcat strikes and malingering crept up as the war dragged on. The intensification of production coupled with harsh workplace conditions led to a rapid deterioration in discipline in the munitions industries, notably among the younger elements of the workforce. Like their Russian counterparts in the metal shops of Petrograd and Moscow, these young workers proved to be mercurial and disinclined to follow the instructions of established trade union leaders. Within the first two years of war, overall trade union membership had more than halved, while the number of strikes and industrial conflicts rose at a startling rate. After a relative calm during the first few months of the war, strikes developed an alarming frequency. Over the course of 1915, stoppages rose to 141 involving over twelve thousand workers, a relatively small figure when compared to pre-war levels, but one which inaugurated a wartime trend: in the following year, the number of strikers increased tenfold; in 1917 – a critical year for Germany – there were 562 strikes involving over half a million workers, and in the following year, the year of revolution, over 1.3 million workers participated in 773 strikes.68 This strike activity clashed with the aim of mobilizing munitions workers as an auxiliary force of the German military machine and was bitterly condemned by Ludendorff who called for ‘patriotic education’ (mostly through the newly established Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst), while General Groener spoke of ‘traitors’ and called for tough sanctions against strikers.69 By early 1917, neighbourhood-based food protests and strike activity among munitions workers were converging to create a larger political movement with latent revolutionary undertones.70 Needless to say, the groundswell of protest constituted a serious challenge to the authority of the state as social grievances and workplace protests progressed from the economic plane to a more general and unsettling crisis of trust in wartime government.71 The first serious challenge to the authority of the wartime regime came in April 1917 with mass strikes in Leipzig and in Berlin where more than 300,000 workers from over three hundred munitions factories downed tools over cuts in food rations.

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Because of the way both strikes coincided (and, it should be noted, following closely on the heels of a naval mutiny in Wilhelmshaven), they acquired in the eyes of the authorities the semblance of a ‘movement’. These strikes also saw the recently founded Independent Socialist Party of Germany (USPD) emerge as a significant political voice of the discontented, given the apparent failure of the Social Democrats and the unions to exert more leverage under the Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law.72 When seen in the context of events in Russia, such protests now raised the spectre of revolution unless some improvement in the social and political condition of the people could be made through reform. Barely two months after the toppling of the Tsar, the Hamburg shipping magnate and general director of the Hamburg-Amerikanische PacketfahrtActien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG), Albert Ballin, wrote to the head of the Kaiser’s personal civil cabinet, Rudolf von Valentini, One told me that in the age of the machine gun, there will not be revolutions. I don’t believe in that. I believe it even less since the events in Petersburg. That a ruling dynasty, and especially in Russia, could disappear so easily without a prince or soldier even lifting a hand [in defence], gives us a lot to think about.73

Over the course of the war and particularly in  1917 and 1918, it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish social from political demands. Often, the dynamic of protest and the response of the authorities on the ground welded the two together. In May 1918 for example, a crowd in Ingolstadt attacked the police station and the town hall after a war invalid had been arrested under the hated state of siege law. This was seen by the Bavarian interior ministry as a ‘slap in the face of authority’ and reported that the events ‘thus provide evidence of how easily combustible the undisciplined masses are, with what destructive anger they appear and how serious we must take their combating from the outset.’74 Troops had to be deployed to bring the situation under control. This event had been sparked by the man’s arrest, there had been no planning and no political demands were made, and the crowd was made up largely of youths, almost predominantly in their mid-teens. But the action of the authorities and the mass arrests that followed served to politicize Ingolstadt’s population (or a part of it at least) against the war. Through its support for the Burgfrieden and partly from its own ambivalent relationship to the state, the SPD leadership had found itself further drawn into the structures of state authority, and in this process suffered a haemorrhaging in its membership.75 Its ‘positive integration’ into the Wilhelmine state had reduced its own room for manoeuvre over the course of the war.76 A consequence of the party’s compromise with the ancien regime was that internal divisions that had pre-dated the war were now brought into sharp relief.77 The party’s vote for war credits in 1914 and the advocacy of expansionist aims (dressed up as Germany’s ‘vital interest’ in Mitteleuropa) in speeches by its various deputies in the Reichstag in  1916, as well as the leadership’s support for the Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law, finally brought into the open the tensions that had been bubbling under the surface. By 1917, the party leadership was under pressure from the growing clamour for peace within the population and from radical critics to its left, as well as from within its own loyal ranks with Noske demanding constitutional reform and Scheidemann calling for an end to

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the party’s support of the Burgfrieden.78 As material conditions deteriorated, the SPD leadership found its political credibility challenged as the party become increasingly the butt of protest as disaffection spread among the rank and file of German workers. Not surprisingly, membership suffered. The support for an increasingly unpopular war coupled to an apparent inability to exert adequate political leverage over the war-state meant that a space opened up for an alternative left politics. This crystallized in April 1917 with the creation of the Unabhängige Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands led by prominent dissenters from within Social Democracy.79 Karl Liebknecht, who, alongside Haase, Eduard Bernstein and Kurt Eisner, emerged as one of the leaders of the opposition had been the first Social Democrat to dissent from the party whip on 2 December 1914, when he voted against war credits.80 On 20 March 1915 during the next vote on credits, thirty deputies abstained, while two voted against; by 29 December 1915, a further twenty deputies joined the existing 43 deputies in opposing credits. Thus, they began to form an oppositional faction within the party. By March 1916, Liebknecht, Otto Rühle, Georg Ledebour and a number of their followers had the parliamentary whip withdrawn, but they were not yet expelled from the party. That expulsion took place finally on 16 January 1917. A few months later during 6–8 April in the small town of Gotha, these dissenters founded a new party of ‘independent socialists’. But even this party was divided between a ‘rightwing’ represented by Hugo Haase and Wilhelm Dittmann, and a moderate-left group led by Ledebour, while a radical-left faction gathered around Liebknecht, Leo Jogisches and Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin and Karl Radek in Bremen; meanwhile, in southern Germany, the Independents soon found a strong following in Mannheim.81 The strongest articulation of dissatisfaction with the war came from the revolutionary shop stewards in Berlin’s metalworking factories and led by Emil Barth and Richard Müller. In early 1917, they were united only in a common desire to end the war and to see the overthrow of the imperial system. In spite of its own divisions, the USPD experienced rapid growth to around 120,000 members by October 1917. Although this growing support was still only half of that of Social Democrat membership, the fact that the latter’s membership was barely a quarter of its pre-war level led USPD leaders to believe they had inherited the mantle of political authority to lead the working class, especially given their stance on the war.82 Meanwhile, the alleviation of wartime hardship had become linked to political reform, which in turn was linked to ending the war. The demand for reform, and above all, the reform of the franchise and role of the Reichstag, had become louder after the German army’s failure at Verdun and was given a critical impetus after the revolutionary events in Russia in February 1917, as we can see from Ballin’s observation cited above.83

Authority between reform and revolution In spite of military success in the east, confidence in the wartime state dwindled steadily over the course of 1918. A number of factors converged to destabilize the OHL’s authority. In addition to the spreading popular discontent with the war, there was

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growing discomfort in liberal circles over the terms being imposed on defeated Russia; meanwhile, the announcement of American President Wilson’s Fourteen Points in January internationalized calls within Germany to end the war and for political reform. Underlying all of this was the friction between the civilian and military authorities that had been there almost from the outset of the war, and which had become more acute with the ascendancy of the Ludendorff-Hindenburg duopoly. For much of the war, the military had been able to assert its influence over domestic politics; the Patriotic Auxiliary Law had appeared to cement this position, but in 1918 the pendulum swung back to the parliamentarians, whose confidence was given impetus by the failure of the summer offensive. Historians have debated the decisive factor that led to a reorientation towards parliamentary authority.84 On the one hand, the demand for parliamentarization was seen by conservatives as an imposition by the American President Woodrow Wilson and condemned as ‘foreign’ to German political culture.85 On the other hand, the radicalization of protest over the course of 1918, and particularly from the late summer, led to a fear of revolution ‘from below’ that could only be countered by reform as ‘revolution from above’ to avert disaster. The aim, according to Paul von Hintze, a senior diplomat and at the time a central figure in the unfolding events, was to transform the monarchy, not to end it. Even Hindenburg eventually had to concede that parliamentary reform was the best way to stave off revolution.86 Indeed, the issue of franchise reform had moved to centre stage of German domestic politics in the wake of the Russian revolution and was raised in the Kaiser’s Easter Message on 7 April 1917.87 That it was being stalled, not least because Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg did not believe reforms should occur during the war, merely fuelled disgruntlement in liberal circles.88 The call for reform entered a new phase in the final ten months of the war, which was helped in no small part by President Wilson’s Fourteen Points announced in January 1918.89 When Wilson presented his agenda for national self-determination to Congress, he did not have in mind domestic political arrangements of any given country but the selfdetermination for small nations and the ending of military occupation of conquered territories. Nevertheless, Wilson’s call for self-determination was picked up by some in Germany to also mean the ending of the iniquitous Prussian franchise and a more constructive role for parliament. To work out the details of this reform, a crossparty constitutional committee was established in May which set about working on a reform of the franchise. Even though its deliberations attracted a degree of scepticism in some quarters, there was nonetheless a reluctant recognition within Germany’s ruling class that reform of some nature was inevitable.90 As Gustav Stresemann told the Reichstag in March 1917, the war had changed irrevocably the triangular relationship between people, government and state, necessitating a more democratic system of government to reflect this.91 Nevertheless, when a proposal was presented in December it was wrecked by Junker conservatives who dominated the Prussian Upper Chamber (Herrenhaus).92 The drive for reform was given further impetus by Wilson’s Four Aims of 4 July calling for the ending of arbitrary and despotic power and the destruction of militarist governments. This demand challenged the core of imperial authority, but

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like the earlier Fourteen Points, was rebuffed by Chancellor Graf Hertling, a diehard conservative, who had replaced Bethmann Hollweg and resisted by Hindenburg and Ludendorff who not for the first time conspired to bring down a member of the civilian administration considered by them to be an obstacle to their military aims (in this instance, state secretary at the foreign office Richard von Kühlmann who had favoured the opening of peace talks in January).93 It was only the failure of the spring/ summer offensives and the horrendous loss of life and the collapse of troop morale that made the spectre of defeat inevitable. After the Battle of Amiens, it was clear that the Ludendorff-Hindenburg dictatorship had failed to deliver victory and as a consequence, the raison d’être for its untrammelled authority was gone.94 At a briefing of the Third OHL between the 29 September and 1 October to consider the military situation and the resignation of Hertling over his opposition to reforms, a consensus emerged that a ‘revolution from above’ was necessary to avert ‘revolution from below’, a manoeuvre that foresaw the incorporation of the Social Democrats into government in order to make an inevitable armistice without victory more palatable.95 True to character, Ludendorff blamed the parliamentarians for the military disaster while at the same time ceding authority to them. I have asked H[is] M[ajesty] to now bring into government those whom we have to thank that we are in this situation. We will see those Gentlemen enter the ministries . . . . They can now eat the soup they have cooked for us!96

This remark is frequently cited by historians as evidence of a shrewd manoeuvre on the part of the Third OHL.97 The military with its mantra of ‘keeping going’ (Durchhalten) thus divested itself of the responsibility for the war they had lost and instead foisted the political burden on the shoulders of Prince Max von Baden’s coalition government and ultimately upon the republic.98 But it is ascribing too much Machiavellian forethought to Ludendorff ’s actions. Prone to bouts of depression, he and Hindenburg recognized that their room for manoeuvre had been whittled down and there was little choice but to make the accommodation.99 As the summer offensive of 1918 failed, so too did their authority.100 A continued dictatorship legitimated by military successes was no longer in the offing, leaving a transfer of authority to an administration based on a parliamentarian coalition as the only path open to them.101 Nevertheless, Ludendorff ’s last-minute pitch to break off peace negotiations was not only an indication of his unstable mental state at that point, as observed by Major General Hans von Haeften, but also an indication of a reluctance to recognize that his power had finally gone.102 Wilson’s calls for national ‘self-determination’ and an end to militarism dovetailed with calls for constitutional reform. Later, conservative anti-republicans would ascribe Germany’s predicament in  1918 to a coalition of the empire’s external and internal enemies as part of their strategy to negate the authority of the republic.103 But once reforms were set in motion by von Baden’s government and then appeared to be endangered, a radicalizing dynamic set in. In his assessment of the events leading to the unravelling of the monarchy, Ludendorff ’s right-hand man, Colonel Max Bauer observed, ‘history teaches time and again that to give in to the so-called will of the people leads to certain collapse’.104 Paradoxically, Ludendorff ‘s dismissal at the end

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of October, seen as a triumph of civilian authority over that of the military, not only removed a target for political dissent, but also left the Kaiser exposed to that same dissent.105 This was an irony given at this point Wilhelm had finally lost confidence in the OHL and consequently had switched his position to favouring cooperation with the Social Democrats.106 Thus, in an unintended sense Ludendorff ’s dismissal was indeed a ‘black day’ for the old order.107 * Much of the protest arising from wartime deprivations had been to a large extent spontaneous and ephemeral, in spite of its creeping politicization. Apart from the chaotically organized groups comprising the revolutionary shop stewards (revolutionäre Obleute) led by Barth and Müller in Berlin, Liebknecht’s Spartacus movement and a radical faction in the USPD, the Kaiser’s removal – let  alone ending the monarchy  – had not been the objective of protestors before the end of October and beginning of November.108 And yet the cumulative effect of these disparate popular protests was the erosion of the Kaiser’s authority. By the end of October and early November, the groundswell of opinion showed that the Kaiser had either already lost or was rapidly losing the trust and confidence of his natural supporters. At the core of Wilhelm’s failing authority was his own ambivalence towards the question of reform that was now linked to ending the war.109 In early October, Max Weber wrote to the Freiburg economist Gerhard von Schulze-Gaevernitz, expressing his irritation with the Kaiser’s stubbornness. As a staunch supporter of monarchical institutions – restricted by parliament – and in particular of the German dynasties, it is my firm conviction that the present Kaiser has to step down in the interests of the Reich and the dynasties. He can do this with absolute dignity if he explains that “he remains convinced that he has acted with right and in good faith, as he must have. Destiny is against him and he does not want to stand in the way of his people’s new future”. . . . If he goes now without external pressure, he goes with honour and the chivalrous sentiment of the nation goes with him. I openly admit to having observed the form of his reaction with acute aversion. But in the interests of the imperial throne, I must hope that an emperor does not end in dishonour . . .110

Weber’s frustration with the Kaiser was a reflection of the changing attitude towards the monarch among sections of Germany’s liberal elite, who ranged from the industrialist Robert Bosch to the new Chancellor Prince Max von Baden and his deputy Friedrich von Payer.111 Wilhelm’s inclination to prevaricate at moments of crisis had a corrosive impact on his personal authority and would eventually leave him isolated even among his most loyal supporters. Moreover, as external pressure mounted for progressing armistice negotiations, the Kaiser and his unpopular son the Crown Prince were seen as obstacles to an armistice. As Bill Drews, Prussia’s doughty interior minister reported: It is clear to see that the movement for the abdication of His Majesty is daily growing in broad sections of the people; not just in working-class circles but also

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within the middle class. One views the Kaiser and the Crown Prince as obstacles to peace.112

During the long month between 1 October and 9 November, diplomatic exchanges between Washington and Berlin for an armistice exerted critical external pressure for internal change that saw Ludendorff ’s dismissal and the Kaiser’s departure. In the early part of that period, Rathenau, who was convinced that ‘the country was unbroken’ and its ‘resources unexhausted’, had criticized what he saw as the precipitate acceptance of an armistice and called for a new office for national defence to lead a levée en masse (Erhebung des Volkes), to avert military dictatorship and civil war (no doubt with Russia in mind).113 Meanwhile, the collapsing morale among troops combined with the mounting pressure on the home front, meant that in a short space of time, the ending of hostilities had become contingent upon Wilhelm’s abdication.114 By early November, crowds were gathered on the streets of the capital openly engaged in rowdy arguments over abdication.115 In a second Note to the German civilian authorities on 14 October, the American government had stated that it would only negotiate with a civilian-led administration  – not with one led by the Kaiser or by the military. The highly placed diplomat Kurt Riezler, however, noted in his diary that abdication was out of the question.116 With the German government appearing to drag its feet on the question of reform, a third communiqué was sent a week later on 23 October baldly stating that the choice facing Germany was either negotiation with a civilian-led government or capitulation.117 This Third Note led directly to the amendment of the constitution agreed by the Reichstag on 26 October and signed into law by Wilhelm two days later, thus transforming Imperial Germany from a ‘crypto parliamentary’ state (Eduard David) into a parliamentary monarchy.118 The Kaiser’s apparent willing compliance had received a positive reception in some quarters of the press, but did not deter a note of cynicism from Count Harry von Kessler in his diary, ‘Who should still believe such a man?’119 Otto Landsberg from the Majority Socialists put it more bluntly during a meeting on 5 November of the Reichstag inter-party committee (Interfraktionelle Ausschuss) at which the issue of the Kaiser was once again raised: Can one seriously believe that this man at nearly sixty and with his character has the ability to change? The question is wholly impersonal, [but] practical. This man can no longer adapt! For the grace of God! We have to get rid of him!120

The momentum for a more far-reaching change thus gathered pace, not least because the obstacle to Wilson’s Third Note and peace was now linked directly to the Kaiser himself.121 As the pressure mounted for him to consider his own position, his indecision up to the eleventh hour merely intensified the calls for him to go.122 As Friedrich Meinecke later recalled, It already appeared psychologically almost impossible that a parliamentary monarchy under an emperor with this past could survive. A voluntary and timely abdication by the Kaiser and the equally culpable heir to the throne would not only  have avoided the audacious demands of the enemy, but perhaps also the incipient revolution.123

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As Meinecke suggests, there was much more at stake than Wilhelm’s personal position. As we saw above in the letter from Weber to Schulze-Gaevernitz, there were few, even among the Social Democrats, who wished to see the end of monarchy in Germany, but who thought it might be inevitable unless the Kaiser went. Count Harry Kessler gives an account in his diary of a breakfast meeting with the leader of the Centre Party, Matthias Erzberger, at the end of October, who asked Kessler for his views on a possible abdication. I said I thought it necessary and it should happen before the armistice, possibly immediately within  48 hours . . . . There was also the danger that should he not abdicate, we would receive harsh conditions or that there would not be an armistice at all; that an assassination would occur; or the people would storm the palace. Then the dynasties would fall also and that would be a national catastrophe.124

Liberals and Social Democrats were caught in a cleft stick. The gathering protest by the autumn of 1918 was fuelling the myth among supporters of the old regime that Germany’s fighting men had been ‘stabbed in the back’. In his memoir, Hindenburg claimed that the German army ‘like Siegfried had fallen on the spear of the hateful (grimmigen) Hagen’.125 Militarists lashed out at an ‘inner enemy’ ranging from Prince Max himself, to the pacifist intellectuals of the New Fatherland League (Bund Neues Vaterland), to the Majority Social Democrats, to the USPD and the revolutionary shop stewards in the munitions factories of Berlin and Leipzig, in the dockyards of Hamburg, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, all of whom the right accused of orchestrating Germany’s collapse.126 Ignoring the Kaiser’s own responsibility for the chain of events, monarchists would later claim that the liberal elite in conniving in Wilson’s demands in order to further its own agenda (parliamentary authority) instigated the course of events that led to the Kaiser’s fall, while the Socialists allegedly had mortally wounded the military and its capacity to fight on through a ‘thousand little stabs in the back’.127 But the wounds inflicted upon the German military body largely came from the hands of its own officers. As was the case almost everywhere among Europe’s wartime armies, there was a huge gulf between the officer class and ranks. The incompetence of the military in matters of strategy and the callous disregard for life that resulted in the deaths of millions had produced a crisis of trust, and in 1917/19, this led to a wave of insubordination with sharp political overtones. A poisonous atmosphere had been fermenting in the fleet and naval yards of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel since 1916 as a result of harsh discipline and this had allowed the USPD to gain a foothold below decks almost from the party’s inception. There had been a serious case of insubordination in Wilhelmshaven in 1917 when among other things, sailors turned water hoses on their officers. The authorities treated this as a mutiny that ended in a court martial with two death sentences and long prison sentences, which, rather than quelling the insurrectionary mood, in fact further politicized the sailors.128 However, the grounds for the revolt in Kiel went beyond mere grievances. The presence of the extreme nationalist Alldeutschen (Pan-Germans) was particularly

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strong among the officers and NCOs of the fleet and in particular on the Markgraf, the battleship where the spark of revolution was lit.129 The order to make ready to sail came on 28 October, the day parliamentary reforms were being voted on in the Reichstag, and this led to the suspicion among ratings that the naval command was instigating an action to thwart Chancellor Max von Baden. In a direct challenge to naval authority, stokers and machinists sabotaged the engines in order to prevent the ships from setting to sea and there were reports of widespread insubordination.130 According to Bernhard Rausch, the editor of the Majority Socialist Schleswig-Holstein Volkszeitung and a member of the Workers’ Council in Kiel, the mutiny was in support of Prince Max von Baden’s government and not against it (although the prince did not see it in this light).131 Rausch recalled, ‘. . . in the final analysis, the sailors’ revolt articulated nothing less than the deepest antipathy to a system which after all its crimes in this war was also considered capable of committing such a terrible act [as sinking the fleet]’.132 As such, it was a test of strength between imperial authoritarianism and democratic authority.133 How a mutiny turned into a revolution was due more to incompetence than to design when the officers in Kiel misjudged the mood of the men and mishandled their protest.134 An attempt to prevent sailors, who had formed their own council, from attending a meeting called by Kiel’s Workers’ Council on Sunday ended in bloodshed when an officer gave the order to fire upon the sailors and a crowd including women and children that had joined them leaving eight dead and 29 injured. The lieutenant,  who  gave the order to fire upon the crowd, was later wrongly reported to have been killed as the violence escalated.135 There could be no turning back as demonstrators quickly armed themselves. The following day, a delegation of stokers from the battle ship Großer Kurfürst went to the Brunswickstraße, the scene of the previous day’s killings, held speeches and led ‘hurrahs’ for the dead. Meanwhile, troops from 5th Company of the 1st Sailors Division broke into the weapons store and set off to free prisoners from the previous day. There were further clashes as troops made up of young recruits from the 1st Shipyard (Werft) Division sought to disperse the mutineers. This in turn sparked off further revolts and sailors from the 1st Torpedo Division now refused to follow orders. By Monday the 4th, the sailors were in control of the fleet and soldiers barracked in the town had gone over to the mutineers. When an officer declaimed ‘we soldiers know nothing of politics, therefore we should not get mixed up in politics’ and ‘A soldier should obey, a soldier must obey, and a soldier obeys’, he was met with whistles and catcalls. One of the leaders of the stokers, Karl Artelt who was also a member of the Independent Socialists, put forward six demands (echoing those put forward by the Berlin strikers in January 1918), but which now included a call for the abdication of the Kaiser and the removal of the Hohenzollern dynasty, the lifting of the hated siege law (Belagerungsgesetz) in force since the beginning of the war, the release of all political prisoners and protestors, the release of sailors imprisoned after the Wilhelmshaven mutiny of 1917, and the introduction of equal suffrage for both sexes. As we noted earlier, Gustav Noske had been sent to Kiel in order to assess the situation and to report back to the authorities in Berlin. By the time he arrived on Monday evening together with state secretary Conrad Haußmann, events were rapidly

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taking their own course.136 Noske and Haußmann were taken to a waiting crowd at the Wilhelmsplatz where Noske, who was at this stage still popular with the rank-andfile left, was ‘crowned’ Ziviladmiral before being taken to a meeting with the military authorities. At this meeting with the governor, Admiral Souchon, the Soldiers’ Council issued its own Fourteen Points in which it demanded political and military authority otherwise the sailors who were in control of the fleet would bombard Kiel.137 Souchon who had been ‘completely surprised by the mutiny’ conceded to the demands and was replaced by Noske as governor of Kiel.138 The following morning a full Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Council was elected and placed Noske at its head. Haußmann was taken aback by the nature of the meeting on the 4th. He had assumed that he and Noske were simply arbitrating a mutiny.139 Now there was the sudden realization that a revolution was underway. As Rausch put it, ‘A turning back was now no longer possible’, and the ‘old ugly world had fallen in ruin’.140 An editorial on 5 November in the SchleswigHolsteinische Volks-Zeitung announced prophetically, The revolution is on the march. What has happened in Kiel will in the next days affect further groups and will initiate a movement that will spread throughout Germany. What the workers and soldiers want is not chaos but a new order; not anarchy but the social republic.141

In his memoir, the later Chancellor Hermann Müller, who arrived in Kiel on the 6th also to report on events, claimed the meeting with Souchon on the evening of the 4th was the moment when an act of mutiny became a revolution which then spread the following day like a bush fire from Germany’s Baltic coast to engulf the country (Map 2.1).142 By Friday the 8, it had spread further south to Hanover, and by Saturday 9th, it reached Berlin.143 * The revolution in Germany was a piecemeal affair without any central orchestration.144 This fact made it all the more threatening while at the same time susceptible to radical elements; it dissolved, if only temporarily, societal hierarchies of order; and in the final analysis, the incoherent leadership curbed the radical movement’s potential to succeed beyond the ‘regime change’ of 9 November.145 Fearful of revolution, Scheidemann sought to convince von Baden that Wilhelm must step down in order to save not only the monarchy and the October reforms but also the country from bolshevism.146 But when the Prussian interior minister Bill Drews went to Spa to put this to the Kaiser, he was brusquely dismissed by the monarch. Ensconced in Spa nearly seven hundred kilometres from Berlin and surrounded by a coterie of aristocratic (and reactionary) advisors, Wilhelm appears to have lost touch with the reality of events unfolding in the capital, in spite of daily communiqués to Spa. Now, it was not so much dithering on his part as plain intransigence.147 The Kaiser’s military adjutant, Hans von Plessen together with Friedrich von der Schulenburg (Commanderin-Chief of Army Group Deutsche Kronprinz) urged him to seize the initiative and return to Berlin at the head of his troops.148 Alarmed, Groener, who had just returned from Berlin where in his own words he had ‘met the revolution’, conducted a snap

Rh ein

Koln

Luneburg

Kassel Großenhain

Cottbus

Passau

Rosenheim

Munchen

Augsburg

Nurnberg

Bayreuth

u

na

Do

Gorlitz

Forst er

Posen

Gleiwitz

Kattowitz

Königsberg

Source:  John Riddell (ed.), The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power: Documents, 1918–1919 (New York, 1986), p. 49.

Neisse

el

We ich s

Beuthen

Graudenz

Danzig

Bromberg

Breslau

Od

Frankfurt (Oder)

Map 2.1  The spread of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, 4–10 November 1918.

Friedrichshafen

Stuttgart

Karlsruhe

Mannheim

Darmstadt

Bitterfeld Leipzig

Wittenberg

Potsdam Brandenburg (Havel)

Berlin

Stettin

Riesa Dresden Pirna Gera Freiberg Chemnitz Greiz Annaberg Zwickau Plauen

Halle (Saale) Merseburg Eisenach Weißenfels Weimar Gotha Erfurt Jena Meiningen

Rostock Schwerin

Dessau

Magdeburg

Nordhausen

Hildesheim

Hannover Braunschweig

Bremen

Frankfurt (Main) Hanau Mainz

Neunkirchen

Saarbrucken

Trier

Koblenz

Aachen

Hamborn Duisburg Krefeld

Mulheim (Ruhr) Essen Dortmund Barmen Elberfeld Rheydt Dusseldorf

Oldenburg

Wilhelmshaven

OSTSEE

Kiel Stralsund Neumunster Warnemunde Greifswald

Eckernförde

Lübeck Altona Hamburg Bremerhaven

Brunsbüttel Cuxhaven

Rendsburg

r

Wese

NORDSEE

Elbe

Flensburg

10 November

9 November

8 November

7 November

6 November

5 November

4 November

1916/19: The Antinomies of Authority 27

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Rethinking the Weimar Republic

survey of the officers at Spa that revealed Wilhelm no longer had an army to lead. Not only was the loyalty of the 5,000 troops stationed at Spa in serious doubt after having formed their own Soldiers’ Council on 8 November in defiance of their officers, but twenty-three of the thirty-nine frontline officers were not prepared to march with the Kaiser, while the position of a further fifteen was in doubt.149 The most striking feature was their ‘extraordinary apathy’ (große Gleichgültigkeit) towards Wilhelm II. Even Hindenburg remained largely passive throughout the proceedings, leaving Groener to break the news to the Kaiser. Moreover, it was clear also that Wilhelm’s fellow dynastic heads no longer thought his position defensible. Ernst Rudolf Huber rightly states that this loss of authority finally sealed Wilhelm’s fate.150 What looked like a presumptuous move by von Baden in announcing the abdication on 9 November was in fact the outcome of a drawn out and complex interplay of different forces. When Drews returned from Spa without a result, Prince Max, facing the need to strike an armistice with the Entente, to conciliate the Social Democrats and to head off the threat from the streets, issued the fateful communiqué announcing the Kaiser’s ‘decision’ to ‘voluntarily’ abdicate.151 In the politically fluid circumstances since late October, Wilhelm, who ever since the ascendancy of Hindenburg-Ludendorff had been reduced to a ‘shadow monarch’, failed to grasp the full meaning of the events unfolding around him. To paraphrase the German scholar Helmut Neuhaus, history overtook him.152

Reasserting authority in the revolution With the Kaiser gone, and power handed over to the six-man Council of People’s Deputies on the morning of 9 November, the question of political authority appeared to be settled. But it was not. To begin with, there was ambiguity over the new government’s legal basis: revolution implied a rupture from the hitherto existing polity. In reality, von Baden had merely handed over the business of government to Ebert and his colleagues, who in turn saw their role merely as an interim administration under the imperial order with the immediate task of negotiating an armistice and ensuring stability at home. This changed dramatically a few hours later when Scheidemann precipitately called into life the German Republic. At this point, there was indeed a formal break with the past as the Council of People’s Deputies suddenly found itself at the head of a very different polity. Its revolutionary authority was underscored by Ebert’s suspension of the Reichstag, much to the consternation of the Speaker, Konstantin Fehrenbach (who would serve as chancellor from June 1920 to May 1921). The idea of a Council had its precedents going back to the French Revolution and the Directory; more provocatively, it bore a resemblance to the type of exceptional dictatorship posited by Carl Schmitt (more of which in Chapter 8). Its transitory character was affirmed by the announcement that there would be an election for a Constituent Assembly, itself a transitional institution that would decide on a new constitution.153 The issue of authority was further complicated by two other factors: the continuing revolutionary agitation on the ground fomented by Spartacus and an assorted grouping of leftist factions; and more importantly, by the presence of the revolutionary Greater

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Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council which also constituted itself as a revolutionary executive, the Vollzugsrat (this role was later transferred to a Zentralrat at the first congress of councils in mid-December),154 which saw itself as the ultimate national authority with oversight of the Council. Until the national Congress of Councils in December, this latter organ chaired by Richard Müller was dominated by radicals to the left of the Majority Socialists, who had a fundamentally different vision for Germany. These radicals sought a thorough-going transformation of Germany’s political and economic institutions through the creation of a ‘republic of councils’ (Räterepublik) which envisaged authority emanating from ‘below’. Neither position could be reconciled adequately. Thus, between 10 November when the Vollzugsrat was established and the date for the election to a National Assembly (19 January), a political space opened in which these radically different visions of authority – parliamentary democracy v proletarian dictatorship – jostled for ascendancy.155 * The internecine struggle waged between the far left and Majority Socialists in this period over the question whether or not Germany’s future lay in parliamentary institutions or in the councils of a Räterepublik was the focus of the historiography of the revolution for more than two decades since the 1960s.156 In many regards, the debate itself was a continuation of the arguments played out by the protagonists in 1918 and turned on what was seen as the overcautious politics of the Majority Socialists and the revolutionary role of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. For those on the left, the revolution’s potentials were stymied by the SPD’s failure to realize fully those same potentials because of its historic compromise with the institutions of the old order (namely, the army, judiciary and bureaucracy). Echoing Arthur Rosenberg, Eberhard Kolb concluded that the German revolution was ‘stopped in its tracks’ and the future contours of republican authority blunted.157 In his widely read synthesis of the revolution, Reinhard Rürup went further, quoting Ernst Troeltsch’s observation that ‘in essence an antirevolutionary pro-order principle countering the dictatorship of the proletariat’ underpinned the SPD’s actions.158 These verdicts are based on an unrealistic expectation that the Majority Socialists should have acted as a revolutionary party. To be sure, the party programme accepted at Erfurt in 1891 asserted allegiance to Marxist principles, but it also allowed for achieving these within an evolutionary framework. During the interregnum of November/ December, SPD leaders referred to the events of 9 November as a ‘legal’ revolution in that there had been a handover of power from von Baden to Ebert and his colleagues; in most respects, this merely completed the logic of the reforms of 26 October and reflected the public will.159 Thus, the SPD’s demand for democratization was driven less by a revolutionary imperative as by a desire to maintain the state by broadening its ‘stake-holders’,160 something which had been partially gained by the October reforms and fully achieved with the granting of universal suffrage on 12 November. The declaration of the republic led everyone into uncharted territory, in which the polestar was a constituent assembly to decide on a new constitution. Thus, in one respect, the Majority Socialists did see themselves as positive actors in a revolution, but not of the Bolshevik type.161 Indeed, such a revolution promised both chaos and

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the possible break-up of the Reich, which no one in Berlin wanted. As far as Ebert and in particular Scheidemann were concerned, the immediate danger to the armistice and inter alia to the interests of the working class came from the revolutionary left.162 Even before the fall of the monarchy, the SPD leadership had been determined that there would be a ‘peaceful transformation [to a democratic parliamentary system] instead of Bolshevik chaos’.163 Looking back, Scheidemann claimed that ‘the Reich, and especially Berlin, was simply a madhouse in the first weeks after the collapse’.164 Scheidemann was consistent in the view that the far left (the extreme elements in the USPD and the Spartacists above all others) were a ‘greater danger [to Germany] than the external enemy’, a point he made repeatedly, finally declaring during a meeting of von Baden’s cabinet on 8 November, ‘my party will make sure that Germany is protected from Bolshevism’.165 Even though there was a break between state-forms, Germany’s new leaders sought stability through continuity of policy and praxis, and that meant authority through consensus on a broad front. The leadership of the SPD should thus be assessed in the context in which it took decisions; in 1918, the choices were either the ‘legal’ revolution from above or the radical extra-legal revolution from below.166 Until the election for a Constituent Assembly, political authority was located in at least two institutions of the revolution: the Council of People’s Deputies that was de facto the government and the Executive Committee of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of Berlin, the Vollzugsrat. These two institutions were supposed to be complementary but in practice did not work well together, often clashing over areas of policy decision.167 They were also divided in their political vision, and over the implementation of democratization of the army and socialization of the economy, and their relationship was further strained by personality clashes, the most severe of which was probably that between Georg Ledebour (USPD), described by Käthe Kollwitz as a ‘demagogue’ and ‘rabble-rouser’, and Scheidemann.168 The Vollzugsrat saw itself as a vehicle for radical politics, even though as it transpired this vision was not representative of the politics of the councils in general.169 Crucially, its authority was not recognized by army leaders, who considered its members to be political hotheads. Instead, Groener and his fellow officers acknowledged the authority of the Council of People’s Deputies with whom they had established a pragmatic relationship.170 Inevitably, relations between the Council of People’s Deputies and the Vollzugsrat deteriorated beyond repair, with acrimonious joint meetings in which each side accused the other of endangering the revolution. Matters came to head after 6 December when the Vollzugsrat was temporarily arrested by army officers, on whose orders exactly no one was sure. The die had been cast, and at the joint meeting the following day, it became clear that the Vollzugsrat had finally lost its authority.171 The USPD itself was divided. Like the Vollzugsrat, it favoured an immediate and thoroughgoing socialization of the economy and its corollary political transformation, but there was division within its ranks on how to go about achieving this. Nonetheless, as a party it favoured the route of parliamentary democracy and only shifted its position in favour of ‘all power to the councils’ as a political alternative the following March, nearly three months after it had left the government, and by which time the moment for revolution had long passed, in spite of a continuing insurgency.172

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With their eyes turned to Russia, only the extreme left believed that the 9  November was the prelude to a second revolution in which a Bolshevik-style dictatorship of the proletariat as part of a world revolution would be established.173 In an article for the liberal Vossische Zeitung, Troeltsch argued that a Bolshevikstyle revolution brought with it the spectre of civil war and chaos and the probable disintegration of the Reich.174 The transition from monarchical authority to parliamentary democracy had been traumatic enough for many progressives like Thomas Mann.175 Placing the revolution in its immediate context (ending the war, managing demobilization, and restoring social order), no one in authority could countenance radicalizing the revolution. Faced with an intransigent allied bloc during the armistice negotiations and insurgent radicals at home, SPD leaders saw their room for manoeuvre severely constrained. As Otto Wels, the Social Democrat responsible for security (Stadtkommandant) in Berlin put it during a tense meeting of the Council of People’s Deputies with the Vollzugsrat, ‘I have to protect the revolution from the right and from the left’.176 The experience of war had taught Ebert and his fellow leaders that the grip on authority, even its authoritarian version, could be easily broken by popular protest. Moreover, there appeared to be little public appetite to do so; indeed, the revolution had run its course by mid-December when the First National Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils met in Berlin and concluded with a resounding support for the election for the National Assembly. By that date, it was clear to see that the German state could not be reconstituted from below through a council movement that was both highly regional and anarchic in its structure and therefore unable to deliver coherent political authority at the national level.177 Nevertheless, within a week of the announcement of an election for a National Assembly, Rosa Luxemburg called for the radicalization of the revolution in the Rote Fahne. ‘[T]he dice must fall’, she wrote, ‘yesterday parliamentary cretinism was a weakness, today it is ambiguous, tomorrow it will be a betrayal of socialism’.178 Luxemburg was not alone in this view. Emil Barth, the leader of the strike movement in Berlin in  1916 and 1917 who joined the Council of People’s Deputies (after Liebknecht declined the USPD nomination), also favoured radicalizing the revolution along Bolshevik lines and considered his fellow travellers, Hugo Haase and Wilhelm Dittmann among them, guilty of the ‘parliamentary cretinization’ mentioned by Luxemburg.179 In his highly partisan account of the revolution, Barth rounded on his radical compatriots, from Liebknecht in Berlin to Eric Muhsam and Eugen Leviné in Munich, whom he collectively accused of ‘flagrantly throwing to one side all life’s realities’. Even Richard Müller, chairman of the Vollzugsrat and of Berlin’s revolutionary shop stewards, was not spared Barth’s scathing criticism.180 Little wonder that the radical revolution appeared as the work of dilettantes doomed to fail. However, Barth saved his biggest scorn for the Majority Socialists who he considered to have ‘betrayed the revolution’ through their collaboration with the old elites.181 A less emotive analysis but nonetheless sharp critique of the Social Democratic leadership on its failure to transform the social relations of production is provided by Clara Zetkin in an article published in the Leipziger Volkszeitung in early December, where she observed,

32

Rethinking the Weimar Republic “Democracy” is the chosen track (gleisende), [and] false solution of the moment, with which the counter-revolution goes into battle in order to cast back the proletariat to its old political powerlessness. The cry for a “constituent national assembly” for the Reich, for the federal states, rings loud and louder. Let’s look at what hides behind this, what a constituent assembly means, what it should achieve. Under the given historical conditions is it really the idea of democracy to find popular sovereignty, whose flesh and blood embodiment is a constituent assembly, in contrast to class rule? Not at all, on the contrary. What now incompatibly confronts each other is not [the contradiction of] class: on the one hand the dictatorship of the proletariat, and on the other hand, democracy – the equality of popular sovereignty. It is something else completely. Democracy, for which the troops of the counter-revolution consciously and unconsciously get excited about, is like an egg whose content has been sucked out. The shell, the form is there, but what actually constitutes the egg is missing. Really! Political equality, political democracy, remains a formal, superficial and incomplete thing as long as it does not have economic equality as its basis. This firm and unshakeable foundation does not exist in the bourgeois capitalist order.182

This sense of a betrayal of the revolution spread beyond the ranks of the extreme left, as Käthe Kollwitz’s diary attests.183 Nonetheless, Zetkin’s comments came at a time when the tide was turning against the radicals. By mid-December, there was little appetite for continued revolution in order to achieve the goal underlying her analysis. When Kessler returned to Berlin from Poland on 17 December, he noted the absence of red flags and in their place a preponderance of the imperial and Prussian banners with an occasional republican flag of black–red–gold (hailing from the 1848 Revolution and not yet the adopted flag of the republic), as well as the remains of the garlands that had greeted troops returning from the Western Front a week earlier. Kessler noted almost laconically that the difference to mid-November ‘was enormous’.184 Indeed, the overwhelming sentiment, even among the ‘revolutionary’ council movement, was to return as quickly as possible to peaceful domestic conditions.185 Writing in the World on Sunday on the revolution’s first anniversary, Rathenau observed that ordinary Germans mostly favoured a ‘return to normal’ symbolized by parliamentary elections.186 The First All-German Congress of Councils which met in Berlin (16–19 December) not only vindicated the policy for a parliamentary system of government when it voted overwhelmingly for the Constitutional Assembly and almost two-to-one against a counter motion brought by Ernst Däumig for the Räterepublik. The Congress also brought to an end the revolutionary duopoly by investing (to the chagrin of the USPD and the far left) sole constitutional authority in the Council of People’s Deputies. The Vollzugsrat was replaced by a Central Council (Zentralrat) in which the MSPD dominated. The outcome was inevitable given that of the 489 delegates to the Congress, 296 were Majority Socialists, whereas the USPD had only 96, and the United Revolutionaries led by Heinrich Laufenberg, had a mere 11 delegates.187 The Congress’s overwhelming support for the National Assembly (344 in favour to 89 against) was underscored by the overwhelming public support in January 1919, when three-quarters

1916/19: The Antinomies of Authority

33

of the electorate voted for the so-called Weimar Coalition (Social Democrats, Centre Party and Liberals). The revolution in terms of its political aim and form was over; the streets, although not completely pacified (in this phase, not until May), were no longer the channels for the radical revolution but had become instead arenas where the quest for re-imposing authority offered an opportunity to legitimize counter-revolutionary violence in the name of law and order.188

Conclusion In her survey of the German labour movement, Helga Grebing concludes that in 1918 ‘the Social Democrats were unable to create the social and ideological foundations for the new state; their party had no clear conception of a social-democratic policy which would embrace all aspects of state and society. It remained enmeshed in ideas of government which were inspired by a monarchic and authoritarian system’.189 What exactly a ‘social-democratic policy’ might be expected to look like is not entirely clear. The politics of authority under the Weimar Republic began as an amalgam of different currents in the war, and as we have argued throughout this chapter, was always constrained and shaped by the context in which the historical actors found themselves. The imperative in 1918 was to salvage the Reich from the rubble of defeat and to reassert national sovereignty as a parliamentary democracy in order to face the task of rebuilding the country. Nonetheless, the authority needed to carry out this task was also Janus-faced as Meinecke noted in a manner close to Troeltsch. Referring to the emancipator moment of the 1848 Revolution, Meinecke observed, ‘National sovereignty once a revolutionary idea, now developed a conservative meaning’ that was to manifest itself in various guises during the course of the life of the republic.190

34

3

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

“. . . in the collapse of 1918 the rise of the Wilhelmine state to dominant economic and world power status found its sudden end.”1

Introduction Germany’s quest for world power status ended with its defeat in  1918.2 Not only were the vestiges of empire removed under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, but Article 231  – the ‘war guilt’ clause – also ascribed to Germany the responsibility for the war, thereby stigmatizing it as a warmonger deserving severe punishment.3 Over the next two years, Germany suffered a number of ‘amputations’ as territories and populations in the east, south-west and north were ceded through a series of follow-up conferences and plebiscites. In the east, Upper Silesia was ceded to Poland and Danzig declared a free city under League of Nations protection; in the north, northern Schleswig went to Denmark; in the west, the industrial region of the Saar was placed under international control and occupied by French troops for a period of fifteen years in compensation of war damage to French mines; in the south-west, Alsace-Lorraine was ceded to France; Eupen-Malmedy to Belgium; a number of key cities, such as Mainz, Koblenz, Cologne and Düsseldorf fell within the occupied region of the left bank of the Rhine, while an area extending 50 kilometres was demilitarized. This area of the Rhineland with a population of 7.6 million was to remain a bone of contention until the early withdrawal of occupation troops in 1930. Carl Schmitt referred to the various League of Nation/Allied controls governing the occupied region as an example of the modern form of imperialism.4 In total, Germany lost about 71,000 square kilometres – roughly one-eighth (or 13 per cent) of its pre-war territory – and 6.4 million Germans (one-tenth of pre-war population) found themselves outside the new borders. Reductions in material resources were equally large (Map 3.1). The reaction in Germany was predictably indignant, typically describing the Treaty as a ‘peace based on might’ (Gewaltfrieden) and ‘rape’.5 During the debate held in the National Assembly on 12 May 1919 on whether or not Germany should accept the terms of the treaty, Chancellor Scheidemann to rapturous applause roundly

Mainz

Coblenz

Cologne

The Ruhr

166

Northern Schleswig to Denmark

100 000 men

ube

Dan

REICHSWEHR LIMITED TO

be

El

Weimar

Berlin

Hultschiner Ländchen to Czechoslovakia

Oder

48

Source:  Anthony McElligott (ed.), Short Oxford History of Germany: Weimar Germany (Oxford, 2009), p. 307.

Map 3.1  Germany after the Treaty of Versailles, 1919. Used by kind permission Oxford University Press.

1874

Allace-Lorraine to France

Saarland 15 years under League of Nations administration and French occupation

60

e

e

EupenMalmedy to Belgium

Ceded territories Occupied territories 10 km neutral zone Demiliterized zone Border zone where new military fortification was prohibited Occupation of the Ruhr, 1923–25 Remaining part of Germany after plebiscite Rivers and canals under international administration Loss of population in 1000s

Rhin

Rhin

0

100

893

N

141

200 km

Eastern Upper Silesia to Poland

2938

Posen and West Prussia to Poland

Danzig (Free city)

331

Memel to Lithuania

36 Rethinking the Weimar Republic

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

37

rejected the Treaty describing it as ‘this horrific and murderous blow’ (mörderische Hexenhammer) that was little more than a ‘continuation of war’.6 Germans may have been inflamed by the indignity of being treated in this way, but their own government had treated Russia in equally punitive fashion the previous year at Brest-Litovsk in terms comparable to the punishment inflicted by Prussia on a defeated France in 1871.7 That particular circle was now being closed. There were four interrelated areas of the Treaty that were in contention from 1919 to the mid-1930s by all Germans, irrespective of where they stood on the political spectrum. The first concerned reparations and, in particular, the alleged accusation of sole responsibility for the war; the second revolved around military security of borders and the question of German ‘equality’ among nations; related to this was the third issue of the international political system and role of the League of Nations; the fourth focused on the interrelated issues of national sovereignty in the occupied areas and the loss of territory after the plebiscites.8 The handling of each of these issues tested the authority of government at home, since each alone and collectively also related to the international authority of Germany as a sovereign state. For much of the early period, Germany was not master of its destiny because it was locked into a reactive policy as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty, and, as we will see below, this posed a serious challenge to legitimating republican authority at home.9 French insistence that the letter of the Treaty would be carried out to the full left little doubt that the republic was going to pay for the sins of the father, while guaranteeing security of French borders.10 How successive governments sought to negotiate that debt underpinned Weimar’s foreign policy over the following decade and melded seamlessly with the republic’s domestic politics.11 There was a fairly clear divide between those who sought peaceful renegotiation of the Treaty and who, for the most part, dominated Weimar politics until the beginning of the 1930s, and those who rejected the Treaty outright. Even after Hitler came to power with a clear message of rejection, some in Germany continued to believe that a peaceful renegotiation of the Treaty was still possible, although this became a dwindling prospect.12 But before Germany reached that point, the reception of the Treaty and its aftermath produced what Thomas Mergel has called a ‘foundational consensus’ partly manifested in the political discourse on revision; at the same time, the negative aspects of this discourse also served as a proxy for attacking the republic, as Wolfgang Elz and Thomas Lorenz have shown.13 While most of the contentious issues were largely resolved by the time of the Locarno Treaties in 1925 and Germany’s entry to the League of Nations the following year, the question of ‘war guilt’ and reparations remained a thorn in German flesh. Nevertheless, these two developments were high points of German foreign policy before the depression and not only rehabilitated Germany internationally, but also helped to stabilize the republic’s authority at home by laying the diplomatic foundations for the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from the Rhineland in  1930. The election of May 1928 which returned the parties of the ‘Weimar Coalition’ extended to include Stresemann’s DVP and the Catholic BVP with a majority share of the vote of

38

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

58.1 per cent, while a long way off the extraordinary level of support in January 1919, nonetheless appeared to vindicate the policy of revision through reconciliation, as we shall see in the second section of this chapter. The withdrawal of French and Belgian troops from the Rhineland in July 1930 marked another high point of Stresemann’s policies, but one which he would not live to see. For our purposes, it is the celebratory aspect of the withdrawal that is of interest here. This celebration was a double-edged sword for while it was undoubtedly a success that can be booked to the account of the republic, it unleashed an outpouring of popular emotion that blurred the line between a reconciliatory revision of the terms of the Treaty and a resurgent nationalism. As we shall see, the leaders of the republic tried to ride this wave of nationalism but ultimately found themselves carried towards a current of foreign policy based on authoritarian politics. Notwithstanding the priority accorded by Weimar’s politicians to securing the above aims, there is a further and often overlooked dimension to Weimar’s foreign policy. Understandably, the focus has been mainly on Gustav Stresemann who served as foreign minister from August 1923 until his untimely death in early October 1929.14 This has meant discussion has mostly revolved around the issue of ‘fulfilment’ and the policy of ‘revisionism’ during the years he held office.15 The result of this focus is that the broader and longer-term context of German foreign policy, namely its ambition to be a power at the heart of the continent (mitteleuropäische Staatsmacht), is overlooked when discussing foreign policy under the republic. Continental or world-power ambitions are usually discussed in relation to Fritz Fischer’s path-breaking study of ‘Germany’s quest for world power’ before 1914 and Hitler’s aggressive expansionism from 1933, in which foreign policy during the Weimar period is presented as a hiatus. But geopolitical considerations run through the entire period that frames this study. On the one hand, Germany’s geographical position reaped benefits, not least in terms of markets and continental influence; on the other hand, the fact that in 1914 Germany found itself fighting a war on two fronts gave credence to the old idea of encirclement.16 Germany’s continental ambitions and quest for security of borders underpinned the calls for annexation in the West and in the East during World War I.17 After Versailles, they informed the policy of reconciliation and revisionism pursued first by Rathenau and then by Stresemann. After 1925, this policy became more proactive in the sense that Berlin now displayed greater confidence in pursuing its aims; the depression opened an opportunity to adopt a more offensive policy in that Germany, in spite of its own financial woes, still flexed enough economic muscle to take advantage of the gap opened up by the withdrawal of London and Washington from European markets. In spite of the tendency in the literature to portray the ‘Stresemann era’ as an interregnum between the quest for Germany’s ‘place in the sun’ under the empire and the aggressive expansionism of Hitler, it can be seen as a link between the two.18 The policies of ‘fulfilment’ and ‘quiet revisionism’ might be viewed as pragmatic responses to the specific conditions faced by Germany arising from defeat, nothing more. Once these external parameters had been either partially or fully lifted, Berlin’s foreign policy returned to an older tradition that placed its interests at the centre of Europe.

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

39

After 1918, for obvious reasons the aim of continental hegemony was relegated to a secondary position behind the need to renegotiate Germany’s international place after the Versailles Treaty. Once this had been partly achieved with both the Locarno Treaties and Germany’s acceptance into the League of Nations in 1926, geopolitical considerations began to re-emerge as an important element of foreign policy. After Stresemann’s death, his party colleague, Julius Curtius, sought to translate Germany’s long-term goals into reality but in a manner that was very different from that of his predecessor. During his two years as foreign minister, Curtius attempted to take advantage of the collapse in world trade to expand German economic interests and political influence, notably in Central and Southeastern Europe. As Germany’s mitteleuropäisch economic foreign policy quickened in pace from 1933, so its diplomacy grew increasingly confident, reaching its peak between 1936 and 1938, by which time mutual relations between Berlin and its over-dependent trading partners began to cool. The trajectory of Germany’s continental ambitions finally found their violent apotheosis in the plan for European integration devised by Walther Funk’s Department for Economic Planning after France’s defeat in 1940.19 The complex relationship between Mitteleuropa ideas driving German foreign policy in the transition from late Weimar to the Third Reich and domestic authoritarian politics is explored in the final part of this chapter.20

From continental power to world pariah: The Versailles Treaty At the height of the war in 1916, many Germans looked forward to a post-war Europe where their nation would be the undisputed leader of the continent. A vision of this German-dominated Europe was provided in one of the most important essays on the subject by Friedrich Naumann in 1915 with the publication of his book Mitteleuropa in which he laid out Germany’s leading cultural and economic role in central Europe. Naumann’s vision found an echo in the work of the renowned geographer Emil Stutzer in his book, The German Cities, published in 1917, that presented a map of continental Europe at whose metropolitan heart was the axis Berlin-Vienna, while other national capitals were reduced to regional main cities.21 The vision of a German Mitteleuropa at war’s end was shared across the political spectrum but ranged from aggressive annexationist to benign conciliationist positions.22 But all could agree with Paul Spahn, speaking on behalf of the Zentrum in the Reichstag in the spring of 1916, when he concluded that ‘the war must end with a tangible result’.23 And indeed, it did, but not with the one Germany had expected. From a continental power to be reckoned with, Germans found themselves in 1918 struggling in the face of a victorious Entente, the country in political turmoil and separatist movements that further threatened the integrity of the Reich. But most of all, the impending terms for peace, which it was widely acknowledged would be grim, preoccupied the political agenda. The new republican government thus had the almost impossible task of re-calibrating German foreign policy in a context where there was little to no room for manoeuvre. As a consequence of this, the authority of the republic hung in the balance for most of its early years.24

40

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

The ceasefire in November had been met with widespread relief among the public, but the terms for peace from the Entente proved to be a different matter, as the meaning of defeat and its implication for Germany sank in. Speaking in the National Assembly, the Social Democrat Wilhelm Keil reiterated the expectation that peace would be on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a theme that was to remain a leitmotif in German appeals for revision of the Treaty in subsequent years.25 In order to avert the calamity of a humiliating imposition of terms, career diplomats placed their hopes on America to act as a moderating force, while Germany’s new leaders meeting at Weimar on 6 February insisted that Wilson’s Fourteen Points should be the basis upon which such terms were struck.26 This position, which had been set out plainly and publicly from the outset by Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau a career diplomat and the republic’s first foreign minister, was reiterated during the following months prior to the negotiations in Paris, even though a number of key politicians, Ebert among them, sensed that the outcome was going to be bleak for Germany.27 During a full debate on conditions for peace in early April, prior to the departure of the German delegation to Versailles, all sides (barring the Independent Socialists) in the National Assembly spoke of the need for a treaty based on equality and understanding, although it was clear by this point that this was unlikely to be the case. Nonetheless, the deputies continued to hold up the prospect for a reconciliatory treaty; as the SPD deputy Gustav Hoch put it: ‘one cannot subject 60–70 million people to unjust peace terms’.28 The Assembly issued a cross-party declaration (excluding the USPD) in which it demanded that the government reject unfavourable terms and accept only conditions within the framework of Wilson’s Fourteen Points for ‘such a peace is as much a blessing for humanity as an imposed peace must remain a curse’.29 The consensus in the Assembly was that in order to leave conflict behind, Europe had to rebuild on terms that furthered peaceful understanding. But the debate in the Assembly on 10 April, with its fierce denial of sole responsibility, severely narrowed the options of both government and delegation and, moreover, raised unrealistic expectations among the public.30 The humiliating treatment of the German delegation led by Brockdorff-Rantzau boded ill for a policy of understanding, particularly between Berlin and Paris. On arriving at Paris on 29 April, the delegation was segregated from the other delegates, placed under watch by a cohort of ten French officers and one American officer and kept waiting for a number of days before being summoned to hear the results of the victors’ deliberations.31 Previously in a speech on 14 February to the National Assembly in Weimar, Brockdorff-Rantzau had balanced toughness with reconciliation: while asserting Germany’s desire for peace within the framework of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, he emphatically rejected German sole culpability for the war.32 BrockdorffRantzau was to repeat this again on 7 May at Versailles. Facing the delegates, he conceded Germany’s part in the coming of the war and he did not deny responsibility for the invasion of Belgium, but stated: We are expected to confess ourselves to be the sole culprits for the war; such a confession, coming from my lips, would be a lie. It is far from our intention to decline responsibility of Germany for the origins of the war and the manner in

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

41

which it was conducted. . . . but we emphatically contest Germany alone, whose people were convinced they were waging a war of defence, being solely charged with the guilt.33

Referring to Lansing’s Note of 5 November, Brockdorff-Rantzau appealed for a peace based on justice and equality and not ‘might’ (Gewaltfrieden); he called for an impartial inquiry into the origins and conduct of the war, whose findings he was confident, would show that Germany was no more if no less, guilty than other powers. But to no avail. His words cut little ice with the Allies and with French premier Georges Clemenceau in particular. Brockdorff-Rantzau knew that he was now engaged in a war of gestures. In giving his response on 7 May to Clemenceau on the terms for peace and in particular to the proposed Article 231 – the ‘war guilt’ clause, BrockdorffRantzau, a diplomat of the old school, caused a sensation when he not only expressed Germany’s refusal to accept sole responsibility for the war, but did so remaining seated thus symbolically demonstrating Germany’s right to be treated not as a vanquished power but as an equal (as set down by protocol).34 After delivering his firm rebuttal of the charge of war guilt, he left the hall pausing in the grand entrance of the Hotel Trianon-Palace to coolly light up a cigarette, a scene captured by photographers from the world’s press.35 In its report, the delegation recommended that the cabinet reject the conditions. Walter Simons (who later served as foreign minister) in a letter to his wife, spoke of the ‘pathological fear and hatred of the French’ towards the Germans, and there was a belief that the French had been the driving force behind the punitive nature of the treaty, thus reflecting a general attitude within the German foreign office.36 Nevertheless, there was a sense that there was little that Germany could do, in spite of its protests. Clemenceau was unambiguous: either Germany accepted the terms, including war guilt, or it faced dire consequences, including the threat of force.37 Referring to the prospect of a military intervention by Entente troops, Otto Landsberg, the Social Democrat minister and a member of the delegation, summed up the futility of resistance when in his response he stated that while ‘this peace is the slow murder of the German people; not to sign is suicide’.38 The cabinet was divided on the issue. Whereas Matthias Erzberger (minister without portfolio), Gustav Bauer, Gustav Noske and Eduard David were fearful of the break-up of the Reich, Rhineland Separatism and the ensuing chaos possibly triggering a Bolshevik style-seizure of power in the event of not signing the Treaty, Brockdorff-Rantzau, on the other hand, preferred to reject the conditions outright thus calling Clemenceau’s bluff. For Brockdorff-Rantzau, it was a question of national honour and personal integrity and of holding one’s nerve in a game of poker where the political stakes were high. Thus, he advised the government in Berlin to remain ‘totally calm, cold blooded and reserved’.39 He believed that the Entente’s front would dissipate in the face of a German refusal to sign the conditions and then Berlin would be in a position to extract better conditions through one-toone negotiations.40 As it happened, he could not convince the majority of ministers of both the Reich and Länder governments that the unity of the Entente would fall apart. A report by Erzberger, in which the minister without portfolio painted alarming consequences for German domestic politics should the government refuse to sign,

42

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

swayed the argument.41 Indeed, according to Brockdorff-Rantzau’s later account of these last-minute discussions, it was this report that lay behind Ebert’s intervention on 6 June tipping the balance in favour of acceptance.42 Faced with a divided cabinet, Scheidemann and Brockdorff-Rantzau, together with Preuß, Dernburg and Gothein from the DDP, and the two Majority Social Democrat ministers Landsberg and Schmidt, resigned their positions on 20 June after barely four months in office.43 The remaining ministers formed the nucleus of the new cabinet led by Gustav Bauer, although few were in doubt that the real power in the government was Erzberger. Supported by the majority of the Länder governments, Bauer took the case for signing the treaty to the National Assembly on 22 June, when a clear majority of deputies voted in favour (237 in favour to 138 against).44 A week later, on 28 June and in spite of Berlin’s best efforts to have the offending clauses (Articles 227–31) removed, Hermann Müller and Johannes Bell, respectively foreign minister and colonial minister, signed the Treaty ‘without, however, accepting in doing so that the German people are the originators of the war’.45 It was ratified two weeks later on 11 July. The peace ultimatum stoked the fires of national indignation: it was alleged that the republic’s leaders, in particular Erzberger upon whom rightwing vitriol was poured,46 had capitulated to France, and there were (predictably) calls for a ‘national opposition’ to rally resistance to the Treaty. French flags that had been captured during the FrancoPrussian war and which now were due to be returned were taken from the Zeughaus by students and burned in front of the statue of Friedrich the Great in central Berlin. The historian Ernst Troeltsch noted at the time how the country appeared to be gripped by a patriotism not seen since the ‘spirit of 1914’ (the so-called Augusterlebnis) and the early days of the wartime Burgfrieden. The “unacceptable” was or appears again to be a heroic sound at which national honour is ignited and the atmosphere of unity from 1914 could return. A shared danger of death appeared again to have prevailed over the endless disintegration and mutual cutting off and enmity. Schoolchildren coursed through the streets in large demonstrations with black-white-red flags and sang – without any sense of the awful irony – “Watch on the Rhine.”47

Initially, public calls for rejection of the terms of the Treaty were universal, with only a few dissenting voices such as that of Helmuth von Gerlach, the editor of Welt am Montag. More typical was the petition protesting the conditions signed by Thomas Mann.48 Walther Rathenau, who was by no means extreme in his view regarding reparations for Germany’s wartime depredations against Belgium, nonetheless described the terms of the treaty as a ‘calculated murder, cold, clear, intelligent and bloodless, destroying the achievements of the past and the lives of the coming generations’.49 At the beginning of the session on 12 May to debate the conditions laid down by the Entente, the president of the National Assembly and later chancellor, Constantin Fehrenbach, told deputies of the flood of telegrams he had received from all parts of the country decrying the terms.50 Meeting in the Auditorium of Berlin University, every deputy who rose to speak delivered an impassioned plea for rejection, and these appeals found cross-party acclamation.51 We noted already the standing ovation Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

43

received for his speech, which was also widely circulated in the media, when he called upon the Assembly to reject the terms of the treaty. The rector of the University, the renowned and much respected legal scholar Professor Wilhelm Kahl, and a deputy for the DVP, in his opening address to the debate reminded the assembled deputies that it was in the same hall that the university’s first rector Johann Gottlieb Fichte had addressed the nation at a similarly critical juncture in its history calling upon citizens to persevere in spite of Napoleon’s victory over Germany.52 Even though Troeltsch had noted that much of this sentiment indicated a return to the politics of the old Fatherland Party, with the exception of the German Nationalists, contributors to the debate appealed to justice and not to hatred.53 The tone of the debate was tinged by a curious mix of indignation and pathos, and while there may have been an element of political theatre, we cannot doubt the depth of emotion unleashed by the treatment of Germany. But the reality, as we noted above, which most deputies acknowledged – was that Germany would have to ‘get on with it’ in spite of the broken pledge of Wilson’s Fourteen Points.54 The public mood of anger and rejection was coupled with a sense of inevitability and demoralization. Once Scheidemann had resigned and it became clear that Germany would have to accept the conditions, Count Harry Kessler, who, like so many others of his class in Germany, was convinced that Germany did not bear sole fault for the war, noted in his diary how he had been afflicted by an ‘indescribable depression; as if all life in my heart and soul had died’.55 He laid the blame for the ‘shame’ brought upon Germany on the Centre Party leader Matthias Erzberger, who had led negotiations and who was a strong advocate of signing; prophetically, Kessler predicted the minister would meet the same fate as Karl Liebknecht, who had been murdered a few months earlier.56 Six hundred kilometres away in Munich, Thomas Mann noted in his diary the confusion and demoralization among the population, himself feeling ‘very irritable, disgusted, embittered and tired’.57 Mann had welcomed the National Assembly’s majority vote in favour of signing the treaty – albeit with the proviso of a ‘well formulated protest’ – but the news that the Treaty had been signed ‘unconditionally’ came as a shock to him.58 According to the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, the realization that Germany was no longer a world power but a defeated nation spawned a resentful ‘culture of defeat’ that gnawed at the national psyche for a generation and eventually played into the hands of Hitler.59 But as Thomas Lorenz has argued, the more extreme reaction to the Treaty tended to come from a small if vociferous nationalist segment of the population that was not representative.60 There were others, such as the artist and pacifist Käthe Kollwitz and the romance scholar Viktor Klemperer in Dresden, for whom the Treaty took second place to the myriad difficulties besetting their everyday lives. The indifference of both Kollwitz and Klemperer cautions us not to overstate the psychological impact of the Treaty on the everyday lives of Germans.61 In an attempt to counter the ‘surge from the right’ (‘Welle von Rechts’), Bauer told the National Assembly in October that Germany, by showing willingness to fulfil the conditions imposed at Versailles ‘within its ability to do so’, would expose the impossible and unjust nature of the terms and eventually lead to their revision.62 Bauer and his successors understood that Germany’s room for manoeuvre was severely constrained by the reality of defeat and thus chose pragmatism in the national interest

44

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

over nationalist sentiment. This conciliatory position did not disguise the fact also that there was cross-party consensus that the terms of the treaty, as well as the subsequent conditions imposed on Germany, whether to do with border changes, especially in the east, or to do with reparations, eventually would have to be revised.63 Behind the international wrangling (mostly with France) were not only material issues, but also questions of authority, both on the world stage and at home. The division that arose within Germany over whether to follow a policy of fulfilment or to pursue a more aggressive policy of revision, characterized domestic politics in these years, divided political parties and lay behind the early challenges to republican authority, such as that launched by Wolfgang Kapp and General Walther Lüttwitz in  March 1920.64 But there was also a (grudging) recognition of a need to be pragmatic for all the political sabre-rattling. Thus, Constantin Fehrenbach after becoming chancellor in June 1920 was able to rely on the support of the DNVP and the Majority Socialists in the Reichstag to defeat a KPD/USPD sponsored motion of ‘no confidence’ over the alleged humiliation of the German delegation at the Conference at Spa in early July, when reparations and German disarmament were the chief topics on the table.65 Before the London Conference in March 1921 (also portrayed this time by the right as yet another disaster for Germany), the level of reparations was left in the balance. Fehrenbach had gone to London in the hope that an accommodation over the schedule of reparations payments might be reached between Berlin, Paris, Rome and London, only to be disappointed. The Reparations Commission took a hard line on both the level and timetable for payments; Berlin argued that it was willing to make reparations but emphasized again that it could do so only within its means; the current state of the economy militated against this and so the government was seeking a temporary postponement. The chancellor sought approval for his programme in the Reichstag on 12 March and got it after a lengthy debate and vote.66 Prior to this, the German foreign minister Walter Simons toured a number of cities in the south-west, including Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, to outline to industrialists the government’s programme for the London Conference. During another Reichstag debate a month later, in spite of reservations (the Social Democrat Rudolf Breitscheid accused the government of having a policy of ‘resignation’ and ‘drift’), a consensus emerged that a policy of ‘fulfilment within Germany’s ability to pay’ was the only way forward.67 The rejection of this by London and Paris (at a meeting on 30 April) merely exposed the weakness of the German government as the allies showed their determination to make Germany pay for the war.68 An appeal to Washington for arbitration fell on deaf ears. On 8 March, French and Belgian troops occupied the left bank of the Rhine, including Düsseldorf and Duisburg. Within a few weeks of the London Ultimatum setting Germany’s reparation obligations at 132 million gold mark, with foreign troops in two of Germany’s industrial cities, and facing an intractable Commission that demanded that Germany’s entire gold and silver reserves be held as guarantee against late payments, the government found itself with its back to the wall. There was now little choice but to either accept the terms of the London Note and the burden of reparations or to resist it and face the humiliation of occupation and the sequestration of the country’s assets (Zwangsvollstreckung). Fehrenbach and his cabinet resigned on 4 May before the issuing of the Ultimatum on 5–6 May.69

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

45

When Joseph Wirth formed the next government, he put this to the Reichstag on 10 May pointing out that the policy of resistance might also endanger the integrity of the Reich (with ominous rumblings in Bavaria and from Separatist movements in the Rhineland). His cabinet had discussed the options and reluctantly decided on accepting the ultimatum. Wirth, however, was seeking not merely approval for his government’s policy but collective responsibility via a Reichstag vote. On the one hand, this could be interpreted as a sign of weakness or insecurity on his part or it might be read as a clever stratagem to ensure cross-party consensus at a moment of national crisis. By giving the Reichstag equality in the decision, Wirth was able to stifle critics (mostly but not only on the right) of fulfilment. But any hope of forging a new Burgfrieden in the face of adversity was quickly dampened. While Wirth was able to garner a majority in the Reichstag (220 votes in favour), a sizeable minority of deputies (172) voted against the motion. Importantly, the vote split the bourgeois parties, particularly the liberals who were in government, down the middle.70 As the constitutional historian Ernst Rudolf Huber remarked, ‘There were few cases in the Weimar period where the principle of a ‘free mandate’ was demonstratively expressed to such a degree as in this party politically multiple divided vote on the London diktat (sic)’.71 Paradoxically, the vote stabilized Germany’s foreign policy by clarifying it. Until then, the response to reparations had been one couched in terms of payments ‘within the limits of the feasible’, a formulation that was politically ambiguous as it was economically uncertain. With a Reichstag majority behind him, Wirth accepted unconditionally (‘ohne Vorbehalt oder Bedingung’) the conditions being imposed on Germany by the terms of the London Ultimatum. Whether or not this was a policy of ‘capitulation’ as Huber asserts, the government at the time had little choice. As Wirth noted, ‘The state of freedom is not too dear even when purchased at the heaviest price’.72 In fiscal terms, the economy was rapidly deteriorating and industrial production was falling; parts of the country appeared to be in an almost permanent condition of insurgency; negotiations were still in progress to end the formal state of war with North America (a peace treaty was eventually signed by president Harding in April and ratified in November); and Germany’s eastern borders to Poland and Czechoslovakia remained unsettled. Thus, overcoming the reparations crisis in 1921 was, for Berlin, a precondition to settling these other matters. Both Wirth and Walther Rathenau, the latter as Minister for Reconstruction and then as foreign minister in Wirth’s second cabinet, were prepared to swallow national(ist) pride in the short term for European and international stability, without precluding revisiting the question of reparations at a later stage. For the moment, it was recognized by some that in order to gain a sound footing and to bring Germany back from the political and economic abyss, this policy of fulfilment had to be followed in order to achieve Germany’s rehabilitation and inter alia the restoration of its continental interests. In a speech to the Reichstag on 2 June 1921, Rathenau spoke of a European ‘community of interests’ and linked this to Germany’s reconstruction as a desideratum of German domestic policy.73 He repeated the message again in Hamburg on 4 July, when he told his audience that ‘rehabilitation, security and peace are only possible when the realization becomes general of the interconnection (Verflochtenheit) between all [nations] of the world’.74 To this end, in October 1921 Rathenau negotiated with his French opposite number Louis Loucheur what

46

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

became known as the Wiesbaden Agreement, whereby Germany pledged to pay for reconstruction in northern France, with an upper limit set at 7 billion gold mark to be paid until 1 May 1926.75 This was an early step towards détente with France and set the tone for the policy later pursued by Stresemann.76 There were of course the usual criticisms from the right that this policy represented a capitulation to the French. Walther Lambach from the DNVP had previously gone further to argue that Rathenau’s entire interventions in the field of foreign policy since the ending of the war had been guided by self-interest as an industrial magnate.77 But Wirth and Rathenau were for the time being at least asserting the primacy of foreign policy over domestic politics, thus laying the ground for Stresemann from 1924.78 That the reparations conflict with France would fester and finally culminate in the crisis of 1923 could not be foreseen in the spring of 1921. By the beginning of 1922, Germany was in arrears and relations with France were at low ebb. Wirth wrote to the chairman of the Reparations Commission, Louis Dubois, in early December stating that payments could only be made if Germany were allowed to raise a loan on the financial markets, and this was proving difficult given its low credit rating (not least affected by the unstable political situation within Germany). In order to buy time to negotiate such a loan, Wirth asked for a moratorium but was refused. Meanwhile, a number of other developments exposed the government’s weak position vis-à-vis the Entente Powers. Wirth’s policy of seeking reconciliation through fulfilment had failed, as he acknowledged to the Reichstag budget committee a week later.79 Up to now, Wirth, rather like Heinrich Brüning a decade later, acted in the belief that by showing willingness, Germany would expose the unrealistic if not impossible demands of reparations (attitudes did in fact appear to soften in British and American quarters during negotiations on the Dawes Plan at the London conference July–August 1924).80 But the limitations of this policy were soon apparent as a result of the Entente’s hard-line policy over the partition of Upper Silesia (12 October 1921) and the ultimatum delivered by Aristide Briand on 20 October over the non-delivery of reparations. Both of these actions precipitated the resignation of Wirth’s cabinet in protest on 26 October. Unable to forge an alliance with the DVP who refused to concede ground over Upper Silesia, Wirth immediately formed a second minority cabinet with the Social Democrats and Centre Party, with Walther Rathenau joining as foreign minister at the end of January 1922.81 And yet, in spite of the allegations of ‘capitulation’ from the nationalists and centreright, Wirth’s policies were tolerated.82 When the Communists tabled a vote of ‘no confidence’ in the government in January as the reparations question was heading towards its first crisis (the second being 1923), they failed because of abstentions on the right. In January, the DNVP and DVP deputies left the chamber before the voting began, which can be interpreted either as an act of defiance or as a form of ‘negative toleration’.83 Wirth’s reform and guarantee plan was accepted by the Reichstag on 28 January but rejected by the Reparations Commission. The Commission’s action described by the DNVP as an ‘attack on German sovereignty’ did much to undermine Wirth’s political credibility. The leader of the German Nationalist Party Graf von Westarp had earlier in the debate referred to Wirth’s ‘policy of capitulation’ and stopped just a millimetre short of accusing him of treason.84 The heated nature of the debates, frequently phrased

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

47

in inflammatory language harking back to the vocabulary of war, provide another dimension to the context of foreign minister Walther Rathenau’s assassination on 24 June. Rathenau’s murder, like that of Matthias Erzberger a year before, was linked to a ‘war psychosis’ among the right that erupted around the policy of fulfilment (in spite of the fact that Rathenau had previously been lauded by the nationalists for his role in bringing about Rapallo and his firm stance on the Saarland). There were attacks against Rathenau in the rightwing press and nationalist deputies assailed him for conceding too much to France in the Wiesbaden Agreement.85 Having withstood the assaults from the right and the left, Wirth’s second administration stumbled on until November 1922 when it finally collapsed after the Social Democrats left the cabinet uneasy with aspects of the coalition’s fiscal policy.86 The new centre-right ‘cabinet of experts’ led by Wilhelm Cuno, the head of the shipping company Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG), sought to depoliticize the reparations question by emphasizing its purely financial and economic aspects. But Cuno, a businessman who was without formal party affiliation, could not escape the acute pressures of domestic politics where reparations were concerned and almost immediately reverted to the policy of previous cabinets. There was some irony that a chancellor who saw himself above politics now found himself deeply immersed in them. His government’s programme announced to the Reichstag on 24 November was met with rapturous applause when he spoke of ‘first bread then reparations’.87 For the first time since Fehrenbach’s cabinet, the Reichstag appeared united on the aims of foreign policy; Cuno’s triumph was short lived.88 The Paris Conference in early January failed to produce consensus among the allies on how to handle the German request for a stay on reparations, with Bonar Law dissenting from the French and arguing instead for moderation in policy and a moratorium.89 The French were able to rely on the Reparations Commission to support their policy and on 11 January together with Belgian troops entered the Ruhr in what was a clear breach of international law.90 The occupation of the right bank of the Rhine in January did not come as a surprise to the government in Berlin.91 There had been threats of sanctions since the previous summer (reflecting the hard-line view in Paris since the signing of Rapallo). And France had used this tactic previously in 1921 when it sent in troops to secure production and materials in lieu of delayed payments. The difference this time came with the German response. In spite of Germany’s disadvantaged international position, all four cabinets since the signing of the Treaty had rejected Article 231. Nevertheless, their policy of fulfilling its terms, however reluctantly, was characterized by nationalist critics as evidence of Weimar’s weakness and created a perception among the public (aided by a virulent nationalist press) that the republic’s emasculated government could not defend German interests. Thus, the credibility of the government and the authority of the republic itself rested on how it responded to the occupation. On the one hand, this action exposed Germany’s military weakness as a defeated country; but on the other hand, concern over the wider economic impact on Europe of the occupation and the intractable stance of the French also provided Germany with a claim to the higher moral ground. The call for passive resistance by the government had a twofold effect: it softened international sentiment vis-à-vis Germany, especially as the crisis became prolonged

48

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

and French responses on the ground grew more brutal, and it forged a temporary consensus of national unity within Germany (notwithstanding the presence of a Rhineland separatist movement).92 Indeed, the Ruhr occupation galvanized the nation and diverted domestic acrimony from the government and towards France, where the rhetoric of war found a better-defined target.93 The fact that the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr also divided French politics was overlooked in most quarters. Instead, German accounts of French violence, arrogant behaviour, immorality (military brothels), callousness with regard to the distribution of food and shelter, and so forth circulated in Germany and did much to sour Franco-German relations for generations to come. Official documentation of atrocities in the occupied area compounded the crisis in French–German relations and recalled the bitter atrocity stories of the waryears.94 A three-part series of reports published in 1923 based on 90 testimonies made under oath provided graphic examples corroborated with photographic evidence of violent acts by French and Belgian troops against officials and civilians, including murder and rape. This material was not destined for domestic consumption but as a dossier of evidence against the French government.95 Such accounts, however, found their way into the public domain, fuelling tensions. There were also publications intended for an international audience. Typical of these is the following account, excerpted here from a 48-page pamphlet compiled from official sources and written in English for an American readership. On passing through the towns of the occupied territory one sees the foreign troops with their numerous families walking along the streets in a most provoking manner, dressed in the most elegant clothes and displaying the proud satisfaction of the victors. At the same time one notices Germans who look like having seen better days, walking along shabbily dressed with emaciated faces, apathetic and indifferent to their surroundings.96

This was mild propaganda intended for a non-German audience. There were more lurid accounts of the so-called black indignity (Schwarze Schmach) referring to the alleged sexual behaviour of the 25,000 troops from the French colonies and carried mostly by newspapers in graphic and overtly belligerent in tones.97 The national consensus that crystallized around the occupation of the Ruhr appeared to evaporate during the summer.98 The country was teetering on bankruptcy and Cuno was facing criticism for forgetting the ‘principles of democracy’ with his failure to consult with either the Reichstag or interest organizations over the funding of the passive resistance.99 In particular, Stresemann and the DVP, with the backing of the Social Democrats, led the attack against what appeared to them as a dictatorial style of government. The Emergency Decree of 10 August, passed just two days before Cuno stepped down, gave the government far-reaching powers, and these were largely untrammelled given that the Reichstag was postponed for an indefinite period during the crisis.100 Stresemann formed the next government on 13 August at the height of the crisis, and in spite of his earlier criticism of Cuno, continued the policy of bypassing the Reichstag, preferring to explain his policy directly to Germany’s powerful interest organizations in a series of public talks rather than to the country’s elected

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

49

representatives.101 Reacting to criticism from the DNVP in the Reichstag which had reconvened in early October, Stresemann called upon the opposition to eschew narrow party interests in favour of those of the national community.102 At the same time, he laid out a more conciliatory foreign policy in a speech to representatives of industry and commerce in Stuttgart on 2 September, in which he stressed its centrality to achieving Germany’s longer-term goals: he wished to inaugurate a new ‘era of peace’ by resolving the Rhine/Ruhr question, ending the occupation via an accommodation with the French and accepting material sacrifice but not territorial losses. He reiterated the substance of his speech again ten days later at a gathering of the German press corps in Berlin in which he prepared the way for a rehabilitation of public finances and the currency through fiscal tightening by stating ‘we have to give the state what the state needs’.103 The crisis over the Ruhr while it had shaken Germany also had hardened its resolve and in a paradoxical way, strengthened the republic. For the first time since the so-called spirit of 1914 and the Burgfrieden, there was something akin to a popular and national rassemblement – at least until the summer of 1923.104 The ending of the Ruhr crisis coincided with the decisive suppression of the abortive Communist Uprising in October, the shambles of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in November, and the collapse of the Rhineland separatist movement. The republic finally was able to assert its authority after the success (for Germany) of the London Conference. The re-entry of the Americans into the international arena through the Dawes Plan not only helped to stabilize the monetary condition of Germany, paving the way for its economic reconstruction, it also provided Berlin with a necessary support for its financial and moral rehabilitation on the international stage.105 Changes of government in London and Paris (both countries saw left-of-centre parties come into power) also did much to ease the international situation.106 The challenges facing the republic in these early years and a faltering foreign policy were not unique to it. The reparations question took a negative toll on French politics too, and it opened up fissures in relations within the Entente.107 The Reichstag elections in December 1924 provided some vindication of policy as the parties of the Weimar Coalition recouped some of their previously lost ground (Table  3.1). Nevertheless, it was a centre-right government that replaced Marx’s centreleft coalition in mid-January, ushering in an era of conservative retrenchment in domestic politics offset by a progressive policy of reconciliation in foreign relations. The path appeared cleared for a much-needed revitalization of the republic at home in which its foreign policy could focus on restoring Germany’s national authority on the world stage while at the same time leaving it free to pursue long-term continental and international goals. During the early post-war years, the domestic authority of the republic had hung in the balance by virtue of its dependence on the victor powers. The two elections of 1924, like all elections, can be viewed as a barometer of public attitudes towards government performance.108 Scholars usually take the election to the National Assembly in January 1919, which saw a never-to-be-repeated resounding victory for the parties of the Weimar Coalition, as the yardstick against which to measure the shifting sands and decline of the ‘middle ground’ in Weimar’s political culture in

4.4

19

13.9

66

9.2

45

10.6

51

10.3

44

15.0

71

18.4

95

20.4

103

1919

69

13.5

65

13.3

68

13.6

91

19.7

Zentr.

19

3.7

16

3.2

21

4.1

-

-

BVP

32

6.3

28

5.3

39

8.2

75

18.5

DDP

131

26.0

100

23.9

102

21.7

163

37.9

SPD

-

84

17.8

22

7.6

USPD

45

8.9

62

12.5

4

2.0

-

KPD

14

2.9

32

6.5

-

-

VFB/NSDAP

Source:  Adapted from Herbert Michaelis and Ernst Schraepeler (eds), Ursachen und Folgen Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart, Vol. 3: Der Weg in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, n.d.), Anlage I: Die Wahlen zur Nationalversammlung und zum Reichstag 1919–1933.

1924

1924

1920

DVP

DNVP

Year

Table 3.1  Votes (percentages) and seats (number) in Reichstag, 1919–24

50 Rethinking the Weimar Republic

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

51

subsequent elections. However, this first election expressed a hope for ‘normalcy’ after the war and took place in the midst of revolutionary and social turmoil; as such, it represents a comment on a specific set of circumstances and is perhaps less useful for charting the subsequent support for Weimar democracy. The year had been dominated by discussions on the Dawes Plan and reparations, rapprochement with France, entry to the League and the question of Germany’s ‘war guilt’. There were ugly debates in the Reichstag over the period of both elections, with both left and right sniping at the heels of government ministers for their ‘policy of fulfilment without results’.109 The May election is usually judged in relation to the discontent arising from the country’s post-inflation economic conflicts (notably over revaluation of war-bonds). However, while the ‘losers’ at the May election were the centre-right and liberal parties of the DVP and the DDP, neither of the other government parties, the Centre Party with its heartland in the Rhineland, and the SPD, conceded votes; indeed, the latter improved on its performance of 1920. Both of these parties had played key roles in the shaping of foreign policy in this period. And the December election is even more telling. This election has been interpreted as signalling the return to domestic stability after the financial turmoil of the early years, but it can also be taken as approval for the government’s foreign policy. During the summer, Chancellor Hans Luther made the compelling argument that the lesson of recent history was that little could be achieved by rattling sabres, but instead only through cooperation between all nations. Within two months of the Reichstag vote (29 August) on the Dawes Plan, which was accepted by a comfortable majority of 65 per cent in favour, the country went to the polls where government policy was tested in the polling booth. The result was a demonstration of public satisfaction across the spectrum of the government parties, with the exception of the KPD and NSDAP, whose spokesmen in the Reichstag debates were accused of infantile behaviour by the former chancellor and elder statesman Constantin Fehrenbach.110 The republic’s foreign policy in these early years had been defined by the prejudices and whims underpinning Entente policies. The re-entry of America as a power broker to deal with the economic fallout of the Ruhr Crisis, coupled with the change in attitude in London and the isolation of Paris, provided an enormous boost to German confidence and paved the way for its eventual re-entry as a player in its own right.111 The result was that in the following years as Germany’s international standing was gradually restored, it buttressed the republic’s authority at home.

Restoring authority: Locarno and the Rhineland As the period of confrontation gave way to that of reconciliation, Stresemann’s policy of ‘quiet revisionism’ brought important dividends for each of the three governments between late 1924 to the spring of 1930. Trade restrictions placed on Germany at Versailles were now lifted.112 Notably, Germany’s ‘pariah’ status resulting from Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty was de facto set aside by her accession to the League of Nations in September 1926. This had followed on from the success of

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Rethinking the Weimar Republic

the Locarno Treaties the previous October which settled the question of borders between Germany and France and Belgium; the finality of the borders with Poland and Czechoslovakia (both guaranteed by France), while still formally unresolved, had been, for the time being at least, tacitly acknowledged at Locarno.113 Some historians see Locarno and the League of Nations as both the climax and a turning point in Weimar foreign policy.114 Nevertheless, this achievement continued to be overshadowed by the question of reparations and foreign troops on German soil and was not welcomed in all quarters, including the president’s office.115 The Dawes Plan was a temporary mechanism that did not settle reparations finally but certainly eased their payment. The initial discussion around the final settlement (in the shape of the Young Plan, 1929) was a crucial testing ground for the republic’s foreign policy and became linked to revising the most pernicious parts of the Versailles Treaty, namely the question of war guilt and the withdrawal of occupation troops from the Rhineland. The path to reconciliation embarked upon after the ending of the Ruhr Crisis and the introduction of the stability package under the Dawes Plan, prompted a reaffirmation of the democratic ideals of the republic, thus linking the two. When Chancellor Hans Luther presented his government’s programme to the Reichstag on 19 January (1925), he made the issue of the delayed evacuation of the northern zone of the Rhineland the polestar of his government’s foreign policy.116 The direction of foreign policy for the new government will also be primarily determined by the London Agreements. Lasting conditions in Europe are the basis for the solution of the question of reparations desired by the London Agreement. The laws adopted pursuant to these agreements will be carried out by us loyally, as much as we expect the loyal implementation of the Agreement by our opposite signatories (Vertragsgegners). Unfortunately, the political and emotional easing brought about by the London Agreements has been badly affected by not clearing the northern zone of the Rhineland. Therefore, the Government restates the position of the previous Government on not evacuating the zone. Maintaining the occupation of the northern zone means failure to comply with legitimate claims based on the Versailles Treaty, and is an obvious contradiction of the spirit and the basic beliefs that had been alive in the London Agreement.117

Over the course of a three-day debate in the Reichstag in May 1925, in which the government’s foreign policy formed a major focus, Luther and Stresemann found themselves caught between nationalists clamouring for a more aggressive stance in negotiations over a security pact with the Entente Powers and calls for greater concilia­ tion from the Social Democrats.118 Such differences over the policy of reconciliation not only bifurcated along ideological–political lines, but were also evident within party camps. The German Nationalists in particular seemed to be caught between the rhetoric of bellicose nationalism and political realities, as Phillip Scheidemann had pointed out with some glee during a debate on foreign policy in 1924.119 Thus during the vote on the Dawes Plan in August 1924, a number of DNVP deputies voted against the government even though their Party was a member of it; in November 1925 when a vote on the acceptance of Locarno was held, it was the turn of the Bavarian People’s Party to act in this way.120

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The chief indictment levelled at Stresemann was that he had given ground but received little or nothing in return. A typical example of the tone of the debates is found during the exchanges over the Dawes Plan, when one deputy, Richard Kunze from the völkisch German Social Party (DSP), asserted ‘history is the Last Judgement. I continue to believe in a just vengeance’.121 Kunze is an example from the political fringe, but his apocalyptic language seeped out to infect even moderate nationalists such as the usually pragmatic Kuno Graf von Westarp during the debates on the Locarno Treaties.122 For nationalists, and indeed, there was some broad cross-party agreement (with the exception of the Communists), that until the ‘stain’ of war guilt had been removed, Germany’s international authority would continue to be severely curtailed. Equally, revision of the clause would bolster the authority of the republic at home. In one of the many debates on foreign policy in the Reichstag, Wilhelm Marx who returned to the chancellorship in May 1926 and remained in office for the next two years, spoke of the intimate relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy, stating that while pluralism was a fact of life in the former, in the latter case partisan politics should not be allowed to interfere with national unity. Breitscheid, who led SPD contributions to the discussions in the Reichstag on foreign policy, was less convinced of the power of foreign policy as pursued by Marx’s Bürgerbloc to unite Germany. He too accused government of achieving little since Locarno, declaring, ‘we are standing in front of a void’. But Marx defended his policy of ‘mutual understanding’ between the powers and emphasized that it was neither ‘fulfilment’ nor ‘revision’. His cabinet was pledged to maintaining this course: The foreign policy, which government[s] have unswervingly pursued continuously since the war and which finally led to the London Dawes Agreement, to the Treaty of Locarno, and to the admission to the League of Nations, is characterized by the abandonment of the idea of revenge. . . . Instead, its tendency is the building of mutual understanding.123

The chancellor went on to list the other achievements of this policy, not least the end of certain allied controls in the occupation zones and the withdrawal of French and Belgian troops from the Ruhr (in August 1925).124 And he expressed confidence that the policy of détente was widely accepted among the population, in spite of a small albeit vocal element who rejected any idea of reconciliatory politics. But he also spoke of the difficult work ahead, primarily ‘Our right to moral and political equality among all nations cannot be called into doubt. Its full recognition is the task of our political work’.125 But before Germany could achieve this, it still had to negotiate the final terms of reparations, which had been a sticking point for the French. The Dawes Plan was due to end in May 1930 and preparations were begun at Geneva in the autumn of 1928 by the six powers (Germany, France, Belgium, United Kingdom, Italy and Japan) with the Reparations Agent Parker Gilbert (USA) acting as broker on a final settlement. The negotiations carried on into the summer of 1929 before initial agreement was reached at a special Reparations Conference in The Hague in August; the final agreement on the New Plan (which came to be known as the ‘Young Plan’) was reached at the second Hague Conference on Reparations in January 1930. Linked to the settlement was the withdrawal of foreign troops from the Rhineland by the end of June 1930.126

54

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

While reparations had not gone away, their payments were now fixed at annual rates that were manageable to the German economy and above all, they were now finite (under the Plan Germany would continue to pay reparations until 1987/88).127 More importantly, Germany would regain both its financial independence with the removal of Control Commission oversight and territorial sovereignty with the early withdrawal of foreign troops from the Rhineland (although the Saarland was to remain under international control until 1935). It was in Stresemann’s view, ‘the lesser evil in financial matters and in political terms it is without doubt the better solution’.128 The first Hague Conference should have been Stresemann’s finest hour. But he reaped little acclamation from his contemporaries, and of course, he did not live to see its realization.129 Predictably, German Nationalists accused the government of a ‘policy of submission’.130 By March 1930 however, when the Reichstag came to debate and vote on  the acceptance of the terms of the Young Plan following the second Hague Conference, the mood had changed to one of broad support as a more pugnacious tone entered the government’s argument for a vote of acceptance. On 6 March, Julius Curtius, who became foreign minister after Stresemann’s death, called upon the Reichstag to support him in the quest to re-calibrate foreign policy for the future, and barely a week later, Brüning as leader of the Centre Party read on behalf of the government parties a declaration of intent once the Plan was accepted by the Reichstag to Counteract the distress created by the Treaty of Versailles with all the means at the disposal of a peaceful foreign policy. Not the current balance of power, but honour, freedom and equality of peoples must be the sole basis of international relations. The future development of this relationship must make room for the recognition of the as yet unfulfilled necessities of life in Germany. Only in this way can a real liquidation of the past be brought about and a secure peace between peoples develop.131

The vote on the Young Plan was won with a comfortable majority of 265 votes for and 192 against (with three abstentions). If Locarno had been a stepping stone across difficult waters to the banks of reconciliation, then the Reichstag debates on the Young Plan signalled a more assertive stance in which the slippage between the policy of reconciliation and robust revisionism became more pronounced in the political rhetoric of the government. Brüning, who within two weeks of making this speech would be entrusted by Hindenburg to form a new cabinet, was playing with fire. Over the following two years, his government took risks in foreign policy that increasingly asserted Germany’s continental ambitions. Lacking clear authority for a domestic policy of fiscal retrenchment, the chancellor was driven by necessity to achieve foreign policy success that resonated with an increasingly nationalistic atmosphere at home – and in doing so, success provided nourishment for the right’s bellicose nationalism. * After the success of Locarno, the withdrawal of French troops from the Rhineland became the chief preoccupation of successive German chancellors, from Luther to Marx to Müller to Brüning, with the latter’s foreign minister Curtius both reaping and squandering the benefit of Stresemann’s diplomacy. For politicians, the withdrawal of

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55

foreign troops from the Rhineland was not just a question of restoring German national pride, although at a popular level as we shall see below, this was paramount; it was vital to depoliticizing the question of reparations, as Chancellor Müller told representatives to the League of Nations in late 1928. Germany had fulfilled all conditions since Dawes; thus, there was no reason not to reciprocate Germany’s ‘good will’ and invoke Article 431 of the Versailles Treaty which allowed for an early evacuation of the occupied zones.132 A succession of German politicians and dignitaries had accused France of being deficient in reciprocating good will, in spite of visible troop reductions since 1923. As late as February 1928, the historian Professor Otto Hoetzsch, a member of the DNVP and an expert on Germany’s Ostpolitik, expressed his disappointment at the feet-dragging in Paris.133 There was, however, a change of heart by the early summer, as Leopold von Hoesch, the German ambassador to France, noted.134 But when troops did finally withdraw at the end of June 1930, the detritus of soured relations was all too visible in some quarters of government (not least with Curtius himself!), much to the dismay of von Hoesch.135 Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the right bank of the Rhine had been divided into three zones with different parts of the region under military occupation by the Entente Powers for varying periods (numbered 1–12 on Map 3.2).136 Zone 1 (north of line A) was scheduled to be cleared on 10 January 1925; the area between A and B constituting Zone 2 was planned to be cleared in 1930, and Zone 3 in 1935. As a result of the Hague Conference, the Entente Powers agreed to an early evacuation of the third zone (simultaneously with the second zone), set for the end of June 1930.137 The British zone of occupation, incorporating Cologne, had been cleared in January 1926 (exactly a year later than originally planned). Their departure from Cologne triggered celebrations led by the city’s lord mayor, Konrad Adenauer. The choice of the city’s impressive cathedral to hold the celebrations was symbolic, allowing for diverse emotional readings of the event; for some, the Dom was a symbol dating from the Wars of Liberation and the Prussian victory over Napoleon’s army at Leipzig in 1814.138 Crowds assembled and marched through the centre of Cologne at midnight accompanied by the ringing of church bells throughout the city and by patriotic music, later listening to Adenauer proclaim: ‘Listen to me! Cologne is free!’ President Hindenburg was guest of honour at the liberation banquet with its 600 guests.139 The ‘liberation’ of Cologne was celebrated as a major stride on the path to restoring sovereignty and heralded the marked improvement in Germany’s relations with the Entente Powers prior to its entry into the League of Nations in September. But it was only with the ending of the occupation of the Rhineland four years later on 30 June 1930 that emotions of popular nationalism were given full vent. Not since the terms of the Versailles Treaty had been made known and the occupation of the Ruhr did foreign relations galvanize the nation regardless of party, this time in an outpouring of jubilation (there was also retribution against those perceived by nationalists to have collaborated with the French or to have promoted secession from the Reich).140 The withdrawal of allied troops from the occupied districts of the Rhineland was chosen as the overarching theme for that year’s Constitution Day celebrations. Apart from the official ceremony and speeches in the Reichstag, the man charged with organizing the celebrations, the Reichskunstwart Edwin Redslob,141 conceived a

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

56

Emmerich 2

PA TI ON

TH

NETHERLANDS

1

E

Essen

Duisburg

T

Crefeld

RU HE

Elberfeld

LG IAN OCCU

Dusseldorf

THE

BE

A

Aachen

H 3 TIS N BRI TIO Cologne PA CU C O

IN

A

A

Frankfurt

H

G

E

4 Coblenz

M

R

B

Y

N

E

C E N F R

Malmedy

BELGIUM

RH

A

B

Eupen

Dortmund

HR

5

6

Mainz

Darmstadt

C

MB

C

XE

O

LU

B

U

OU

P

RG

Worms

7

A T

8

O

I

L

THE SAAR

Mannheim Rheinau 9

N

10

O

Germersheim

Leopoldshafen

E

R

Metz

11

I

A

N

R

Karlsruhe

N

H

I

A

C

E

Kebl

12

Offenburg

M R

H

G

A

E

L

T

S

E

A

N

A

R

N

E C

Strasbourg

F

Y

R

E

Nancy

Former German boundaries 0

10

20

30

40 Miles

Complied by Col. Lawrence Martin © Foreign Affairs, 1945

Mulhouse Basel

SWITZERLAND

Map 3.2  Occupied zones of Rhineland, 1920–1935*. Reprinted by permission of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, (Vol. 4, No. 1, October 1925). Copyright 2014 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. www.ForeignAffairs.com *Nr 1: Emmerich temporarily occupied by Belgian troops; Nr 2: Ruhr occupied by French and Belgian troops, March 1921 and January 1923 (eventually cleared August 1925); Nr 3: Cologne bridgehead occupied by British and French troops; Nr 4: Koblenz bridgehead occupied by American, then French troops; Nr 5: Mainz bridgehead occupied by French; Nr 6: Frankfurt, April 1920 briefly occupied by French; Nr: 7–11 periodically occupied by French; Nr 12: Offenburg temporarily occupied by French; Kehl occupied by French under terms of the Versailles Treaty. Source: Wilhelm Kreutz/Karl Scherer (eds), Die Pfalz unter französischer Besetzung (Kaiserslautern 1999), p. 12 accessed at http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/image/artikel/ artikel_44493_bilder_value_3_franzbesetzung8.jpg

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series of coordinated events in the Rhineland and across the nation culminating on 10 August in a mass spectacle in the Berlin Stadium. This event began in the early afternoon and was staged before a crowd of circa 30,000 with government dignitaries, including the president, in attendance. The spectacle was based on a libretto Redslob wrote especially for the occasion entitled: ‘Germany’s River’ (Deutschlands Strom), inspired by Ernst Moritz Arndt’s poem ‘Rhein Deutschlands Strom nicht Deutschlands Grenze’ (‘Rhine, Germany’s River not Germany’s Border’, and which was used as the motif for the commemorative coins showing the Reich Eagle symbolically bridging both banks of the Rhine thus representing German unity).142 Arndt’s poem had been about the mass levée against the French in 1813, and Redslob consciously deployed this historical motif as an emotive chord in which the entire nation would be participants in a ‘cultural levée’ of national identity. As Redslob put it, ‘It was the conscious design of a current historical event’.143 Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony brought the festivity to a close.144 The staging of Deutschlands Strom had the desired effect. But to fully appreciate the thinking behind Redslob’s spectacle as an insinuation of the restored nation without its amputations of 1919, we can turn to the dry run that had previously taken place in Wiesbaden on 20 July.145 A theatre-cum-stadium ringed by oaks was created in the former barracks of the French occupation authorities (thus also laden with symbolism) with a capacity for 10,500. For Redslob, the layout, with the trees in the background, had the effect that the boundary between barracks and hinterland was dissolved ‘so that the hard line of demarcation that otherwise often dominates in an arena, completely disappears’. At the beginning of the event, Hindenburg arrived in an open top limousine and drove in an arch around the arena to the cheering crowd. The spectacle commenced with the lone voice of a Herald representing German Unity calling upon the great rivers of the nation to enter the arena. In groups of 500, children dressed in gold and blue entered from three separate entrances, each column representing Germany’s principal rivers: the Elbe/Weser, Weichsel/Oder and Danube. One river was missing: the Rhine. The ‘rivers’ inside the arena repeatedly called out to the missing river – only to hear the sound of rattling chains in response. The Herald after surveying the arena and the German rivers then called to Germany’s missing river whereupon the Rhine entered and stopped at the fourth entrance, the heads of the 500 children bowed ‘waiting for the signal of liberation’.146 The Herald called again and proclaimed the river’s liberation at which point the arena was suddenly flooded with groups of farmers, vintners, artisans, miners, sailors and fishermen, each group wearing traditional costumes and reciting choruses rhythmically denoting their occupations and finally drawing together in a circle chanting: We are the people and we Were encumbered We want to smash The chains of bondage!147

The massed choirs facing the chained Rhine suddenly surged forward breaking its chains with the cry: ‘Freedom!’ ‘Rhine!’ Its ‘waters’ now flooded the arena. At this point of the spectacle, the Reich flag which had been hung at half mast was fully hoisted.

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Rethinking the Weimar Republic

The effect was startling. The arena, overfilled by about 5,000 persons,148 sprang to its feet in jubilation and spontaneously broke into the Deutschlandlied, which had been banned in the zone of occupation for the past decade. For Redslob Listeners and performers have become one, and it is as if the ring widens, as if the whole Rhineland, as if all of Germany took part in this organized celebration of the liberation of the Rhineland.149

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the singing of Schiller’s ‘Freude schöner Götterfunken’ and the Deutschlandlied brought the event to a rousing and emotional close. At this point also the massed choirs turned and faced the audience moving towards it with outstretched arms Thus once again, but now from the inside to the outside, participants and guests of the celebration form a single internally connected community.150

Redslob had successfully adapted the theatrical modernity developed by Erwin Piscator in his ‘total theatre’ to transform not just this event, but the German nation itself into a ‘total work of art’.151 The celebration also typified the ambiguity that had crept into ‘civic pedagogy’ by the beginning of the 1930s (a topic we will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 6). Deutschlands Strom both coincided with and fuelled a resurgence of anti-French sentiment and a flood of war novels glorifying war and the trench experience.152 This begs the question: What exactly was being celebrated in Wiesbaden and again in Berlin? In the libretto, Redslob made clear that the chains of oppression were broken by the Rhinelanders’ ‘will for conciliation’.153 But the message of conciliation was overwhelmed by the surge of emotional nationalism released by Deutschlands Strom. Curtius ratcheted up nationalist fervour when, in his welcome speech at the celebration in Speyer, he told his audience, ‘We are not at the end of this path. We can see this by just a glance at the Palatinate and the whole Saar’.154 The international and domestic contexts of the 1930 celebration of troop with­ drawal from German soil lent nationalist overtones to both the spectacle and its reception. For the first time, the right-wing press joined liberal and social democratic editors in applauding Redslob’s effort.155 In 1930, anti-French sentiment was taking an uncomfortable course, causing concern in government circles and consternation in Paris. For this reason, Redslob was asked to exclude Mendelsohn’s Rheinweinlied, with its overt anti-French text, when staging Deutschlands Strom in Berlin.156 In cultural terms, Redslob had inadvertently contributed to the psychological revision of the Versailles Treaty: the emotional power behind the words ‘Freedom!’ and ‘Rhineland!’ sang by the choir in Wiesbaden and in Berlin could equally apply to all ‘lost’ areas resulting from the Versailles Treaty, notably the Saarland but also to that part of Silesia now in Poland. Hindenburg had dragged his feet over the issue of ratifying the borders with Poland (Part X of the Versailles Treaty and now contained in the Young Plan). His and the government’s joint declaration to the nation in June 1930 that the ‘Vow (Gelöbnis) in this solemn hour is unity! . . .‘­Germany, Germany above all else!’ could be easily interpreted to mean the German lands before Versailles.157

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

59

Thus, the event also harboured the potentials for a more dangerous journey. A counsellor in the Ministry for the Occupied Areas wrote to Redslob extolling his idea of German national identity wrapped up in the currents of its rivers, he and his guests had found the Festspiel strongly emotional – adding ‘the Rhine runs through Europe!’158 Timing is everything. And in the case of the withdrawal of French and Belgian troops, it might be said the timing was unfortunate. What should have been the high point of achievement for Weimar foreign policy became instead a rallying point for those voices long hostile to the republic and its alleged ‘softness’ vis-à-vis the French in particular. Even Hindenburg exploited the evacuation and its attendant celebrations to the advantage of the nationalist right when he used the occasion to blackmail the Prussian government into lifting the ban against the Stahlhelm in the Rhineland by making this a precondition for his appearance with representatives of the Prussian government at the state celebrations held in Mainz.159 The period book-ended by the two Hague Conferences saw a revival of nationalist propaganda directed against what were portrayed as the injustices against Germany since the Versailles  Treaty and behind which stood the hand of France; this material ranged from serious academic and high-level political publications to popular pamphlets.160 Unable to gain approval for his first deflationary budget, Brüning requested the dissolution of the Reichstag on 16 July and set an election for 6 September. In spite of the fact that the German Nationalists had kept up a constant and vocal opposition to Stresemann’s policy of reconciliation throughout the mid-1920s, the DNVP as a party hitherto had failed to capitalize this platform, largely because of the ambivalence within its leadership to European reconciliation.161 The wave of popular nationalism that swept across Germany in the summer of 1930 not only fed into the election, but mainly flowed in the direction of the NSDAP. Historians usually concentrate on the fact that Hitler and his acolytes were able to piggyback on the German Nationalist campaign against the Young Plan (in the form of the campaign for a plebiscite162) and the nationalist fronde that culminated in the Harzburg Rally in October 1931. As a minority in the Reichstag, its record of opposition on foreign policy matters was pretty much negligible in spite of its stridency. Its stunning performance in the September election is no doubt a consequence of its ability to exploit the unfolding economic crisis (as we will see in the following chapter). But little consideration is given to foreign policy and the possible impact of the withdrawal of French troops from the Rhineland on popular nationalism. The election saw a sharp increase in voter participation across the Reich from 72.3 per cent in 1928 to 81.5 per cent, suggesting a strong regional mobilization which need not have been the fruit of Nazi efforts. In particular, voters in the Rhineland and the Palatinate turned out in vast numbers, and while support for Hitler’s party remained below the national average in the Rhineland, in the Palatinate the Nazis’ performance stood 4 per cent above its national gains (Tables 3.2 and 3.3), and tipping over 30 per cent in Bergzabern, Zweibrücken and Pirmasens.163 Strictly speaking, the beneficiary of the wave of popular nationalism that gripped the country that summer and autumn should have been the middling

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60

Table 3.2  Reichstag/Landtag elections in the Rhineland, 1928–1933 (main parties) Year

DNVP

DVP

Zentr.

DDP

SPD

KPD

NSDAP

Others*

1928

9.5

8.2

34.9

2.9

17.5

14.2

1.5

12.1

1930

4.5

4.6

30.1

2.2

12.8

17.4

15.8

11.5

1932

4.2

1.9

34.6

0.8

10.1

15.4

28.3

4.5

1932

4.8

1.4

33.7

0.3

12.0

19.2

26.7

2.2

1932

6.3

2.0

33.2

0.2

11.6

21.3

23.2

2.0

1933

6.6

1.6

30.6

0.3

10.0

15.7

34.7

0.8

a

b c

*Includes Wirtschaftspartei. a Prussian Landtag in April. b Reichstag in July. c Reichstag in November. Figures rounded to nearest decimal point. Source: http://www.gonschior.de/weimar/Preussen/Rheinprovinz/Uebersicht_RTW.html

Table 3.3  Reichstag elections in the Palatinate, 1928–1932 (main parties) Year

DNVP1

DVP

Zentr.

DDP2

SPD

KPD

NSDAP

Others

1928

9.5

8.2

34.9

2.9

17.5

14.2

1.5

12.1

1930

0.8

6.6

24.9

2.3

22.4

10.5

22.8

9.7

a

1932

1.1

1.4

23.8

0.5

17.6

10.7

43.7

1.2

1932

b

1.8

2.1

22.5

0.6

16.1

12.9

42.6

1.4

2.5

1.2

22.7

0.6

16.8

9.0

46.5

0.7

1933

Konservative Schwarz-Weiß-Rot. from 1930 Deutsche Staatspartei. July. b November. 1 2 a

Source: J. Falter, Th. Lindenberger und S. Schumann, Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 86), pp. 71–5.

parties ­associated with the successful withdrawal (both Stresemann and Curtius were from the DVP). But these parties were beset with internal squabbles and divisions; the DNVP, which was never strong in either the Rhineland or the Palatinate suffered from a credibility deficit among the electorate not least because of its internal divisions on policy. In spite of the DNVP’s return to nationalist rhetoric in 1928 after Hermann Müller took over the reins of power at the head of a coalition of ‘Weimar parties’, and the party’s radicalization under the leadership of the right-wing media magnate Alfred Hugenberg, it still found itself vulnerable to Nazi encroachments onto its territory. The NSDAP had been assiduous in putting a distance between itself and the German Nationalists, thus staking out their own

Authority Revitalized: Weimar’s Foreign Policy

61

ground ever since Dawes.164 This now paid dividends. Hitler himself was in little doubt as to where support for the NSDAP was coming from in those halcyon months of 1930. After the Saxony Diet elections, he wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter that the Party was attracting ‘not disappointed democrats but embittered bourgeois nationalists who no longer have any trust in the parties that eternally do deals with the ­Marxists’.165 In addition to representing a high point of Weimar foreign policy, when the republic’s authority should have consolidated the achievement at Locarno, the ending of the Rhineland occupation was also a turning point in which the republic’s authority based on a policy of ‘quiet revision’ gave way to a strident assertion of national interests.

Revitalizing authority: Risk and geopolitics in Mitteleuropa 1930–1936 The revitalization of Germany’s foreign policy had begun with Locarno after which it took on a more assertive tone. The German historian Karl Heinrich Pohl has argued that from this date policy became focused more on Eastern Europe, and this was underwritten by heavy industry interests. For Pohl, this revitalization represented a restorative moment in German foreign policy that anticipates the aggressive policy under Hitler.166 There is much to agree with in Pohl’s analysis and it helps us to better contextualize foreign policy in the three years prior to Stresemann’s death: neither Locarno nor the triumph of the Rhineland constituted a turning point in Germany’s foreign policy so much as a stepping stone on the longer path of re-establishing Germany’s former continental position.167 Before the outbreak of war, Germany had been the second leading international trading nation with 13 per cent of world trade. During the 1920s, its share of world trade had halved to 7 per cent and it had fallen behind France to occupy fourth place. Nevertheless, as a European industrial power it remained the largest on the continent, in spite of the restrictions imposed at Versailles. It was powerful enough to attempt (however briefly) to leverage France in 1926 when that country was undergoing severe economic and currency difficulties. Important too was the recognition of its vital position in Central and Eastern Europe. The agreement with Russia at Rapallo in 1922 was not simply an agreement between two outsiders of the international community, but represented a current of thought within the German Foreign Office based on a long-standing Ostpolitik which emphasized the value of trade, as well as being a deft manoeuvre for regaining German influence vis-à-vis the West by drawing Russia back into European politics.168 For Chancellor Wirth, whose policy of fulfilment seemed to bring few if any tangible political dividends, the agreement struck at Rapallo was also a means of renewing political authority albeit a risky one at both home and abroad.169 Meanwhile, Stresemann’s later resistance to finding an accommodation with Poland through an Ostlocarno was motivated by other considerations. To have agreed the borders would have stymied the ambition of putting back together the

62

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

national body as it had existed before Versailles; and this particular aspect of foreign policy remained a key consideration in subsequent years.170 Thus, Stresemann was not slack when it came to defending traditional German nationalist interests. His supporters, such as his close associate Werner von Rheinbaben, defended his policy of ‘reconciliation’ as being nonetheless ‘energetic and national’.171 On a populist level, anti-Polish sentiments were never too far behind those levelled by German nationalists against France. Indeed, while Locarno marked a high point in relations with Paris, mutual recrimination and hostility underwrote relations with Warsaw throughout these years.172 If, as we have suggested, Locarno represented a ‘stepping stone’ rather than a turning point in Germany’s continental ambitions, we can better understand foreign policy in the decade from the mid-twenties by placing it into a longer time frame. This means that Stresemann’s premature death in October 1929 was less a factor in redefining the direction of foreign policy than it was in accelerating the tempo. The collapse of world trade inaugurated by Black Friday on the American Stock Exchange in the same month as Stresemann’s death created an early opportunity for Berlin to test its revitalized continental aspirations. Against this background of international economic crisis and the accompanying fallout in international relations, German foreign policy became more strident in its revisionist aims. The depression removed Washington from the European arena, diverted Britain’s attention towards its empire and weakened France, its continental political isolation sealed with the election of Leon Blum’s socialistdominated Popular Front government in 1936 while the rest of Europe (and Britain) veered to the right.173 Diplomats in the foreign office, notably permanent state secretary Bernhard von Bülow, saw the opportunity to revive traditional ideas of a German continental strategy that dovetailed with popular sentiments on Germany’s ‘unfettered’ place, if not in the sun, then at least in Europe.174 Meanwhile, in order to shore up political authority at home at a time when domestic policies were provoking public revolt, Stresemann’s ill-suited successor Curtius focused foreign policy on ‘freedom and equality of rights’ even if that meant squandering the goodwill relationship to France.175 Speaking to the Reichstag, Curtius remarked that ‘the aims of German [foreign] policy were determined by the total situation of Germany and international conditions’. As the latter conditions deteriorated, policy (and politics) driven by a ‘patriotic wave’ at home became increasingly disposed to risk as it eventually turned to the geopolitical idea of a German Mitteleuropa which not only looked to the east but to the successor states of the Danubian basin and further beyond.176 The increasingly aggressive nature of Germany’s foreign policy revitalized the idea of Mitteleuropa authoritarian politics at home in order to succeed abroad. * The liberal aspiration for a German-led Mitteleuropa or ‘middle Europe’ was based on geopolitical ideas dating back to the earlier part of the previous century; it had been a key motive in the discussions for a greater-German solution to the fragmented German states in the Frankfurt Parliament during the1848 revolutions.177 Bismarck had favoured the lesser-German (kleindeutsch) solution to German unification since it gave greater authority to a Prussian-led Germany.178 Nonetheless, ideas on a

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63

German-led Mitteleuropa fed into trade policies in the final decade of the nineteenth century after Bismarck’s departure from office. His successor Leo von Caprivi favoured the idea of a free trade bloc within a mitteleuropäisch customs union that found support among Germany’s exporters. This vision was given some substance a little later with the founding of the Mitteleuropäischen Wirtschaftsverein in  1904 by the economist Julius Wolff, but in spite of extensive trade links, the dream of integration remained elusive.179 The war in 1914 revived the idea for integrating more closely trade between Berlin and its allies; a policy that was underpinned by the publication in  1915 of Friedrich Naumann’s influential book Mitteleuropa with its vision of German cultural and economic dominance.180 Naumann, who together with Hugo Preuß, Max Weber and the editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, Theodor Wolff, would found the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP),181 argued that Germany’s geopolitical position combined with its industrial might predisposed it for an organic union with the surrounding states, notably Austria and Hungary. The linguistic and cultural glue of this vast region was provided by Germany and the Habsburg Empire; thus, Mitteleuropa was underwritten by a cultural and linguistic heritage that placed the German ‘tribe’ (Stamm) at its centre.182 The timing of the book’s publication was not an accident. Before the war, national authority and power were measured by trade and the latter was linked to the growth of markets and their security, giving rise to the imperial rivalry that immediately preceded the war. A Mitteleuropa would balance the ‘political and economic giants’ to the east (Russia) and to the west (Britain) and ensure independence in a world constituted by empires.183 Thus, the war fought on two fronts was seen in many quarters as a defence against hostile imperial forces keen to cut off the oxygen of German trade and with this, German aspirations as a world power.184 This problem had become accentuated by the naval blockade necessitating the need to secure vital resources for the war economy in order to make Germany self-sufficient. This was Stresemann’s argument in April 1916 in an analysis of the economic origins of the war and the necessity for Germany to secure its Mitteleuropa trade bloc by militarily strengthening itself in the west and east.185 As we noted above, before the war Germany had expanded its trade to become the second greatest trading nation in the world. In his exposition to the Reichstag, Stresemann produced trade figures to show that Germany’s exports were on a par with that of Great Britain, a third of whose trade was with its empire. He was of course legitimizing the German case for colonies; but importantly, the bulk of its own trade (valued at 9 billion marks) was with its continental partners.186 Naumann’s own contribution to the debates emphasized union with Austro-Hungary as a geopolitical necessity.187 Germany’s early military successes in the east after the defeat of the Russian army at Tannenberg held out the prospect for continental hegemony, in spite of the emerging military stalemate on the western front. For these deputies, such a dominance of the continent by Germany would guarantee future stability and peace.188 The Reichstag debates featuring discussion of the German idea of Mitteleuropa revealed not only the claim to German economic dominance. Independent Social Democrat deputy Georg Ledebour outlined how a German-led Mitteleuropa could be transformed from a project of German imperialism into a vehicle for European peace.189 The veteran Social Democrat thinker Karl Kautsky, responding directly to

64

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

Naumann’s Mitteleuropa (which had been well received in Social Democrat circles) and the annexationists’ vision of a German-led continent, was more sceptical. Like Ledebour, Kautsky believed in a union of nations based on parity and not power, seeing behind Naumann’s vision of a trading bloc at the heart of the continent the hand of German imperialism, leading him to remark: ‘Then, to reverse the well known Clauswitz saying, Central Europe would have the task to continue the policy of war with other means in peace’.190 Already in these discussions we can see the polyvalent character of foreign policy under the republic: on the one hand, the European project based on conciliation and embodied by the ‘shuttle-diplomacy’ of Stresemann-Briand, and on the other hand, simultaneously, the restoration of continental economic hegemony that after 1933 looked more and more like Naumann’s Mitteleuropa. The terms of the Versailles Treaty curbed both its continental and its world trading position as overseas and European markets were lost, pushing Germany back into fourth place behind France. Foreign policy after 1924 steadily was geared to re-establishing its lost continental position. Thus, the attempt to fuse rump Austria and Germany in 1918/19 (desired equally by the Austrians but denied by the Treaty of St Germain), later the (thwarted) Customs Union 1930, and finally success with the Anschluss 1938, reflect the German idea of Mitteleuropa and the economic importance of Austria as a springboard to Central and Southeastern Europe.191 The importance of this region for raw materials and as a market had originated in the 1890s.192 Traditionally, Germany had traded with smaller European and Scandinavian economies such as the Netherlands and Denmark for dairy and meat products, or Sweden for wood, but also had strong trade links to England; this changed during the depression as these markets closed down. From 1932/33 using preferential bilateral tariff agreements, Berlin embarked on a vigorous trade drive into Central and Southeastern Europe that was to last the decade, buying primary products in exchange for German-made finished goods. Through a system of barter, cash-strapped Balkan economies built up large favourable balances that drew them closer to the German orbit. An early analysis written in January 1935 by the SPD leadership in exile in Prague saw in this development not so much a process based on an ‘organic organization of the European economy’ but ‘feudal-imperialist plans’ in which the ‘greater economic sphere . . . was the path to achieving power over [Central] and Southeastern Europe’.193 The report made a differentiation between traditional aims and those of the Nazis. But in reality this separation was cosmetic. Important firms such as Otto Wolff A. G., Rheinmetall, I. G. Farben, Norddeutsche Aluminium A. G., Krupp and Siemens had been expanding their activities in the Balkans since the later 1920s, often through investing technical goods and services and through intensifying the exploration for and exploitation of minerals.194 Meanwhile, the Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank took a keen interest in the investment opportunities in the region (and by proxy through the Creditanstalt in Vienna).195 Each of these corporations, like much of ‘big industry’, was a beneficiary of the change of government in 1933.196 Utilizing foreign economic policy to assert continental aspirations was not confined to the Third Reich, as evident in trade relations with Yugoslavia and with Bulgaria under the Weimar Republic.197 The intensification of trade with the six countries

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comprising Southeastern Europe (Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Turkey and Yugoslavia) from the early 1930s, as well as attention eastwards, was a central plank of policy aimed at ensuring Germany’s continental position. Rather than seeing this orientation as a break in foreign policy, it represented more a shift into a higher gear as opportunities were availed of. Nevertheless, as both Hans Paul Höpfner and HansJürgen Schröder have argued, there was a difference between expansion of trade and investment under the revisionist policy of the later Weimar period and the aggressive policy after 1933. Over the following years up to 1936/37, foreign policy became increasingly focused on manoeuvring Germany into a key position of influence in Central and Southeastern Europe. From the beginning of the 1930s, the foreign ministry took a path of action to prevent a Balkan federation (Donauföderation) – seen as a threat to Germany’s economic and political interests and favoured by Italy, France and Britain, from emerging. In a memorandum dated 2 March 1932 to the ambassador in Vienna and a second one at the end of the month circulated to his colleagues in the region, von Bülow stated categorically that there should be no ambiguity in conveying to the respective governments the negative repercussions to their economies of such an initiative were it to materialize.198 As part of this strategy, cementing closer ties with Austria, and also with Hungary, became paramount.199 From 1933, it extended to the region in general, and by the middle of the decade, the political dimensions of close economic ties to Berlin were barely disguised.200 Reporting to Berlin in  1935, the German envoy in Athens noted: In discussing the economic exchanges, I endeavoured to make clear to the King that Greece could not live without her German customers and that in particular, a reduction or cessation of our purchases of tobacco must lead to the impoverishment of the Macedonian peasants and thus to grave disturbances in Greek domestic politics. Careful fostering of these relations [between Germany and Greece] was therefore as much an economic as a political imperative. . . . I said I assumed that the King must be much concerned that the projected re-equipping of his armed forces should transform them into an effective instrument of defence which would give Greece greater political weight, especially with her allies, and that he should be concerned to bind the armed forces to his person and thus provide himself with a reliable bulwark for his throne in the ever-changing currents of internal politics.201

Berlin’s manipulation of those countries drawn into its economic orbit was motivated by its quest to attain autarky in what it saw as a hostile world.202 Whereas the conciliatory policies of the mid-1920s had seen an amelioration of the friend-foe paradigm, from the early 1930s this thinking had returned in full force bringing policy deliberations full circle to the lesson learnt from World War I. As a foreign office circular from 1936 put it: In future, German commercial policy will no longer be able as in the past, to leave it to the hazard of technical production or market influences to decide from which countries Germany should obtain her indispensable raw materials

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Rethinking the Weimar Republic and foodstuffs. [She] will be intent on seeing that these articles are obtained as far as possible from such countries as will be prepared and able to continue to supply Germany even in times of economic, financial or political crisis. The safeguarding of economic and political independence therefore makes it in the long run necessary to plan systematically our imports of raw materials and foodstuffs.203

This circular typically reflects two decades of continuity in German foreign policy thinking. When Curtius made his reference to the Saarland in his Speyer speech in 1930, the vocabulary of ‘encirclement’, almost certainly not heard within government circles since the war, was re-entering the political lexicon. The revision of the Versailles Treaty from 1924 until 1929 had been largely risk free and largely in concert with the Entente Powers. After Stresemann’s death, caution was thrown to the wind as foreign policy returned to the gambling table as the German players placed bets on ever higher stakes in their quest to break the ‘shackles of Versailles’. A gambler’s mentality appeared to seize hold of German foreign policy: it was reflected in Curtius’s abortive attempt to form a customs union with Austria and in Brüning’s announcement in  1932 that Germany could (or would) no longer pay ‘political’ reparations; it is alluded to in the private correspondence of Ernst von Weiszäcker, an undersecretary of state in the foreign office; we can see the pokerplayer in the cool hand of the permanent secretary of state, Bernhard von Bülow, whose reports both analysed and shaped foreign policy; like his boss Konstantin von Neurath, Bülow used bluff as a tactic when projecting German interests. The analogy to a game of poker is apposite. We saw above how Brockdorff-Rantzau played for high stakes at Versailles as if at the poker table. The discussions during the first months of Hitler’s cabinet (before its quasi reshuffling in November) set the tone for later policy. The difference between the situation in 1933 and the earlier period was the changing international climate that appeared to open up the opportunity for Germany to play a more aggressive hand in the game of diplomatic bluff. The key foreign policy issue that appeared to dominate the agenda was that of Germany’s right to equality of military security rather than the consensus of collective security encapsulated in the League of Nations and under review at the ongoing Disarmament Conference. This policy linked directly to the quest for securing vital raw materials for industry and cheap foodstuffs for the German population – the two elements that were believed to have undermined Germany’s war effort from 1916. In a wide-ranging report to the cabinet meeting on 7 April 1933, von Neurath reiterated that Germany’s foreign policy would still be determined by the need to revise the conditions of the Versailles Treaty (within the parameters of Article 19).204 Departing by degree only from the approach of his predecessors, von Neurath claimed that the Treaty had weakened Germany much more than hitherto acknowledged, notably with regard to military parity especially vis-à-vis Poland. France was still a hostile nation; and the English could not be trusted, but following the logic of Realpolitik might be won over to support Germany in the interests of a continental balance of power. After laying out the various positions, von Neurath was confident that Germany’s geopolitical position would enable it to prepare for the eventuality of a defensive war which might arise from a shift from a ‘drip-by-drip’ policy to a bolder

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revision of the territorial conditions of the Versailles Treaty. To this end, Hitler was prepared to abandon the Disarmament Conference and to leave the League, and later, send German troops in March 1936 into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, flagrantly breaching Articles 42 and 43 of the Versailles Treaty, each time risking sanctions and even possible military intervention.205 Alan Bullock portrays Hitler’s behaviour as akin to a ‘gambler’ at the diplomatic card table; each win made him raise the stakes.206 We do not need to recount in detail the trajectory of the Third Reich’s foreign policy as sketched by von Neurath in April, only to note that his prognosis of the world situation in  1933 and the solution to it (as far as Germany was concerned) represented an intensification of rather than a break from earlier foreign policy goals that nonetheless accepted the eventuality of conflict.207 Von Neurath did not think that Germany should leave the League; nor did he think that Berlin should throw down the gauntlet to Paris; but as far as Germany’s Eastern borders were concerned, Neurath envisaged a ‘total’ rather than ‘temporary and compromise solutions’ (‘Zwischen- und Teillösungen’).208 Guiding von Neurath’s approach to Germany’s geopolitical position was the spectre of encirclement, an old theme that had underwritten policy decisions in the imperial period and which had been at the core of wartime debates in the Reichstag on military and economic security. This idea of encirclement, never far from policy formulation, had edged its way back to the centre of foreign policy by the beginning of the 1930s and had a direct impact on the nature of authority at home.

Conclusion In  1933, traditionalists and Nazi leaders were agreed that the long-term goals of territorial revision with its attendant military risk could only be achieved provided Germany had the economic wherewithal to withstand the demands of war and, importantly, the nation was prepared for this and accordingly strengthened internally.209 In other words, national sovereignty expressed through an assertive policy of expansion through the revision of the post-war settlement required an authoritarian approach at home in order to ensure unity of national purpose. After Hitler delivered his so-called peace speech on 17 May in which he portrayed Germany being forced to take a stand over security because of allied intransigence at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, the Reichstag resoundingly approved a motion brought by the NSDAP, Centre Party and BVP expressing its confidence in government policy.210 Seven months later, the Reichstag election and the plebiscite on the government’s foreign policy purported to display an overwhelming acclamation for Hitler. In a fawning vote of congratulations on behalf of the government, the Vice Chancellor von Papen eulogized Hitler for achieving the ‘total state’ and for bringing unity to the nation and a determination to German politics that had an impact far beyond its borders, ‘also because the necessity of a peaceful re-ordering of Europe according to the law of right and fairness (Gesetz von Recht und Gerechtigkeit) has henceforth entered a new and decisive phase’.211

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The meaning of this goal of ‘re-ordering Europe’ depended in which cabinet one sat: in the early years, it meant the need to vitiate the worse aspects of punishment and exclusion under the Versailles Treaty; between 1924 and 1929, it was a matter of re-inserting Germany into the larger diplomatic picture; from 1930 onwards, ‘re-ordering Europe’ meant precisely that and it was to be achieved by the rejection of the remaining constraints of the Versailles Treaty. What remained of the Treaty in 1933 can be seen as increasingly ‘soft’ policy targets easily removed in a game of diplomatic bluff; here, Hitler gained where his predecessors had failed both bolstering his reputation as leader and statesman and stabilizing his regime.212 For the diplomats in the German foreign office, the goal was more long term: namely to complete the business of establishing a continental Mitteleuropa bloc based on Germany’s ‘natural’ geopolitical leadership that had been interrupted by defeat. Traditional and Nazi motives for pursuing this aim intersected from 1933 and required a different type of authority to that offered by Weimar’s parliamentary system, as we shall see in the final chapters of this study.

4

The Authority of Money

Only with money can one start to be a decent person. Not even the air is good when one doesn’t have money; one cannot open the window because the expensive warm air is lost. One cannot bathe because hot water costs coal. The razor blades are old and scrape. One skimps with laundry – no tablecloth, no napkin. One saves on soap. The hair brush has no more bristles, the coffee pot is cracked and patched, the spoons have turned black. Inside the pillows are heavy lumps of bad, old feathers. Whatever breaks, remains broken. Nothing is done. The insurance policy must be paid. And one doesn’t even know that one lives the wrong way, one believes it must be so. . . . One becomes a completely different person when one has money, when one can buy.1

Introduction If the comfort of ordinary Germans depended on the amount of money they had in their pocket, as suggested above by the character of Kringelein, a protagonist in Vicki Baum’s novel Menschen im Hotel, then the authority of the republic hinged to a large degree on its ability to ensure that material security. As we know, successive Weimar governments for the most part faced insurmountable obstacles to delivering material stability. There is broad agreement that the experience of monetary chaos in the early years and material distress during the later years of depression created an unbridgeable gulf between the republic and people. Even the period of relative stabilization between 1924 and 1929, it is argued, had a fiscal sting in its tail.2 Germany was not alone among European economies to suffer the roller-coaster ride of inflation and depression during the interwar years. Germany’s post-war inflation was similar to those of the successor states of Central and Eastern Europe (after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), as internal and extraneous factors arising from a messy post-war settlement fuelled instability. In particular, Hungary and Poland suffered debilitating hyperinflations, as too did the rump state of Austria. In each case and similar to Germany, stability only came about after intervention in the form of an internationally floated stability loan and a currency reform. Nor was monetary instability in the early post-war years confined to this region of Europe. Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and France also suffered inflationary pressures. Indeed, with the exception of Britain and Czechoslovakia, few post-war societies escaped inflation.3

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From 1929 until the mid-1930s, hardly a country in Europe escaped the fallout from Wall Street’s ‘Black Friday’, characterized by falling production, contraction of markets, widespread cuts in welfare and mass unemployment.4 The Great Depression tested liberal democracy everywhere with the 1930s seeing a discernible shift to the right in Europe (with the exception of France which swung to the left in 1936). But while Italy and to a lesser extent Poland saw a radicalization in fascist and proto-fascist policies, there was not the same extreme version of racial fascism as espoused by Hitler’s regime especially from 1935, as Detlev Peukert noted.5 Part of the explanation for this is the role of Weimar governments in managing the economy and the implications this had for the authority of the republic. In 1918, the republic was declared by its leaders to be a social state that held out the promise of a better life for ordinary Germans. The programme of welfare implicit in the ‘social state’ promised a redistribution of wealth in order to pay for it and was met with reservation and hostility in some quarters of industry and business. When that better life failed to materialize for the mass of Germans, the natural authority of republican democracy foundered on blighted expectations. It is this aspect of the economic life of the republic that forms the focus of the present chapter. For as Martin Geyer recently argued, by concentrating exclusively on the economic policy argument, we lose sight of the experience of ordinary citizens.6 What changes, if any, did the revolution of 1918 bring for the millions of families and households who had lived through four years of extreme hardship and sacrifice brought about by the war? Did the establishment of a parliamentary democracy with its constitutional promises for welfare, work and health have any meaningful impact on their lives? What did it mean to experience the inflation, the years of relative stabilization, or the depression? These are important questions and money lies at their heart. In the period following the war – during the years of inflation, there was too much of it and of dwindling value; in the later years during the depression, there was not enough of it and it was expensive; in the years in between, getting it proved elusive. In what follows, we chart the experiences of ordinary Germans during each of the three distinct phases of Weimar’s economy.

The early parameters of authority: Inflation Studies of Weimar’s economy have largely focused on the question of constraints, with historians arguing over the degree to which there was room for policy manoeuvre, both during the inflation period but particularly in the later period under the chancellorship of Heinrich Brüning.7 It is well known that policy decisions under the republic had to take into account international players as well as domestic interests. The issue of reparations looms large in this respect and is hardly distinguishable from domestic politics. Underpinning economic considerations was the question of authority – whether that of governments or that of employers. Interest politics and state authority had become closely entangled since the Hindenburg Programme and this situation continued after 1918; only now, it was fraught with contradictions in the changed arena of democracy. During the early period, governments sought to avert political and

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social radicalization through buying support of capital and labour equally. The result was, as Harold James notes, ‘consensus through the printing press’.8 A decade later, the willingness for compromise was over as big business and conservative political forces took advantage of the depression to reassert their authority of ‘Herr im Haus’ vis-à-vis the unions and Social Democracy, finally accomplished after 1933.9 The material and political implications of the republic’s economic policies whether those of consensus or conflict for the ordinary citizen are dealt with later in this chapter. Before examining them, we trace the early economic parameters within which the republic’s authority was shaped. * The devastating inflation of early Weimar had its origins in the war. Most of the belligerents financed their war effort through a mixture of taxation, the liquidation of assets and borrowing.10 Bethmann Hollweg’s government had been precluded from choosing the first two, not least because Germany’s assets were frozen and because the country lacked a central tax system. There was also little appetite for raising taxes (which also would have clashed with classical economic thought). Over the course of the war, only 11.1 per cent of expenditure was covered by taxation; in addition to issuing war bonds, the only way to finance the war effort was through paper credit. Between 1914 and 1918, somewhere in the region of 171.8 billion marks were raised this way (accounting for 81.8 per cent of the total cumulative budget of 211.6 billion marks).11 This policy injected an inflationary pressure into the economy, although this was not recognized at the time.12 By 1918, the public debt had swollen to around 150 billion marks or three times its size in 1914. Had Germany won the war, the vanquished powers would have carried the financial burden. But Germany was the defeated power, thus the maxim that ‘the enemy would pay’ now fell at its own doorstep. The Entente Powers demanded reparations. As we saw in the previous chapter, Germany’s liability was set down in Clause 231 of the Versailles Treaty (the ‘War Guilt Clause’). But until March 1921 when the Reparations Commission fixed Germany’s liability at 132 billion gold marks, the total indemnity was left unspecified, causing internal instability and prolonged international tension, particularly with France. It also impinged directly on the course inflation would take. Faced with an unspecified reparations demand and a revolutionary situation at home, the only choice left to government was to continue to borrow and simply print its way out of the crisis. As a result, the public debt continued its upward climb. By the end of March 1920, it looked as if the budget deficit was veering out of control, and this was having a stronger negative impact on the value of the currency and on the balance of payments.13 A number of historians, Karl Hardach among them, are critical of this policy of deficit spending, seeing in it the root cause of the hyperinflation from mid1922.14 Moreover, Niall Ferguson cites one of the earliest (monetarist) studies of the inflation namely that by Bresciani-Turroni published in Italian in 1931, to claim that the cost benefit of inflation to Germany was largely a negative one, since it discouraged investment and encouraged moral and economic laxity.15 However, to have balanced the budget in these early years would have meant deepening the political crisis, thereby

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endangering the fledgling republican state. Thus, the twin concerns of domestic politics and international pressures encouraged the early post-war authorities to pursue inflationary policies. This helped to stabilize the Weimar Republic and mostly everyone benefited.16 For this reason, Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich argues that understanding the inflation cannot be reduced to a monetarist interpretation but requires consideration of what he terms ‘the political conjuncture cycle’.17 Thus, historians, such as Werner Abelshauser, emphasize less the crisis character of the inflation than its positive effects in helping post-war reconstruction. This is a ‘lesser evil’ approach that has not gone unchallenged, especially by those historians such as Niall Ferguson and to some extent Harold James, who have been critical of what primarily is a Keynesian interpretation of the inflation.18 By providing cheap paper credit to industry, early Weimar governments ensured that manufacturing was kept on its feet during the transition from war to peace; meanwhile, distributional conflicts over profits and wages between capital and labour were eased, for the time being at least. Responding to defeat and revolution, employers and trade union leaders had agreed to cooperate in order to secure the sovereignty of the Reich and to avert the radicalization of the revolution. The Central Working Community Agreement of 15 November 1918, better known as the Stinnes-Legien Agreement after the two principal signatories, the Rhineland industrial magnate Hugo Stinnes and the labour leader Carl Legien, reaffirmed the wartime Burgfrieden.19 But the degree to which this agreement was successful can be questioned, especially given that workplace authority was heavily contested in these early years, as it had been during the war years, with employers seeking to curb concessions to labour. In 1922 alone, there were 4,300 stoppages involving over one and half million strikers and with a loss of 2.3 million working days.20 If creeping inflation up to 1921 had its origins in the conditions arising from a lost war and revolution, then from the early summer of that year, a toxic combination of domestic and extraneous factors (not least the assassinations of finance minister Matthias Erzberger in June 1921 and foreign minister Walther Rathenau a year later, and the continuing friction with France) resulted in a collapse in international confidence in Germany’s currency. The terms of the Versailles Treaty had led to bitter wrangling over the reparations question, as we have seen. As we saw previously, the political mantra coming from all sides in the Reichstag was that Germany did not have the capacity to pay; but of course, governments had little choice but to pay. The question of the level of reparations, Germany’s ability to pay and the method of payment lay at the heart of Germany’s hyperinflation from late 1922. Following the armistice, the question of how much Germany should pay was left open, largely because the allies could not agree among themselves. This was only resolved at the London Conference in March 1921 when the Reparations Commission settled on 132 million gold marks. This huge sum was considered to be unrealistic and ‘unreasonable’, and not just by Germans. The British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote of the folly of a ‘Carthaginian Peace’ that sought to ‘squeeze’ Germany until one could ‘hear the pips squeak’.21 Before 1924, reparations took the form of material goods (services, coal, timber, railway rolling stock etc.), and only from 1924, after stabilization and the introduction of a reformed currency – the Rentenmark, did actual cash transfers take place, totalling

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11.2 billion RM up to the summer of 1932, and these were largely financed out of the American loans that flowed to Germany in the wake of the Dawes Plan. Before this date, the problem is how to calculate the value of reparations in a period of inflation. Versions of the amounts paid differed wildly, depending on who was calculating them. French estimates tended to undervalue reparations, while those made by the German authorities overvalued them. Thus, the Paris Reparations Commission claimed that only 9.6 billion gold mark had been paid up to 1922, whereas German sources gave over four times that amount. Lujo Brentano, for instance, calculated that Germany had delivered reparations to the value of 36.2 billion gold mark by the end of 1922. Brentano’s figure was closer to that of the London Institute of Economics, which estimated a total of 25.8 billion gold mark up to the end of September 1922. After this date, the figures are practically incalculable due to the turmoil of hyperinflation.22 Throughout this period, the German government employed a battery of delaying tactics, resisting reparations as far as it was able to. But the failure to meet obligations (together with alleged non-fulfilment of other treaty requirements) merely antagonized the French, as successive notes to the German government show.23 The Catalan journalist Eugenie Xammar reported with biting irony on the dire consequences for the mark (and for the franc) resulting from the stand-off between victors and vanquished.24 This stand-off had a grave impact on the internal stability of the country and led to a rapid decline in confidence evidenced by a ‘flight from the mark’ from mid-1922. By that date, the value of the mark had been reduced to a mere 1 per cent of its 1913 value (it had already fallen to 7 per cent by mid-1921). When French and Belgian troops occupied the right bank of the Rhine in January 1923 after Germany defaulted on delivery of a scheduled payment, the mark was worth 0.0004 per cent, or put another way, mortgage bonds valued at 10,000 marks in pre-war currency were now worth 4 gold marks.25 The last phase of inflation was thus shaped by a crisis in international relations. By this time, the German government was facing severe internal threats to political stability and to the integrity of the Reich. The nationalist backlash against the French spurred Wilhelm Cuno’s government into bank-rolling passive resistance, with disastrous fiscal consequences: by October, the mark was worthless and the country bankrupted. Any monetary gains made before the summer of 1922, were now virtually wiped out. But according to Knut Borchardt, the damage had already been done before the Ruhr crisis produced hyperinflation, that is, in the second half of 1922. As he wryly observes, ‘It is surely insignificant if one retains a thousandth of one’s assets or a millionth millionth’. * Borchardt’s observation goes to the heart of the debate among historians as to the so-called winners and losers of the inflation. There are no doubts that among the big losers were foreign investors who, up to the summer of 1922, speculated with the devalued mark. One of the leading historians of the inflation Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich has estimated that up to 1.8 billion dollars of so-called hot money flowed to Germany in these years, an unparalleled sum. If foreign investors got their fingers burned, then the contrary was true for the Weimar state, which not only liquidated war debts but was also able to offset the cost of reparations (at least until mid-1922).26 To be sure, the turbulent conditions infected the political arena; the oft-quoted instability of the

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Weimar political system owes its reputation to the period between March 1920 and November 1923 when there were seven cabinet changes.27 But the inflation’s final phase actually led to a strengthening of executive powers through the use of Article 48.28 The political system, unlike the currency, did not collapse. The authority of the Weimar Republic during these early years was vulnerable to internal and external challenges that demanded a policy of compromise forcing otherwise hostile interest groups into alliances for mutual benefit. Charles Maier has argued that the German inflation signified a ‘tacit’ agreement between unions and industry. But he also argues that it reflected a political paralysis when it came to acting decisively and independently of corporate interests. As Maier states, Successive governments in Berlin reflected either a stalemate among different interests – the Joseph Wirth-Walther Rathenau cabinets of 1921–22 sought to keep Social Democratic support and business cooperation simultaneously – or else they reflected the conventional wisdom of the industrial and financial community as under ­chancellor Cuno (1922–23). The price of industry’s toleration was fiscal paralysis.29

This accommodation meant that industrial and white-collar unions strengthened by the revolution of 1918 could secure wage increases for their nine million members, while employers profited from ever cheaper paper credit and rising income while seeing the burden of debt wiped out by currency depreciation. However, the picture on closer scrutiny is much more complex than suggested by this simple formula of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.30 In the first place, although some workers, such as the Ruhr miners that Rudolf Tschirbs studied, could keep ahead of a tumbling currency well into the period of hyperinflation, not all workers could keep abreast.31 The Ruhr miners were an exceptional case. The evidence shows that industrial wages struggled to keep pace with prices.32 A working man with a family earned far too little to sustain a household at the best of times, including during the boom of 1920/21, let alone in 1922/23 when the real value of wages was obliterated by rampant inflation. A contemporary report cited the example of a married railway worker during the later stages of the inflation who struggled to support his three children and his aged mother, in spite of their small additional contributions to the household income. Like many workers, he kept a small allotment for food, carried out odd chores for a small payment, but there was absolutely no spare cash in that family, not for alcohol, not even for tobacco, let alone any other ‘luxuries’ such as a newspaper, a book or even a rare visit to the popular theatre (Volksbuhne) or cinema.33 One did not need to be a low-paid blue-collar worker to experience the constraints of inflation-induced poverty. While some white-collar employees in both the private and public spheres were able to maintain their living standards, up to a point, others did not. Much depended on the ability to negotiate salary levels, but also on geographical location and the regional cost of living index, as Andreas Kunz has shown in one of the few major studies to focus on this group.34 Kunz argues that while white-collar incomes declined during the war years, this was less the case in the post-war inflation; indeed, some employees actually recouped the loss. Nonetheless, particular groups of employees did fall behind  – in relative terms if not absolutely, and this stored up problems that were to become noticeable in the years following the inflation.

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The diminishing value of money led to a marked deterioration in the physical condition of the German population, already weakened by material deprivation during the war and exacerbated by the allied blockade of 1919. Infant mortality rose, while the number of stillbirths – a sign of the poor physical health of mothers – remained high. Malnutrition was rife, particularly among the elderly and youngsters, as a number of reports for the German Congress of Cities (Deutsche Städtetag) found. In the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin in 1922, for instance, nine-tenths of 450 preschool children between the ages of two and six were diagnosed by medical officers as undernourished (a decade later, it was estimated that 55,000 pupils in Berlin were undernourished). Combined with the notorious conditions of Berlin’s slum tenements, it is not surprising that such children were susceptible to scurvy, rickets and tuberculosis.35 If workers were not uniformly ‘winners’, then recent research has also challenged the oversimplified picture of a middle class destroyed by inflation.36 Not all businessmen were in the privileged position of the great Ruhr magnates who can be counted among the ‘winners’ of the inflation. More typical was the uneven experience of the numerous small entrepreneurs and family-run firms in urban areas. Having benefited from inflation up to mid-1922, many of these found themselves in a precarious position and a large number faced ruin as purchasing power and rents collapsed as a consequence of hyperinflation. An important study by Rudolf Küstermeier showed that between 1919 and 1923, up to one-third of urban property changed hands, and independent businesses became drawn into dependency on municipal authorities or large corporations.37 Even though many property-owners and small to medium businesses had redeemed their mortgages with worthless money, they faced other costs so that in terms of how they saw their balance sheets, the inflation did more harm than good. This point of view was widespread in the countryside where the small holding farmer, like his urban counterpart, initially had been a beneficiary of inflation. Agriculture still accounted for between a third and a quarter of the economically active population in the interwar years. In contrast to the East Elbian estates, most holdings in the NorthWest of Germany and in Bavaria were small to medium size comprising independent farmers and unpaid family helpers, with some casual hired hands.38 The studies by Robert Moeller on the farmers of Rhineland-Westphalia and Jonathon Osmond on the peasantry in the Palatinate show how farmers were ‘winners’ whose capital debts were negated by inflation but who nevertheless thought of themselves as ‘losers’.39 This perception was based on a resentment of the regulatory state that had emerged in the war rather than to actual material loss. During the latter stages of the hyperinflation, Stresemann’s government resorted to emergency decrees to control prices and rents, raise taxation and regulate food markets, thus prolonging the hated ‘control economy’ (Zwangswirtschaft) of the wartime period. Farmers, like their urban propertied and trading counterparts, came to see themselves as the ‘whipping boys’ of government regulatory practices. The 100,000-strong Rhenish Peasant Association of Rhineland Westphalia, for example, depicted its members as politically disenfranchised and economically ‘enserfed’ by the republic. Their claim of ‘enserfment’ also arose from the fact these were frequently the very people whose investments had been wiped out by inflation. But providing they had other sources of income, their predicament was not as severe as that of the so-called

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rentier class comprising investors, savers, pensioners and others on fixed incomes, even though within this group too the impact varied.40 Of all the Mittelstand groups, this one was most likely to be the ‘loser’ and the most antagonistic towards the republic.41 Michael Hughes’ study of small and medium-sized creditors showed that collectively they lost to the tune of 200 billion marks in assets (savings, mortgages and government bonds). Indeed, as Hughes points out, between 1918 and 1923 the inflation ‘obliterated the life savings of millions and precipitated hundreds of thousands into poverty’.42 An example of this depletion in modest capital can be found in the north German city of Altona where in  1914 just over seven thousand taxpayers paid wealth tax (Vermögenssteuer); ten years later, this number had been halved.43 This local picture is supported by national data (Table 4.1). By the mid-1920s, 62.1 per cent of Weimar’s taxpayers fell into the lowest band (annual income of less than 1,200 RM) compared to 47.6 per cent in 1913. During the peak year for economic performance in 1928, 88 per cent of the republic’s 29 million taxpayers were in the two lowest bands (in spite of a slight improvement in the two lower bands); at least 16 million taxpayers had annual incomes less than 1,200 RM (Table. 4.1), whereas barely one per cent declared incomes over 50,000 RM (indicating a widening gap between wealthy and poor).44 Nor did the situation improve after stabilization. Indeed, the low level at which currency revaluation was fixed with the introduction of the Rentenmark from 1924 exacerbated the situation, contributing to a material crisis for those whose investments had been wiped out by the inflation. Not surprisingly, the revaluation was accompanied by public furore and widespread dissent.45 The material consequences of the inflation could be observed in immediate and shocking ways. The war had seen the widespread phenomenon of soup kitchens catering Table 4.1  Distribution of taxpayers 1913–1926/36 Tax band46

1913

1926

1928

1936

29,011

31,031

n 000s 23,550

–

Percentages 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

47.6 42.6 5.2 2.4 } 0.9 } 0.2 0.3 0.2 } 0.1 } 0.05

62.2 28.6 5.0 2.4 0.4 0.2 0.13 0.01

54.5 34.2 6.8 2.6 0.8 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.04 0.01

54.0 35.1 7.2 2.2 0.6 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.03 0.02

Sources: Rudolf Meerwarth, Adolf Günther, Waldemar Zimmermann, Die Einwirkung des Krieges auf Bevölkerungs-bewegung, Einkommen und Lebenshaltung in Deutschland (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig, 1932), p. 194 (1926); D. Petzina, W. Abelshauser, A. Faust (eds), Sozialgeschich-tliches Arbeitsbuch III. Materialien zur Statistik des Deutsche Reiches 1914–1945 (Munich, 1978), p. 105 (1913 and 1936).

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increasingly for struggling members of the middle classes, who, according to Wilhelm Tewes from the Centre Party in Düsseldorf, had ‘lost the war’ in material terms.47 Similar types of soup kitchens catering to the needs of an impoverished population were again evident in the later stages of the inflation and again catered largely members of the Mittelstand and in particular pensioners. Their destitution tended to remain hidden and was only exposed when they resorted to the soup kitchen as a last resort. A study of household budgets in Bavaria in this period showed how the family of a middle-class public official (Beamte) experienced a stark reduction in calorific intake of protein and fats essential for mental work as household income shrank.48 The impact of war and inflation on Germany’s social structure was the subject of sociologist Theodor Geiger’s seminal study published in 1932.49 In this study, Geiger traced a process of decline or Nivellierung of the middle classes in trade, commerce and administration brought about by war and inflation. In the light of the political radicalization taking place at the time of writing, Geiger wanted to understand the profound psychological repercussions of ‘unhinging’ the solidity implied in the idea of Stand – or estate – that had prevailed for generations and which provided the quintessential social and cultural authority of the old trades and crafts Mittelstand.50 In particular, farmers, middling businessmen and small independents up and down the country saw themselves as the ‘whipping boys’ by bearing the brunt of republican economic policies.51 While the inflation had a profound effect on particular sections of the population, the politics of stabilization further soured their experiences. According to Thomas Childers, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the German electorate were affected, creating a reservoir of mistrust in the republic.52 But in spite of the perceived and real travails of the early inflationary period, Mittelstand voters were not radicalized to the extent that they would later be. Indeed, we could argue that the two elections of 1924 and the presidential election of 1925 reveal a desire for stability based on a conservative and traditionalist authority. In May and in December 1924, Mittelstand voters in city and country united in their support for the German Nationalist People’s Party, and in 1925, they returned to the presidency the man who had provided charismatic authority during the war: Paul von Hindenburg.53

The parameters of the social state: Stabilization, 1924–30 The collapse of the currency in late 1923, set against the background of a political crisis brought on by left-wing coalitions in Saxony and Thuringia, an abortive communist insurrection in Hamburg and the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch in Munich in October and November, finally prompted the Entente Powers to rethink policy towards Germany.54 The result was a stabilization package announced in January 1924 proposing the commercialization of war debts and reparations, and which became known as the Dawes Plan, named after the international Experts’ Committee chairman Charles Dawes. With this measure, Washington finally recognized the connection between reparations by Germany and the wartime inter-allied debt.55 Under the scheme, an international loan to Germany of $8 billion was made, which helped to underpin a new (interim) currency in mid-November – the Rentenmark. Henceforth, the government

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of the Centre Party politician Wilhelm Marx, (Stresemann’s second cabinet was no more successful than the first and ended in November) set about balancing the budget through the instrument of an Enabling Law. The Dawes Plan itself was in fact an interim settlement that was to be reviewed in  1929; for the moment, it allowed for realistic reparations to be made annually (starting at 1 billion RM in 1924/25 and rising to 2.5 billion RM by 1928/29) and thus inaugurated the period of relative stability for the Weimar economy. During the brief period of relative economic stabilization, somewhere in the region of 13.5 billion RM of foreign (mostly American) loans flowed to Germany.56 These private loans functioned almost in the same way that printing paper money had in that they allowed competing demands of capital and labour to be met. Big business had access to loans in order to carry out far-reaching restructuring, while efforts to fulfil the promise of the social republic were made in these years. Industrial production quickly stabilized and by 1928 exceeded its 1913 level by 14 per cent; meanwhile real incomes (i.e. income calculated against prices) had nearly reached their pre-war level by the same year.57 On the surface, the economy looked good and these certainly might be counted as ‘golden years’ but for the niggling fact that while national income rose by 24 per cent and incomes from entrepreneurial activity by 17 per cent, industrial wages rose by 29 per cent. Moreover, a crisis loomed in agriculture as heavily indebted farmers failed to repay loans or deliver on their taxes leading to bankruptcies and farm foreclosures. Schleswig-Holstein, to where we will return a little later in this chapter, suffered the highest rate of sequestration and forced auctions in the Reich resulting in violent protests.58 It was also one of the first regions to desert the republic. If the inflation was in part the result of a tacit fiscal consensus, there was little of this consensus by its end. The stabilization package under the Dawes Plan was in fact a deflationary measure that signalled the end of concessions. One of the first signs of the drift from compromise came with the struggle over the eight-hour day, one of the key gains for the working class of the revolution in 1918. The ending of Social Democratic participation in Reich government from 1922 partly weakened the political leverage of the working class, as too did sharply falling membership of the left-leaning Free Unions, which reached a peak of over eight million in 1920 only to halve by 1924.59 The so-called Reichsexekution whereby the central authorities suspended the left-wing coalition governments of Saxony and Thuringia in the autumn of 1923, coupled to the use of emergency decrees to control labour, served to put organized labour on the defensive.60 Meanwhile, employers found their position strengthened on the back of a resurgent nationalism in the wake of the Ruhr occupation and aided by Cuno’s and Stresemann’s pro-business governments. The inflation boosted big industry’s financial capacity and the Dawes Plan greatly bolstered its political clout. Under the Stinnes-Legien Agreement, the working day had been fixed at eight hours and wages and salaries were to be determined through collective bargaining, affecting approximately half the dependent workforce.61 Accordingly, wages and salaries as a proportion of a rising national income (until 1928) rose by about 15 per cent above the pre-war level, to around 60 per cent, where it remained. But working conditions

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did not necessarily improve. Within a brief time, working hours crept up to old levels. Already by mid-1924, the eight-hour day was all but dead.62 When in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1926), Freder, the son of the profit-driven factory owner and lord of the city, secretly joins the workers on the early shift in the ‘dynamo’ hall of the city factory, and calls out in anguish, ‘Father do you know what torture ten hours is?’, he spoke for many of Germany’s industrial workers. Industrial unrest appeared to peak in  1922 when, as we saw above, there were around four and half thousand strikes. Immediately after stabilization, the number of strikes and lockouts together more than halved while the numbers affected declined by two-thirds. The following two years (1926/27) saw a further decline, leading to the impression of peaceful industrial relations between employers and their labour force. But a close examination shows that while the overall numbers declined, strikers were more successful than ever in pressing home their demands (usually over wages and hours). Whereas in the pre-war and even in the revolutionary period a strike was less likely to end in victory (barely a quarter of the strikes up to 1922 had been successful; the same proportion had been unsuccessful; and the remaining 2,300 stoppages registered only partial success), between a fifth and a third of strikes during the period of relative stabilization ended in favour of workers. Also, even though the number of strikes and lockouts declined in the brief period up to 1928/29, and the numbers involved declined too, the number of lost days rose sharply from 1927. In fact, there was only a lull in disputes in a single year, 1926.63 Not all industrial disputes ended in a strike or a lockout. An important component of the social republic was its industrial arbitration process (Schlichtungswesen) introduced in  1923 and in which both unions and employers were compelled to participate.64 Under this system, there were arbitration boards and labour courts whose function was to not only settle disputes but to ensure agreement on issues regarding collective bargaining and so forth. Between 1924 and 1929, there were 60,648 cases before the boards, with a slight rise from 1927.65 Intended as a neutral institution of last resort whose decisions were binding, the boards as a proxy for the state were drawn into the operation of the labour market, frequently settling in favour of the employee. Attitudes among employers towards conciliation were hardening already in 1927 when the number of lockouts involving over a quarter of a million workers nearly tripled and indicated not only a growing frustration with the arbitration process, but also reflected resentment towards an interventionist state. The Ruhr lockout of November 1928 has to be viewed as part of a broader resurgence of conservative interests against the social republic.66 From here on, employers not only sought to face down the powerful unions, which had been in a position to successfully negotiate 8,925 collective agreements by 1928 covering about a third of the economically active workforce; they also challenged the republic’s authority to arbitrate in disputes between employers and labour – the bedrock of Weimar social policy. On 1 November 1928, employers in the iron industry locked out the entire labour force of 220,000 workers in protest against a court ruling (26 October 1928) that upheld a 5 per cent increase in the hourly wage.67 The employers refused to accept the court’s decision and unilaterally declared the sector was not under any hourly wage agreement. The lockout was a pre-emptive action by the employers to wrong-foot the unions.

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The conflict soon transferred from the factory gates to the courts, with the Labour Court in Duisburg finding in favour of the employers in mid-November. However, this decision was then overturned by the Upper Regional Labour Court a week later on the 24th. This major conflict saw a return to the industrial conflicts of the early 1920s, thus inaugurating the general crisis of the republic’s late period. On the one side, there was the influential Employers Association of the Northwest Group of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists (Arbeitgeberverband der nordwestlichen Gruppe des Vereins deutscher Eisen- und Stahlindustrieller), and facing them were the combined memberships of the Christian Metalworkers Union, the German Metalworkers Union and the Trade Union Association of German Metalworkers. Moreover, the conflict divided the coalition government with the economics minister Julius Curtius from the DVP, pitted against Rudolf Wissell (SPD) the labour minister. By the end of 1928, half a million workers had been shut out of 2,410 workplaces and nearly twelve million working days had been lost.68 A key issue for the Ruhr employers was not only the interventionist role of the state manifested through arbitration, their constrained autonomy as a body and the loss of authority vis-à-vis the work force, but also the question of labour costs. As we noted earlier, wages rose faster than productivity. Thus, employers’ groups argued that state intervention through arbitration and the unions’ ability to negotiate binding wage agreements for over twelve million workers was a manipulation that raised labour costs to levels simply too high for the economy to bear. In other words, decoupling wages from the market mechanism had led to ‘sticky wages’. For Borchardt and his followers, the Weimar social state lived beyond its means.69 Writing in the late 1970s (in a not dissimilar economic context), Borchardt came to the conclusion that Weimar’s social accommodation had caused the economy to ‘sicken’.70 It is true that nominal wages rose steadily across all sectors of the economy until the end of the 1920s. By 1930, indices of hourly and weekly money rates for industrial workers stood at 194 and 156 above prewar levels. But for six years after the onset of depression, they fell by as much as a fifth of their peak level, a decline surpassed in Europe only by Poland. Moreover, the benefit of buoyant wages was offset by a rising cost of living during the mid-1920s, and which only briefly abated during the depression. Indeed, real wages, that is wages calculated according to their purchasing power, barely rose above the pre-war level, remaining static for much of the twenty years between 1916 and 1936.71 Moreover, labour costs under the republic were little different to those of either the United States or Britain over the same period, if anything, they lagged somewhat, leading Alfred Braunthal to observe at the time that the ‘legend of too high wages’ was part of the armoury in the propaganda war against the social state.72 Nonetheless, because negotiations between employers and unions frequently ended with the imposition of wage agreements by the arbitration boards, business groups saw in this an example of ‘wage dictatorship’. Thus, the Ruhr lockout was, in fact, a signal of the refusal by employers to accept any further the authority of the Weimar social state. Paradoxically, the Ruhr dispute came at the very moment when the economy was at its post-war zenith and labour was resurgent, evidenced by the return to political power of the Social Democrats after their triumph at the May election. Their return to power promised a strengthening of the framework of compromise rather than its

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weakening. The ideas underlying the social and economic foundations of the republic had their origins in the putative industrial corporatism of the war economy.73 Under the republic, it had ‘softer’ more democratic tones. Dr Heinrich Brauns, a priest and deputy from the Catholic Centre Party, who for much of this period (1920–28) was the Reich Minister for Labour (Reichsarbeitsminister), believed in a policy ‘of accommodation of class differences on the basis of collective work rights, that is, the equal participation of employer and employee and their representative associations’.74 He was followed in office by Rudolf Wissell, a union functionary at the time of the Patriotic Auxiliary Law and formerly economics minister in 1919, and who was similarly committed to the social state and its policy of accommodation. By the time Wissell took office in June 1928, the focus of employers’ ire had broadened to unemployment insurance.75 The republic had inherited the social insurance system established by Bismarck, and between 1923 and 1926 set about universalizing the system through a series of far-reaching reforms, finding their climax in the transformation of support for the jobless with the passing of the Unemployment Insurance Law of July 1927.76 Hence, it was not just arbitration but also unemployment costs that bothered employers. Great strides had been made in expanding the social state since the ending of inflation. Between 1925 and 1929, for example, government expenditure (including social insurance) as a proportion of gross domestic product increased from a quarter to just over 30 per cent (it was to increase again in the depression to 36.6 per cent and into the later 1930s to 42.4 per cent, albeit for very different reasons). When measured against pre-war government expenditure, there were also significant increases as a proportion of total government expenditure in health and welfare budgets and in housing provision (where the largest increases in expenditure were registered).77 Like the inflation, the era of relative stabilization and American loans allowed government some room to manoeuvre between the growing reassertive interests of employers and the demands of the Weimar welfare state. In spite of the complaint that the Weimar social state was sickening a once healthy economy, the profit margins of some sections of the private sector were not as severely constrained by low productivity relative to wages, as Theo Balderston has recently shown. Indeed, the value of capital investment almost doubled between 1924 and 1928, with the greater part of it in heavy industry (the sector that also complained bitterly about the costs of labour).78 Nevertheless, for many employers and certainly for conservative politicians, not least Chancellor Hans Luther (1926, who later served in Brüning’s and von Papen’s deflationary cabinets) or the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar  Schacht, the Weimar social state was judged to be a millstone around Germany’s neck. This was a view shared by Junker backwoodsmen, who on closer examination did not fare all that badly under the republic, but who nevertheless rejected it, mostly on ideological grounds. The revolution swept away the serflike legal and political status of rural workers in the Prussian provinces east of the Elbe. The Reich Settlement Law of 11 August 1918 aimed at freeing up a third of the land of the great estates for small-scale settlers, but only chipped modestly into the edifice of property relations.79 In spite of this law, the structure of economic power and the social authority of the East Elbian landowner remained little changed. In some districts, estate owners

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treated their labourers little better than serfs. For example, in the district of Strasburg in Mecklenburg, where tied workers (the so-called Deputate) accounted for 41 per cent of the nearly six thousand strong labour force scattered among the 51 estates of the  district, hourly wages at the beginning of the 1930s were as low as 5 to 10 pfennige for an eight- to nine-hour day during the winter months (in summer the usual working day was around fourteen hours). This paltry sum was supplemented by payment in kind, usually potatoes, grain, wood and coal, animal fodder and, of course, the tied cottage, so that the labourer might expect to see the total value of his wage rise to 43 pfennige per hour, though the ratio between money wages and goods varied from estate to estate. In general, there was quite a variation in rural wage levels, with some categories of worker faring better than others.80 Thus, also in Strasburg the so-called free seasonal workers could expect an hourly wage of 35 pfennige as well as receiving food and board (usually on straw in the stables). As a result of landowners’ power to enforce such stringent conditions locally, the level of poverty among the East Elbian rural labourers was as great if not greater than that Alexander StenbockFermor found among the industrial villages and small towns of central and eastern Germany.81 A Junker magnate such as Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, with his political connections in the Prussian civil service and at the highest levels of the Reich, notably to Hindenburg, continued to exert immense influence and power over the local populations, in spite of the revolution.82 As a powerful lobby with support from Hindenburg, they were able to secure from Chancellor Brüning a massive programme of aid valued at two billion RM (the so-called Osthilfe) ostensibly as a package to revive the failing fortunes of those provinces affected by the border changes.83 * Notwithstanding the advances in wages and labour conditions in some branches of industry, there was still chronic low pay and long hours of work in many other sectors of the economy.84 The cramped working-class home prevailed as a place of work, in spite of legislation at the beginning of the 1920s to curb sweated trades. And while traditional home industries, such as cigar-making in north Germany, had largely died out by the end of the 1920s, it remained widespread in Saxony. A system of ‘putting out’ was still very much in evidence throughout the country and was not confined to rural areas. It also increased during the depression years. Indeed, according to census data, over a quarter of a million people, the majority of them females, still worked in home-based trades in 1925, and this number doubled to over half a million over the next decade.85 The working conditions of women hardly improved under the republic. To start with, they usually earned between a third and a half less than their male counterparts.86 Widows in particular, many of them due to the war, and who comprised about 9 per cent of the female population, frequently earned a living either as cleaners, or by taking in work, usually laundry, or as seamstresses or button-makers in the growing ready-to-wear clothing trade. By the middle of the 1920s, the neighbourhood around the Hausvogteiplatz in central Berlin had become the epicentre of production for Germany’s fashion industry. In the court tenements of this district, around 78,000 female homeworkers worked for a pittance. The work was seasonal and involved long hours stretching well into the small hours of the night; the women were usually paid

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piece rates at very low levels, sometimes less than 60 pfennige. When work was plentiful, a seamstress might earn between 25 and 30 marks a week, but no more. This sum was not even enough to buy the smart autumn ladies woollen overcoat in whose making they would have taken part, and which might be priced as much as 40 RM.87 Women who went out to work endured a life of hardship with little respite at the weekend. In 1928, 150 female textile workers were asked by their union to write about their workday and weekend. The typical working day for a female worker with a family and household to manage was a long one and on average divided as follows: ‘wake up at 5.45 am; make breakfast 5.45–6.30; journey to work 6.30–7 am; work in factory 7 am–5 pm; broken by one ten-minute break at 9 o’clock for second breakfast followed later by a one hour break for lunch; 5 pm–6 pm return home with grocery shopping; short break 6 pm–6.30; [from] 6.30–10 pm prepare meals for next day, etc., housework, before going to bed at 10 o’clock’.88 In actual fact, many women began their working day much earlier than that cited here. The blighted life filled with drudgery is captured in the following account from a 36-year-old woman: I’ve been married 12  years and have been forced to go out to work. I have five children between the ages of 12, 10, 8, 7, 1½ years and a sick husband. My way to work takes 1¼ hours mornings and evenings. The youngest child is in care for which I pay 7 Mk weekly; the others have to fend for themselves. That’s because I have to start work at 6 am, I get up at 4 am. I have cried bitterly because of this. I have gotten over this, for reasons of health and for the children. If I arrive home in the evening tired, then one still has to see to things. Mostly this happens without joy, and without friendly chit-chat. I cannot find joy in anything.89

Her story is a common one. Some women gave graphically depressing accounts of preparing their sleepy children for school at the crack of dawn, expressing their sadness at missed childhood joys; the worry of not having enough money for food haunting them through the day; endless mending of clothing; and the heavy nature of the continuous round of housework. With or without children, women’s lives were imprinted by the work and duties of factory and home. Nevertheless, many women resisted succumbing to the grinding nature of work and poverty. Older women endeavoured to read newspapers and to have interests outside the home. The woman quoted above in spite of the monotony and exertions of her working day was active in the local branch of her union where she was deputy treasurer and had recently attended a union congress.90 Younger working women of all social backgrounds made the most of the opportunities offered by Weimar’s emergent consumer leisure culture to escape the reality of an oppressive working life, brilliantly portrayed in Billy Wilder’s screenplay based on Curt Siodmak’s reportage People on Sunday first screened in 1930.91 A survey of two thousand family budgets carried out by the Reich Statistical Office for the period from March 1927 to February 1928 revealed the wide differences in expenditure and consumption patterns between the three main socio-occupational categories – civil servants, salaried employees and blue-collar workers – as we can see from Table 4.2 (a further survey of rural labourer households conducted in 1930 has been added, which shows an even starker contrast than that between ‘middle class’ and urban ‘working class’).

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Table 4.2  Monthly household budgets (1927/28–1930) Aa Number of Households

498

B

C

546

896

Db 130

Average Household Size

3.9

3.6

4.2

?

Av. Monthly Income RM

445.78

392.69

277.09

169.65

Av. Monthly Exp. RM

430.96

379.84

270.54

161.75

Percentages Food

33.2

34.5

45.3

56.9

Housing (Rent and Upkeep)

18.4

17.0

13.9

13.9

3.7

3.5

3.6

–

13.9

12.6

12.7

15.3

Personal Health/Hygiene

2.6

2.0

1.4

–

Insurances

3.2

7.8

7.9

–

Taxes

4.6

4.4

2.5

–

Educational/Leisure

5.0

4.4

2.9

–

15.4

13.8

9.8

13.9

Heating and Lighting Clothing

Other

A  Civil Servant; B  White-Collar Employee; C  Urban Working Class; D  Rural Labourer. c. 1930.

a

b

Sources: Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich 49 (1930), 342; Plashke, ‘Untersuchungen über die Lebenshaltung des Landarbeiters’. Fortschritte der Gesundheitsfürsorge, Nr.3 (1931), 78–81, cited in Jens Flemming, Klaus Saul, Peter-Christian Witt (eds), Familienleben im Schatten der Krise. Dokumente und Analysen zur Sozialgeschichte der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Düsseldorf, 1988), pp. 75–7.

While the survey is useful for showing socio-occupational differences in household consumption, it tells us little more than that.92 Indeed, it (and others like it) gives only the vaguest impression of what the quality of life was like for those covered by the survey (it shows average not actual income/expenditure) let alone what life must have been like for the majority not represented by the survey. Moreover, the data relate only to conventional married families, thus ignoring ‘open’ partnerships, single and singleparent households or households comprising the elderly, pensioners or war-wounded pensioners. The survey was also based on what transpired to be the one really good year for employment and wages. It gives no indication of the number of hours needed to work in order to maintain standards of living (often twelve hours and more). It is also silent on the quantity and quality of goods and foodstuffs purchased that year. A trade union report published in 1929 revealed that compared to their counterparts of 1907, working-class families in the mid-1920s spent more money on food, but consumed substantially fewer items of nutritional or calorific value, especially dairy products. Dietary conditions of rural workers, whose families tended to be larger, but whose income was considerably smaller, fared worse.93 Kessler in his account of conditions

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among the impoverished families of Berlin just after the war noted the ‘devastating monotony’ of their diets: Mornings for children and adults one, or when the situation allows, two slices of dry bread, or with a bit of marmalade or margarine for the better-off. Accompanied by coffee supplement (Kaffeersatz). Midday at work again a slice or two of sweet bread (Stullen), at best with margarine. Evenings, potatoes, white cabbage or carrots. Meat only for the better off and maximum once a week.94

As Alf Lüdtke argues, hunger was a pervasive aspect of people’s lives in the interwar years, and not just in the periods of extreme economic conditions that book-ended the republic, the so-called turnip winter (Steckrubenwinter) of 1917 and the allied blockade of 1919, and the depredations of the Great Depression of the early 1930s.95 The impact on health could be devastating, as Kessler and those social commentators who came after him found. One looks at the faces of the children portrayed here in each of the photographs [in this pamphlet]: bloated, watery, pale flesh, the formless and weak bodies, the rickety and deformed arms and legs. That is the typos of the next generation. So ends in these tragic, infinitely touching and helpless little ones, whose spirits only a Dostoyevsky could describe, the once strong and productive German people.96

This picture remained little changed a decade later. Such accounts of everyday poverty among Weimar’s struggling classes paint a picture that is at odds with studies that place emphasis either on high wages or on social institutions. Again, Kessler provides us with a striking account of housing conditions at the beginning of the 1920s where ‘In airless cramped conditions, in far too few rooms far too many people. That four or five adults and children live one on top of another in a single room, is almost the rule. Equally that three or four people sleep in one bed’.97 A report in 1923 from the Baltic city of Greifswald showed that 62.3 per cent of children had to share a bed.98 Another report based on a survey of working-class youth in Berlin at the end of the 1920s painted a similar picture of cramped conditions.99 Most of the teenage respondents in this survey told of living in small one- and two-roomed flats, with little privacy. One young man reported that six members of his family slept in one room, ‘and everyone can imagine for himself what sort of air has amassed in the room during the night’. He and his brother shared the living room, and slept in relative luxury on the sofa and a divan. Such conditions were not unusual. Another survey carried out by the Reich Association of German Youth in  1929 of 200,000 apprentices and unskilled youth showed that more than two-thirds did not have a room of their own; twenty per cent had to share a bed with another family member, and a small number had to share with a lodger, giving rise to concerns of morality.100 In Berlin, one estimate put the number of Schlafgänger – those who paid simply to sleep in a bed – in the mid-1920s at 44,600 and the number of lodgers at 130,500. Under such conditions, noted Kurt Tucholsky, the individual was ‘never alone’.101 Tensions could easily arise if a lodger chose not to be as polite and discrete as the young Christopher Isherwood who quickly attuned himself to the daily rhythm of the poor working-class Nowak family with whom he

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lodged in a court dwelling in Berlin’s district of Hallesches Tor.102 As one teenage girl told an interviewer in 1929, Since our room and kitchen did not have a hallway, but instead a through room, there was soon trouble between us and the lodger. Namely, the lodger had the last room. The lodger brought a friend back home almost every night and this was usually quite late. Anybody can imagine for themselves how unpleasant it was. They came through our room without knocking, just as we were undressing.103

These cramped housing conditions, it should be pointed out, had pre-existed the republic and were to continue after 1933. In 1918, Reich and local housing agencies stipulated that a minimum of 2½ rooms were needed to ‘healthily’ accommodate a family. By this criterion alone, two-thirds of families in Berlin in 1938 failed to meet this standard, and such abject conditions in the capital were not exceptional.104 These living conditions were tied to whether or not one had regular work. For many working people under the republic, employment insecurity was the norm, and not vice versa. Apart from 1922 and 1928 when there was full employment, most workers regularly experienced bouts of unemployment (between 1925 and 1928, the level of unemployment doubled from 3.4 per cent of the labour force to 6.3 per cent and peaked in 1926 at 10 per cent as a result of the poor conjuncture), and these periods got longer for certain sections of the labour force in the second half of the 1920s (even before mass unemployment of the early 1930s).105 Moreover, seasonality characterized work in a number of sectors of the economy, notably the building trades, some branches of the food processing industry and the docks of Germany’s ports, notably Hamburg, Kiel and Cuxhaven, and of inland ports such as Cologne.106 One man’s recollection of life in Hanover between the wars reveals the constant money worries of a working-class family suffering from chronic penury. His father had become unemployed in 1931 and remained unemployed for four years. After paying the rent from the weekly unemployment benefit of 17.50RM, the family had barely ten marks left over for food and other necessities. The worry over money prematurely aged his mother, and it blighted his early childhood even after his father found work in 1935. Even then, money remained scarce. We lived at that time in a courtyard house, two rooms, there was not much more. Because living conditions were so tight my sister always stayed on and off with grandma. . . . As for the financial side of things, it was a pretty sad time, for sure. I saw, for instance, that my mother always had money worries. Earnings at that time were relatively meagre when my father began work at Edelstahl [in 1935]. At the very most, father might bring home maybe 40 Marks a week and until the second youngest was born, we were in fact 5 children, and the house still cost 30 Marks a month.107

For youngsters growing up in such conditions, both the span and meaning of childhood was a limited one. Before the war, it was not unusual for between ten and twenty per cent of school children in towns and cities to have worked, with a higher proportion in industrial villages and in rural areas. After 1918, official data show that the number of working children under the age of fourteen was declining dramatically.

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But such censuses overlooked the many children working in the ‘invisible’ sphere of casual employment (apprenticeships were only available from the age of fourteen), or in home-based sweated trades, or on family farms, or on the streets as messengers and newspaper hawkers. For families on the margins of society, children were expected to make a contribution from minding younger siblings to running errands, and might even become the main breadwinner, as frequently happened during World War I and again in the depression. One man from the Eiffel recalled how he and his siblings together with their grandfather gathered wood to sell in order to make up the meagre wages of their father. In the sweated trades, carried on in the home, a family’s offspring learnt the trade of the father and mother early in life. At usually around five years old, children would assist in the most basic chores, graduating to more responsible tasks as they grew older.108 * The above accounts relate to the everyday life of the urban poor living at the margins of society. Much harder to gauge is a comparable insight into the everyday existential crises of the old and new Mittelstand who not only lived cheek by jowl with Weimar’s urban working class, but in the case of a quarter of white-collar employees, originated from proletarian families, and frequently shared that class’s material marginality.109 From the mid-1920s, the proportion of white-collar employees among the unemployment rose from 3.6 per cent in 1927 to 11.6 per cent in 1936. In mid-June 1933, white-collar employees, mostly from the commercial sector, accounted for 15.5 per cent of regular unemployment benefit claimants and 11.8 per cent of crisis welfare claimants.110 Money and the lack of it play a central role in Hans Fallada’s classic novel on the predicament of Germany’s ‘new’ middle class, Little Man What Now? In this novel written during the depression, the young protagonist Pinneberg and his wife, Lämmchen, already live a hand-to-mouth existence on low salaries before Pinneberg loses his job in a menswear store as a result of the economic downturn. Lämmchen’s work as a secretary pays too little and she too has to give up her job when she becomes pregnant. Over time, they have to give up their possessions (but cling hopelessly to an expensive dressing table symbolizing Pinneberg’s ‘desire to join his social betters’)111; eventually, they lose their apartment and move to a squalid abandoned building where they have to take care of their newborn baby. The Weimar years saw a massive increase in the numbers of clerical workers as the economy’s tertiary sector expanded – a so-called white-collar proletariat (Stehkragenproletariat).112 But the great majority of these employees were semi-skilled female who were paid considerably less than their male counterparts. Vicki Baum captured their predicament in her novel Menschen im Hotel through the character of 19-year-old Flämmchen (like Fallada, Baum also uses the diminutive ‘chen’ to stress the character’s lack of independence). Asked by the novel’s anti-hero, the accountant Kringelein (another materially marginalized figure) why she had allowed herself to become amorously attached to the firm’s boss, Flämmchen answers, Obviously because of money. I’ve been without a job for over a year now. I have to start somewhere. . . . Some say that one should not go with a managing director just

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Rethinking the Weimar Republic for money. On the contrary – only for money! When one has been without a job for a year, hurrying to the film [job] exchange, chasing adverts, and underclothes wearing thin, nothing to put on, and one looks at the offerings [in the stores] – I can’t help it: dressing nice is my ideal. Because of money; naturally because of money. Money is so important, and whoever says otherwise, is a liar.113

Even before the depression, money was in short supply for the real-life counterparts of Pinneberg and Flämmchen; many of the self-employed struggled to meet their tax bills, with the majority struggling close to subsistence well into the mid-1930s.114

Deflation and the destruction of Weimar’s social authority The mid-years of the republic saw an attempt by centre-right governments to adjust the tax burden in favour of middling business and property owners, but with little success.115 During the depression, economic policies impacted negatively on middling business which saw a massive curtailment in their turnover. By January 1931, the total nominal income – including welfare benefits – of the working class had declined by around a fifth and this had a knock-on effect on small and medium businesses as households reduced their expenditure.116 Scholars are divided on the question of how much room for manoeuvre Chancellor Heinrich Brüning had during the depression.117 Brüning, who held two terms of office from March 1930 to June 1932, is accused of having exacerbated the crisis by pursuing an unnecessarily relentless austerity programme that deflated the economy, which in turn undermined Weimar’s authority, thus paving the way for Hitler. In his defence, Borchardt argues that Brüning’s critics base their arguments on later experiences of managing the economy and therefore apply a ‘retrospective optimism’.118 Nonetheless, there is also evidence to suggest that it was less a question of applying a sharp dose of deflationary medicine to the ‘patient’ (i.e. the economy), than of applying a blunt instrument to carry out radical surgery to the body politic.119 As trade and incomes declined, Germany’s Mittelstand faced new pressures as Reich, Länder and local authorities squeezed what they could by way of new taxes and surcharges. In the period between 1929/30 and 1932/33, annual transfers from the Reich to the Länder and local authorities were slashed, in some cases by half at a time when financial needs were greatest as a result of rising welfare costs in the depression. At the local level, the tax burden fell on the trading and propertied classes since there was little else to squeeze from the unemployed (whose benefits were cut, nonetheless). Surcharges were levied by local councils on business turnover; on property values, which in many cases trebled or quadrupled and in some places rose by as much as sevenfold; a local poll tax was introduced in  1931; salary cuts and redundancies of public officials and administrative staff were announced. The mental anxiety caused by these policies on the struggling middle classes was captured by Viktor Klemperer in his diary. So far, the ceaseless torment of new tax demands. 30 M, no: 29.75 per month civil servants’ special tax, 125 M[arks] Church tax, 52 M[arks] general supplement

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to income tax. Since yesterday, [there are] Cabinet negotiations to cut the pay of civil servants. I am deeply troubled. I do not know how to streamline my household; I do not know how I am to proceed with it in the current manner. Eva is beside herself when I speak of these things. They cause me stress. Reserves are still there.  .  .  .  In addition, there is the constant political worry. One day everything can collapse.120

Brüning’s deflationary measures were skilfully exploited by Nazi propaganda (although both Klemperer and his wife remained immune to their overtures).121 Whereas the Socialist and Communist parties attacked the cuts in welfare but not the tax increases, and the middling and conservative parties imploded, the NSDAP focused on the iniquity of placing the burden of deflation on the nation’s middling classes.122 Nazi promises to amend the tax laws and to reflate the economy if elected into power were welcomed by Weimar’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ Mittelstand.123 The communal elections in Prussia in November 1929 and those held in Baden, Bavaria and in the provinces of the Rhine and Mosel at the same time as the Reichstag elections in 1930, focused on tax issues affecting the Mittelstand, and in rural areas, on the plight of farmers.124 The results of the September elections went beyond the Nazis’ own expectations, when they took 18.3 per cent of the vote.125 The surprise came in spite of the telltale signs in the Prussian local elections the previous November and the result of the Saxony Landtag elections in June, when the number of Nazi deputies almost trebled from five to fourteen, paralleling a tripling in their share of the vote.126 In September, they managed to increase their presence in the Reichstag tenfold, a performance they repeated in the regional elections occurring at the same time. In Braunschweig, which also went to the polls on the 14th, the NSDAP took a fifth of the vote and a quarter of the seats in the Landtag; in the city-state of Bremen, traditionally a leftwing stronghold, the regional election in November put the Party five percentage points behind the SPD when it gained a quarter of the vote, enabling it to return 32 deputies – roughly a quarter of seats – to the Bürgerschaft.127 Until the late autumn of 1932, when it suffered a setback and found itself in the midst of a crisis,128 the NSDAP appeared unassailable as it swept the regional and national polls following the September breakthrough. At the various Landtag elections held during 1931 and 1932, the NSDAP took between 26 per cent (Württemberg) and 42.5 per cent (Thuringia) and made significant gains elsewhere. At the Reichstag elections in July 1932, it mobilized nearly fourteen million votes.129 As if to underscore the affinity of interests underlying that success, Geiger pointed to the social make up of the 107 Nazi deputies who entered the Reichstag in September: I see from the Völkischer Beobachter that of the 107 NS deputies, 17 belong to the peasantry, 18 to crafts (and the working class). 19 are petty traders and white collar employees, 14 are teachers, 13 are members of the free professions and writers, 12 are middle and lower grade public servants, 8 are lawyers, 6 are officers of the former army. Obviously one should not extrapolate from this picture of the numerical balance of the electorate; but from this, the origins from which the candidates were chosen, [we can see] which social groups the election managers aimed at.130

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In spite of challenges to this early assessment of the Nazi supporter as predominantly ‘lower middle class’,131 the correlation between an angst-ridden Mittelstand and the phenomenal rise in the Nazi vote between 1929 and 1932 is borne out by a number of ethnographic studies analysing the electoral strongholds of the NSDAP. These studies clearly show that in electoral wards of towns and cities where the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Mittelstand predominated, the level of Nazi support from 1930 is highest.132 For instance, in the Mittelstand wards 1–3, and 8–11 in Goslar (Harz), a Mittelstand town, the Nazi vote rose to between 60 and 70 per cent in 1932.133 In Nuremberg, the lower-middle-class district of Stadtpark returned a 52 percentage share of the vote for the Nazis that same year.134 The same was true of Augsburg where the Nazis enjoyed enormous support in the inner-city socially mixed districts of Lechviertel, Ulrichsviertel and Zentralstadt, together with the outer-suburbs of Südend, West-Südend and the new housing estate of Hochzoll, where the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Mittelstand were heavily represented.135 Similar districts in Braunschweig also proved susceptible to the message of the NSDAP.136 In Hamburg’s socially mixed districts of Rotherbaum, Hohefelde, Fühlsbüttel, Eilbeck and Altstadt, the Nazi Party could rely on the vote of the Mittelstand. The same phenomenon prevailed in Mittelstand wards of neighbouring Altona.137 During the election campaign of late summer 1930, the authorities in Trier observed that Mittelstand and ‘better class’ attendees at meetings of the NSDAP were growing in frequency and numbers.138 The same authorities reported in early 1931, ‘It is worth noting that the greater interest in these [i.e. Nazi] meetings comes particularly from the small and medium-scale trades people, but also from among public servants of the courts, customs and excise, finance and railway administrations’.139 The twin burdens of public debt and tax continued to dominate the political campaigns during the 1931 Länder elections. And these issues festered well into the summer of 1932 and were highlighted in Nazi election leaflets with graphic pictures of the plight of the ordinary citizen in countryside and town.140 As Geiger astutely observed, It is not the great currents of contemporary ideas that the middle classes have allowed to carry them along – it is worry and angst, which oppress them. For years the middle class man has kept his head down or sought to rescue, what there was to rescue, his special interests; he has gone with this or that party, and it always got worse. He has realised the futility of his splintered parties. The formation of a grand bourgeois middle bloc had to fail, because the divisions of interest are too great. Interest politics are always politics of reason. There is no common line of rational politics for the middle classes; at the moment the greatest crisis-ridden excitement casts one into the rebellious politics of unreason.141

The early 1930s were years of existential angst for Germany’s middle classes. The perceived social fixity of the pre-war years was the stock measure against which they viewed themselves; and it did not present a calming picture. In their view, they had been cut-loose and disadvantaged from the outset by the regulatory and distributional nature of the social state. And this transformed many of them from liberal voters to revolutionary challengers of republican authority.142

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A startling illustration of this is the heavily indebted middling farmers of SchleswigHolstein, a group of whom carried out arson attacks upon tax offices throughout the province in 1929 in protest against forced auctions and sequestration of livestock in lieu of unpaid taxes.143 The response was swift and severe: the ringleaders were soon arrested and sentenced to terms in prison that merely alienated further the province’s farmers from the republican state. At the elections in 1930, with the exception of the major urban centres of Kiel, Altona, Flensburg and Rendsburg, the province turned to the Nazis, a relationship that culminated in July 1932 with a share of the vote that exceeded fifty per cent. In those districts where acrimony towards the republican state was deepest, as in the small communities of Norderdithmarschen, support for the NSDAP rose to as high as 80 per cent!144 The level of support for the NSDAP is all the more startling given that many of these districts had been DNVP strongholds at the elections in 1924 until 1928. The DNVP albeit critical of the ‘social republic’ was nonetheless a party of the ‘system’. As its support evaporated between1929 and 1932, paradoxically so too did republican authority. * The republic’s political legitimacy among the working class was founded on the social contract enshrined in the Weimar Constitution that proclaimed security of employment and shelter. In spite of the violent upheavals of the early period and the punitive response by the Weimar state (see the following chapter), its members clung loyally to their idea for a social republic, even a decade after the promise had failed to fully materialize. There were efforts under the republic to fulfil this promise but with diminishing success.145 Meanwhile, progressive attempts to ‘reform’ the habits of the working classes also had an authoritarian streak in them that drove a resentful wedge between people and the republic.146 Nevertheless, before 1930 Weimar’s working classes remained largely loyal to Social Democracy or to political Catholicism. When they deserted either party, it was mostly for the Communist Party as in Cologne in 1932.147 For as Weimar’s social state was scrolled back leaving its citizens on the margins, the authority of the republic too was pushed to the edges of a political abyss. The high water mark of Weimar’s social accommodation had come with the introduction of the unemployment insurance system in 1927, as we saw above.148 For the first time, material security was offered to all workers in the event of unemployment. But the scheme was never intended for the type of long-term mass unemployment that befell Germany from 1930.149 The last pre-depression budget of 1928/29 showed that the Reich Office for Labour Exchange and Unemployment Insurance (Reichsanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung) which coordinated the system had 820 million RM in its coffers, enough to support 800,000 unemployed.150 By May 1931, the government was facing a 2.2 RM billion budget deficit and there was a chronic shortfall in the contributions to the scheme. Unemployment which was now creeping up to 4½ million was putting a further strain on dwindling resources. Around half of the unemployed were receiving regular payments with the other half equally shared between emergency and local welfare. Indeed, the system had already been severely tested in the winter of 1929/1930 after a sudden rise in seasonal unemployment brought the total number of jobless to 2.5 million. But by the middle of 1931, seasonal or

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temporary joblessness was giving way to long-term mass unemployment. By 1932, the unemployment figure hit six million or roughly 30 per cent of the workforce, meaning that between twelve and fifteen million people (roughly one-fifth of the population) depended on benefits. Increasingly, the burden of unemployment costs was crippling public coffers.151 The viability of the unemployment insurance system was not only threatened by the poor economic conjuncture and the banking crisis of the summer of 1931; it had been coming under political attack already in 1929 and proved to be one of the issues that fuelled the political crisis leading to the collapse of Müller’s coalition cabinet in March 1930.152 As the depression deepened, the Reich authorities found they were both unable and unwilling to bear the burden of long-term mass unemployment and took a number of measures that signalled a shift from national to regional and local responsibility.153 Thus, from mid-1931 to the summer of 1932, the burden shifted to hard-pressed local authorities, as we can see from the following table.154 The shift from centrally administered unemployment insurance benefits (ALU) to means-tested crisis payments (KRU) as recipients exhausted regular payments, finally to locally administered welfare payments (WOLU), was a regressive step from rights to dependence, with far-reaching implications for the relationship between state and citizen. Indeed, we can read in this development the reneging by the Reich of the social contract of 1918.155 In addition, the crisis was also utilized by Brüning to discipline what he and others perceived to be profligate local authorities via a series of emergency decrees that progressively eroded the authority of the public sector.156 Observers, such as the director of the Association of German Machine Factories, Karl Lange and the constitutional historian Ernst Rudolf Huber (who observed events first-hand) remarked on the paradox that the republic’s greatest achievement was also its nemesis.157 While this might have applied to those who claimed they had to foot the bill, in the case of the working class, it was its dismantling that radicalized. As more and more people fell on to municipal systems of welfare, the stigma of poor relief was revived for recipients; at the same time, dependence on communal agencies and their personnel recalibrated power relationships in the locality. There was a degree of arbitrariness built into the system in that welfare benefits – unlike regular unemployment benefits – were subject to local and regional rules frequently with variation in practices and in levels. Thus, in Magdeburg between October 1931 and January 1932, a couple could expect to receive around sixty marks monthly, but in Altona, a city of comparable size and structure, they received eight marks less, while Table 4.3  Distribution of unemployed by support 1930–33*

ALU KRU WOLU

1930

1931

1932

1933

73.1 10.5 15.3

44.6 27.2 28.2

23.7 31.6 44.7

14.3 34.6 51.1

*Annual averages. Source: Collated from Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich vols 1931–4. ALU  Arbeitslosenunterstutzung; KRU  Krisenunterstutzung; WOLU  Wohlfahrtsunterstutzung

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in Ratibor (near Breslau), a married couple might expect 50 RM a month; if a claimant was a single unemployed male, his monthly benefit extended to 38.56 RM.158 Such differences in levels of support frequently resulted from local interpretation of the regulations governing welfare.159 Bruno Nelissen Haken, who had worked in one of Hamburg’s labour exchange offices in the late 1920s, in his (almost forgotten) novel The Case of Bundhund (Der Fall Bundhund, 1930) described the arbitrary and often pitilessness of welfare administration. The novel’s anti-hero ‘Bundhund’ is progressively excluded from his welfare benefits as a result of bureaucratic chicanery and in despair is driven to his death.160 Nelissen Haken’s graphic account of the downward spiral of life on welfare captured the demoralization of the outcast and provides a mirror on real life. In the small town of Brand-Erbisdorf, a glass-making centre south-west of Dresden, nearly half of the population of nearly six thousand (excluding pensioners) were in receipt of welfare payments in April 1931. Most of the unemployed men had been out of work for two years and longer and therefore had exhausted their entitlement to regular unemployment benefits. If married, they probably received similar rates of benefit as in neighbouring Pirna where over a thousand inhabitants were drawing local welfare at the end of 1930. A couple on general welfare qualified for 57.65 RM monthly, and a further 18 RM if they had a child under sixteen years of age. This payment was less than half the 146.79 RM income for a three-head household cited by a report in the International Labour Review at the beginning of the depression and considerably less than the lower end of household incomes cited above (Table 4.1).161 Not much could be purchased for this amount. When Stenbock-Fermor travelled through Germany’s ‘proletarian province’ in 1930, he found levels of poverty that far exceeded anything he had previously witnessed among Ruhr miners a decade earlier. ‘Everywhere I came to: increasing poverty, increasing bitterness, increasing doubt; a world of impoverishment and hunger and exploitation. I got to know Germany from below’.162 Hubert Knickerbocker, an American journalist who travelled extensively through Germany in the 1930s, found the daily meal of an average family consisted of 6 small potatoes, 5 medium slices of bread, a small cabbage, a knob of margarine of around 16 cubic centimetres. Three Sundays in the month each adult could hope to eat a herring, a child might receive a herring most days, as well as a half litre of milk. Knickerbocker met one couple who ate almost nothing but bread for most of the week together with a few potatoes; on the day when they received their benefit, they treated themselves to a sausage. For two days a week, they went hungry.163 It is hardly surprising that an adult might lose up to four kilograms of weight. In Berlin-Kreuzberg, for example, there were men who weighed as little as 50 kilos. Such diets that offered ‘too little to live on, but [which were] too much to die from’ became commonplace over the course of the depression; ‘Moreover, as has already been observed during famines, when food is short the heaviest sacrifices fall on the wife’.164 Not surprisingly, Eugen Diesel bleakly concluded after his own journey through Germany’s poverty-stricken districts: ‘The whole nation is enveloped in distress; official interference is of no avail; the people live in a veritable hell of meanness, oppression and disease’.165 Not surprisingly, long-term unemployment meant that ‘the accessory resources available to the unemployed gradually become exhausted’. As a result, the physical

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condition of unemployed populations deteriorated (tuberculosis while falling nationally remained extremely high among the unemployed until 1936), with an increasingly debilitating effect upon their mental health. A report on the effects of continuing unemployment upon families painted the following depressing picture: Among the illnesses which show a particularly striking increase should be mentioned the conditions resulting from underfeeding, diseases accompanying growth, anaemia, scrofula, lice, worms, diseases caused by uncleanliness, caries of the teeth, and nervous conditions leading to rapid fatigue and inattention.166

There was a particular concern over the health of children: numerous cases of mal­nutrition were reported among very young children, as in Hamburg and neighbouring Altona.167 Municipal health officers noted a rise in the incidence of tuberculosis, in spite of its interwar downward trend.168 For example, in the Ruhr town of Gelsenkirchen 38 per cent of the city’s children were afflicted by TB, slightly higher than in rural Hildburghausen in Thuringia, while in Berlin overcrowding and shared beds ensured it spread to children and adults alike.169 One estimate put the total number TB cases at around a million; medical data showed that tuberculosis was the cause of death of half of those who died between the ages of fifteen and thirty years.170 Meanwhile, the impact of enforced idleness on the moral fibre of youth also became a talking point. In  1925, about 10 per cent of Germany’s population had been aged between 10 and 15  years of age. This meant that in  1928/29, they were either already of employable age or were just about to enter the labour market, just as job opportunities were shrinking because of the onset of the depression.171 At the beginning of January 1932, when the level of unemployment had almost peaked, nearly a fifth of those out of work were teenagers under 21  years of age, and they suffered miserably. The mayor of Brand-Erbisdorf noted the deteriorating physical and mental condition of jobless apprentices in his town. ‘Their clothing’, he reported, ‘which the boys outgrow, gets worse from day to day. These youths must degenerate spiritually. The condition of unemployment removes every desire for knowledge and improvement’, once the archetypal leisure activity of Germany’s skilled working class.172 In his contribution to a debate in the Prussian Council of State on the impact of Brüning’s emergency decrees in late autumn of 1931, Altona’s Lord Mayor Max Brauer asked the question whether the austerity measures were justified when one looked at their unbearable social and cultural consequences. He answered his question in the negative.173 To remedy this situation, the government introduced voluntary work schemes (Freie Arbeitsdienst) for young people, and by the time Hitler introduced labour conscription in 1933, the programme had already developed its coercive and disciplining characteristics.174 Grinding poverty and forced idleness frequently meant that families lost interest in their social environment, becoming increasingly disconnected from the world around them.175 It was not uncommon for social workers to find that the use of bedclothes in some households was virtually unknown. Home visitors discovered despondent families who had lost interest in basic hygiene and lived in the most appalling conditions.176 While it is the case that such conditions might be secular in the sense that they did not need the depression to produce them, the prevailing

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economic conditions exacerbated them. The psychological impact of unemployment cannot be fully measured but was noted by contemporaries. ‘How terrible not to know what one is there for’ is how one young unemployed woman described her life on the dole in Berlin at the height of the depression.177 Writing at the time, Ludwig Preller observed that unemployment meant a time of ‘want and abjectness’ and disorientation.178 Divorced from the social world of work, the unemployed might quickly suffer loss of identity, purpose and importantly the networks that made up the typical (working class) social structures of solidarity. In a society where a social premium was put on the world of work, unemployment over time had a negative impact upon the mental health of those affected. Suicides rose slightly during the depression, particularly affecting younger people of both sexes. A particularly harrowing case was that of an unemployed musician from Düsseldorf. The 40-year-old father had tried to make a living playing occasional engagements in restaurants but this had virtually dried up by the autumn of 1932. In desperation, he took his own life and that of his 14-year-old son. His wife discovered their bodies on her return to the tenement where they lived and collapsed but not before turning on the gas of the stove in the kitchen. Neighbours, alarmed by the smell, alerted the authorities.179 Preller’s conclusions on the social, physical and mental impact of unemployment were largely in tune with other contemporary studies of the unemployed, such as the field study of the industrial village of Marienthal in Styria (Austria) carried out between November 1931 and May 1932 by Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel. In the book that resulted from this, The Unemployed of Marienthal, the investigators found that after the single textile factory closed, the community’s 358 unemployed families (out of a total of 478) ‘separated from their work and without contact to the outside world, . . . lose the material and moral opportunities to utilise time’, becoming resigned to their fate in the process and uninterested in the affairs of the world.180 But not all unemployed communities fell into the sort of lethargy that Lazarsfeld and his colleagues found in Marienthal. A remarkable phenomenon of the depression was the appearance of quasi shanty towns on the outskirts of towns and cities as unemployed families, such as that of the Pinnebergs in Fallada’s novel, who no longer were able to afford rents moved into the garden huts of weekend settlements. It is not a coincidence that key scenes in the depression film par excellence Bertolt Brecht’s and Slatan Dudow’s collaboration Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehöhrt der Welt? took place in the garden allotments at the edge of the Müggelsee, in the south-east of Berlin that had by 1932 developed into a tent city of the unemployed. Kuhle Wampe had its parallels elsewhere in Germany.181 It might be going too far to describe such encampments of the unemployed as ‘alternative republics’, but they developed their own vibrant subculture based on self-help and radical politics and came to symbolize the failing authority of the republic as a social state. These ‘republics of the unemployed’ were viewed with suspicion by the authorities but even more so by the Nazis, especially after they came to power. One of the first actions of the Nazi Berlin city government in 1933 was to disperse Kuhle Wampe and other settlements like it. They had all disappeared by 1936. Unemployment also induced anger at the abject conditions and the system responsible for this. The apprentices of Brand-Erbisdorf we encountered above were

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described as ‘desperate’ – and desperation could lead to revolt. Indeed, by the beginning of the 1930s (and not just in Germany) mass unemployment was considered to be society’s ‘most dangerous social problem’ as it tore through the fabric of communities and challenged political authority.182 In Phil Jutzi’s bleak social documentary Um’s tägliche Brot (Hunger in Waldenburg) (1929), the unnamed protagonist in complete desperation lashes out against an exploitative landlord, but is killed in the ensuing struggle when he is toppled down the stairs.183 Both Jutzi and Nelissen Haken had been on the left of Weimar politics184 but chose to represent the unemployed as fated to fail. This is in stark contrast to Brecht’s and Dudow’s collaboration Kuhle Wampe where the unemployed are redeemed through collective action. The early 1930s saw an increasing number of localized protests by the unemployed against changes in the regulations and conditions pertaining to benefits, or calling for the restoration of cuts in welfare payments.185 For instance, in Frankfurt, three hundred unemployed on voluntary labour schemes went on strike for better pay and conditions. In Hamburg, there were ‘dole office sit-ins’ as groups of unemployed refused to leave the premises in protest of their treatment. Recalling the paranoia of World War I and revolutionary period, the authorities believed they could see the hand of communist agitators behind these protests.186 But as then, the protests were mostly spontaneous and owed little to communist foment. Nonetheless, the KPD was conscious of the growing importance of such protests as the economic crisis deepened and therefore sought to harness and channel protest towards a more coherent political goal.187 Thus, Walther Ulbricht, a member of the party’s Central Committee, who was responsible for the mobilization of the unemployed shared the view of the Moscowled Third International that ‘The conquest of the unemployed is not only a question of putting forward the right solutions, but is in the first instance, primarily a question of putting the organisation of their daily struggles onto the agenda’.188 By the middle of June 1931, there were around 1,300 committees of the unemployed with an active membership of 80,000.189 By 1932, the KPD had become the party of the unemployed, with an estimated 80 per cent of its c. 250,000 members out of work.190 Given the scale of the economic crisis, the communist leadership in Berlin asserted that the party had to ‘forge the front of millions into a revolutionary mass struggle against hunger and fascism’.191 Demonstrations of the unemployed were to be organized usually incorporating a march to the local labour exchange or town hall in order to highlight the plight of the unemployed. For instance, the Regional Committee of the Unemployed in the Ruhr organized a ‘Struggle Congress’ in Dortmund at the end of August 1930, which focused on the link between Brüning’s deflationary budget, introduced that summer by presidential decree, the Young Plan due for ratification in the Reichstag and the deteriorating material conditions of the working class.192 In early September, the leadership of the unemployed movement in the RhinelandWestphalia called for a national day of protest by the unemployed, who having been driven out of the workplace should ‘conquer the streets’.193 But ‘conquering the streets’ in order to highlight the plight of the jobless was always going to be an impossible task. When small groups of the unemployed tried this in Dresden, Chemnitz and Plauen at the end of November and again in early December 1930, they were dispersed by the police.194

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The protests of the unemployed were triggered by existential concerns and not driven by revolutionary ideology.195 Nor should we view them simply as ‘anti-Weimar’. Primarily, they were desperate actions by desperate people in defence of what little they had left to them. For example, the most common protests were those relating to securing winter fuel and food, or preventing evictions because of lack of money to pay the rent.196 The fact that the north-west regional communist leadership and the Berlin-based communist newssheet, the Red Storm Flag, attributed any successes against evictions to the Hamburg-Altona unemployed committees does not mean the unemployed were beholden to the party.197 Indeed, Ulbricht eventually had to concede that party efforts to sustain mobilization, especially among unemployed youth, had largely failed.198 Nevertheless, the KPD found its strongest support precisely among this group. With the deepening of the existential crisis among Germany’s working class, support for the communists grew from 10.6 per cent in 1930 to 16.8 per cent by November 1932. And regional variations were even stronger, gaining around a fifth of votes in Saxony, Thüringia and Hamburg. In Altona, its vote rose to over fifty per cent in those neighbourhoods with the heaviest concentrations of unemployed; it achieved a comparable performance in similar districts in Essen and in Berlin, where taken as a whole, it remained the stronger of the two working-class parties, with around a third of the vote, and did equally well in those outlying industrial villages around Aachen studied by Günter Plum.199

Conclusion While the Communists attacked the ‘betrayal’ of the social state, the NSDAP campaigned with a programme aimed at reflating the economy, at the same time managing to attract Weimar’s elites.200 Both parties’ rising level of support in the sequence of elections from 1930 to July 1932 is a testament to the power of their messages. The Nazis nonetheless could outperform the communists simply because the majority of the working-class vote remained loyal to the SPD, in spite of its own shortcomings. Hitler’s coalition government could benefit from Schleicher’s aborted plan for a counter-cyclical programme of public works.201 The first Reinhardt Programme introduced in June quickly put the country back to work through a stimulus package. At the same time, the unemployed were conscripted into labour battalions under the watchful eye of the Party and SA. Within a year, the material crisis had been overcome – in terms of its visibility at least – as Germans returned to work and money began to enter households again. As Kringelein remarks, ‘One becomes a fully other person when one has money; when one can buy [things]’.202 But restoring the authority of money in 1933 came at the price of personal and political freedoms as we shall see.203

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5

The Authority of Law: The Judiciary

The German judge is in his core, apolitical; until now one has described him as ­innocent of the ways of the world (Weltfremd).1

Introduction Writing from exile in New York in 1942, the German jurist Franz Neumann attacked Germany’s judiciary for its alleged role in undermining the Weimar Republic.2 Neumann’s study connected to earlier writings (including his own) from the 1920s, which portrayed Weimar’s judiciary as a remnant from the Bismarckian state that was unable to adjust constructively to democracy.3 This view was aired forcefully by the trial judges at the Jurists Trial in Nuremberg in  1947.4 In the mid-1950s, Gerhard Kramer in his critical account of the judiciary argued that its hostility to democracy was one of the key factors undermining the authority of the republic, and that as a consequence, it bore a heavy responsibility for its disintegration, a view echoed by Wilhelm Hoegner, the Social Democrat deputy in the Landtag of Bavaria (and its prime minister after the war).5 Within a decade, Karl-Dietrich Bracher, whose own study of the dissolution of the republic represented a milestone in Weimar studies, wrote in the introduction to Elizabeth Hannover-Druck and Heinrich Hannover’s unsparing critique of the Weimar courts: ‘One will have to say finally that the judiciary during the Weimar Republic not only contributed to the failure of this republic, but also even to their own subjugation by authoritarian and totalitarian movements. It is therefore justified to view the Weimar judiciary to a great extent as a prerequisite and source of the “Third Reich” ’.6 Drawing heavily on the pioneering study by Emil Gumbel from the early 1920s, the Hannovers showed how the judiciary pursued an unremitting policy of ‘class justice’ directed against the supporters of the republic.7 In what might be loosely viewed as a companion volume edited a decade later by Kurt Kreiler, Weimar’s judiciary’s was attacked in a similar fashion for its role in dispensing one-sided ‘political justice’.8 By the 1980s, Gotthard Jasper, Hinrich Rüping, Michael Stolleis and Ralph Angermund, among others, had produced highly important critical studies (that more or less owed their intellectual lineage to Neumann, his colleague and friend, Ernst Fraenkel and other critical jurists from that period) to challenge a conservative generation of historians who appeared to downplay the judiciary’s anti-democratic stance.9

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With the exception of Gotthard Jasper, or Christoph Gusy who focuses not so much on the judiciary per se as on the function of law and legal discourses in relation to the protection of the republic10, these studies generally deal with the judiciary under the Third Reich and notably with the role of the People’s Court from 1934.11 In the absence of empirical studies, the relationship between the judiciary and the Weimar Republic has been judged in the light of the subsequent behaviour of the courts in serving the interests of the Nazi dictatorship.12 The sentencing policies of the lower and regional courts or the decisions of the Reich Court in Leipzig (Reichsgerichtshof) which heard political cases and like the Verwaltungsgerichtshof at Kassel also arbitrated on constitutional matters, left little doubt as to their political bias in respect of the republic. As far as liberal and left circles were concerned, there was too much evidence of judicial authoritarianism when it came to sentencing; that an inveterate ultra-conservative judiciary divorced from mainstream society used its position from the bench to launch surrogate attacks upon the republic. The courts on the other hand saw themselves as defenders of the Reich rather than the republic, and as bulwarks against crime and chaos.13 Their powerful position led legal historian Ralph Angermund to describe the judiciary as a ‘third force’ in Weimar politics.14 As we shall see in this chapter, there is much to recommend in Angermund’s description, but if one were to ask judges or any jurist for that matter under the republic, how they themselves saw their position then a quite different picture would emerge. To begin with, we would hear of a judiciary that believed it was undervalued, especially given its role in keeping ‘bolshevism’ at bay during the revolutionary period; in the mid-twenties, judges would say their loyalty to the republic was misrepresented;15 they bemoaned what they saw as political interference and declining standards: as did Dr Baumbach, formerly a senior judge of the Berlin Kammergericht (upper regional court) in the January issue of the Deutsche Juristen Zeitung in 1928 that under the republic ‘criminal justice was merely the prostitute of politicians’.16 By the later 1920s, jurists and legal experts would tell us that the authority of the courts had been weakened by the policies of successive governments and by a liberal constitutional framework that rather than upholding ‘healthy national values’ had provided a ‘Magna Carta for the criminal’.17 By the beginning of the 1930s, a younger generation of jurists would be demanding an end to the liberal-left ‘stranglehold’ on legal values that had allegedly undermined the authority of the courts and the state and called for a return to authoritarian law that better suited German values.18 The paradox of the judiciary as an authoritarian ‘third force’ working against the republic or as an emasculated authority is the focus of this chapter. To be sure, the judiciary was locked into a mindset that was deeply conservative and highly ambivalent vis-à-vis democracy; but whatever the degree to which it still harboured monarchist sentiment, it was not necessarily anti-republican in its everyday courtroom praxis. Nevertheless, its failure to find in favour of the political authorities in those cases brought under the law for the Protection of the Republic (Gesetz zur Schutz der Republik) brought onto the statute book in the wake of Rathenau’s murder in 1922, called into question its reliability.19 But political trials as such only ever constituted a minor part of the case load of Weimar’s courts, maybe no more than 9,000 trials

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compared to a total of 450,000 criminal trials in Prussia.20 As for the argument of a weakened law under the republic, the evidence for this does not really stand up to scrutiny. There was indeed a critical discourse on the sentencing policy of the courts, especially after reforms of sentencing policy took effect.21 But as we shall see, sentences passed by Weimar’s courts dovetailed with the ebb and flow of Weimar politics: during the early years, it veered towards authoritarianism before taking a more liberal turn in the mid-years, only to return to authoritarian ideas from 1929/30. In other words, the judiciary was not so much out of step but in step with the culture of the republic. In this chapter, we examine the complex matrix of authority–authoritarian relations between law, society and state within the framework of the long republic between 1916 and 1936.

The judiciary: The caste of authority As with other professions, the German judiciary had experienced a fairly robust expansion in the pre-war period. As reserve officers, many of them were mobilized after 1914. About a thousand judges were killed in action during the war. In Prussia, where the overwhelming majority of judges was to be found, 414 judges fell at the Front (or 5.8 per cent of their number), and four times that number of assistant judges and legal trainees attached to a court (Gerichtsassessoren and Referandare).22 After 1918, its size and composition remained relatively stable (in spite of a small reduction) until the mid-1930s. In general, its numbers hovered at around ten thousand from the end of the war to the mid-1930s.23 In terms of its social characteristics, Weimar’s judiciary continued to be drawn from the upper-middle and middle classes, as it had been under the empire. A study of the social origins of legal trainees in Prussia for each year between 1922 and 1930 showed that the upper, upper-middle and middle classes made up roughly 95 per cent of the cohort (Table 5.1). Lower-level judges were more likely to have a lower and middle-class background, and conversely, senior-level judges more upper and upper-middle class.24 Klaus Bästlein found that of the 110 judges and prosecutors attached to the Reichsgericht after 1933, 54.5 per cent came from families with a higher education, 40.5 per cent from professional families, 4.5 per cent from rural families and only 0.5  per cent from manual families.25 A snapshot of the family backgrounds of Prussia’s judiciary is given above.26 While over half of the cohort does not show a father’s occupation, the table demonstrates that a sizable proportion of Weimar’s legal profession was drawn from the corpus of public service, with the higher echelons predominating. This social make-up also held true for the judiciary in Bavaria; in the city-state of Hamburg with a social elite drawn from the trading and financial sectors and its highly developed educated and cultural class, it is of little surprise that the city-state’s judges and prosecutors were drawn predominantly from these groups. In terms of age structure, well over half of Bavaria’s judges were in their fifties and sixties (respectively 26.14% and 27.03%) and with just around 40 per cent comprising a younger cohort in their thirties and forties by the end of the 1920s, with a similar picture in Hamburg and in

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Table 5.1  Father’s occupation of judges, prosecutors, civil servant graduates and law trainees in Prussia, 15 December 1927 Judges/ Prosecutors

Civil servant graduates

Law trainees

Percentages Higher civil   servants

19.2

18.6

14.4

11.9

15.1

16.0

  servants

0.6

0.9

1.5

Teachers

4.5

7.9

10.0

Industrialists

4.1

4.3

2.4

0.03

0.2

0.7

4.0

3.2

0.9

55.7

49.8

54.1

Middle civil   servants Lower civil

Manual workers Pensioners/   House owners Unknown

Source: Wilhelm Schwister, Deutsche Richter Zeitung, Jg. 23, Heft 4 (1931), 125–9.

Baden.27 Ralph Angermund reminds us that social class and age were significant factors influencing sentencing policy and also conditioned attitudes within the judiciary towards the republic itself.28 Indeed, in one of the earliest studies to tackle this issue from a social–psychological perspective, Ernst Fraenkel noted: The entire civil service of the old regime was monarchist in terms of its education, conviction, tradition. The judge was a monarchist out of inner necessity. As a result, no branch of the civil service found it more difficult to come to terms with the new arrangements [in 1918] than the judiciary.29

The older age profile of the judiciary meant that the majority had been socialized under the empire; its conservatism, expressed through its monarchist inclinations, reflected the cultural outlook of the Beamtenschaft of that generation, as Fraenkel observed. Typically, before 1914 a judge would have been a reserve officer, a connection that not only gave him important status, but one which bound him closer to the monarchical system.30 The historian Detlev Peukert laid great stress on this authoritarian socialization under the empire to explain the judiciary’s obstructive mentality vis-à-vis the democratizing imperatives of the republic.31 But there was also a material factor that influenced a judge’s loyalty to his profession and to the state. Progress from the lecture hall to the bench was a slow one. After finishing university, a law graduate would spend

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four years as a trainee (Referendar) and then a further period of between eight and ten years as an assistant judge (Gerichtsassessor). This was a vulnerable position with little security, for an assistant judge was unpaid and could be transferred or removed from the post with little or no notice. In general, a trainee spent twelve years between graduation and donning the robes of a full judge. There was plenty of time in this period to inculcate, probe and to test his loyalty to the state and system. ‘The torture of such probation’, Fraenkel observed, ‘would not be borne by anyone who had not an inner loyalty to the old political and social system’.32 By the end of this period, the newly minted judge would be in his mid to later thirties before he gained security as a civil servant and started to earn a basic annual salary starting at between 3000/4000 marks rising to around 7200/7900 marks if in Prussia.33 There is, however, evidence that trainees and assistant judges resented this unpaid journeymanship and took advantage of the democratization of the German state after 1918 to press for payment for their services.34 Nevertheless, while the salary of a judge was secure, the material well-being of the Assessor was not. The image of the impoverished assistant judge under the empire portrayed by Gerhardt Hauptmann’s character Assessor Wehrhahn in his play Der Biberpelz (1892/93) continued to mirror the social reality during the 1920s of many aspiring jurists such as Curt Rothenberger (who after 1933 had a rapid career becoming president of the upper regional court of Hamburg).35 The war and inflation exacerbated the materially fragile position of the judiciary as the value of their salaries deteriorated.36 As a young man, Hans Frank, later to become Hitler’s ‘crown jurist’, whose father’s law praxis suffered in this period, had to make do with a diet of cabbage and potatoes.37 The damage to the self-esteem of the judiciary was considerable as Fraenkel wryly observed. The salary was no longer enough. One learned to go without all luxuries. If the judge had to take a train, he travelled fourth class among the apprentices and tramps, whom he only otherwise knew from the defendants’ bench. A university course for the sons was no longer possible; they would become salesmen. . . . One had to get rid of the servants; [instead] Frau Court Director had to cook and wash up.38

Facing (relative) penury, some judges did not stop short of thinly veiled threats against the state. ‘The State could experience terrible consequences if its judges run out breath. Many whistle from the last hole. Does [the state] not know any longer the saying: Justitia fundamentum regnum?’ asked one judge who remained anonymous.39 For many judges who had invested in war bonds, their material situation fared little better with the revaluation of the Mark, as David Southern has shown, and as a result judges complained bitterly about their condition, in spite of some improvement in salaries in  1924 and in  1927.40 However, this improvement was soon clawed back under Chancellor Brüning’s emergency decree of September 1930 which inaugurated the era of economies that impacted negatively on Germany’s civil service: salaries were cut first in December 1930 by 6 per cent and again in the following summer by between 4 and 8 per cent, depending on their grade.41 For Weimar’s judiciary government policies in the economic cycle from inflation to depression either triggered or confirmed and certainly compounded its growing alienation from the

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republic, captured by Ernst Ottwalt’s protagonist the ‘apolitical’ Berlin district judge (Landgerichtsrat) Friedrich Wilhelm Dickmann in his novel Denn sie wissen was sie tun (1931). A simple servant of the law of the German republic, which paid this servant of fair justice (Gerechtigkeit) a salary of six hundred marks a month, assuming that he is a chairman of a regional court and has already so many years of service behind him. The Emergency Decree had imposed hefty deductions, and if one wanted to hear regional court counsellor Dickmann swear, then one only had to bring the conversation around to the Emergency Decree.42

The perception within the legal profession that it had been among the losers of the inflation and the economic stabilization that followed alienated many of its members from the Weimar state in the period of stabilization.43 As we shall see below, by the mid-1920s, in spite of an improvement in material conditions, a large number of judges, prosecutors and lawyers had adopted an antirepublican stance. Many were already members of popular organizations that stood at a distance or were openly hostile to the republic, such as the nationalist veterans’ league Stahlhelm, the Pan German League, The German-Völkisch Protection League, the monarchist Imperial Yacht Club or the National German Officers [Club], or, if eligible, the German Aristocratic Association.44 After the constitutional reform of October 1918, they had flocked to the Fatherland Party as part of a conservative counterweight to the liberal forces in parliament. From November, they transferred their allegiance to the newly founded nationalist DNVP, to a lesser extent to the centre-right DVP and  to  an even lesser extent to the liberal DDP, not to speak of the Majority Socialists or  radical Independents. Until 1933, there were at least forty-three conservative Reichstag deputies at one time or another who were either members of the judiciary or who had gained a doctorate in law out of a total cohort of 137 jurists.45 But there were strong regional variations. In Hamburg before 1933, as SteinStegmann shows, those members of the judiciary with known political affiliations inclined equally towards the DVP and DDP, as well as the DNVP.46 Similarly, Kißener in his study of Baden’s judiciary shows that the majority of judges, who also had a political career, were in fact members of the Catholic Centre Party, and until 1932, a pillar of republican democracy.47 What is clear from regional studies is that before 1933 the NSDAP had a weak foothold within the judiciary. Similar to Hamburg, Baden had a liberal tradition, whereas Bavaria did not.48 Apart from a handful of high-profile Nazi jurists, such as Hanns Kerrl, Roland Freisler and Otto Thierack, all of who were early joiners, the evidence suggests that other than only a small handful of jurists, such as the chief state lawyer (Oberreichsanwalt) Karl Werner, joined the NSDAP before 1933.49 Indeed, even by the end of 1932, the Bund Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Juristen (BNSDJ), the organization founded in  1928 by Hans Frank (another early joiner), numbered just 1,374 of all jurists, and even though the organization grew significantly over the following years, only a handful of its members were judges or state prosecutors, indeed, the majority was drawn from private practice.50 This lukewarm attitude to the NSDAP, it was estimated that around 30 of Prussia’s 7000 judges belonged to the party,

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was to motivate Hans Kerrl who became Prussia’s first Nazi justice minister in 1933, to immediately inaugurate an educational programme for law trainees (Referendare) to ensure the creation of a Nazi ‘corps of jurists’.51 The political pluralism of the judiciary did not preclude a shared Weltanschauung among the broad mass of jurists, many if not most of whom as students would have been affiliated to one of the ubiquitous student clubs (Burschenschaften) notorious for their virulent anti-Semitism, such as the Burschenschaft Gothia zu Königsberg.52 In terms of professional associations, Weimar’s judiciary was overwhelmingly organized in the conservative Deutscher Richterbund and its Prussian and Bavarian counterparts.53 Only a small proportion of judges declared themselves openly in support of the republic, and these were mostly organized in the Republican Judges Association (Republikanische Richterbund), a pro-republican cross-party group established in 1922. The members of this association, led by Gustav Radbruch, the distinguished law professor who had twice served as justice minister in the early crisis years, comprised barely three per cent of the Reich’s judges, with a slightly higher membership – five per cent – in Prussia (compare this to the ca. 15 per cent who were thought to be blatantly monarchist).54 Much (though not all) of the criticism at the manner in which the courts arrived at decisions that challenged not only the scales of justice but also the authority of the republic, tended to come from these pro-republican judges. Their pro-republican and law reform views were frequently aired in the journal, Die Justiz that was established in 1925, drew the ire of much of the profession represented by the conservative Deutsche Richterzeitung and to a lesser extent from the Deutsche Juristen Zeitung edited by Otto Liebmann; Die Justiz was quickly closed down in  1933, whereas the other two journals were ‘coordinated’.55 Being part of a professional and social association or having membership of a political organization meant that in reality members of the judiciary were as much a part of Weimar’s political landscape as any other organized group under the republic, in spite of claims of being ‘apolitical’ and standing above parties.56 But their preparedness to participate in organizations whatever the orientation does not mean that the judiciary had become pragmatically reconciled to the republic. It is safe to say that in the main most members of the judiciary were not among Meinecke’s Vernunftrepublikaner. In  1918, the judiciary found itself confronted by a political situation from which it could either retreat, or over which it could attempt to regain some control.57 * In order to broaden the social base of the judiciary to reflect Germany’s diverse social structure, the republican administration, especially in Prussia, attempted to open up the judiciary after 1918, but this attempt at reform had largely faltered by the mid1920s, not least because of changes in government and because of fierce resistance from the judiciary itself.58 Nevertheless, there were some signs of a limited democratization in terms of social background by the beginning of the 1930s; a shortage of judges during the Third Reich led the regime to relax entry criteria thus taking in a broader social sweep of trainees by the later part of the decade. It is perhaps an irony that Wilhelm Schwister the president of the central examinations office for legal trainees

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(Prüfungsamt) from 1927 until the end of 1933 when he was transferred to OLG Düsseldorf, and who had complained already in the later 1920s of the declining quality of legal trainees, had to preside over them after 1933.59 Under the imperial constitution, judges could neither be sacked nor transferred against their will, and this privilege was incorporated into Article 129 of the Weimar Constitution. Moreover, since there was not an upper age limit for judges, they constituted an ageing population. This privileged position in society, together with a long and expensive legal training had set them apart from the rest of society.60 Under the republic, an attempt was made to rejuvenate the service and to democratize it by making it more representative of society as a whole. Thus, Article 104 of the Weimar Constitution allowed Länder governments to pass laws for setting an upper age limit. The Prussian administration was the first to propose measures in this direction. In response, the chairman of the Circuit Court in Düsseldorf (Oberlandesgericht) protested that ‘Many civil servants had held it for their duty to the Fatherland to remain in state service beyond their 65th birthday’. Adolph von Staff went on to call the proposed reform a ‘serious violation’ that was both ‘unnecessary’ and ‘misguided’ and which would ‘endanger the continued existence of the Prussian judiciary per se’.61 There may have been some justification for the suspicion that once this law was passed, it would pave the way for other regional governments to follow suit. Indeed, the small state of Hessen pensioned off twelve of its senior judges in the summer of 1923.62 In Prussia itself, the overall number of judges was reduced from 6,343 in 1919 to 5,346 by 1924, affecting almost entirely lower court judges (Amtsgerichtsrichter).63 By 1929, there was approximately 10 per cent fewer lower court judges than in 1913; meanwhile, the number of judges throughout the Reich decreased from 10,177 to 9,719 between 1913 and 1929.64 While the reductions were not great, it appears judges responded by sitting on their case loads, especially as the pressure grew with rising numbers of defendants before the courts in the depression years. In spite of claims of social and material decline, Weimar’s judiciary at every level continued to enjoy immense kudos, especially in the provinces where its members belonged to the caste of the local notables, even under the republic. For left-wing critics such as Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Ottwalt and Ernst Fraenkel, the situation of judges improved as the republic stabilized, not simply as part of the general improvement associated with the period of so-called relative stability, but because ‘The more the  leading social class regained the monopoly of state power in their hands with the progressive embourgeoisement (Verbürgerlichung) of the republic, [the more] the spiritual crisis of the judiciary lessened’.65 Fraenkel cited an independent study carried out by Friedrich Dessauer and published in  1928 that persuasively argued that this process was also a consequence of the progressive curbing of the Reichstag as a law-making body, resulting in more and more power being vested in the courts and bureaucracy.66 This trend was more pronounced during periods of crisis when government was by emergency decree. The regained social and political confidence of the judiciary was perceptively registered at the time by Ottwalt in Denn sie wissen, and it can be traced in the way the judiciary interpreted the law in relation to the republic, and in its sentencing policies vis-à-vis those it considered to be either its ‘class enemy’ or its class friend.67

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Bulwarks of the Nation. The judiciary in war and inflation, 1916–1924 On 4 August 1914, the Bundesrat approved an enabling law (Ermächtigungsgestz) that allowed the government to pass laws without recourse to the Reichstag.68 At the same time, Article 68 of the imperial Constitution allowed for a state of siege (Belagerungszustand) based on the 1851 Prussian Law to be declared under which acts defined by Paragraph 9 as threatening the interests of the wartime community were to be tried by extraordinary courts (Ausserordentliche Gerichte also sometimes referred to as Kriegsgerichte).69 During the war and in the revolutionary period, the extraordinary courts were manned by five judges, three of who were military officers, but usually chaired by the senior of the two civilian judges. As reserve officers, the judiciary played a vital role during the war on both the home and fighting fronts, and again during the turbulent period of the republic’s founding. Thus, the judiciary found itself in the front line of the state’s defence of the ‘inner front’, a concept that hardened as the war dragged on and protests against the war gathered pace.70 In little over a year of their introduction in Prussia, the number of these courts increased from 25 to 38 by mid-November 1917, with a further nine on the eastern border, and by war’s end peaked at around 60.71 From 1 June to the end of December 1916, over 62,000 cases were heard before the Ausserordentliche Gerichte; the figure fell to 47,442 during the first six months of 1917, but rose again to sixtyeight thousand the following year over the same period. The number of defendants was much higher: in 1917 for instance, it totalled 143,641. Almost two-thirds of all defendants in Prussia were brought before these courts, and around 35,000 persons brought before similar courts in Bavaria, Saxony and Alsace.72 Increasingly, the remit of Paragraph 9 of the state of siege spread to issues relating to everyday social crime, industrial conflicts and criticism of the wartime authorities, now deemed threatening to the war effort; thus, in Württemberg it was invoked as a preventive measure allowing for internment without trial or evidence.73 Using the state of siege, the courts increasingly turned their attention to trivial cases. The increasing resort to these special courts to deal not with only political cases but also with petty crime reflected the diminishing authority of the wartime regime as it sought to compensate for this with ever tougher law. With the presence of judges in uniform, the courts became little more than summary tribunals that grew more authoritarian in their sentencing policy, with the result that public confidence in the legal process dwindled rapidly.74 Complaints were quickly aired that courts were passing sentences that were out of all proportion to the offence. Thus, being involved in food protests or stealing bread or shoes during a food riot could result in being sentenced to forced labour; involvement in strikes that gained in frequency as we saw in earlier chapters also resulted in prison sentences being meted out, as in early 1918, when a woman who did not show for work during a strike was sentenced to four weeks prison for ‘acting against the interests of the state’.75 It was possibly this expansion of the special courts’ remit that led Walther Rathenau to comment ‘there are too many trials in Germany’ and to call instead for a more charitable approach to welfare for the poverty-stricken.76

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Meanwhile, prostitutes faced incarceration for endangering the fighting capacity of men through the risk of infection.77 The revolution did not end the draconian practices of the extraordinary courts and their military judges. While the wartime state of siege was lifted on 12 November, it was soon reinstated regionally at least thirteen times in as many months after November 1918 to counter disorder. The 1851 Law was eventually replaced in 1919 by the emergency powers granted under Article 48 of the constitution.78 Under this provision, a state of siege was invoked a further twenty-four times in the period up to the end of 1923 in different parts of the country as a means to tackle the continuing unrest. Against this background, a decree issued by the Reich Justice Ministry in March 1921 reintroduced extraordinary courts at all thirteen upper regional courts (Oberlandesgerichtsbezirke) in Prussia.79 In Bavaria and Braunschweig, § 212 of the Procedure of Criminal Trial (Strafprozeßordnung, StPO) allowed for summary trials (Schnellverfahren) in the ordinary courts, and which, like the extraordinary courts, greatly disadvantaged the defendant since there was no right of appeal.80 The recourse to tough justice was seen by the new republican authority as the most effective way of dealing with the endemic unrest that plagued Germany during the spring and summer of 1919 and in the following two turbulent years. In June and July, rioting broke out in a number of cities over food and material shortages. Hamburg suffered severe rioting in June as rumours spread through its old rookery quarters (the so-called Gängeviertel) that rotten meat was being utilized in the making of Sülze (jellied meat), and order was only restored after the colonial hero General von LettowVorbeck led his troops into the city.81 Over the spring and summer of 1919, the State of Siege law of 1851 was invoked across of much of Prussia, over Berlin, Breslau, Hamm, Düsseldorf, Königsberg and Marienwerder that allowed the use of extraordinary courts.82 Already in March, over a hundred persons had been sentenced by the three special courts attached to the Landgericht in Berlin under similar emergency measures. Heavy sentences were passed down by the courts in the majority of cases ranging from a few months prison to penal servitude against those involved in strikes, instigating strikes, taking part in street demonstrations or just disorderly conduct construed under the emergency provisions as treasonable. In a number of cases, the courts were blatantly being used to support employers in conflict with workers over conditions and pay.83 The draconian sentencing of the courts gave rise to political and public disquiet and was reported critically in parts of the press.84 The Prussian Assembly debated the issue of special courts on several occasions in 1919, with deputies citing numerous cases of judicial capriciousness in the treatment of defendants. The Social Democrat deputy, the jurist Arnold Freymuth, a co-founder of the German League for Human Rights, spoke of one mass trial where 54 defendants were allocated a single lawyer; and the only witness for the defence to appear was quickly impeached by the state prosecutor as an accessory. Freymuth lamented the judiciary’s lack of the ‘right spirit’.85 A month before, during a three-day debate in the Prussian Assembly from 15 to 17 June 1921, the leader of the Majority Socialists Ernst Heilmann stated a total of 2,500 years of penitentiary confinement had been meted out to men and women caught up in the unrest in Mitteldeutschland. The sentences were out of all proportion

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to the gravity of their actions he claimed and continued, ‘I believe that the criminal justice current in Mitteldeutschland has destroyed more lives than those destroyed by the entire uprising’.86 He spoke of a case where a special court had sentenced a man to six years imprisonment for shouting ‘down with the government’; he gave another example of a defendant, a crippled war veteran, who received eight years for belonging to the alleged communist-led ‘red army’ (later exposed as a chimera by an internal government inquiry).87 And comparing the draconian nature of the sentences to those much lighter ones passed against members of the Free Corps would not, in his view, repair the divisions within the country and lead to national unity. Such anecdotal evidence also aired in the Reichstag was given weight with the  publication in  1922 (and a revised edition two years later) of Emil Gumbel’s analysis of the courts’ bias in sentencing.88 It was such sentences that provided the material for Ottwalt in Denn sie wissen to depict a legal system steered by petty ambition and laden with political corruption that led judges to put into practice authoritarian law. However, Heilmann was unwilling to place the responsibility directly with Ebert and the SPD, stating that it was the Prussian government at that time comprising a liberal coalition of Centre Party and Deutsche Democratic Party that insisted on the illiberal Belagerungszustand and the use of special courts. Unconvinced by this line of argument, Dr Cohn a deputy from the Independent Socialists put the blame squarely upon Noske’s shoulders and remarked caustically how ‘once again the medicine had proved to be worse than the disease it was supposed to combat’.89 Cohn, who had from the beginning of the republic demanded the democratization of the judiciary, called for the lifting of the state of siege throughout the Reich, the withdrawal of the extraordinary courts and summary trials, and importantly for the democratization of judges and for parliamentary control over the judiciary. Such demands were rebuffed by the army minister Gustav Noske, who when it came to restoring law and order, did not shirk from extra-judicial lethal force to ‘combat the enemy’, at this time viewed as being on the left.90 Noske merely typified a widely held view among the SPD leadership. His party colleague the Prussian interior minister and in 1919 state commissar Wolfgang Heine shared Noske’s position but not his methods and defended the use of the extraordinary courts, an irony given that they both had been vociferous in their opposition to their introduction in  1916.91 Nevertheless, Heine had been disturbed by the role played by military judges, noting that younger officers were particularly inclined to partisan sentences that bespoke little more than a thinly disguised ‘inner war’. ‘It is also not to be forgotten’ he noted in a dispatch to the chancellor in 1919, ‘that these officers bring with them the habits of a four-year war on foreign soil and will be inclined to bring these without further ado into the political struggle at home’.92 It was becoming obvious that regional military commanders were declaring states of siege as they saw fit without any consultation with the political authorities, but frequently in response to requests from employers and landowners to end strikes, as in the county of Franzburg. What this meant in practice was that social conflict was turned into raison d’étât as striking was effectively declared treasonable.93 And there were other dreadful miscarriages of justice. For example, when a number of students who had belonged to a Free Corps detachment stood trial in Marburg

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in 1920 for killing fifteen unarmed workmen from Bad Thal, Thuringia, Dr Viktor Sauer, the state prosecutor, whose task normally would be to gain convictions for the state, called instead for the students to be acquitted contrary to all the evidence that showed their guilt.94 This blurring of the boundaries between the war front and the home front was also highlighted in some quarters of the press, and the point was made that the new republican authorities resorted to draconian measures, such as the arbitrary use of ‘protective custody’ (Schutzhaft), not seen even during the ‘dark days’ of the hated wartime state of siege.95 The left-wing newspaper, Die Freiheit, cited the case of a 15-year-old boy taken into ‘protective custody’ who was unfortunate for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (i.e. in a demonstrating crowd); and the case of a young woman, Gertrud Paul, who with her fiancé, was incarcerated under the emergency laws without charge or trial in Berlin’s Moabit prison for singing popular songs at workers’ fêtes.96 But it was not just the left-wing press that criticized the government and the courts. The liberal Frankfurter Zeitung recoiled at the continual imposition of the state of siege declaring: ‘that is how it used to be, but it should not be like this any more’.97 Der Tag, a newspaper of the ultra-conservative Scherrl Publishing group owned by Alfred Hugenberg, agreed with the Frankfurter Zeitung, noting that the military had abused its judicial powers during the war and that this had contributed to the mass alienation of the people from the state.98 Eventually, the pressure on the political authorities to curb judicial excesses had an impact and a large number of sentences  were revised upon appeal, by as many as 81 per cent in  1921 and two-thirds in  1923. This corrective, which had been encouraged by Prussia’s justice minister Hugo Am Zehnhoff,99 was criticized by judges as directly undermining the authority of the court who argued, ‘factually, that means a severely unsustainable weakening of the fearful impact of sentencing of the AoG’.100 Such criticism of policy notwithstanding, government authorities had come around to the view that exemplary sentences when used sparingly had a greater impact on the population than mass repression.101 Nevertheless, the courts continued to hand down what appeared to be harsh justice leading both the KPD and the SPD Reichstag groups in early January 1925 to put two separately written questions to the government on the subject of ‘class justice’.102 In the febrile conditions of Weimar’s revolutionary years, the deployment of authoritarian justice had been an indispensable tool for stabilizing the republic. Even Carl Severing, who cannot be put into the same camp as Noske when it came to authoritarian law and order, turned the courts (and the army under General Walther) upon so-called insurgent workers who had mobilized against Kapp and his co-conspirators in March 1920 in defence of the republic!103 But it also gave the courts free rein to wage a war of attrition against those they held responsible for the overturning of order. The blatant partisanship evident in the sentences meted down to working-class defendants inevitably eroded the authority of republican leaders among their natural supporters, a fact that was recognized by Social Democrats such as Heine at the time.104 For critics of the justice system under the republic, the evidence was unassailable. Gumbel’s study showed the proclivity of the courts in the early period to operate in an uneven-handed way; the introduction of the Law for the Protection

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of the republic in 1922 was in response to right-wing murderous excesses but it was quickly deployed to suppress the communist left.105 As such, judicial practices under the republic merely deepened the divisions between the leaders of the politically conscious working class and their natural constituency that had opened up during World War I.

‘The alien body in the social people’s state’. The judiciary and the authority of the republic, 1924–29 Amid calls for reform of the judiciary in 1921, Gustav Radbruch, the newly installed Social Democrat justice minister for the Reich, publicly accused judges of hiding behind ‘judicial objectivity’ to exercise a form of justice that was an ‘alien authoritarian body in the social people’s state’.106 Radbruch’s biting remark about the resistant nature of the judiciary to the political changes of 1918 was not without good reason, as many contributions to the Deutsche Richterzeitung testify.107 Indeed, a great part of Weimar’s judiciary was unable to undertake the mental shift towards democracy; instead, they remained locked into the authoritarian and deferential atmosphere of the Bismarckian state, brilliantly captured by Heinrich Mann in his novel Der Untertan (1918).108 Radbruch’s dismal view of Weimar’s judiciary was supported by a study into the political affiliations of the judiciary by Hermann Grossmann, the only Social Democrat and pro-republican judge of Jewish heritage at the Reichsgerichtshof (Supreme Court) in Leipzig.109 Grossmann provided a portrait of the great majority of judges as opportunists whose political orientation was contingent upon the policies of the republic. And yet the judiciary recoiled at the accusation that it was somehow a fifth column within the republican state and went on the offensive. When the League of Republican Judges was founded in 1922, it came under attack by fellow judges for breaking ranks and allegedly giving ammunition to the judiciary’s critics. Addressing Radbruch in an open letter in the conservative Deutsche Richterzeitung, Dr Liebmann stated that the judiciary was in fact a loyal branch of the executive, whatever the political form of the state. But the founding of the League Must give the impression that the true friends of the Republic are gathered in one camp, and its opponents gathered in the other. The planned increasing attacks on judges are based on this alleged opposition.110

And Liebmann became more combative further on in his criticism and demanded rhetorically, ‘Should we allow the campaign of lies to roll over us, just as in the war? . . . . I think: No!’ In a subsequent issue of the Deutsche Richterzeitung, another judge accused Radbruch and the Social Democrat press of waging a political campaign against the judiciary. There was now a gathering counteroffensive by conservative judges against the alleged political interference under the republic. Thus, Rauch indignantly countered Grossmann’s criticism stating that judges should not be subjected to ‘political snooping’ (Gesinnungsschnüffelei), while the chairman of the Berlin regional court, Dr  Weiß maintained that judgements were ‘above politics’, a claim that was continuously repeated throughout the life of the republic.111

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The biggest stumbling block for these judges and prosecutors was that overnight they had gone from sentencing in the ‘name of the monarch’ to sentencing in the ‘name of the people’ (Art 130 WRV), or as they saw it, ‘in the name of the despised mob’.112 As Fraenkel noted, the revolution had turned the world of the jurist upside down. For many within the judiciary, this change entailed a loss of their authority that was soon to be compounded by what they viewed as political interference by the new republican authorities as reforms of the service were called for. As long as the judiciary remained a closed caste, it was inevitable that it would find itself the object of scrutiny and criticism. The calls from Grossmann and the Social Democrat minister president of Saxony and later lord mayor of Leipzig, Erich Zeigner for the democratization of the service, and in particular of the position of senior judge at the regional and upper regional courts, were met with fierce criticism.113 The desire to transform the judiciary and to open it up by broadening its social base inevitably led to allegations of political tampering leading to a loss of judicial autonomy.114 For example, the chairman of the Berlin court in a lecture to his fellow jurists on 4 December 1924 in Halberstadt claimed that the judiciary faced a purge, especially in the circuit and upper courts, should democrats come to power in the coming election. And indeed, many judges and state prosecutors barely concealed their hostility towards the democratic imperative of the republic.115 According to the industrialist and DNVP spokesman on legal issues in the Reichstag, Walther Rademacher, democracy and justice (Rechtsprechung) did not go together.116 One of the crassest examples of this is Hitler’s trial for treason at the Munich People’s Court between 26 February and 1 April 1924 after the failed ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ the previous November. Bavaria’s premier Eugen von Knilling (who the putschists had ‘arrested’) was intent that Hitler should receive the death penalty, although he and the authorities in Berlin could not intervene directly in this regard.117 But as is well known, the presiding judge not only indulged Hitler and allowed him to use the trial as a national tribune to promote his ideas, it displayed uncharacteristic leniency by confining him to fortress custody (Festungshaft). This sentence was cut short after his early release barely ten months later under an amnesty granted by the Bavarian justice minister, Franz Gürtner, who in 1932 became Reich justice minister under von Papen and remained in this post after 1933 until his death in 1941.118 A friend of Gürtner’s, 50-year-old Theodor von der Pfordten, an Appeal Judge at the Bavarian High Court who in 1921 had railed against the ‘new era’ in the Deutsche Richterzeitung and in the following year had played a part in the notorious miscarriage of justice against Eisner’s press secretary Felix Fechenbach, took part in the putsch and paid with his life, earning him a lengthy eulogy in the same journal.119 The mismatch between sentencing and support for the republic was all too noticeable in those cases dealing with insults and slanders against the republic and its representatives prosecuted under the Law for the Protection of the Republic. The behaviour of judges and the outcomes of such trials did indeed raise the question of both the judiciary’s loyalty vis-à-vis the republic and the latter’s authority. For example, the president of the court in Limburg alleged in 1919 that the revolution had been a breach of law (Rechtsbruch) and ‘thus the legal foundation for all state activity is lacking’. The logic of this put the republic’s legality in doubt.120 Thus, it is of little surprise that

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ten years later in December 1930, a judge at the court in the Silesian city of Glogau found the slanderous comments by a defendant on trial for stating the republic was the product of high treason and perjury ‘content-wise to be accurate’ (‘inhaltlich zutreffend sei’). The judgement was echoed in a joint declaration of the Prussian and Reich organizations of judges in the 15 February issue of the Deutsche Richterzeitung.121 Meanwhile, the circuit court at Gleiwitz found little wrong with a Stahlhelm song that was tantamount to a call to arms against the republic. Even Adolf Lobe, the president of the 111 Senate at the nation’s highest court, the Reichsgerichtshof in Leipzig, seemed to call into question the legality of the republic in a landmark decision in 1922 that overturned custodial sentences previously passed down by the criminal court in Gotha against members of the Jungdeutschen Orden for slandering the republic, when he made a distinction between the ‘present state’ and a ‘constitutional state’.122 While some of these decisions overtly challenged the very existence of the republic, others undermined its authority by upholding acts of denigration against it and its symbols which were illegal under the Law for the Protection of the Republic. For example in a case heard before the First Senate of the Reich Court in June 1923, the jibe ‘Jew republic’ (Judenrepublik) was declared by the court not to be an insult against the republic because it merely described factually the ‘current state form in which Jews play a leading role’.123 The jibe itself was a common term of abuse against the republic among nationalists and was frequently condoned by the courts where the judges’ own antisemitism was barely concealed. Towards the end of the 1920s, the upper regional court (Oberlandesgericht) in Breslau stated baldly in a case brought before it, that the ‘Jew republic’ was ‘a fact’.124 Quite common too were cases before the courts dealing with the denigration of the republic’s most prominent symbol, the Reich flag in which individuals had insulted it by referring to its colours of black-red-gold as ‘black-red-yellow’ or ‘black-redmustard’.125 The law of 1922 determining that the national flag was to be black-redgold remained a bone of contention throughout the life of the republic, with the DNVP going as far as to allege its violent history. For many, the imperial flag remained the symbol of unity and rejected thus the republican colours.126 This discourse while not necessarily advocating violence against the flag created a climate in which rejection of the republic could assume violent acts against the flag. For example, in Konstanz during late evening and at the end of a Republic Day organized by the republican Reichsbanner at Whitsuntide in 1926, two students approached two soldiers from the 14th Jäger Regiment from opposite ends of the Rhine bridge. Both pairs were drunk, with the soldiers singing ‘Proudly flutters the black-white-red flag’; the students asked the soldiers if they too were ‘schwarz-weiss-rot’, to which they answered yes. One of the students then clambered up one of the flag poles adorning the bridge and cut down a republican flag, describing it as a ‘Jew flag’. The Schöffengericht (a court whose judge sat with lay jurors) sentenced him to two weeks prison and immediately paroled him on good behaviour (Bewahrungsfrist). The other three accused were acquitted.127 In the town of Landsberg, the Schoffengericht acquitted a 41-year-old businessman (Kaufmann) Franz Schulz, after he was prosecuted for referring to the Reich flag as a ‘mustard’ flag (Mostrichfahne). In his defence, Schulz stated that he had been drinking since 9 a.m. that morning and by the time he got to the new bridge he was drunk

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and therefore claimed not to be responsible for his actions. The prosecutor was clearly dissatisfied with the outcome of the trial and appealed the acquittal which nonetheless was upheld first by the regional Landgericht and then by the Reichsgericht- based on precedent in Gleiwitz in 1924 he had merely ‘offended’ but not ‘denigrated’ the flag, ‘for according to binding law we are to understand denigration only as an odious, particularly injurious manifestation of disdain’.128 Such decisions by the courts were not untypical and may have taken as licence the view of Bavaria’s conservative minister of justice Franz Gürtner when he expressed his personal opinion during a debate in the Bavarian Landtag in February 1929 that the colours of the Reich flag did not have the protection of the law if used by associations other than public bodies.129 Heavy drinking had obviously played a part in the above cases, loosening any restraint in one’s inner emotions vis-à-vis the republic. But this was not always the case. The editor of the Kreuz-Zeitung (Neue Preußische Zeitung) reprinted an article from the Ostpreußische Zeitung in which the republic’s flag had been referred to as a ‘stain’ (Schandfleck). The article republished in late May 1926 by Dr Otto Bleck, the 41-yearold Berlin editor of this arch-conservative newspaper, was ostensibly commenting on a conflict that had broken out in the East Prussian town of Marienburg over whether to bedeck the town with the republic’s official black-red-gold colours or the old Prussian black–white banner on the occasion of its 650th anniversary.130 Because of the reference to the Reich flag being a ‘stain’ on the town’s history, Bleck was convicted under the Law for the Protection of the Republic for denigrating the republic (Beschimpfung) and sentenced to two weeks’ prison commuted to a fine of 280 RM. He appealed in the hope of an acquittal. But the second court comprising three judges and two laymen (a Schoffengericht) rather than overturning the earlier sentence upheld it and moreover – contrary to what so often happened in such cases – raised the fine to 500 Marks.131 Bleck was unlucky in that he came before a Berlin court. The chances of acquittal were better in the provinces. Thus, the judges at the Magdeburg Landgericht acquitted the editor of the Bundeszeitschrift Stahlhelmbund over an article in which he described the constitution as a ‘deformation’ (‘Missgeschopf ’), an ‘arbitrary power’ (‘Machtwerk’) and a ‘cretinous . . . collection of sterile paragraphs’. The Magdeburg judges in their summing up described the editor as a man ‘Who did not want to defy the Republic as such, but only in the form based on the democratic principle provided by the Weimar Constitution’.132 The context to such cases was the new Flag Law Decree (Flaggenordnung Erlaß) introduced by Hans Luther’s government that gave the former imperial colours equal status with the republican black-red-gold flag. The ensuing furore led to a vote of no confidence against Luther that was tabled by the liberals and Social Democrats with the result that Luther’s government resigned.133 Conflicts over the republic’s symbols thus had tangible political repercussions. Insults against the republic, its symbols and its politicians were usually triggered by frustration or anger at some perceived slight or injustice as in the example concerning a 42-year-old retired front officer and farmer, Hans Krüger, from Pappelshorst near Wrockow in Mecklenburg.134 Krüger had gone to a meeting of the Königsberg branch of the Kriegerverband in the late spring of 1928 where he had ranted against the ‘swine state’ and ‘swine republic’. This outburst landed him before a court in June. In his

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defence, Krüger’s lawyer, the DNVP Reichstag deputy Dr Everling, argued that his client had not referred to the Weimar Republic, but had spoken of the ‘state’ in general abstract terms. The state prosecutor and the court disagreed, noting the context in which he had spoken, namely during a discussion of the Reich flag in which ‘he drew a clear line between Germany of the imperial period and the German Republic’. In choosing his words, Krüger had sought to ‘diminish the present day state form when he expressed the opinion that it was undignified for a veterans’ association to display the colours of the republic’. His trial ended in a three-month prison sentence plus costs, but on appeal in October 1930 this was reduced to ten days and a 100RM fine by the regional court in Frankfurt/Oder, a display of leniency that incurred the displeasure of the chief state prosecutor and was subsequently revoked by the Prussian Justice Minister. Like many rural holdings in these years, Krüger’s farm was crippled by severe financial difficulties as agricultural prices fell and taxes rose, leading him to accuse the republic of ‘bleeding him dry’. He was clearly one of the many middle-class Germans who expressed their repugnance towards the republic not only in the polling booth, but also in their everyday encounters with the republican state.135 Krüger’s appeal, unlike that of Bleck’s, elicited sympathy from the court often echoed by judges elsewhere. As we saw above, many of Weimar’s judiciary had seen active service as front officers, were frequently nationalists, and if in the main they did not express their anti-republicanism overtly, they tended to express it by proxy when passing mild judgements. Thus, around the time Krüger was in court, another former officer, Captain Heiß found himself facing a court in Landsberg after referring to the republic’s flag as the ‘colours of mutineers’ at a Stahlhelm meeting in Würzburg. Heiß was unrepentant but his judges acquitted him nonetheless, causing a furore.136 Some courts used the bench to express hostility to the republic under the cloak of law, often tortuously twisting it to get the outcome they desired. If a court found against a defendant, a higher court, as we saw above, simply overturned the lower court’s decision. In September 1930, a Berlin court acquitted a city official after he had been prosecuted for calling Albert Grzesinski a ‘Jew bastard’ and a ‘ridiculous bigwig’ (‘lächerlicher Bonzen’). Meanwhile, a short while later, another court exonerated the Nazi Gau leadership after Grzesinski sued it for slander.137 Over the lifetime of the republic, Grzesinski brought somewhere in the region of one hundred prosecutions for slander against him, nearly all of them against the NSDAP. Meanwhile, Friedrich Ebert became embroiled in 173 court cases of slander and libel during his presidency against which he initiated proceedings through the courts to defend his reputation, often with difficulty. The most notorious of these was the libel brought against the editor of the Mitteldeutsche Presse, Erwin Rothardt who had accused Ebert of high treason for his part in the strike of January 1918 (another variation on the stab-in-theback allegation).138 The trial opened in March 1924 at the regional court in Magdeburg rather than before the State Court for the Protection of the Republic (Staatsgerichtshof) and was heard by two professional judges and two lay judges (Schöffen); amid extensive media interest it dragged on until Christmas when Rothardt was found guilty of slander and sentenced to three-months imprisonment, the minimum sentence allowable.139 However, the chairman Bewersdorff and his co-judge, Schultze did not rebut Ebert’s

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alleged treason in their judgement.140 This was not surprising given both judges’ own political sympathies; indeed, the Magdeburg court was renowned for its anti-republican tendency.141 Allegedly, Bewersdorff had some time previously told a group of judges in Cottbus that Ebert was the ‘saddler’s apprentice at the top’ (‘Sattlergeselle da oben’) who ‘had to be got rid of ’. His co-adjudicator, Landgerichtsrat Schultze is alleged to have referred to Philip Scheidemann as a ‘pig’.142 Such sentiments accompanied by light sentences (that contrasted starkly to those handed down to editors of left-wing or communist papers over the same period) not only made a mockery of the law, but they also challenged the authority of the republic. As Dr Haas told the Reichstag, I want to say with all emphasis that the feeling exists in wide circles that when a republican brings a complaint to the German courts across many parts of Germany, he runs the risk that he cannot get just justice before these courts.143

The authorities nevertheless were determined not to let slanders against the republic go unchallenged. And it was not only Social Democrats who had to resort to the courts to defend the republic. In 1931, Brüning’s government initiated criminal proceedings against a retired army captain for alleging that it wanted to ‘barter’ East Prussia to Poland in order to avoid paying the cost of the Osthilfe.144 In the face of a growing verbal assault on it, the republican government again turned towards draconian measures. In January 1931, the acting Reich Minister for Justice, state secretary Curt Joël, once disparaged by Kurt Tucholsky for his ‘republicanism that was lodged so deep in his heart that it could not be found’, sent out an instruction to prosecutors at the thirteen regional upper courts (Oberlandesgerichte) to combat those who insulted the republic, its officers and political representatives ‘strenuously and with all speed’.145 Clearly, many judges and prosecutors simply had not come to terms with the republic since its founding. In their view, the revolution had been a treasonable act that had betrayed and weakened the nation. Indeed, the co-founder of both the Bavarian Richterbund and Deutscher Richterbund, Johannes Leeb described the republic in 1921, a year before his death, as having been founded upon ‘compromise laws which emphasised the rights of parties, class and bastardy’ rather than the ‘majesty of the law’.146 A close collaborator Max Reichert, president of the Deutscher Richterbund and editor of the Deutsche Richterzeitung who in 1926 was appointed to the Reichsgerichtshof stated that while judges owed allegiance to the constitution to which they had sworn an oath, ‘the interpretation we as judges give to the Constitution is not primarily the form of the state’.147 For the likes of Leeb and Reichert and their ilk, their allegiance was to the German state (Reich) and not to a republic which in their words ‘accidentally’ (zufällig) happened to be its current form.148 To overcome this lack of republican identification, Kurt Rosenfeld, an SPD deputy in the Prussian Landtag who also was a ministerial counsellor in the Prussian justice ministry with responsibility as ombudsman for judicial matters, advocated civics training for judges.149 But this proposal does not seem to have had much impact. Relations between the judiciary and the republic, always fragile not to say, tetchy, appeared to deteriorate further in the second half of the 1920s. The judiciary claimed that it was under siege from liberals and the left and their constant berating of judges in particular was both undermining of authority and demoralizing. The mid-years saw

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lengthy debates in the Reichstag on the question of the judiciary’s loyalty to the republic, frequently with individual cases being cited. In 1926, the chairman of the Reichsgericht, Dr Simons, who can best be described as a Vernünftsrepublikaner, found himself speaking of a ‘crisis of confidence’ between judges and republic, echoing the sentiment expressed at the Prussian judiciary’s fifth annual congress in Cologne in September 1926.150 But the nature of crisis was understood differently by those involved in the debate. By 1928, the discussion was tilting more towards the idea that the republic’s judicial system was in crisis because it had been weakened by political interference. According to the SPD deputy Paul Levi speaking in the Reichstag debate of February 1928, the conservative minister for justice Oskar Hergt’s call for the reintroduction of tougher courts was itself a symptom of the ‘crisis of confidence’ in the judicial system.151 Levi was of course right in one respect. But he could equally have said that at the heart of this ‘crisis’ was the lack of support among Weimar’s judiciary for the republican state, whose legitimacy as we have seen was frequently challenged.

The republic as apocalypse: Crime and ‘shackled justice’ From the outset, the discourse surrounding the application of law under the Weimar Republic was dominated by its portrayal as a toothless institution in combating crime.152 To be sure, in the early days of the republic, this discourse was fed by the conditions arising from social and political upheaval. The occurrence of theft and petty larceny for instance increased dramatically; interpersonal violence seemed to become a commonplace of everyday life, with the early years yielding some horrific tales of serial murder, exemplified by the Fritz Haarmann case.153 Also stories were rampant in the press and popular media of an underworld of cheats and swindlers who made fortunes at society’s expense in the inflation, an image dramatized on the cinema screen with Fritz Lang’s classic of 1921/22 Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr Mabuse, the Gambler).154 But worse still, there were reports of judges being attacked by defendants and of courtroom tumult.155 Thus, for many judges, the republic appeared unable to assert the authority of law in the face of organized crime, even though this was hardly a new phenomenon nor a new complaint.156 This discourse of a law under siege was also partly the product of the judiciary’s sense of victimhood as it complained bitterly how it was being constrained by the liberal turn under the republic. Even though, as we have seen, much of this criticism was baseless – given the use of martial law before 1924 and the continuing resort to summary trials after that date – the discourse of crime as ‘cultural crisis’ stuck.157 Conservatives argued that the democratization of law after 1918 had ‘shackled justice’ rendering it impotent in the face of crime. While there had been plenty of complaints in this vein in earlier periods, from the end of the 1920s it crystallized as the dominant discourse, particularly after the publication in 1931 of a popularly written book with that title ostensibly based on factual cases of ‘miscarriages’ of justice (favouring the delinquent).158 The idea that the Weimar Republic had ‘shackled’ the institution of law was a powerful weapon in the arsenal of right-wing attacks on the republic. In its sights were the reforms initiated by Radbruch who was

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again briefly justice minister in Stresemann’s second cabinet, which emphasized the re-socialization of the criminal rather than his or her punishment as the primary aim of law. In other words, Radbruch and his colleagues, pre-eminent among them Hans von Hentig, and fellow liberal jurists, such as Max Hirschberg in Munich, envisaged the law as rehabilitative rather than a punitive instrument and to this end urged that courts take into consideration the social circumstances of the defendant.159 This approach was exemplified in the implementation of social court assistance (Soziale Gerichtshilfe), whose antecedents were to be found in the so-called Bielefeld System of criminal supervision which spread throughout Prussia per decree from 1916. As Warren Rosenblum has shown, the Gerichtshilfe spread rapidly throughout Germany from the mid-1920s with any one of the 300 offices providing the courts with a ‘complete portrait’ of the offender.160 For critics, especially those from the nationalist right, the Gerichtshilfe laid too much emphasis on social conditions which seemed to abrogate the individual’s responsibility to society, an approach that was not necessarily welcomed by the majority of judges, but which they nonetheless had to accept. Thus, conservatives argued that the republic was weakening the authority of law by misplaced reforms that emphasized rehabilitation rather than retribution.161 The result, in their view, was that ‘social justice’ had become a ‘magna carta’ for the criminal and the resulting societal crisis could only be overcome by a return to ‘authoritarian justice’.162 Indeed, by the time such calls were being made, ‘social justice’ was already in retreat as presidential decrees, notably under von Papen, strengthened calls for a tough, authoritarian law which after January 1933 had its remaining liberal ‘shackles’ removed.163 The apocalyptic vision of a society besieged by crime found its way into popular imagination and was helped no doubt by a number of spectacular murder cases, notable among them the case of the sexual predator Fritz Haarmann during the first half of the 1920s in Hannover, and the notorious multiple killer Peter Kürten in Düsseldorf, whose trial and subsequent execution coincided with the screening of Fritz Lang’s film M. Eine Stadt sucht ein Mörder in 1931 that seemed to capture on screen the paranoia and panic of late Weimar society.164 There were also widespread rumours of venality and corruption among Weimar officials with some examples like that involving Berlin’s liberal lord mayor Gustav Boß and his acceptance of gifts from the Sklarek brothers who had contracts with the city, had substance, but many did not.165 Finally, theft, petty larceny, handling stolen goods and prostitution appeared to have free rein according to late Weimar discussions on crime.166 In all of these areas – interpersonal violence, corruption/white collar crime, theft and sexual deviancy – there was a clash between perception and reality. For instance, there were spectacular stories of gruesome murders in the mid-1920s, but murder statistics showed an absolute decline and a lessening in its rate of occurrence during the mid1920s from 193 cases in 1924 to 124 in 1927, or 0.41 per 100,000 of the population to 0.25 per 100,000 of the population. In simple terms, there was a 40 per cent decline in the murder rate during the very years it was supposed to be on the rise (Table 5.2). Similarly, cases of grievous bodily harm and simple assault were also in decline, as too were sex-related crimes, during the course of the 1920s, and these only rose during the turbulent years of the Depression.167 Most of the violent deaths and a substantial

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Table 5.2  Murder and manslaughter by gender with convictions, 1924–1930 Male

Female

Victims

Total

Convictions

% of Total violent deaths

1924

896

461

1357

602

44.4

1925

875

538

1413

570

40.3

1926

811

540

1351

574

42.5

1927

756

544

1300

509

39.1

1928

727

537

1264

407

32.2

1929

707

469

1176

417

35.4

1930

734

498

1232

435

35.3

Source: Hans von Hentig, ‘Gewaltsame Todesarten 1924–1930’, in Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform, Jg 24 (1933), 758–69; Polizeihauptmann Julier (Würzburg), ‘War die Tötungskriminalität der Nachkriegszeit wirtschaftlich beeinflußt?’ Ibid., Jg. 25 (1934), 121–9, here 124–5.

part of interpersonal violence occurring in the period between 1929 and 1934 were politically motivated, and strictly speaking do not fit easily in the general discussion on crime, but nonetheless they filled contemporary discussions on weakened law and fed calls for tougher justice (as we shall see below).168 Not only were real-life murderers and other violent criminals hard to find in Weimar Germany: the all-pervasive bogeyman of right-wing discourse, the persistent and socially corrosive ‘habitual criminal’, on closer examination proved to be more a product of police and legal imagination than a real-life character.169 Nevertheless, this character constituted an important element in calls for a more authoritarian justice. To be sure, in the district of Gera roughly half of those convicted in the nearly three decades from 1900 to 1928 had a previous conviction, and most of these were for property crimes. Similarly, in Hamburg previous convictions for petty theft or receiving stolen goods was common among defendants in court. However, Michael Grüttner’s study of petty larceny in the Hamburg docks during the decades spanning the last years of the empire and the early period of the republic reveals the complex ‘moral economy’ contextualizing the behaviour of dockworkers that cautions against resorting to such labels. Grüttner found that a small amount of ‘theft’ – usually taking ‘damaged’ goods – was tolerated among workers in the docks and seen as a ‘perk’; it was only a hardening in the owners’ attitude towards this as profits came under pressure that resulted in prosecutions. In other words, the changing context of policing behaviour in the docks produced a higher registered crime rate among this milieu, rather than reflecting an actual increase in the incidence of theft.170 As we saw in an earlier chapter, the difficult material conditions of war and the economic insecurity of its aftermath drove otherwise law abiding citizens to resort to other means of making ends meet. At the height of the inflation, for example, the incidence of prosecutions for theft rose by a factor of 363 above the pre-war level and about a third higher than the average for the period 1918–24. But this alarming figure soon subsided sharply as soon as economic conditions stabilized. Indeed, the average

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for the period 1925/28 stood at 67.7 per cent of that year’s level, while it stood at 79.6 per cent of average for the four years from 1910/13.171 The material context of social crime, and especially theft, appears to have been taken into consideration by the courts, once such crimes were no longer heard before the summary tribunals. For instance, in Gera nearly a fifth of defendants were acquitted during the mid-years of the 1920s, compared to a mere tenth between 1900 and 1918. In the early years of the republic, the courts could be harsh arenas where a defendant’s chances of defence were negligible. Nonetheless, published data show that the level of convictions remained largely constant during the 1920s through to the beginning of the 1930s. Within these convictions, there was a turn to fines rather than custodial sentences. Thus, the imposition of fines rose between 1925 and 1928, before the trend reversed thereafter. The shift from custodial to non-custodial sentences and indeed, the rise in acquittals need not represent a softening on crime, as alleged at the time. Indeed, the level at which fines were pitched rose; from 1927, the proportion of small fines (under 20 Marks) decreased, while higher fines rose. Thus, in 1931 fines less than 20 Marks constituted 40 per cent of fines, while fines of 100 Marks accounted for 53 per cent. Even a small fine was a hard penalty given the precarious monetary situation of most Germans and evidenced by the increasing numbers failing to pay them; at least 37 per cent were unable to pay fully their fines in 1931 and in lieu of payment went to prison.172 One critic of Weimar’s alleged weak criminal justice system who attracted some attention, Wilhelm Gallas, argued against reformers such as Franz Exner and Hans von Hentig that the reluctance to pass tough sentences against those convicted of social crime must result in a weakening of the state’s authority.173 Examining the criminal data, Gallas argued that under the republic the approach to the criminal had been turned on its head with custodial sentences falling from 48 per cent for those convicted to 31 per cent by 1928 (in 1882, the year criminal data for the Reich commenced, the proportion had been 76.8 per cent); of these custodial sentences, the proportion of penitentiary sentences had fallen dramatically, especially for recidivists (the so-called Gewohnheitsverbrecher) who, according to Gallas, were the main beneficiaries of Weimar’s ‘soft’ justice. Taking the Reich as a whole, the evidence to support the contemporary discourse that the republic’s courts had gone soft on social crime is simply lacking. Its pattern of sentencing when viewed over the long term was in step with a shift from penal incarceration towards prison, custody (Festungshaft) and fines. The use of extraordinary courts during the war and early period (they were finally withdrawn from January 1924) had been exceptional. Also, an examination of their sentences too shows these largely remained in line with those of the ordinary courts (there were of course, crass exceptions, as we have seen above). The resort to speed trails § 212 StPO (see below) during the period of stabilization was also aimed at clearing the backlog in jurisdictions by speeding up the process in uncomplicated cases. Here, sentencing also conformed to general patterns. Thus as long as political and social life remained calm, authoritarian justice remained in check. Where there had been controversy over court sentences, this had occurred in the mid-years mainly over the anti-republican tendencies of certain judges, particularly those in the east of the country.

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For a short period, the authority of the republic represented through its legal system appeared as a benign and firm democracy. This situation, however, proved to be temporary. Already in the summer and autumn of 1929, Weimar’s political stability was coming under pressure as parties mobilized their members and took to the streets against a backdrop of rising unemployment as the economy faltered, and which only got worse as the depression deepened in the following years. One result of this was an increase in the incidence of political disorder and violence frequently resulting in death (Table 5.3).174 The fact that political disorder, like that of World War I, took place within inner city neighbourhoods and frequently involved the working class (though not exclusively), helped to cement the equation among conservative judges of crime with left-wing politics. To combat the spiralling violent political disorder, a number of presidential emergency decrees were passed in March 1930 and again in March and July 1931 to combat disorder and which provided for the nationwide introduction of special courts (Sondergerichte) and the general use of § 212 of the Reich Criminal Court Procedural Regulation (Reichsstrafprozessordnung – StPO).175 The latter in particular allowed ordinary courts to dispense with lengthy procedural defence safeguards (such as the pre-trial investigation and defence lawyers) in cases where guilt was either admitted or ‘self-evident’. The purpose was to give the courts free reign in clamping down on the growing number of politically related crimes in the Depression.176 The decrees provoked a public outcry, and not only in the liberal and left-wing press.177 This development towards summary trials enhanced the power of the individual judge, since most of the cases were heard by a single judge rather than by the so-called Schöffengerichte where a regular judge sat together with two lay judges. Their criticism was that the scope for ‘class justice’ was greatly enhanced by the resort to summary trials presided over by a single judge. Clearly, the terms of § 212 StPO placed the defendant at a disadvantage. Certainly, critics railed against sentences that appeared to fall heavily on defendants with little education and therefore unable to fully comprehend the proceedings. The Communist deputy and lawyer, Dr Fritz Löwenthal, Table 5.3  Deaths resulting from political violence in Prussia 1 February to 10 August by party affiliation Month

NSDAP

KPD

Other

Total

February

3

3

2

8

March

2

9

–

11

April

2

3

1

6

May

2

4

1

7

June

14

6

–

20

July

38

13

36

86

1

–

4

5

62

38

43

143

1–10 Aug

Source: Arnold Brecht, Preußen contra Reich vor dem Staatsgerichtshof (Berlin, 1932), pp. 14–16.

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took the opportunity during a Reichstag debate in February 1931, to declare that as a result of this latest piece of Weimar class justice, Germany had been transformed from an ‘imaginary land of poets and thinkers’ into ‘a land of judges and hangmen’.178 And he went on to give a graphic account of what a defendant might expect. The arrested person is usually 24, or no more than 48 hours (sic) after the arrest taken from the cell. He doesn’t know at all where he is being taken. Suddenly he is in the courtroom before a summary judge (Schnellrichter). The prosecutor rises and mutters an indictment in legal terms, the layman of course does not understand. The man is asked: what do you have to say about this? and is completely caught off guard. He lacks even the minimum legal guarantees, which incidentally are available to the accused in the code of criminal procedure. He is usually not in a position to obtain a defence lawyer. He will suddenly be confronted with the indictment. He is to answer before he even knows what’s actually going on. Of course, he gets into an extraordinary state of confusion, quite apart from the fact that defendants from uneducated circles are unable to weigh up each of his words effectively as is necessary in order to avoid falling into the pitfalls of our legal system.179

During the same debate, Löwenthal also cited a case in which he had been involved. This was a trial involving eight workers charged with public order offences arising from a demonstration where the court passed sentences ranging from eighteen months penal servitude to ten months imprisonment. On appeal, the sentences were acknowledged as severe but were only slightly reduced because, according to Löwenthal, in a small provincial town a judge would not be prepared to undermine the authority of his colleague, even when a clearly unjustified sentence had been passed. Löwenthal’s comments were more than mere hyperbole, for there ample examples where the behaviour of the courts recalled earlier miscarriages of justice.180 But an examination of the available evidence also suggests that at this juncture at least, the sort of sentences he and others cited were not typical but exceptional. During the three months from 1 April to the 30 June 1931 (for when we have reliable data), the thirteen Prussian judicial administrative districts convicted nearly five and a half thousand persons under the speed trial decree; the busiest courts were those comprising the Berlin Kammergericht (1288 convictions). Most of the sentences passed by the eighty courts comprising the thirteen Prussian judicial districts were indeed custodial, but they were of short duration (2025 less than a month imprisonment and 1157 from between one and six months). Fines were also imposed in 826 cases, but over half of these were for less than 20 RM, and the rest from between 20 and 100 RM.181 The data we have just cited involved those brought before a single judge. Over eleven hundred persons were brought before a Schöffengericht, of these 188 (17 per cent) were acquitted, a similar number received prison sentences of between 3 and 12 months, a smaller number (128) faced sentences of less than three months, but the greater proportion (nearly eight hundred) received fines.182 Understandably, harsh or custodial sentences by the courts in this period compared to light sentences passed in cases of insulting the republic and its symbols have been viewed by some historians as evidence of ‘class justice’. But the emergency decrees laid down minimum sentences for different categories of offences thus circumscribing the courts’ room for manoeuvre.183 Nevertheless, before 1933,

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where judicial excesses took place both presidential amnesties and the appeals process usually acted to rectify the judgement in the defendant’s favour.184 Löwenthal’s graphic description of the court gives some sense of what the experience must have been like for a defendant coming before the courts. But there was some hope that the political authorities would reconsider the severity of sentences. The recourse to clemency on appeal by justice ministers and by the president was not unheard of, and justice ministers took more than just a cursory interest in such cases. But by 1932, the political climate was changing rapidly and a hardening in attitude was evident. The perception (and some might argue, the reality) that by 1932 Germany was sliding into civil war as Nazis and Communists battled in the streets led to a revived argument that tougher courts were the necessary means by which to prevent a collapse into anarchy.185 This shift in attitude among jurists and police was fully evident by the beginning of the 1930s. At the 25th Conference of German National Committee of the International Criminology Association, younger jurists such as Georg Dahm and Friedrich Schaffstein called for a return to ‘authoritarian criminal law’ based ‘not on the freedom of the individual, but the well-being of all’.186 In 1933, Dahm, a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, argued in an influential article that law under the Weimar Republic suffered from a ‘cultural and spiritual crisis’ which could only be overcome by the reassertion of its authority through a strong state.187 This understanding was derived in part from the legally positivist definition of the relationship between law and the state in Germany developed during the nineteenth century by state law theorists such as Georg Jellinek and Paul Laband, and later reworked under the republic by its leading expert in jurisprudence, Hans Kelsen, professor of constitutional and administrative law in Vienna and an opponent of the authoritarianism espoused by the likes of Carl Schmitt.188 For conservatives such as Dahm, the relationship between law and the state was understood differently to Kelsen and liberal jurisprudence in general in that law was perceived to be not the servant of society, but rather its check. Indeed, in the same year that Dahm and his colleague Friedrich Schaffstein were calling for authoritarian law, the head of personnel and legal expert in the Prussian justice ministry Roland Freisler, who would achieve notoriety as the president of the so-called Nazi People’s Court from August 1942 until his death in an aerial bombardment in February 1945, published a memorandum (Denkschrift) wherein he argued that tough criminal law was ‘in particular (in besonderen Maße) the quintessential character’ of the state itself.189

‘Fair Justice – Authoritarian Justice – People’s Justice’190 Between 1930 and 1932, there were no fewer than thirteen emergency decrees, each heralding a tougher approach to social discord and political violence. The authority of the Reichstag was challenged as each successive decree pushed it further to the political margins. Matters came to a head in the summer of 1932 against a background of street violence not seen since 1919/21. Von Papen’s government, which like its predecessor had been the architect of much of the distress, effected a coup d’état against Prussia on 20 July following the so-called Bloody Sunday in Altona and followed this

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with an emergency decree on 9 August which made provision for special courts, the Sondergerichte.191 Historians usually focus on the role of the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) created in  1934. However, this court was exceptional and dealt only with a limited number of high-profile cases before 1939, before coming into its own as a Nazi instrument of terror during the war years.192 The principal instruments of authoritarian law remained the ordinary courts and the Sondergerichte which were reintroduced on 21 March 1933 as a permanent feature of judicial authority, after having been withdrawn under an amnesty the previous December.193 The number of indictments, trials and defendants of the Sondergerichte before and after 1933 is difficult to assess and what data there is can be conflicting. In the first weeks and months after Hitler came to power, thousands of opponents were rounded up and later brought before the special courts. Official data suggest a rise for 1933 (March to December), when 5,365 indictments were brought before the special courts, many of them on charges relating to the notorious emergency decree of 28 February following the Reichstag Fire, and of which nearly half were in Prussia.194 As before, the position of the defendant was severely weakened, while that of the prosecution was strengthened as a result of ‘eliminating formalism’ as a means to speeding up the process ‘with the greatest possible thoroughness and speed, and at the lowest cost’.195 Inevitably, such restrictions led to a reduction in the safeguards guaranteeing the protection of the defendant. For instance, the pre-trial judicial investigation determining whether or not the charges were justified was dispensed with, as was the opening statements of counsel; the defence was denied access to the charges and lost the power to negotiate the setting of a trial date; a shift towards authoritarian justice was indicated in the removal of the right to be tried by one’s peers, leaving judgement in the hands of three professional judges, whose chairman had wide powers, including the right to deny defence counsel’s submission of evidence to the court; after sentence had been passed, there was to be no legal means of appeal; and a retrial could only take place if new facts or evidence were unearthed that convinced the prosecutor (!) of the necessity for a new investigation in the ordinary courts.196 In short, the function of the trial was to affirm the guilt of the defendant and to punish without consideration of mitigating circumstances.197 While most of the indictments in the period from 1932 to 1934 were politically related, by the mid-thirties, as evidence drawn from the special courts like their earlier counterparts soon moved beyond their original remit to deal with crime in general, much of it of a petty nature. Thus, by 1935, trivial cases formed around 80 per cent of the case loads of the Sondergerichte in Munich, Cologne and Kiel, recalling the development of the extraordinary courts during World War I and revolutionary period.198 The overall numbers of those brought before the courts rose by about a fifth during the depression period of 1930 to 1933. Moreover, as we can see from the foregoing, sentencing remained consistent over time. Indeed, the trend first evident in the 1920s, of short- and medium-term prison sentences (up to three months, and up to one year), and the use of fines continued down to 1936. Where draconian penitentiary sentences (Zuchthaus) were imposed, these were mostly reserved for political cases. There was little or no break in  1933, other than a greater willingness to impose and carry out death sentences (Table 5.4).199 According to Gallas, the disagreement within the legal profession over how one should approach crime and its punishment was due to the compromise nature of the

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Table 5.4  Death sentences and executions, 1913–1938 Death sentences

Carried out

Executions as % of death sentences

1913

110

1914

82

1915

68

1916

74

1917

71

1918

87

1919

89

10

11.2

1920

113

36

31.9

1921

149

28

18.9

1922

124

26

20.1

1923

77

15

19.5

1924

112

23

20.5

1925

95

16

16.8

1926

89

14

15.7

1927

64

6

9.4

1928

46

2

4.3

1929

39

0

0.0

1930

43

1

2.3

1931

49

4

8.2

1932

52

3

5.8

1933

108 [17*]

81 [11*]

75.0

1934

118 [4]

82 [4]

69.9

1935

103 [9]

73 [8]

70.8

1936

81 [11]

66 [11]

81.4

1937

100 [30]

76 [26]

76.0

1938

111 [13]

96 [13]

86.5

*1932. Sources: Data for 1913–32 taken from Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution. Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 915–16; data for 1933–38 from Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, R3001/alt R2/1314. Figures in brackets refer to Convictions for State and High Treason.

republic. Gallas was clear that the reform movement given a free rein by the republic was not part of German tradition. Thus, a return to tough law required an authoritarian state.200 But this state had to have authority, for authoritarianism without a purpose other  than repression would only continue the alienation between the people and in particular youth, and the state.201

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Rethinking the Weimar Republic

Conclusion As we have seen, authoritarian law was already being practiced before the onset of crisis in 1929. In 1924, a senior counsellor in the Prussian justice ministry published a lengthy article in the liberal Vossische Zeitung in which he reflected on the state of siege, the emergency laws and the special courts. He made a clear distinction between the rights of the individual and the needs of the state. There can also be moments in public life, when the state is not in a position to take into account all these [rights] it has bestowed on its citizens; where in pursuit of the higher interests of the state for the good of the whole people it has to ignore the rights of the individual. Property and freedom, yes, the life and honour of an individual must be sacrificed in circumstances of higher goals and purposes in the best interests of all legal comrades (Rechtsgenossen). The Fatherland must live, even if the individual in his rights is infringed, indeed, must perish.202

The author, Ernst Falck, was not writing from an anti-republican stance, quite the contrary; he was justifying the use of authoritarian law to protect the republic. Like Heine, Prussia’s first justice minister during the debate in 1919 in the Prussian Assembly, he also emphasized that its use should be exceptional and not a permanent feature.203 Its purpose was to protect the authority of the state, not to supplant it. Such justifications show that an existing discourse and practice of authoritarian law predated the political shift to the right from the beginning of the 1930s. Moreover, its existence, I would argue, helps to explain the ease with which the judiciary was mobilized in reshaping the republic as an authoritarian polity after 1930, and which then eased the transition to dictatorship and terror. In 1919, Wolfgang Heine had supported the need for exceptional courts in order to combat with ‘deadly and ruthless means’ (‘scharfes und rucksichtsloses Zufassen’) those whose actions threatened Germany’s social and political reconstruction, concluding that ‘half measures always mean failure’.204 This message was repeated in August 1932 and became the credo of the courts under the Third Reich.205 The Sondergerichte like their earlier incarnations allowed for ‘expeditious trials’ untrammelled by procedural constraints, as von Papen told the court at Nuremberg.206 Indeed, there was little to distinguish the purpose and modus operandi of the special courts in 1932/33 with those of the earlier period.207 What was different was that they were now to become a permanent weapon in the arsenal of the government. In spite of regional disparities in sentencing, the special courts symbolized not only the national reassertion of ‘judicial authority’ in  1933, but also aided the transition from liberal democracy to authoritarian state. However, this does not mean that the judiciary per se fell completely under the power  of the Nazis.208 The available evidence suggests that although challenged by Hitler’s paladins, notably Himmler, Bormann and Goering, Gürtner as Reich minister of justice and his Bavarian counterpart, Hans Frank who also held the largely meaningless title of Leader of Reich Law (Reichsrechtsführer) were able to defend their turf against encroachments in the first twelve to thirteen months of the regime. In particular, the

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judiciary sought to reign in the actions of the Party, which frequently flouted the law. For example, some attempt was made to curb arbitrary arrest and the illegal use by local SA men of ‘protective custody’ in settling scores with their opponents.209 The turning point came with the murder of Ernst Röhm and other potential challengers over the three days between 30 June and 2 July in what has become known as the ‘Night of the long knives’. This action implicated the judiciary and its leadership; it was retrospectively legitimated by the ‘Law on Measures of State Self Defence’ on 3 July and by an article published at the beginning of August in Deutsche Juristen Zeitung by Carl Schmitt who meanwhile had become its editor, wherein he effectively argued that law in the Third Reich was embodied in Hitler’s vision.210 The calls for and the practice of authoritarian law did not necessarily stand in contradiction to the Weimar Republic. In the early post-war years, the courts practised a draconian policy of sentencing which was accepted by democrats as necessary for asserting the authority of the republic. During the mid-twenties, the practices of some ordinary courts appeared in  alignment with a resurgent nationalist right, justifying lenient sentences in terms that frequently challenged the authority of the republic. But even though much attention has been given to the anti-republican politics of judges in this period, there is also evidence that shows Weimar’s judiciary on the whole conformed to the changes brought about by democracy. The so-called soft glove of liberal law – which at the same time we should be cautious of overstating – had spread far into the sentencing practices of the criminal courts by the later 1920s. Nevertheless, the concept of authoritarian law was never far from the surface, and it was not the exclusive property of conservatives as we have seen in this chapter. But there was a difference in how it was both understood and used. On the one hand, liberals and Social Democrats understood authoritarian law as an extraordinary institution invoked to safeguard the state in times of crisis when ordinary law privileging the rights of the individual was inadequate for the task. On the other hand, conservatives viewed authoritarian law as a permanent attribute of the state’s power, in which the rights of the individual were subordinated to the needs of the national community. As the chairman of Court I at the Berlin Kammergericht Günther put it in 1919, the law was there not to serve, but to govern. Günther called for the tough practices of the summary exceptional courts to be ‘normalized’ by incorporating them into criminal law procedures.211 This did not happen and could not happen as long as a parliament could challenge such practices. But from 1932, and particularly from 1933, the judiciary no longer operated within the framework of parliament but under a permanent ‘state of siege’, framed by the emergency decree of 28 February 1933.212 This was not a new departure for Weimar’s judges. The situation recalled that of World War I when the ‘state of siege’ and the courts had been a vital element in disciplining the home front. At the same time, Franz Gürtner’s maxim: ‘Fair Justice – Authoritarian Justice – People’s Justice’ (Gerechte Justiz – Autoritäre Justiz – Volksverbundene Justiz) encapsulated not only the quintessence of law under the Nazi regime, but also expressed a core belief embedded within Germany’s judiciary since 1916. The blurring of the boundary between the authority of law and authoritarian law had to await two further developments in February and March when the legal state was transformed into the extra-legal state, as we shall see in Chapter 9.

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6

The Quest for Cultural Authority

The State’s role is to promote the cultural life of the people. In cultural will lies the key for each development, each advancement.1

Introduction While scholars acknowledge the extraordinary dynamism of ‘Weimar Culture’, they nonetheless point to its divisive nature and the isolation of republican cultural elites from the mainstream of Weimar society. Thus, according to the German historian Eberhard Kolb and the political scientist Theo Stammen, the supporters of the Weimar Republic failed to assert cultural authority in the public sphere.2 Kolb and Stammen were writing at a time when scholarship had barely begun to challenge the paradigm of the failed republic and when interest in ‘culture’ (broadly defined) was confined either to its ‘high brow’ forms or to aspects of Weimar’s consumer leisure cultures. Kolb’s pessimistic assessment (although he makes an exception for architecture and theatre) is shared by historians and cultural scholars alike and originates in Peter Gay’s still influential classic study: Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider published four decades ago. Gay rightly locates ‘Weimar culture’ as part of a longer trajectory spanning imperial, republican and fascist eras, but treats it as destabilizing only for the republican period. ‘When we think of Weimar’, he writes, we think of modernity in art, literature, and thought; we think of the rebellion of sons against the fathers, Dadaists against art, Berliners against beefy philistinism, libertines against old-fashioned moralists; we think of The Threepenny Opera, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Magic Mountain, the Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich. . . . Weimar culture was the creation of outsiders, propelled by history into the inside, for a short, dizzying, fragile moment.3

This image of what is taken to be ‘Weimar culture’, with its iconic landmarks from the arts, stage, cinema and architecture which combined to create the ‘dizzying, fragile moment’, has been the paradigm guiding scholarship ever since Gay wrote these words. Scholars of Weimar culture whose own work has been influential among recent generations of students of the republic, notably John Willett, Jost Hermand and Frank Trommler, or the social historian Detlev Peukert, have been reluctant to challenge

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Gay’s paradigm of Weimar as the site of destabilizing cultural conflicts.4 Steve Lamb and Anthony Phelan in their contribution to a collection of essays in 1996 write of the ‘bewildering complexity’ of Weimar culture, its conflicting styles, hectic movements and arcane activities that left its exponents isolated from the mainstream of society. Like Kolb, Lamb and Whelan are critical of Weimar’s cultural elite for having failed to create a unifying republican cultural identity.5 These scholars were writing at a time when Weimar culture was understood in terms of its modernist innovations in the arts and in science and technology that brought with them apocalyptic visions of the contemporary world.6 These artistic innovations produced the ‘culture wars’ between those who espoused such visions and traditional conservative elites that rejected them. To quote Eric Weitz from his recent history of Weimar, ‘[the republic’s cultural innovations] became yet another battlefield of conflict over the scope and meaning of modernity’.7 This conflict between two competing cultures – on the one hand conservative and reactionary, and on the other hand progressive and challenging – has framed the discourse of the republic as a site lacking in cultural authority from historians as diverse in approach as Henry Pachter, Larry E Jones, Ursula Büttner and Richard Evans.8 As such, it has distracted our attention from the republic’s own efforts to establish a democratic cultural authority. It is important to note here that the ‘cultural turn’ in mainstream Weimar historiography is recent. During the 1970s and 1980s, ‘culture’ was largely absent from critical discussions of the republic.9 Traditionally, ‘Weimar culture’ was discussed by scholars in the narrow guise of ‘Dichter und Denker’10 or in terms of being defined by Prussian militarism.11 In recent years, what frequently is referred to as ‘Weimar culture’  – usually the interlocking areas of gender, consumerism, leisure and communication in the metropolis – has emerged as a key preoccupation among scholars of the republic, almost displacing class, economy and politics.12 But the abundance of cultural histories that now seem to dominate the academic market, often estrange their subject from Weimar’s political landscape, speaking instead to interests and concerns of our contemporary world, from the androgyny of the Garçonne to more overt gay subcultures, from the tingel-tangel and its jazz-cabaret to the revue with its tiller girls, from body cults to cocaine.13 As Hugh Ridley observed, Weimar culture is as much a product of the historian’s pen as a real historical phenomenon.14 Certainly, these phenomena existed and contributed to a mostly metropolitan based culture. Their reification in literary accounts of the likes of Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Harold Nicolson and Count Harry Kessler15 have had an impact on English-speaking readers in which these phenomena have become conflated with ‘Weimar culture’. But it was a culture of the few and not representative at all; it was, to borrow from Janet Ward, a culture of surfaces.16 And yet at the heart of the debates and conflicts over matters regarding the written, visual and performing arts, and particularly that emblematical medium of modernity, the cinema, stood not only the question of moral probity but also a question of republican authority. The focus on cultural production, whether cinema, theatre, cabaret, art, novellas, popular music (especially jazz) or journalistic impressions of the city, all of which scholars today subsume under the rubric of ‘Weimar culture’ – whether of its ‘high’ or ‘low’ type17, has meant the republic’s own efforts to define and assert its own cultural standard have

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been largely ignored. Nonetheless, there has been some headway in breaking this mould in the last decade, not least the edited collection of essays from Lothar Ehrlich and Jürgen John, or the recent volume of essays brought together by Wolfgang Hardtwig which have the added benefit of locating Weimar’s political culture within a comparative context.18 Neither of these editions, however, tackles the issue of the relationship between culture and republican authority. Nor in the final analysis does Bernd Buchner’s study of national and republican identity in which he discusses the conflict over political symbols, particularly the question of the republic’s flag, festive culture and Constitution Day celebrations. Ultimately, Buchner’s work is a contribution to the political culture of the Social Democratic movement under the republic rather than of the republic per se.19 Similarly, while the study of heritage policy by Winfried Speitkamp offers an important insight into the development of policy from the imperial period to the end of the Weimar Republic, it is less concerned with the issue of cultural authority.20 Indeed, until very recently scholarship has largely ignored the republic’s own efforts to shape cultural authority, to give the republican state its own distinctive form.21 Thus, questions remain: Did the diverse phenomena that we associate with the ‘volcano’ of Weimar culture in actuality deepen the well of discord and division that militated against a national republican identity, as asserted by two of Germany’s leading scholars of Weimar’s political culture, Detlef Lehnert and Klaus Megerle?22 Was there really a failure of the republic’s political and social elites to establish a project of national cultural regeneration in the wake of the war? Was the Weimar Republic truly devoid of cultural authority? This chapter attempts to answer these questions in two parts: first by looking at the question of censorship from the perspective of a broad platform of consensus rather than as a field of conflict and then by looking at the republic’s own endeavour in constructing its own public culture. While these appear to be distinctly different areas of enquiry, they are linked by the common goal at the time of establishing the cultural credentials of the Weimar Republic. But before exploring these areas, a brief discussion of the place of culture in national statehood is offered.

Culture and the authority of the state Before 1914, the idea of Germany as a cultural nation, as a land of poets and thinkers (and composers!), was an integral part of its identity as a striving Großmacht.23 This national Kulturgut (cultural capital) based around literature, the visual arts and music was closely tied to the patronage of a mostly urban-based educated Großbürgertum and aristocracy. These elite strata were small both numerically and as a proportion of the population and they did not necessarily constitute a unified body, but their tastes collectively articulated through an influential salon culture shaped the nation’s postunification cultural identity that underpinned the political authority of the empire.24 The Prussian Academy, established in 1696 by Elector Friedrich III of Brandenburg (later King Friedrich I of Prussia), like its later counterpart in Bavaria (1759), established itself as the quasi cultural gatekeeper of the German state after 1871 (only to become a site of intense cultural conflicts in the 1920s), while the nation’s universities, not least Heidelberg with the group of literary and history scholars

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gathered around the romantic poet Stefan George, became the intellectual guardians of a deeply conservative and mythic nationalism.25 The tone in the arts under the empire was in part dominated by the staid cultural programme of the Kaiser’s own questionable taste and by the Academy’s president, Anton von Werner, the court’s favourite neo-historicist painter. Taken together, their predominance in the arts fused German Kultur into an instrument of nationalism that emitted a high degree of self-belief and complacency.26 The empire’s outwardly cultural confidence was, however, already being challenged by the turn of the century with the emergence of a plebeian mass culture that was located outside the institutional boundaries of high culture,27 and by newer directions from within the arts community.28 For example, Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan (‘The Subject’) or Franz Wedekind’s Frühling’s Erwachen (‘Spring’s Awakening’) and his Büchse der Pandora (‘Pandora’s Box’) described by one complainant to the Bavarian censor as ‘filth’, or Gerhard Hauptmann’s Die Ratten (‘The Rats’) and Die Weber (‘The Weavers’), or Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique, or Max Liebermann’s expressionist canvasses, are some of the better known works that unsettled and scandalized Germany’s conservative Bildungsbürgertum, and which began to hollow out the imperial cultural myth. As Georg Simmel noted in 1916, ‘Perhaps the war, for all its destruction, confusion and danger, would not have had such a shattering effect had it not encountered cultural forms that were already so eroded and lacking in self-assurance’.29 By the time Simmel wrote these words, the German authorities were struggling to develop a patriotic culture that would underwrite the mobilization of the population for the war effort. As we saw in Chapter 2, the initial euphoria of ‘August 1914’ (indeed the so-called Augusterlebnis can be understood as an expression of cultural nationalism) soon passed and the authorities became alarmed at the demobilization among an increasingly demoralized population as casualties mounted and hardship increased.30 Over the course of the war, the authorities came to see the growing alienation of the home front from the state as the consequence of inadequate education and awareness of Germany’s mission as a great power in the middle of Europe. Simmel’s comments were not so much a criticism of the empire at war than a diagnosis of a general malaise that had to be overcome in order for the nation to renew itself – culturally. He, like his contemporary Max Weber, sought national regeneration through cultural renewal. And this view was shared by the Army High Command, and Generals Groener and Ludendorff in particular, both of who were keen on the introduction in 1916 of the Vaterlandsunterricht (patriotic education) and its offspring the Reichszentrale für Heimatsdienst staffed by artists drawn from expressionist and Werkbund circles who were put to work creating posters and other visual forms of cultural propaganda, while intellectuals such as Carl Schmitt and Victor Klemperer found themselves employed in the censor’s office.31 While some among the German public were increasingly uncertain as to what exactly Germany was fighting for, nationalists had little doubt that it was to achieve territorial expansion while conservatives such as Thomas Mann believed the war was justified by Germany’s pan European cultural mission.32 But the empire’s claim to cultural authority had been dramatically compromised in August and September 1914 when the German army destroyed the ancient library of the University of

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Leuven in Belgium and bombarded Rheims Cathedral, the traditional site of the crowning of French kings. Both events were viewed as shocking acts of cultural barbarism by the outside world, and discredited Germany’s cultural claims.33 The abrupt ending of empire in November 1918 was accompanied by an air of resignation and pessimism among the guardians of German Kultur. Thomas Mann lamented ‘I share a certain reverence for a declining culture. . . . I feel very clearly, that a cultural lifestyle (Lebensführung) acquired over the course of the centuries is dying’.34 Mann later reconciled himself to the change that swept Germany after 1918, and from 1922 would champion the republic in cultural matters without sacrificing his natural conservatism.35 But there were many others among Germany’s middle classes for whom the cultural death Mann spoke of stood as a proxy for the German nation per se, and for whom the quest for cultural stability entailed the struggle against the republic.36 * From 1919 at the latest, conscious efforts were made not only to establish the cultural credentials of the republic, but to create its own cultural form. Germany’s leaders after 1918 agreed on the need to promote the republic as a cultural entity. Thus, Prussia established a ministry for the arts, education and science while a Reich office for the guardianship of arts and culture – the Reichskunstwart – was created with the aim of fashioning for the republic what we today would call a ‘corporate image’.37 The second part of this chapter looks in greater detail at the workings of this office and its efforts to promote the cultural authority of the republic as an enacted expression of the nation. On the one hand, there was a belief that the republic’s cultural institutions were a vital component of the state, and that their role was to translate the diverse ‘bundle of interests’ within the arts (and society at large) into a collective sense of nationhood or national community (Staatsvolk).38 On the other hand, the republic’s political guardians believed that culture could be used to restore Germany’s authority on the world stage in the aftermath of defeat and rejection, as Georg Schreiber, the respected theology professor from Münster and Centre Party deputy for North Westphalia, put it during a Reichstag debate on cinema censorship in 1929: That this Germany of today in the post-war period, in many ways deprived of an army and weapons, [and] no longer basking in the external glow of power, is obliged to [use] its worldwide recognition to proclaim to the world cultural market  also an ethical cultural capacity in order to influence the nations of the cultural world, . . . thus this disarmed Germany today in the council of nations has to devote itself to making a really great cultural contribution of valuable energies, of great spiritual assets.39

As we can see from the above, culture was understood not simply in terms of what the German sociologist George Simmel writing at the turn of the century on the consumption of leisure products, termed the ‘culture of things’. Indeed, Weimar’s cultural guardians made a distinction between negative cultural phenomena originating

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in the leisure industry and a programme for culture that would lift the population from national despair in the wake of war and defeat. This sentiment was captured by Thomas Mann in a letter to Gerhard Hauptmann in 1927, when he spoke of how the ‘dignity of literature’ could generate cultural authority.40 In spite of a convergence of thinking on the role of culture in national life, what was considered positive and therefore to be included and what was deemed deleterious to the national good and thus to be excluded became a battleground for the different political parties.41 While German nationalists spoke of spiritual decay and national decline, democrats argued in terms of spiritual rekindling and national regeneration. Where conservatives saw examples of low culture that undermined German Kultur, progressives saw fruitful and necessary experimentation. Nevertheless, from the outset of the republic, the conflicting parties in the debate understood ‘culture’ as a key ingredient of providing state authority. The question was not only about principles but also about the means on how to achieve that authority. While there could be disagreement on the former, there was consensus on the latter. Legislators, excepting the Communist deputies in the Reichstag, were clear about the need for a cultural pedagogy to inculcate taste and for laws to regulate probity. But in seeking to assert cultural authority as a national project, the line between a benign liberal authority and cultural totalitarianism became blurred, as we shall see in the first half of this chapter.

Cultural authority through censorship What did cultural conservatives have to fear after 1918? How disorientated were they, not so much by the shock of defeat as by the ‘shock of the new’?42 The war and revolution threw up an array of cultural movements that deliberately rejected the past and set out to shock. A striking example is the radical culturalanarchist movement self-styled as ‘Dada’, which originated in Zurich in  1916 and migrated to Berlin in  1918. Dada in Germany represented a rebellion against the Academy and the Expressionists, disassembling form and structure through the use of collages and absurdist theatre. In order to see the first international Dada exhibition held in Berlin in 1920, the public were required ‘to enter via an open pissoir upon which they came across a girl dressed as if for first holy communion reciting obscenities  .  .  .  and distributed around the entire courtyard were different objects, among them Baargeld’s Fluidoskeptrik, a glass aquarium filled with blood red water in which female hair floated . . . Naturally, most of the visitors were shocked, as a vent for their outrage a wooden object was erected attached to which was an axe. The public were encouraged to destroy the object, which they did’.43 As part of poking fun at the ‘republic of letters’, Dada also briefly produced a number of short-lived journals, among them the fortnightly ‘illustrated journal’: Every Man his Own Football with its biting critique by artists such as John Heartfield and Georg Grosz (the first issue appeared on 15 February 1919 and was immediately seized by the authorities). The antics of this younger generation of artists horrified Germany’s cultural establishment and seemed to reflect the general moral collapse in the wake of defeat. Dada, however, eventually

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gave way to a more controlled artistic form in the shape of the New Objectivity from the middle of the decade and to which many Dada artists, such as Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, George Grosz, and in Hannover, Kurt Schwitters, made important contributions.44 Dada had directly benefited from the new freedoms that captured Germany in the revolutionary period. Its importance at the time was to be found less in its artistic/aesthetic experimentation than in its challenge to received forms of artistic values and cultural authority. It literally broke down conventional structures of cultural expression, and this was destabilizing. For conservatives, the lifting of censorship by the Council of People’s Deputies in November 1918 was a breach in the dam that protected society against what they saw as a flood of cultural madness and immorality. In the following years, there was little to assuage fears that German Kultur was being undermined by a collapse in the nation’s moral compass. The German stage, the visual arts and literature appeared to have succumbed to prurient inclinations and to a coarsening of values at whose epicentre was a hedonistic Berlin.45 Reinhard Mumm, a DNVP deputy from the Düsseldorf area (Arnsberg) and a member of the Church Synod, declared to the Reichstag in 1922 that the inertia of the authorities in the face of such cultural attacks could no longer be tolerated. ‘The existing legal protection’, he claimed, ‘is not invoked enough against squalid and coarsening shows and performances in the circus, variété and cabaret – in character as un-German as in name – against indecent and vulgarising postcards, literature, and shop windows, against nude dances, and against the grubbiness of so-called family restaurants’.46 Increasingly, what had been simply a matter of probity (or its lack) became a political issue. Particularly given the context of Germany’s defeat and the presence of French colonial troops stationed on the right bank of the Rhineland, the staging of a popular revue titled Harem Nights in which semi-naked girls kowtowed to a black chieftain ignited widespread fury especially among nationalists. Mumm, quoting a report by the editor of the Sonntags-Zeitung (Stuttgart) Erich Schairer, declaimed to the Reichstag, ‘How can we  .  .  .  defend ourselves effectively against this “black indignity” [i.e. the deployment of black troops by the French] when one does not forbid such an indignity in the capital!’ And he continued ‘While France holds a knife to our throat and wants to finally murder us, all the French Don Juans (Schwänker) are chasing about on Berlin stages: one increasingly more worthless, and increasingly more unclean than the other’.47 Mumm finally concluded, All the demons of the abyss are being let loose upon our poor nation, and this to a very great degree, constitutes a foreignization (Überfremdung), an invasion by the foreign world.48

* The demons Mumm spoke of did not disappear after both the inflation and the Ruhr crisis subsided. Indeed, the allegation of degeneration was a much-used trope of the conservative-nationalist discourse on the decline of culture under the republic. The nub of the complaint was that a degenerate culture had been not only unleashed by

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defeat and revolution, but that it had been encouraged by the inveterate weakness (and internationalism) of the republic’s leaders and their failure to protect ‘authentic’ national culture.49 Writing in  1921, the National Socialist playwright Hanns Johst, defined cultural authenticity as ‘neither direction nor tendency; neither party nor class or caste; national [culture] is the obligation under which a German individual in his time and among his people is called upon by destiny to realize his bond to blood and culture (Bildung)’.50 Art (in the broadest sense) was merely the tool to the realization of an authentic national culture.51 In many respects, Johst’s position was not far off from that held by Thomas Mann, who also believed in the possibility of achieving albeit a vaguely defined sentiment of ‘spiritual Germanness’ without necessarily contradicting the rational mindset.52 According to Elizabeth Harvey, such a conservative-nationalist cultural discourse only served to destabilize the republic, a view earlier rehearsed in Margaret Stieg’s discussion of the Law for the Protection of Youth from Harmful Publications (Gesetz zur Bewahrung der Jugend vor Schund- und Schmutzschriften), and echoed by Klaus Petersen in his discussions of Weimar censorship.53 However, the scholarly framing of cultural debates under the republic that pits anti-modernist, anti-republic and anti-avant garde attitudes against Weimar progressivism and experimentalism, or as Larry Eugene Jones puts it: the binary division between the ‘spirit of Potsdam’ and the ‘spirit of Weimar’ is oversimplified.54 In the context of continuing political and social upheaval in the autumn of 1919, moral concerns and agreement for a common front of action were shared across the political spectrum, with the exception of the USPD and later, the KPD, shaping the debates on cultural policy especially where this concerned youth.55 Thus, during the  many debates concerning popular leisure, the German Nationalist People’s Party (DNVP) sought to claw back some of the freedoms resulting from the abolition of censorship in 1918 by invoking paragraph 2 of Article 118, which allowed legal restrictions where youth morality was thought to be in jeopardy. In a wide-ranging debate in the National Assembly in mid-October 1919, the DNVP called for the regulation of cinema, stage and so-called trash literature ‘as long as the prevailing conditions existed’, declaring that ‘only by raising the [standards] of moral responsibility’ would Germany be saved from anarchy, crime and the ‘wave of dirt’ allegedly sweeping over the nation.56 Germany’s alleged fall from moral grace in  1918 became a motif for conservative critiques of cultural life under the republic. Cologne’s lord mayor, Konrad Adenauer, declaimed to an audience in Munich in the later 1920s: ‘materialism, immorality, lack of authority, these are the diseases that have befallen our people’.57 Such claims of moral corruption were, of course, perennial and predated the republic.58 What is more, they were not confined to political conservatives. During the same debate in October 1919 in which Mumm and his colleagues expressed fears of cultural degeneration, the republic’s newly appointed interior minister Erich Koch (later Koch-Weser59) from the German Liberal Party (DDP) stated he felt ‘not that far removed’ in principle from Mumm and his colleagues on the need to safeguard the nation’s moral fibre, but he did warn deputies that establishing the ‘division (Trennungslinie) between trash literature and serious literature was not straightforward’.60 Koch told the chamber one of his main cultural tasks as interior minister would be to secure the

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link between education as a cultural endeavour (broadly defined) and national identity (Nationalbewußtsein).61 The republic – and its leaders – would thus derive legitimacy through asserting a moral authority via cultural means. His success in this and that of subsequent interior ministers is questionable, as we shall see. Indeed, the Reichstag was neither permissive nor lax where moral absolutes were concerned. The opposition between reactionary and progressive ideas that we referred to above was complicated by alliances that cut across simple political divisions. Nationalist concern with ‘public taste’ and ‘probity’ was not solely a surrogate for attacks against the republic, but was shared by liberals and social democrats.62 Beginning with the Lichtspielgesetz (Cinema Law, 12 May 1920), a raft of measures, mostly to do with youth attendance at cinemas, was passed on the basis of cross-party consensus in the early 1920s. This broad front was already in evidence in the National Assembly in July 1919 during the debate on whether or not to insert a censorship clause in Article 117 (later Art.118) of the constitution. When the DNVP deputy Ernst Oberfrohren spoke of the challenges facing the nation’s cultural authority, he found an outspoken ally in the person of Adolf Braun, the SPD deputy from Franconia; such cross-party alliances were apparent again in a further debate on morals and culture that October. Indeed, there was little to divide conservatives, nationalists, liberals or socialists in that debate.63 In 1922, it was the liberal Erich Koch together with Adalbert Düringer, a conservative deputy from Baden, who introduced a parliamentary motion for a law to protect youth morals.64 And when finally in 1926 such a proposal was again debated in the Reichstag, it was again a liberal minister of the interior who advocated what some saw as a disturbing widening in the remit of the Law for the Protection of Youth against Harmful Publications (Gesetz zur Bewahrung der Jugend vor Schund- und Schmutzschriften).65 These politicians were united in a commonly held view of the negative influences of modern leisure behaviour, especially among urban youth buttressed by reports from social workers and a burgeoning sociology of youth culture.66 But there was also the recent experience of unruly, not to say, criminal, youth during wartime and the revolutionary period that bode ill for creating a new civitas republica from the perspective of liberal progressives or for rehabilitating nationalist fibre when viewed from the right.67 Thus, Meinecke made the connection between cultural identity and national unity when he addressed university faculty at their annual conference in 1926. The war proved that a great existential struggle today can only be waged without internal ructions, when the broad masses are spiritually at one (innerlich zufrieden) with the State that they have to defend.68

While there had been acrimonious exchanges over the implications of the proposed law for artistic endeavour generally, there was cross-party consensus in the Reichstag on the need for the moral protection of youth. The 1926 law was eventually carried on its final reading by a large majority with 248 votes based on a coalition of conservatives, liberals and the Catholic Centre Party in favour, and with 158 votes against.69 As we noted above, Margaret Stieg has argued that the Law exposed the deeper ideological and political divisions that beset Weimar culture. But once again, political and ideological divisions were not clear-cut. Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Külz from the DDP, who

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introduced the measure and who had strongly favoured some of its sterner aspects, found himself estranged from half his own parliamentary party who voted with the Social Democrats and the Communists. The Communists saw the Bill, as indeed with all measures concerning censorship, as a conspiracy against the proletariat while shielding the profit margins of exploitative capitalists; the Social Democrats were deeply unhappy with last minute alterations to the Bill that broadened its scope and which left Schund undefined, and thus trumped them into opposing the law, with possible consequences for their continued support of Marx’s centre government.70 The experience of wartime censorship was still fresh in the minds of the opponents to the law. Particularly, those on the left were perturbed by its vaguely formulated definitions of what constituted ‘dangerous’ to the moral good of youth seeing in this a danger that its remit could too easily be extended into other spheres of cultural activity. The 1920s had witnessed a number of prosecutions against artists whose works allegedly had ‘outraged’ public morals by attacking the church and the state.71 Speaking for the Social Democrats, Dr Eduard David pointed out that the SPD shared the concern over trash and its impact among youth especially. But he also expressed the apprehension many of his party colleagues and artistic bodies outside the Reichstag had with the Bill, which they believed was driven by an ‘alleged normal morality of the average man’; were the law passed in its entirety, David argued, it would stifle experimentation in art and literature (guaranteed by Article 142 of the Constitution)72, thus putting in jeopardy Germany’s attempts to re-establish cultural authority. The Reichstag is faced with a serious choice. It wants to pass a law that raises great dangers for literary and artistic creation and as a result has awoken a passionate protest from intellectuals in Germany. . . . Art needs freedom if it is to thrive. It cannot endure the chains of moral concepts that are outmoded or which randomly achieved dominance. What today the average person with his supposedly normal moral opinion thinks of as filthy and indecent content is often enough in later times accepted as natural and self-evident. . . . The artist [and] the poet must be allowed to create things from which the average person today still blankly recoils. Therefore, the legislature should beware of bridling and reining in artistic creativity. . . . This, however, is the case with the present Bill. We want to make clear yet again loud and clear before the entire world at this late hour (in diesem letzten Augenblick): this law in its present form is a permanent threat to literature and art.73

The debate on the proposal signalled a turning point that established ‘clear blue water’ between authoritarian understandings of the role of culture and those of progressivism. While Stieg is right to highlight the divisive nature of the 1926 Law, at the same time it is worth noting that Hermann Müller’s SPD-led coalition which came to power after its decisive victory in the May 1928 elections did not seek to overturn the Law. Indeed, the Reichstag debate on morals and cultural decline resumed in 1929 with calls for even more draconian measures to combat the perceived evils of popular cinema. By this date, cinemas had become ubiquitous in the urban landscape where film-going was a dominant part of popular entertainment, accounting for between 50 and 60 per cent of the nation’s three million attendances.74

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As before, the question in  1929 turned not so much on the principle of cultural authority, as on the method of achieving this.75 The issue remained unresolved and the debate continued into 1930, with the discussion broadening to the question of whether or not to introduce tariffs on foreign (mostly American) films, not only as an economic protection of the German film industry but as a means to protect national culture from ‘foreign kitsch’, and as such fell in with a broader conservative anti-Americanism during the 1920s.76 * Because the definition of Schund was left vague, it allowed for wide-ranging interpretation and led to confusion among the regional censorship boards, usually made up of a writer, a teacher and a civil servant.77 There were problems with interpreting the 1926 Law and exactly what publications fell under its purview. Three years after its passing, in a written answer to a request from the Centre Party to report to the Reichstag on the progress of the 1926 Law, Carl Severing, now Reich interior minister, conceded ‘that the Law had not yet had an impact in the greater part of Germany’.78 Severing went on to state that there were also disparities in judgement and practice where the law was being enforced because of the lack of clear definition. ‘It would otherwise not be comprehensible why the number of petitions that lie in the grey zone between smut and serious harmless works is a relatively large one’. In the period from August 1927 to May 1929, the censors banned or assigned to the register of harmful or lewd publications a relatively low number of publications: 63 from an approximate total of 4203 titles.79 Policing popular taste as a manifestation of asserting cultural authority proved to be a complex task. At its most focused, the 1926 Law should have been invoked to combat questionable publications harmful to the moral development of youth, not least those semi-pornographic publications that had been circulating widely since the war with ‘lewd illustrations that have no bearing on the text whatever’.80 But we should note that Paragraph 184 of the Criminal Code pertaining to ‘public outrage’ proved to be the more effective tool and was more likely to be invoked by the police and courts against these type of publications than the 1926 Law; until the onset of the depression when there was a revived interest in pornographic material, it also had more success in combating these.81 At the same time, as we shall see below, the 1926 Law was used to curb critical works and movements considered too left or ‘unGerman’. The question of how to deploy the law per se in relation to establishing cultural authority remained unresolved throughout the 1920s. It was clear by 1929 that the 1922 Cinema Law (that had superseded the earlier one) had not lived up to expectations. The Law had been passed in order to act as a buttress to the censorship clause in Article 118, believed by some of its supporters not to go far enough (its opponents obviously argued the contrary). Even though it is difficult to pinpoint the evidence to support a decline in standards, not least because the interpretation of cultural authority was itself contestable, conservatives alleged that the Christian foundations of German society had been progressively undermined since 1918, not least by comedy films that brazenly made light of monogamy.82 Opponents of the 1926 Law were thus right to

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fear that conservatives would instrumentalize the law in tandem with Paragraph 184 of the Criminal Code to attack material either critical of the republic or which espoused alternative life styles and sexual orientation. Already at the beginning of the decade, there had been a vigorous campaign against so-called sex education films (some of them indeed flimsy covers for pornographic titillation) but particularly against Richard Oswald’s highly successful ‘Different to the Others’ (Anders als die Anderen, 1919) which called for the decriminalization of homosexuality;83 in the mid-1920s, the Bavarian authorities in tandem with the Catholic Church had been in the vanguard of imposing a more conservative cultural authority: they successfully banned Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpiece Battleship Potemkin and led a campaign against mixed-sex bathing (especially as practiced by body clubs) in the state’s lidos and lakes; Bavarian theatres and galleries were heavily policed for examples of material considered to be ‘unGerman’ or ‘unChristian’. Meanwhile, the Central Offices for Combating Lewd and Pornographic Material registered 188 titles as ‘harmful’ between 1926 and 1933. This was a considerable drop from the number of magazines and journals that had been banned in the early years when pornography flourished, but significantly in the period after the passing of the 1926 Law the most affected publications concerned lesbian and homosexual lifestyles such as Die Freundin, Frauenliebe and Die Freundschaft with their contacts pages; New Lifestyle, Ideal Life Partnership and Laughing Life advocating ‘modern’ marriage; body culture magazines such as ASA, because of its nude photography.84 Outside parliament, the critic Wilhelm Stapel alleged in 1930 that the republic had brought about the death of German Kultur and announced ‘it is finally time to clean up all this rubbish’.85 Thus, by the time Severing made his report to the Reichstag in August 1929, a cultural backlash was already underway, and not least in those studios and cinemas controlled by Alfred Hugenberg’s UfA where a marked decline in entertainment films was countered by a sharp rise in the Wochenschau with an allegedly overt nationalist tenor.86 The onset of economic crisis from late 1929 inaugurated the turning point. Whereas before 1929 there had been some cross-party consensus on cultural probity where cinema was concerned, the debate now took on explicit political tones that bifurcated along party lines, with the DNVP again in the vanguard of the attack upon popular culture. A motion was brought by Mumm to the Reichstag that proposed to tighten further controls on cinema and to give the police greater powers to decide what constituted ‘Schund’. This time, Mumm and his colleagues found the SPD no longer willing to support an initiative to tighten censorship; even the Wirtschaftspartei baulked at the idea, seeing in the proposal a danger to the economic interests of the German film industry; while the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) expressed reserva­tion over what it saw as a missed opportunity to positively improve on the existing 1922 Cinema Law. However, the Catholic Centre Party saw an important opportunity to complete what it saw as the process began in 1919 of creating for the republic a firm foundation for cultural authority. Its spokesman, Georg Schreiber, reminded the Reichstag of what had been the intentions of the National Assembly in 1919. In Weimar strong leitmotifs were given for certain ethical principles for our people that must not be disturbed. At that time an appeal was made for a system of positive creative forces in order to secure for the Constitution a spiritual base within the

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people themselves, and it is no coincidence that amid the deep seriousness of the constitutional proceedings of Weimar as a sort of finale a cinema law was also debated. Here, may I be allowed to say that it would have been a weakness of today’s Germany not to have taken the film question in hand, especially since all civilized nations have taken a position on it. . . . Film production is not merely an economic problem, it is not just a financial question, but it is especially a spiritual question too for our whole people. . . . As long as there will be a people of conscience in Germany, they will have an obligation to give the entire people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) its definite ethical character. What point do the debates on various laws in the Reichstag have if in the final analysis the legislature did not have the conviction that the laws rebuilding our nation are borne by the moral energies of the people out there.87

Nevertheless, Peter Maslowski, the communist newspaper editor and spokesman for the KPD on cultural matters in the Reichstag, was surely right when he noted during the debate that in reality neither the quality of film nor popular taste had declined since the beginning of the 1920s. Maslowski and his party colleagues were convinced that behind the calls for a tightening of censorship lay political motives.88 Culture was both entertainment and a political weapon under the republic. Certainly, it was deployed by the left to level criticism at the republic: here one only need look at the stage works of the young Bertolt Brecht (for example his play, Baal 1922, whose protagonist Brecht described as ‘asocial, but in an asocial world’,89 or his satirical critique of commercial capitalism in ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’ 1927); the critical writings of Kurt Tucholsky (Deutschland, Deutschland über alles 1929) on the failure of the republic to make good its social promise of 1918; Georg Grosz’s excoriating depictions of the republic’s sexual venality in his lithograph series Ecce homo (1922), and his anti-war lithograph series ‘Hintergrund’ (1927), which included a depiction of a crucified Christ in a gas mask (and which landed him in the dock)90; or the two late Weimar films we encountered in Chapter 4: Phil Jutzi’s Hunger in Waldenburg (1929), where a number of scenes whose bleak landscape of pauperization and social injustice of working class life in the depression were censored by the authorities using the 1926 Law; similarly, Bertolt Brecht’s and Sladan Dudow’s collaborative work, Kuhle Wampe oder wem gehört der Welt? (1931), had those scenes referencing contraception/abortion, depicting proletarian solidarity and showing social nudity fall victim to the censor’s knife.91 It is impossible to say how far such left-wing cultural critiques of the republic undermined its authority. Nor is it possible to gauge how far right-wing attacks on alleged expressions of degeneracy contributed to a crisis of cultural authority. One of the most notable cultural pessimist texts of the period was undoubtedly Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, published in two parts in 1919 and 1923.92 The first volume appeared to critical acclaim and was nominated by Thomas Mann for the Nietzsche Prize.93 The fact that Spengler’s subject matter both predated the republic – he wrote the book during the war years as a general critique of western industrial

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civilization – did not seem to matter. The Weimar Republic was seen by its critics as the outgrowth of a misshapen modernity that had emerged at the turn of the century. Decline became a hit overnight, with the second volume achieving a print run of nearly 50,000 copies. But it is doubtful whether at the time the book had the negative impact on the republic’s cultural authority that historians later have attributed to it. Spengler, who died in 1935, was always a marginal figure who became increasingly isolated by the mid-1920s, as evidenced in his erstwhile champion Mann’s own distancing from him as early as 1920.94 It is probable that debates on how to achieve cultural authority escaped the wider attention or the deeper interest of the general public whose taste by and large did not necessarily mirror that of the republic’s cultural guardians. It was not only Eduard David who worried about the limited taste of the ‘man in the street’. A number of Reichstag deputies, including two interior ministers, made much of the ‘philistinism’ or narrow tastes of the ‘common man’ who was unable to comprehend great art.95 Thomas Mann, the undisputed arbiter of Weimar ‘high brow’ culture, had in 1919 recoiled at the idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ setting the national tone, seeing little potential for German Kultur in the revolution nor in its avant garde offspring, such as Dada; Mann preferred to leave culture to the ‘anti-liberalism of the great German masters Goethe und Nietzsche’.96 Without a doubt, provincial middle brow audiences broadly preferred the popular entertainment of the Volksbühne to the heavy drama of the Landestheater, as Konrad Dussel has shown for Heidelberg.97 Visitors to Weimar’s galleries felt more comfortable with kitsch and the historicist canvasses of Anton von Werner than with the impressionist canvasses of Max Liebermann and his fellow Secessionists, not to speak of the demanding expressionist works of the Brücke and Blaue Reiter movements in Dresden, Berlin and Munich, or the more challenging modernist works of Christian Schad and Oskar Kokoschka, not to mention the disturbing tableaux of Weimar life by Otto Dix and Georg Grosz.98 While the complex compositions of Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique and his follower Paul Hindemith might have appealed to the musically sophisticated, and the allegedly wild syncopations of Jazz spoke to bourgeois youth such as Klaus and Erika Mann, mainstream audiences preferred operettas, or the more traditional marches and polkas of Paul Lincke, and the popular hits (Schlager) of Otto Reutter, all of which lent them to a good singalong, whether in a pub, theatre or as one of the four million radio listeners by 1932.99 The adventures from the pen of Karl May or colonial adventures in Africa rather than the saga of the Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann continued to fascinate German youth.100 And if the clever and sometimes spectacular revues of Rudolph Nelson could not be experienced firsthand by the broader masses, at least his popular waltzes such as The Shopgirl, filtered down to audiences in the tavern, at the fairground and in the tingel-tangels (incidentally where the phenomenon of the variété or revue originated) with their frequent rowdy audience participation (captured vividly by Joseph Sternberg in his 1931 screen version of Heinrich Mann’s novella Professor Unrath 1910).101 This preference for ‘middle’ brow’ over ‘high brow’ characterized the Weimar years as it did the Third Reich. When Victor Klemperer travelled to Stettin in  1924

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to give a number of lectures, he was entertained by members of the city’s cultural elite, who in salon style engaged in debates about culture. Klemperer found they were ‘the rich provincial people familiar to me with their well-known educated tone, half serious, half snobby’.102 During his stay, Klemperer was shown the city’s collection of modern art by Otto Mueller, the dynamic director of the art gallery, but he remained stubbornly unimpressed.103 Klemperer, whose own taste in culture and entertainment appears more ‘middle brow’ than that of the educated Bildungsbürgertum to which he belonged  – frequently found he had little in common with his wife’s interest in classical music; he waxed lyrical in his diaries about Vicki Baum’s popular novel ‘Incident at Lohwinkel’ (Zwischenfall in Lohwinkel) which depicted the superficiality and materialism of modern life in the city, and he was a keen cinema-goer, although he too appears to have been aware of that medium’s own cultural hierarchies.104 * If culture could be utilized by the likes of Grosz or Kurt Tucholsky to level criticism against the republic for its failure to bring about social transformation and justice, its suppression was equally part of the battle. A by-product of the worsening political climate by the end of the 1920s was that an artistic work could be banned by the police if it was believed that it might provoke public disorder. The controversy surrounding the withdrawal from public audiences of the film version of Erich-Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel Im Westen nichts Neues (1929/1931) is well known.105 The film originally had been passed by the censor’s office which then did a volte-face after a systematic campaign by the NSDAP and Morality Groups in the nationalist press. The resulting furore more than anything opened up political divisions over culture: with liberals and liberal organizations mounting a counter-protest. After heated debate in the Reichstag, an amendment to the 1922 Cinema Law (Lichtspielgesetz) was passed stipulating that the film could be shown only to private audiences. It was banned outright in Thuringia.106 Similarly, Ernst Krenek’s immensely popular jazz operetta Jonny Spielt Auf (1927), depicting a complex love entanglement and material desire of a black jazz bandleader, and referred to in some press quarters as a ‘Neger Oper’, was shut down in Bavaria after tumult ensued among theatre audiences when tear gas bombs were exploded as the lead actor Alfred Jerger came on stage. When Brecht’s Mahogonny Songspiel caused uproar in Baden where it was premiered in July 1927, it too was removed from the stage.107 As Maslowski observed, on such occasions not the law, but the right-wing provocateur and a reactionary police authority were the censors.108 Thus, the proposal in 1928 to give the police greater powers in regulating culture in the protection of youth was met with dismay by progressive commentators. Writing in the leftist Socialist Education, the Social Democrat pedagogue Kurt Löwenstein, noted that the proposal lacked any objective basis for deciding what should be forbidden, leaving this ‘completely to the subjective judgement of the police officer’. And remarked caustically, ‘What, however, does a Bavarian or Pommeranian policeman not consider as dangerous to youth?’109 But censorship was not simply a bourgeois weapon in the class struggle, as Maslowski and his compatriots would have it. In the febrile atmosphere of the late 1920s and early 1930s, it took on racial overtones too. The Thuringian Government under its education

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and interior minister, the Nazi Wilhelm Frick, set about ‘cleansing’ that state’s cultural institutions and banning ‘negro’ influences from theatre and music.110 Frick’s initiative extended to Prussia in the summer of 1932 when its commissarial minister Franz Bracht signed an edict in August that forbade social nudity. Here it was not just a matter of combating alleged prurient lifestyles; the edict provided the legal basis for the censorship of the largest socialist nudist organization the Institute of Body Culture, in Berlin.111 In addition to tightening measures against homosexual activity, it also allowed for a cultural reordering of the nation along bio-racial lines that anticipated later Nazi policy.112 This edict was followed by a further edict from the Interior Ministry in March the following year, and which was accompanied by the comment that the Institute’s leader, Dr Koch, ‘should be viewed as one of the greatest dangers to German culture and morals and is to be rejected as a cultural mistake’ and thus removed his association licence.113 Where Mumm (who died in 1932) had seen black demons in French garb on German stages in the early 1920s, the Nazis and their political fellowtravellers saw Weimar as the embodiment of the ‘Jewish-Marxist destruction of culture and morality of the German people’.114 Thus, on the back of the Decree For The Protection of The German People of 4 February 1933, greater powers were given to the police to confiscate materials described as ‘filth’ tolerated by the ‘marxist’ republic.115 These measures contextualized by the earlier debates on endangered youth found their culmination in the notorious auto de fé – the book-burning by nationalist students of so-called degenerate works of literature at the Opernplatz outside the University on 10 May as Berlin’s Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels intoned the names of their so-called unGerman authors.116 Henceforth, the cultural authority of the state would be asserted in terms of its racial cleansing.

Cultural authority and the pedagogy of enactment As we have seen in the Reichstag discussions on censorship, the guardians of the new state were conscious of the importance of infusing the republic with a moral authority. In this regard, parliamentarians and cultural elites acted as both arbiter and agent. Even those, like Thomas Mann or the historian Friedrich Meinecke, neither of whom initially warmed to the revolution in 1918, eventually acknowledged the importance of this task and their own role in this mission. Mann, who had in 1918 turned down an invitation by the German Society for Civic Education (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Staatsbürgerliche Erziehung) to participate in a series of talks, later justified his reconciliation to the republic to his close friend Ida Boy-Ed (who for her part remained implacably hostile to the republic): ‘The attempt by this pitiful state devoid of citizens to instill something such as an idea, a soul, a spirit, seemed to me not a bad undertaking, appeared to me as something like a good deed’.117 Both Mann and Meinecke were rational rather than emotional supporters of the republic, so-called Vernunftsrepulikaner. Both believed that successful nations were grounded in cultural-civic identity that was not only suffused with morality but also delineated by history.118 For them, the revolution had nonetheless created the opportunity for forging a new national cultural identity focused on the Constitution.

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The task facing Germany’s leaders was a pedagogical one: the virtues of democracy had to be inculcated in such a way that they became second nature.119 At the same time, the republic and its bedrock, the Constitution, would be shown to have emerged from within the traditions of the German people themselves rather than being the product of defeat.120 As in the case of censorship, particular focus was placed on the civic education of youth, testified by the ‘Staatsbürgerliche Woche’ held in 1923, which sought to do what the Patriotic Education campaign of 1917 failed to do: bind youth to the state (also with questionable results).121 At the end of the decade, the Prussian minister for culture, science and education, Adolf Grimme, was still emphasizing the ‘national pedagogic importance’ of creating an enlightened society freed from narrow clichés and political particularism.122 He was of course, speaking at a time of increasing radicalization and political violence, when leaders such as he worried about the growing alienation from the republic, especially among youth. The focus on youth and the drive to inculcate in it republican and democratic virtues led to a programme of what is today commonly referred to as ‘civics’, but in the context of asserting cultural authority under the Weimar Republic we might also refer to as ‘constitutional pedagogy’. As we shall see below, historians in particular played a role here, especially in the universities where democratic sentiment and republican support appeared weakest. To achieve the goal of a ‘constitutional pedagogy’ required something more than mere schooling. The republic had to become an ubiquitous element in the everyday lives thus becoming part of quotidian culture. In a contribution to a series of short pieces on ‘enacting the republic’ published in the liberal Vossische Zeitung in spring 1925, Heinrich Mann advised, Do we want to “enact” (insenzenieren) the German Republic, but not hidden as so often in the past, behind the scenes? If so, then we must remind people of it at every step and turn. No public building, no printed public notice [should be] without the heading: “German Republic”. On all postage stamps: “German Republic”. . . . In order to affirm the republic and to make it real (“ins Werk zu setzen”), one must approach the people differently. Office signage and postage stamps are only the smallest examples. No German should be allowed to breathe day-in, day-out any other air than that of the republic.123

In order to achieve this sort of ‘republican saturation’, a new post, that of Reichskunstwart (translated roughly as Reich Guardian of Culture), had been established in 1919/20 within the Reich Interior Ministry with responsibility for protecting the nation’s cultural heritage and ‘to participate in all laws and administrative measures which have artistic questions as their subject and should thereby mediate between the authorities and artists’.124 Its first and only holder (from 1 January 1920) was the art historian and former director of the Stuttgart Museum Edwin Redslob, who, in spite of having to operate under tight financial constraints that grew progressively worse over time, ran the office with undiminished enthusiasm until his dismissal in 1933, when his post – together with his assistant Biebrach – was incorporated into Goebbels’ Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.125 The initial impetus for the post arose from the chaotic conditions of the time when valuable works of art were being sold abroad without any consideration of their

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value to the nation. However, Redslob soon defined his mission as that of raising the profile of the republic by ‘making it visible’ (Sichtbarmachung) through cultural and symbolic forms that not only created what we today might call a ‘corporate image’ (Formgebung), but which also connected with a deeper sensibility of the people thus awakening and demonstrating their ‘resolve for the state’ (Wille zum Staat).126 The aim was to transform the nation’s inner spiritual core. As we noted earlier in this chapter, a primary aim was to demonstrate that the republic was more than merely the sum of ‘divided interests’ (Interessentenhaufen).127 Redslob’s understanding of his task was not universally shared but neither was it rejected outright, and indeed he found (eventually and albeit briefly) a broad cross-party consensus for his work, as we shall see below.128 Broadly speaking, there were two areas in which Redslob sought to achieve an explicitly republican cultural authority, each reworking a sense of nationhood and identity. The first was in the sphere of symbols, notably creating new insignia for the republic (for instance, postage stamps, letterheads and so on, as referred to by Mann above).129 However, the attempt to make the republic visible through such everyday material met with resistance in some quarters as we will see in the following chapter. The question of symbols was at its most controversial where this concerned the question of the flag as national symbol. The First Flag Decree of 11 April 1921 stipulated that the national flag was the black–red–gold tricolour (black on top, red in the middle and gold on the bottom), sparking off a bitter conflict that remained unresolved for the life of the republic.130 When Hans Luther’s government passed a decree on 5 May 1926 allowing the imperial colours to be flown alongside the official flag at embassies and consulates around the world, the pro-republican parties staged mass demonstrations and protests. The liberal DDP brought a motion of ‘no confidence’ in the Reichstag on 12 May, which passed 177 to 146, leading to Luther’s resignation. The nationalists hit back dramatically with reports from around the country of republican flags being vandalized.131 The issue of the Reich’s flag was partly resolved in March 1933 when a presidential decree allowed the Swastika and the imperial colours to be flown together as the official state emblem.132 The second area related to the Reichskunstwart’s belief in the importance of connecting the republic to democratic traditions of the recent (and sometimes more distant) past. Redslob recognized that for Weimar’s republican state to have authority, it had to have history. Past events and historical personalities, such as Goethe and Baron vom Stein, were appropriated by the republic in the construction of a cultural tradition skewed towards 1919 (the year of the National Assembly and the Constitution, and not the revolution of 1918). To this end, an annual Verfassungsfeier, a Constitution Day celebration, was inaugurated on 11 August 1921 (the day the Constitution was signed into law) as a national ritual symbolizing the new statehood of the democratic republic. This day of celebration also sought to invest the Constitution with an emotional quality in an effort to take its appeal beyond mere dry words. The circumstances surrounding the launch of the first Verfassungsfeier in 1921 did not augur well for future years. There appeared to be little confidence among Weimar’s leaders that an official affirmation of the German state as republic would have the desired effect on the population. The historian Hermann Oncken who had been invited to hold the public address expressed his misgivings about the event to Chancellor Joseph Wirth, stating that a Verfassungsfeier would be divisive since it would be unable

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to compete with the more popular commemorations of past events. The result, in Oncken’s opinion, would be a weakening of the republic’s constitutional authority at home and in the eyes of the international community. Oncken did, however, give a spirited defence of the republic in his address a few years later at the University of Berlin, where he had succeeded Erich Marcks to the chair in history, on the occasion of the constitution’s tenth anniversary.133 Part of the difficulty of the Constitution Day celebration was that although it had been elevated to a national day of commemoration, it was not compulsory but remained at the discretion of the individual Länder governments; thus, in Bavaria it never received official approval (the only time a ceremony was held in 1929, it was hosted by the Reich representatives in Bavaria), whereas in liberal Baden it was declared an official public holiday in 1924. Moreover, while in Prussia public officials, such as the mayor or Landrat, were expected to make appropriate arrangements for its celebration, it had to compete at a popular level with a myriad of local and regional events, as well as celebrations among monarchists of the ex-Kaiser’s birthday (27 January), festivities surrounding a revived Sedan Day (2 September) with its heavy sediment of nationalist and anti-French tones, especially in the febrile conditions of the early 1920s, and most notably, the commemoration of the Reich’s foundation (18 January) which remained an official celebration vying with Constitution Day and to which we will return below.134 Partly for these reasons and because of the ongoing political tensions arising from the imminent plebiscite on Upper Silesia, the proposal to inaugurate Constitution Day in 1921 was met with scepticism and revealed a disinclination among proposed keynote speakers to take part. This may not be such a surprise when one considers the assassination barely two months previously of Matthias Erzberger, one of the German signatories to the Versailles Treaty, and the ongoing murderous attacks on supporters of the republic. Joseph Wirth as chancellor and a keen supporter of Redslob was determined that the event should go ahead and indeed it was duly held in the State Opera House; Wirth delivered the keynote address.135 Thus, against a background of international crisis and tension between the Reich authorities and the state governments over the question of autonomy, Wirth spoke of the ‘gravity of the hour’ in which Germany found itself and emphasized the integrative function of the republic’s albeit far from perfect Constitution. National unity on a liberal foundation is the guiding star. Both are guaranteed and have been achieved in the Weimar Constitution. The division into tribes and states as a result of a rich historical development has always posed great difficulties for Germany’s constitutional question, as is the case in other countries. The present Constitution has surely succeeded in taking into account the actual conditions existing in Germany, even if some wishes remain unfulfilled and must be left to future developments.136

The event passed off reasonably well and while not exactly galvanizing republican sentiment, it was the first time since the revolution that hitherto potentially hostile interests were brought together in one place to honour the new state. In spite of a certain amount of uncertainty on the part of both government and Ebert as to what

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exactly was being celebrated (the Reich Eagle in black set against a background of gold and red – thus symbolizing the republic – had been removed from the hall), icons of German culture were much in evidence: there were readings from Goethe and music by Wagner, Beethoven, Gustav Mahler and the ‘overture for Freischutz’ by Carl Maria Weber. A military band and tattoo (militärisches Schauspiel) bridged the official event inside the Opera House with the waiting public outside. In spite of the prevailing hostile winds, for the first time the republic enacted itself as a cultural event.137 If the republic had to have history, then, in Redslob’s view, it should also cohere as an emotional community. Redslob believed that the Verfassungsfeier should be visible enactments of the republican nation as community. Indeed, as Nadine Rossol has argued in her study of republican spectacle, Redslob worked towards ‘visualizing [Germans as] a community’ through aesthetic means.138 Thus, in  1922, under the motto ‘The Declaration of the Länder and Reich’ (Bekenntnis der Länder and Reich), for the first time since the revolution the flags of the eighteen Land governments were symbolically arranged in a circle together with the Reich eagle at the centre, thus symbolizing the continuing unity of the German nation. And whereas in the previous year the State Opera House had been the venue, the Verfassungsfeier was now held in the plenary chamber of the Reichstag which was adorned with the words ‘Unity, Right, Freedom’ emblazoned on a large banner. The choice of the Reichstag as symbol of the democratic foundations of the political nation was unambiguous. The symbolism of the event becomes clearer when one considers the fractious nature of the Reich/Land dualism and its bitter conflict over the prerogative of state authority and competencies that was only resolved in the so-called Nazi coordination of the Länder in  1934.139 In 1922, the Reich had engaged in an ongoing bitter dispute over demarcation of areas of governmental competencies (mostly to do with civil service and policing issues) with the Bavarian authorities resulting from the Law for the Protection of the Republic passed earlier that year, and which had reached a delicate stage by the time of Constitution Day on 11 August by when it was finally resolved.140 Just days before being declared the national anthem by President Ebert, the first and third verses of the Deutschlandlied (‘Deutschland Deutschland über alles’) were sung at the Constitution Day celebration, but not as a signal of nationalist reawakening but as a collective affirmation of the love for the Fatherland now embodied in the republic – Ebert’s exhortation to celebrate the 11 August followed the famous trinity of Hoffmann’s verses: Unity and Right and Freedom (Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit).141 Thus, the emphasis on the joint representation of Reich and Länder in the republican project indicated the recognition by chancellor and Redslob of the political use to which culture could be put; and it served as a template for later celebrations. Moreover, by the late summer of 1922 the Reich faced worsening relations with France, and Redslob introduced another dimension into the Constitution Day celebrations which appeared to caution against militant revanchism. As part of the cultural programme, excerpts from the epic anti-war prose poem ‘Opfergang’ (‘Sacrifice’), originally written in  1916 after the Battle of Verdun but first published in December 1918, by the expressionist playwright and poet Fritz von Unruh, who since Verdun had turned his back on militarism, were read to the assembled guests.142 The recital of Opfergang is pertinent to the attempt to convey a republican culture that

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was peaceful rather than asserting the martial nation; like Mann’s Der Zauberberg two years later, it directly challenged the myth of the blood sacrifice of Langemarck.143 Nor was Redslob averse to instrumentalizing Constitution Day in the service of Germany’s foreign policy. Thus, in the following year, at the height of the Ruhr crisis, Redslob convinced the government to hold the Verfassungsfeier in Frankfurt with Duisburg’s lord mayor Dr Jarres representing the occupied areas of the Ruhr, as the guest speaker. Again, the first and third verses of the Deutschlandlied were sung, but this time possibly with a different connotation to the previous year.144 The choice of Frankfurt as the venue for the Verfassungsfeier in 1923 was not only calculated to directly link the occupied territory to the republic – a theme that was to repeat itself throughout the life of the republic, but also connected to the political tradition of democratic constitutionalism of 1848. The occupation of the Ruhr had galvanized the entire country in opposition to the French, and in doing so, it stoked the fires of ultra-nationalism, and with it all the associated dangers for the republic. The emphasis upon an explicitly German democratic tradition harking back to the Paulskirche and 1848 was repeated in future years and was partly to counter international fears of Prussian revanchism. It was for this reason too that Carl Petersen, Hamburg’s lord mayor and a leading figure in the liberal German Democratic Party emphasized the peaceful constitutional basis of the republic rooted in a democratic ‘German spirit’ in his address in the Reichstag the following year. ‘This requires not only courage for willing sacrifice, confidence in our own power, but also the trust of the world in the spirit of the German people’.145 As we know, 1924 was a turning point for the republic: it marked the beginning of what came to be termed the period of relative stabilization as the dangers from monetary chaos and political radicalism receded, and, as we argued in Chapter 3, when the republic was strengthened by the improved relationship with the allies, and above all else with France. It was also the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of war in August 1914. Thus, that year’s Constitution Day celebration began with a solemn act of commemoration for the war dead on the steps of the Reichstag in full public view. Redslob had conceived the celebration as a mass event intended to show the unity of the living nation reborn from the sacrifice of the dead.146 In his address, Petersen referred to how the social strains of war had broken the old imperial order, but he also emphasized the myth of national unity in the face of adversity symbolized by the Burgfrieden and applied this to the democratic order of the republic. And this nation joined together even more firmly in the days of its greatest catastrophe seeking the ultimate unity, which it had not had until then; it found in a resolute and clear commitment to that free [decision], their desires and their responsibility [which is the expression] of all democracy.147

Petersen was not concerned with providing a historically accurate account of the war. Sketching the longer course of German history since Friedrich the Great, he located the Constitution in the liberal traditions of the German Enlightenment and spoke of the individual freedoms announced in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1776); and with a nod in the direction of Germany’s disaffected Mittelstand, he argued that the Weimar

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Constitution offered equality of opportunity not social levelling (‘Gleichmacherei’). And Petersen went further, when he connected the republic to Bismarck’s Reich, emphasizing the constitution as fulcrum of national unity. Here, Petersen touched on the issue of the flag as the visible symbol of the nation: the imperial black–white–red or the democratic black–red–gold? He challenged the right’s appropriation of the old colours, but in true liberal fashion sought to reconcile both. The republican colours were, in the final analysis, the only symbol of national unity. In conclusion, Petersen returned to the war and to the question of the republic and its origins. The fact that republic with its Constitution had emerged from the war patriotism encapsulated in the Burgfrieden: ‘was a real declaration of the German people . . . that showed a nation in flux and difficulty at its best.’148 This reclamation of the war as a foundation for liberal democracy was echoed by Thomas Mann in explaining his support for the republic, which, he claimed, was the child not of revolution but of the ‘Spirit of 1914’. ‘At that moment’ he wrote in a letter to Ida Boyd-Ed, ‘in the hour of honour and of deadly enterprise, she [democracy] established herself in the breast of youth’.149 Others, such as the philo­sopher and neoKantian Ernst Cassirer, delved deeper into both German and European history to show the republic’s enlightenment lineage.150 Such portrayals were common in the efforts to ‘historicize’ the republic and thereby to ‘normalize’ it as part of Germany’s development, even when occasionally the revolution of 1918 was put back into the historical frame. Peculiar as it may sound to us today, it was a given that eminent historians such as Hermann Oncken in 1929, Fritz Rörig in 1929, and Fritz Hartung in 1932, or constitutional experts such as Konrad Beyerle in 1929, and August Manigk in 1930, could connect the democratic constitutional underpinnings of the republic in their respective commemorative lectures to students ­during celebrations  for Constitution Day and the founding of the Reich, to ­Bismarck’s Reich.151 The twelve annual Verfassungsfeier not only made claims on history, but also consciously took contemporary issues as their core themes with the explicit aim of actualizing the Constitution. In 1928, at the height of republican confidence, Gustav Radbruch, the Reich Justice Minister, delivered a lengthy speech rebutting the criticism levelled against the republic by its critics. Radbruch argued that the republic’s culture of political accommodation demonstrated a will for constancy (Stetigkeit) and was a sign of strength rather than weakness; moreover, it reflected the workings of German society at large. The issue of constitutional reform (Reichsreform) was once more being discussed at this point, and Radbruch thus turned to the question of Länder particularism seen (correctly) in some government quarters as a stumbling block to achieving the unitary state (which incidentally, had hindered the Reichskunstwart’s efforts to nationalize the cultural aesthetization of the republic).152 Radbruch’s speech in 1928 was a spirited assertion of republican authority and he utilized the occasion’s most potent cultural icon in order to achieve his aim.153 The May elections that year had seen the Social Democrats return to power with a resounding victory; it was also the year when economic recovery was matched by political equipoise. But this apparent equilibrium was being challenged by the nationalist right with increasing frequency.154 Radbruch was astute enough to claim for the republic the very embodiment of traditional conservatism in the person of Field

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Marshall Hindenburg, seated in the first row. Recent work on Hindenburg shows how his mythical status spanned the political spectrum as each ideological current (the Communists excepted) sought to claim him for its own. Quoting from the romantic nationalist poet Stefan George, Radbruch echoed the laudations made by the former interior minister Albert Grzesinski (SPD) and Carl Petersen in previous years in his homage to Hindenburg as ‘first citizen of the republic’. He who at that time saved Germany, the first soldier of the old Germany, we are happy to have him as the first citizen of the new Germany and today make our reverent thanks!155

Hindenburg was hugely popular across all generations of German society, as the celebrations upon his election showed.156 Indeed, Anna von der Goltz makes the interesting argument that Hindenburg’s popular ‘myth’ literally embodied Weimar’s cultural identity.157 Thus, Radbruch’s depiction of him as the republic’s ‘first citizen’ was neither a naïve claim nor an empty rhetoric flourish but tapped into a rich vein of popular sentiment. From the outset, Verfassungsfeier speeches were conceived as homilies on how to be good citizens. They sought not only to embed the constitution in German history but to enact its relevance to contemporary life, especially where youth were concerned. Weimar’s political and cultural elites knew that in order to secure the future of the republic, they had to win over Germany’s youth, and notably those from the traditionally nationalist middle class who populated the grammar schools and universities, which had long been cradles of rampant nationalism.158 By actualizing historical themes to tackle contemporary questions, celebration of the Constitution sought to engage the public, and children and youth in particular, by performing the republic as a ‘living form’ and by emphasizing the transformation from being a subject (Untertan) to active cultural citizenship.159 With this in mind, on the tenth anniversary of the Constitution in 1929 Redslob planned celebrations in Weimar in early February to commemorate the National Assembly and its historic task, and for the August celebration together with the Berlin choirmaster Josef von Fielitz created a Festspiel in which the republic was symbolically represented by a ‘living flag’ performed by three and a half thousand children to a capacity-filled Berlin stadium while a 7,500-strong choir provided musical commentary.160 The symbolism of the ‘living flag’ was that it represented the Reich colours as the people in an act of performed republican civics.161 The overarching theme on this tenth anniversary was the demonstration of the people’s ‘resolve for the state’ (Wille zum Staat), as Redslob later recounted to the Berliner Tageblatt, The process is really quick. The obvious establishes itself so quickly: loyalty to one’s state, even if events transformed it from a monarchy into a people’s state – or may one say, precisely because [of this]!162

There was a strong emphasis on the idea of the republic as a ‘national people’s community’ or Volksgemeinschaft in these celebrations.163 The event in the Berlin Stadium comprised a 300-strong adult choir drawn from all occupations and classes holding working tools in their hands and in the act of fashioning a giant golden pole.

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They call upon Germany’s youth to help them to complete the task; these enter in groups of 60 preceded by the flags of the seventeen federal states and singing ‘we want to build a golden bridge’; soon the arena filled with three thousand children and youths, divided equally into the colours of the Reich flag: black, red and gold; once assembled, they paraded before the tribune where Hindenburg sat together with other dignitaries, then regrouped on the field, followed by a spectacle of sports and games. This was followed by the singing of the first and third verses of the Deutschlandlied and a fly-by of aeroplanes each trailing the democratic tricolour of the republic, after which Wagner’s overture, the Oberon Suite, brought the event to a close.164 In August 1930, emphasis was again placed on the nation’s youth by Joseph Wirth, now the interior minister in Heinrich Brüning’s first cabinet (30 March 1930– 10 October 1931). Speaking to the deputies of the Reichstag against the background of looming elections, Wirth called upon Germany’s youth especially to give their support to the republic.165 Like many others in authority Wirth was worried by the radicalization of young voters (at the time thought to be evident in the Prussian municipal elections the previous November and in regional elections earlier in the spring in which the NSDAP and the KPD had both registered substantial gains), but also with the increasing turn to violence. Acknowledging the difficulty that the Weimar  state found itself in, he appealed to youth to commit themselves to the democratic project and to resist the superficial attraction of paramilitary organizations and of fascism in particular.166 Redslob meanwhile had conceived a much more dramatic event than the 1929 celebration, as we saw in Chapter 3. In general, it can be said that by the beginning of 1930s, celebrations of Constitution Day had become central to civic pedagogy exhorting its younger citizens to pledge themselves (Bekenntnis) to the republic at a time when its authority was facing increased challenge. * By the beginning of the 1930s, national renewal through culture had become a leitmotif of Weimar’s elites.167 There was, however, a fundamental difference in how this was being understood. For nationalists, renewal meant resurrecting some semblance of the cultural conservatism associated with the Reich ante1914; for many republicans, including Vernunftsrepublikaner, renewal had always encapsulated a national ‘spiritual’ awakening of Volksgemeinschaft but within the parameters of democracy.168 The difference between the two was encapsulated in the contrast between pedagogy of democracy (Volkspädagogik) and pedagogy of leadership (Führerpädagogik).169 Thus, on the one hand, Harry Mayne, a lecturer in German at Marburg University in his annual address in  1932 to students on the occasion of the founding of the Reich extolled Bismarck and Goethe as spiritual links in the formation of Germany’s nationalist cultural identity, using Bismarck’s ‘legacy’ to attack the republic. While on the other hand, Fritz Hartung drew a more liberal connection to the Bismarckian state and Weimar national identity when he spoke to Berlin’s students on the occasion of the same event.170 In either case, as the 1920s wore on, the theme of national renewal became one in which an element of cultural dirigisme became ever more apparent and the idea

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of a ‘German spirit’ increasingly mythical.171 In both approaches, achieving the goal of ‘cultural authority’ propelled one closer towards a more authoritarian position. As we saw above, this slippage was evident in the debates in the Reichstag on cinema and censorship, and it also featured heavily in the pedagogical activities of those academics like Meinecke who were pro-republic but, like Thomas Mann, conservative in their cultural inclinations. For example, when the historian Franz Schnabel was invited to give the guest lecture at the Technical University in Karlsruhe on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Reich (18 January 1931), he appears not to have seen any contradiction between the symbolic character of the occasion with its overt reference to Bismarckian authoritarianism (Obrigkeitsstaat) and the topic of his speech (Freiherr vom Stein) emphasizing active citizenship as the basis of the Kulturnation.172 It might be argued that Schnabel’s concept of citizenship harked back to an older understanding of the relationship between state and Bürger wherein the actions of the citizen were subordinated to the higher good of the state, and while not anti-democratic, veered towards a more authoritarian model that was being articulated at the same time by Carl Schmitt and others. The real question to be answered of course is, did students listen, assuming they turned up at all? Victor Klemperer noted down in his diary how the rector of his university, Professor Gravelius made a brave attempt to deliver a balanced address in one of the large lecture theatres at the Verfassungsfeier in 1922. But he spoke to an audience of barely fifty, among whom were eight to ten professors but no students.173 And when students did attend, then the speaker was usually speaking to the converted, as with Adolf Grimme when he addressed the Republican Students Association at Berlin University in 1931.174 In a somewhat bleak retrospective of youth and republican cultural authority, Martin Sommerfeldt, Goering’s press chief and biographer, remembered that as a student on Constitution Day the concepts of liberty and democracy ‘like two worn out circus horses, were presented to the people who dutifully applauded’.175 Homilies on good citizenship were important and were designed to appeal to students in particular. For the mass of ordinary Germans, Edwin Redslob developed a more populist approach that dovetailed with plebeian cultural traditions, notably the sports spectacle, and more modernist cultural forms associated with avant garde ‘total theatre’ and dance associated with the stage producer Erwin Piscator, and Rudolf von Laban.176 Redslob believed that the republic could be performed as a mass ‘happening’. But his espousal of enactment as a way to establish a bond between state and citizen also resonated with quasi mystical undertones that drew on nineteenthcentury romanticism and thus anticipated the mysticism of the Thingspiele of the mid-1930s; while at the same time, the attempt to create a ‘spectacle as total art work’ in which the individual dissolved into the totality of the mass predated the authoritarian aesthetic of Nazism.177 This turn to cultural authoritarianism mirrored a Zeitgeist that not only dovetailed with an increasingly conservative desire for ‘wholeness’ (Ganzheit) within the population at large, it also reflected Redslob’s own form of liberal nationalism and that of the German State Party (the successor of the DDP) with which he was close.178 Detlef Lehnert and Klaus Megerle in their work on republican celebrations claim that until 1929 the Verfassungsfeier had never fully galvanized the national spirit,

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partly because of the way they had been staged as an interior act with the public as audience.179 The substance of their argument is problematic, not least because it assumes that social and political division was particular to the Weimar Republic. The Constitution Day celebration in 1929 took the event into the public arena as a ‘total event’. Certainly, the aesthetic was galvanizing, judged by contemporary accounts. But the celebration was still that of the democratic republic, and as such it had its critics. This changed in 1930 with the staging of Redslob’s Deutschlands Strom, as we saw in Chapter 3. The celebration, one could argue, typified the ambiguity that had crept into ‘civic pedagogy’ by the beginning of the 1930s. The aesthetic of the republic’s cultural authority had adopted an almost plebiscitary character as it drifted towards nationalist waters. While it might be overstating the case to say that the ‘cultic function’ of this particular republican (1929) and national (1930) enactment was authoritarian in its nature, its aesthetic was dangerously close to what Walter Benjamin later observed in the staging of fascist politics,180 an example of which is portrayed through the lens of Leni Riefenstahl’s depiction of the Nazi Nuremberg Rally of 1934 in Triumph of the Will (1935).181 With regard to Weimar culture, Peter Gay has written of the ‘hunger for wholeness’ (Ganzheit) in a period (1920s) and place (Germany) that ostensibly lacked unity of identity or purpose.182 According to Christian Welzbacher, the centenary celebration of Goethe as the republic’s first cultural citizen in  1932 was the ‘high point of republican festival culture’.183 But this is doubtful. More or less restricted to Frankfurt and to Weimar, it achieved neither the unity of purpose nor the mobilization of a ‘national spirit’; the Reich and Prussian authorities did little to promote it; the Bavarian government ignored it; the University of Munich refused to make available a lecture theatre for republican students wishing to celebrate Goethe; in Baden and in Württemberg, proposals by the SPD and Centre Party were resisted by the DNVP.184 The anniversary in Goethe’s town of Weimar was called into question over both poor organization and a hostile campaign in the local press, leading Thomas Mann, who was to be the main speaker, to threaten his withdrawal from the event.185 Thus, it was the melding of the 1930 Constitution celebration with the Rheinlandfeier that harnessed the national spirit, with its choreography of the republic as a national community, as a Volksgemeinschaft, as Redslob was at pains to point out in an interview with the Berliner Tageblatt.186 But with the commemorations in the following two years, there was little to celebrate and the speeches became more authoritarian in tone; this changed with what has come to be seen by some historians as the ‘foundational act’ of the Third Reich. As suggested above, there is continuity between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich in the aesthetic of state-orchestrated enactment. The obvious example of this continuity is found in the Day of Potsdam on 21 March 1933, when in full pomp and circumstance the new Reichstag was opened. It was the task of Wilhelm Frick as interior minister to make the necessary arrangements for the opening of the Reichstag and, like his predecessors, he turned to Kurt Biebrach, the former assistant to the Reichskunstwart, take charge of the arrangements, now that Redslob had been relieved of his post and lay sick at home.187 It is clear from a reading of the available sources that at this stage the charismatic leader was still Hindenburg and not Hitler.188 The conclusion to the event lent Hitler his symbolic aura as the charismatic leader

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in-waiting, when the two men shook hands. Goebbels in his rather contrived diary entry captured the moment. The great Day of Potsdam will be unforgettable in its historical significance . . . A solemn silence settles over all those present. Brief and serious the President delivers his message to the members of the Reichstag and the German people. His tone is firm and collected. In our midst [he] stands a man in whom generations are united. Then the Führer speaks. He talks with tough and compelling urgency. At the end, all of us are deeply moved. . . . All rise from their seats and bring cheering tributes to the wise field marshal, who extends his hand to the young Chancellor. A historic moment.189

The Day of Potsdam brought republican state enactment to a close; it also became the foundational act for the myth of the Third Reich as a ‘community of national will’.190 It also provided a lesson in state enactment that was learnt by Goebbels.191 More importantly, it marked the beginning of Hitler’s own path towards claiming charismatic authority that was both carefully staged while at the same time rooted in the popular acclamation necessary for asserting that authority.192

Conclusion According to the American sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb, ‘modern states, despotic and democratic, use the creativity of artists and scholars to lend themselves a cultural aura just as the princes of old once did’.193 ‘Cultural aura’ underlay the attempts to establish republican moral authority from the outset, either via legislating for a cultural morality or through enacting the Constitution as civic pedagogy. The extent of its success – or failure – can be argued over. The aim here has been less to judge it in these terms but to show how ‘cultural authority’ as a republican project contained both democratic and authoritarian impulses; and how these cannot be simply attributed to the usual political polarities of the Weimar Republic. A civic pedagogy, whether expressed in terms of the debates on censorship in the Reichstag, or whether articulated in the homilies on good citizenship by professors to their students in which the ‘republican nation’ increasingly could only find legitimacy through reference to the Bismarckian state, or whether expressed in the momentary spectacles of enacted national emotion, had clearly veered into the muddied waters of cultural authority/ authoritarianism by 1930. The ambivalence can be followed in Thomas Mann who began the decade wary of the republic, then reconciled to it, becoming finally one of its most vehement advocates, but who nevertheless remained innately a cultural conservative. He accepted an invitation to join in the Constitution Day celebrations in Heidelberg on the republic’s tenth anniversary, but at the same time reiterated his ‘deutsch-romantischen Bürgerlichkeit’ in correspondence with the editor of the republican journal Das Reichsbanner, while at the same time stating that he did not exclude ‘the idea of a democracy’ in which he ‘sought a transition of the concept of a

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romantic community to a societal-socialist one’.194 The reasons for this polyvalence are complex and deserve a study in their own right.195 In this chapter, we have seen that a key factor was that ‘cultural authority’ could only find purchase among the population by reflecting the broader sentiments sweeping through society. Within three years of the optimism of 1929, when the Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst had spoken of the opportunity offered by the Weimar Constitution for the ‘organic development’ of the nation,196 another interior minister, this time the arch-reactionary Wilhelm von Gayl in his Verfassungsfeier address to the Reichstag also spoke of the culture of the ‘organic state’ and derided the idea that the Constitution could have achieved such a thing during the ‘13 heavy and suffering years’ of the republic, adding that the Constitution rather than uniting the national spirit, had divided it.197 The republic’s cultural authority was itself inherently ambiguous, depending on how it was understood and how it was deployed, but its authoritarian direction evident in 1932 was not inevitable as we shall see in the final chapter of this book. In conclusion, it would be an oversimplification to view the story of ‘cultural authority’ as another ‘Weimar failing’. The republic was a democracy founded on the plurality of interests as its spokesmen from across the party spectrum repeated often enough. Ideological divisions were not perceived as a weakness but as the republic’s strength, providing these remained in political equilibrium.198 Historians tread an odd path when they expect from the republic what they abjure about the Hitler state. The task of providing the state with its visual form after 1933 was entrusted to the Reich Cultural Chamber one of whose key functions was to shape the ‘daily scene of our streets and cities into an expression of German culture’.199 But in spite of the Nazi rhetoric of the Volksgemeinschaft as cultural mobilization, this project too had largely failed by the mid-1930s when the ‘schein und sein’ of the Third Reich’s ‘commodity aesthetics’ had lost much of its lustre.200

7

Renegade Authority: The Junker Landrat

Today, people in all walks of life have their own Germany. They are allowed to lead their lives, ignoring the Republic.1

Introduction Republican authority, to be effective, had to be supported and carried by the administrative apparatus of the state. Ebert’s call to civil servants to continue at their desks in 1918 was an appeal to their sense of duty to the state and patriotism for the nation rather than a call to arms for the revolution. Without their cooperation, the country – and the revolution – would have collapsed and chaos ensued. As we saw in Chapter 2, the country’s machinery of government made the transition from empire to republic without little disruption. But this did not necessarily mean its officers welcomed the change, as we saw in the case of the judiciary. The apparent effortless continuity might be explained by the sociology of the state and its self-awareness as a wielder of power. Writing in 1919, the German sociologist Max Weber observed that a professional bureaucracy was the hallmark of an advanced and rationally ordered society. The authority of the modern state, according to Weber, lies within the routines of its administrative apparatus. As he observed, it was the expert bureaucrat who formulated and refined the policies that governments enacted; it was the administrator who implemented these policies on the ground. As such, in modern societies, Weber concluded that it was not the executive or the parliament but the civil servant who was the true wielder of power.2 In the context of the Weimar Republic, which was regarded with scepticism (at the very least) by many within the administration, Weber’s observation raises an interesting question regarding the role of the bureaucracy as an agency of the democratic state. A common assumption has been that a hostile bureaucracy played a negative part in the republic’s demise.3 For example, the former state secretary in the Reich interior ministry, Arnold Brecht, who went into exile in New York after 1933, referred to the ‘bureaucratic sabotage’ of the republic. Brecht was referring to the higher echelons of the state apparatus. Further down, the field administration was thought to have been especially anti-republican. Dr Hans Simons, a Social Democrat and a career civil servant, who had been appointed commissarial head of the provincial administration (Regierungspräsident) of Stettin at the beginning of the 1930s, asserted in an interview with the American political scientist Lysbeth Muncy in the late 1940s that all twelve

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county managers (Landräte) in his district were ‘reactionaries’ who resisted the republic at every opportunity.4 Muncy, writing in the immediate aftermath of the war, concurred in the claims of Brecht and Simons. Later studies took up this theme assuming the bureaucracy’s hostility to the Weimar Republic without ever really exploring or contextualizing the interface between loyalty and disloyalty.5 For instance, Herbert Jacob in one of the few treatments of the German bureaucracy under the republic to also incorporate the provincial field administrator, that is, the Landrat, could write of a policy failure to purge the ranks of the bureaucracy of such ‘reactionaries’. ‘As a result’, Jacob writes, ‘a hostile residue of civil servants always remained to plague the regime (sic); the Republic never really won the allegiance of its civil service’.6 And the German historian and publicist Christian von Krockow in a recent popular book (Beware of Prussia!) describes Weimar’s civil servants as having a ‘renegade’ mentality whose resistance to the republic was a crucial factor in bringing it down.7 While few will deny this fundamental claim of an anti-Weimar bureaucracy, the picture is more complex than the literature suggests. As Jane Caplan has demonstrated, civil servants were as much in the vanguard of positive political reform in 1918/1919 as workers. And she notes that our perspective on the civil service is based on the sort of partisan viewpoints encountered above and which continue to exert an influence on the current literature.8 Frequently, received wisdoms regarding the anti-republican politics of civil servants are little more than blanket assertions that fail to take into account either the changing course of politics or the heterogeneous nature of the German bureaucracy. For instance, while some civil servants showed support for the Kapp Putsch in March 1920, others declared themselves loyal to the republican government.9 This is not to deny anti-republican politics within the bureaucracy as Caplan’s own research shows, and as we shall see further in the present chapter.10 Much of the scholarship on Weimar Germany’s bureaucracy has focused on the activities of a small privileged group within its higher echelons in the Reich and Prussian ministries in Berlin, but to a lesser degree on higher officials in the regions, and even more rarely on the ‘field administration’ that covered the provinces.11 The present chapter focuses on the latter, and in particular on its central figure: the Landrat who was chief administrator of a county.12 The Landrat was a political appointment, who, as county manager supervised local government and as such was a key figure in the life of the republic.13 Working alongside the county councils, he ensured the provision of welfare and relief among the needy and unemployed; the operation of public utilities; the upkeep of roads and communications; the integrity of the local savings bank and credit institutions; and ensured favourable conditions for local enterprise to flourish. The Landrat may have occupied one of the lower rungs of the administration but he sat at the apex of local life in the province, and as the mediator between the regional authority and the local community, he exerted a great deal of political influence.14 In spite of this pivotal role, the Landrat under the republic has attracted little scholarly attention. Apart from brief references in a couple of older studies on the Prussian administration, and an unpublished thesis on Landräte in the East Elbian provinces by Hans-Karl Behrend, we know very little about the Landrat, and next to nothing about his day-to-day activities as agent of the republican state in the province.15 The Landrat was situated at the level of republican administration where the tasks of formulating and translating into practice the authority of the state, as Weber saw it,

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was most tangibly evident.16 But if, as Muncy and others have asserted, the Landrat was essentially a reactionary, how did he come to terms with the republic which he now served? And how did his attitude towards the republic and his actions impact upon his social environment? After all, we know that in the eastern provinces of Prussia in particular, politics challenging the authority of the Weimar Republic were strongest from 1924 and finally erupted into a phenomenal groundswell of support for the NSDAP in 1932 that saw the vote for the Nazis in these regions rise to well over 50 per cent. This is the question that we will try to answer in what follows. After an overview of the republic’s administrative structure in which we challenge the sweeping application of Muncy’s criticism of the Landrat as a site of institutional reaction under the republic, we move on briefly to explore the provincial landscape in which the Landrat operated. Finally, by homing in on a particular case study of Herbert von Bismarck, a ‘renegade’ Landrat, in the concluding section of the chapter, we return to Weber’s hypothesis that the civil servant was not only a broker of state authority but a wielder of power too. Through the close study of defying the republic in mundane everyday acts, we can see clearly the limits imposed upon the reach of the republic.

The Field Administration under the Republic Germany’s government bureaucracy had grown steadily since the nineteenth century as the functions of the state both grew and became more complex. Among European states after 1918, Weimar Germany certainly had one of the largest and best trained bureaucracies. In  1928, the administrations of the Reich and the seventeen states (including the Saarland) together numbered 1,187,925 personnel. The Prussian bureaucracy was the largest – even larger than that of the Reich, employing nearly half a million persons.17 The German bureaucracy was not a monolith, but instead was highly differentiated: it divided between central (Reich), regional (Länder) and communal administrations, of which the latter was the largest element. For example, in Prussia nearly half of its bureaucracy was to be found in local administration; above that it ranged over the great institutions of state, from the army to the judiciary, from post, telegraph and rail services, to school teachers and a growing body of welfare agencies. There were sharp distinctions within the service too: throughout the 1920s, the thirteen career grades both reflected and reinforced wide social divergences, since each grade required a discrete level of qualification and each level was differentiated by stark differences in remuneration.18 The federal states that emerged from the ruins of the empire inherited the administrative structure that had prevailed since the reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. As we know, the largest state was Prussia, divided into thirteen provinces with a political head, the Oberpräsident. Each province was in turn divided into thirtyseven regional administrative units (Regierungsbezirke) headed by a civil servant, the Regierungspräsident in Prussia, and the Bezirkshauptamtmann in Bavaria, the second largest state of the Reich. These administrative units were further divided into either municipal authorities or rural counties (Kreise). These were the lowest units of administration and self-government. Prussia had the largest number of rural counties (there were 423, which were later reduced to 408 in March 1920 following territorial

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changes, and again in 1932 to 352 because of further boundary reforms).19 Bavaria had 156 counties, followed by Württemberg with 61 rural counties, Baden with 53 counties, Saxony with 27 rural counties and Thuringia with just five rural counties and one subcounty (but with ten metropolitan boroughs or Kreisstädte). After the introduction of a general municipal statute in  1935 that also extended to rural administration, the varying offices and units of government and administration in the seventeen Länder were co-ordinated along the Prussian system and forced to adopt its terms of designation.20 And even though counties and their managers went under different names in the different states before the reforms of the mid-thirties, their functions were more or less the same.21 The Prussian Landrat was by birth and training deeply conservative. Before 1918, the Landräte formed the bulwark of the Wilhelmine political and administrative system, especially in Prussia after the Puttkammer reforms of the 1880s created a staunchly conservative bureaucracy. Clemens von Delbrück is reputed to have described the Landrat as part of an ‘iron net of conservative administration and self-administration’ at the very base of the Reich.22 As such, this level of administration was the preserve of Prussia’s nobility.23 Indeed, before 1914, aristocrats dominated Landräte posts, accounting for 46 per cent, and by 1916, 54 per cent. Their predominance should not be surprising, for the Landrat was a ‘political civil servant’ and therefore subject to royal approval (after 1918 it required the approval of the interior minister).24 Lysbeth Muncy argues that through the office of Landrat the nobility, and in particular represented here by the East Elbian backwoodsman Junker, was able to consolidate the position of ‘Herr im Haus’ in its heartlands of Pomerania, East Prussia, Brandenburg, Silesia and Saxony.25 The Junker dominated local life through the provincial administration as well as by virtue of noble birth, and because he frequently enjoyed a long tenure as Landrat, he could establish a proprietary relationship to his district. Before 1914 over half of Landräte held the post for longer than eight years, while a fifth remained in post for as long as twenty years. Thus, in many respects the system facilitated a form of paternalism whose vestiges could still be seen under the republic, in spite of a turnover of post-holders in 1918/20 and again in 1924 and 1932/33 that inevitably meant increasingly shorter tenures.26 An appointment as Landrat in the deep recesses of the province in actual fact might be the first step of a career for the ambitious minded civil service trainee. Indeed, during the imperial period it was usual for a competent Landrat to gain promotion first to government counsellor (Regierungsrat), then to ministerial adviser (Ministerialrat), possibly to regional administrator (Regierungspräsident), and perhaps even to provincial governor (Oberpräsident), such as Detlev von Bülow in SchleswigHolstein. It was also feasible that a Landrat might rise to even higher office at the heart of government: Christoph von Tiedemann became Bismarck’s personal adviser; Rudolf von Valentini became chief of the civil cabinet from 1908 until 1918; Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and Georg Michaelis both rose to become prime minister of Prussia and Reich chancellor; Günther Gereke, the nationalist Landrat in Torgau briefly joined Hitler’s cabinet in 1933 as a junior minister before falling from grace; Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk remained in cabinet as finance minister until 1945; he began his administrative career as a trainee Landrat before moving to the Reich finance ministry in 1920, then to become finance minister first in Franz von Papen’s

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‘cabinet of barons’ in 1932 and later under Hitler.27 Not every Landrat could expect to attain such heights of power, and this was even less likely after 1918 when the route to high office often went through the political party machine. According to Jacob, the field administration at county level gave only lukewarm support to the republic.28 While there was not a straightforward carry-over of Landräte in 1918, equally there was initially little desire to purge the administration at this level. Given the need to avert a complete breakdown of the state and to quickly stabilize conditions so as to avoid further radicalization of the revolution, Ebert appealed to the administrative bureaucracies of Reich and states not to abandon their posts. As we noted already, the majority of public servants followed Ebert’s exhortation to stay at their posts, although in some localities there was some turnover among the mayoralty.29 Thus, Franz Cornelsen whose father had become Landrat of Stade on the Elbe in 1917 remained in his post until 1932.30 But there was nonetheless an irreconcilable schism between an arch-conservative imperial political culture and the political newcomers, especially at local level. An illustration of this tension comes from Linden (Hannover) where after the revolution the Landrat came under pressure from the local branch of the Majority Socialists. Linden was staunchly socialist, as the first elections to the district assembly (Kreistag) in  1919 based for the first time on universal suffrage, showed. The newly constituted Kreistag was now dominated by the SPD and it soon found itself on a collision course with the staunchly conservative Landrat Rossmann, who had represented Mittelstand and farming interests for the previous fifteen years. Rossmann quickly became the target of a sustained campaign by Social Democrats who identified him as an impediment to reform. In spite of a counter-campaign by Mittelstand supporters, he was eventually replaced.31 Rossmann’s fate was shared across the country as universal suffrage swept away large sections of the old order in the localities. It was not unusual for conservative Landräte to go of their own accord, more frequently taking sick leave (never to return), or sometimes declaring outright their inability to work alongside socialist-led county councils. But on a number of occasions, a Landrat’s departure was the result of a long-running battle between republican groups and conservative forces, as in the case of Detlev von Reinersdorff-Paczensky und Tenczin in Groß Wartenberg, in Upper Silesia.32 The Linden case is also interesting because underpinning the conflict was the question whether or not a Landrat should be an appointee or an elected official. In either case, conservatives were bound to be disappointed given the extent of support after 1918 for the Social Democrats and liberals among the electorate, notably in the western provinces. Because of the largely still unstable nature of Germany during the post-revolution period, Landrat replacements were often temporary and the postholder given commissarial status (especially in the sensitive areas of the Rhineland and Silesia). In conservative counties, such a move provoked a negative reaction with loud complaints that the Prussian interior minister was riding roughshod over local interests. And this protest was given force by elements from within the higher echelons of the civil service who believed that its ‘apolitical’ character would suffer as a result of ‘politicization’ because of a minister’s capacity to appoint candidates considered politically compliant.33

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Traditionalists had even more to worry about when the Social Democrat Prussian interior minister Wolfgang Heine for a short while toyed with the idea of democratizing the position of Landrat by allowing it to be elected directly by the Kreistag (and this is where the lesson of Linden county was felt).34 Needless to say, while Heine’s proposal found approval among republicans at local level, it was met with hostility in conservative quarters of the administration. The Oberpräsident of the province of Saxony, Rudolf von der Schulenburg, himself a former Landrat, in a letter to Heine pointed to the danger posed to the integrity of the civil administration should the minister’s proposal go ahead. In von der Schulenburg’s view, such a reform would only add to the general instability during volatile periods (as in 1918!). For Schulenburg, Heine’s plan to turn the Landrat into an elected official would not only radically alter the balance of power within a given locality, but also it would mean that the post would be colonized by what he obviously considered to be the barbarians at the gate. So, as conditions in the province of Saxony currently stand, in future few or none of the qualified civil servants for the post of Landrat will be appointed to this most important post in the present public administration. Of the 39 districts in the province of Saxony, Social Democrats have an absolute majority in 16 of the district assemblies (Kreistage). In ten other districts they are short of 1 to 3 votes for an absolute majority. Only one-third of all assemblies have a middle-class (bürgerlich) majority. The Social Democrat deputies in the assemblies are almost invariably not representative of the intelligentsia but of the working class.35

Schulenburg’s attempt to block the ‘silent revolution’ being attempted by socialist minister Heine is symptomatic of his class. Spurred on by numerous complaints from local republican groups, Prussia’s new government did endeavour to tackle the question of administrative resistance by reforming the civil service through democratization.36 It passed a decree in February 1919 allowing it to retire political civil servants ranging from ministerial under secretaries to Landräte who were thought to be unreliable.37 A large number of the old guard, including von der Schulenburg, were soon replaced by men more amenable to the republican project in a top-down purge of the administration that affected county managers too. Together with nearly all the provincial heads and over half the district administrators, ‘a considerable element of the 480 Landräte’, according to Huber, were removed by the interior ministry.38 But as the Kapp putsch was to reveal within a year of these changes, their replacements were not necessarily stalwart republicans either. Thus, in the aftermath of the attempted coup, 88 Landräte – or almost a fifth of the total cohort – were removed from their posts either for having openly sided with the usurpers or because of serious doubt over their allegiance to the republic.39 Further change came after the introduction of a new civil service law (Beamtengesetz) law in 1924, which allowed for wide-ranging reform of the civil service.40 However, the attempt to shake up the civil service and to ‘democratize’ it by appointing candidates from outside the caste of jurists who traditionally made up its corps also had its limits. During Carl Severing’s two tenures of the Prussian interior ministry (1920–26, 1930–32), the introduction of so-called ‘outsiders’ remained only partially fulfilled, contrary to the recollection in his memoir.41 Post-holders who were recruited from outside the traditional corps tended

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to be party nominations. In the East Elbian provinces, around two-thirds of the SPD cohort of Landräte and a third of the DDP cohort were ‘outsiders’ under the republic, and all other Landräte with known party affiliations were drawn from the traditional pool of trained career civil servants.42 Nonetheless, as a result of changes in the five years following the revolution, barely ten per cent of East Elbian Landräte in 1918 was still in post by the later years of the republic.43 While not all of those purged in 1920 were necessarily of Junker background, by the end of the Weimar Republic the proportion of nobility among Prussia’s Landräte had declined sharply. In 1918, over half of the positions had been filled by nobility, by the mid-twenties the Junker held on to less than a third of posts, and by 1931 their hegemony was finally ended when a mere fourteen Junker were still in Landrat positions, mostly in the east Elbian provinces.44 In spite of this small number, Muncy noted how ‘here in their homeland the Junkers’ arrogance, domineering self-assertion and contempt for reform flourished’.45 For Muncy, this contempt was significant enough to obstruct the implementation of republican policy on the ground.46 This was true in isolated cases, as we shall see below, but it is an exaggeration when extended to the Landräte in general. The political affiliation of a Landrat and his affinity towards the republic might be gauged by six draft (partially undated) surveys on the political membership of Landräte between 1919/20 and April 1933. The information was demanded by the new Nazi masters in the Prussian interior ministry probably with a view to purging the field administration of politically ‘unreliable’ officials.47 The surveys provide details on the affiliation of around a quarter of the post-holders in each review, and while one’s political membership cannot with certainty pin-down attitudes towards the republic, it nonetheless is a fair-weather indicator as to the loyalty of the field administration, in Prussia at least. Excluding the last survey of April 1933, carried out when a number of these posts had been filled with members of the Nazi Party, the data show that the majority of those Landräte with known affiliations belonged to parties of the so-called ‘Weimar Coalition’, namely the SPD, the Democrats and the Centre Party (the latter were concentrated mostly in the Rhineland region). This finding coincides with the results of a separate study published in 1929 by Ernst Hamburger and which found that half of the 408 Landräte belonged to the Weimar Coalition parties, followed by the DVP, and with only 17 belonging to the DNVP, and with the remainder without party affiliation.48 Both the unpublished surveys and Hamburger’s findings are supported by Behrends’ sample of 192 Landräte (from a total of 296) in the East Elbian provinces of Brandenburg, Pomerania, East Prussia and in the marches of Posen-West Prussia, which showed that a third were members of the SPD, nearly a quarter affiliated to the DDP, 13.4 per cent allied to the DVP and 12.5 per cent connected to the Centre Party. A further 17.3 per cent gave their political affiliation as DNVP, which is considerably more than Hamburger’s sample.49 Drawing broader interpretations from the data is constrained by its incompleteness and complicated by either shifting or hidden loyalties. For example, in a few cases previously ‘non-party’ Landräte appear in early 1933 with Nazi Party affiliation. Or in the cases of Count von Bernstorff, the Landrat in county Harburg, on the left bank of the river Elbe facing Hamburg, or Count Gottfried von Bismarck-Schönhausen, the Landrat on the Baltic island of Rügen, their Nazi affiliation was a factor in their respective appointments (Bismarck was appointed in 1932 as part of the purge carried

164

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

out in late summer by von Papen’s government; Bernstorff was appointed at some point after October 1932 and end of March 1933). Nevertheless, it is likely that the majority of the so-called ‘non-party’ Landräte leaned towards the DNVP or DVP and remained loyal to these traditions. Behrend shows that even in the four East Elbian provinces of Brandenburg, East and West Prussia, and Posen, among the homelands of Junker resistance to Berlin, the Weimar coalition parties dominated Landrat posts by the later 1920s. And this political proximity to the republic was even more in evidence in the western counties of the country, particularly in the Rhineland area where Centre Party Landräte dominated.50 Thus, rather than the hostile ‘reactionaries’ described by Muncy and Jacobs, it appears that the majority of Weimar’s Landräte comprising a professionally trained corps mostly from bourgeois backgrounds (the latter accounted for four-fifths of posts in  1930) stood closer to the republic than has been hitherto assumed. It also raises the question of how ‘organic’ not only the county manager was to his local community, but also that of republican authority. As we noted above, while the new regime in Berlin was anxious not to alienate the civil service, and indeed relied on it during the transition from empire to republic, from war to peace, from instability to stability, it nonetheless went about trying to democratize it through the appointment of politically reliable candidates who did not necessarily originate from within the traditional corps of legally trained – and traditionally though not necessarily conservative – pool of candidates. For example, two-thirds of the of Social Democrats and one-third of the Democrats in Behrends’ study of the East Elbian Landräte were made up of these so-called ‘outsiders’ (the Centre Party, DVP and DNVP Landräte were all career civil servants).51 As we saw above, the Social Democrat Wolfgang Heine as Prussian interior minister sought to breakdown the elitist character of the civil service and of the Landrat in particular by challenging the 1906 law stipulating legal training for the civil service. His successor, Carl Severing in spite of a ruthless purge in the wake of the failed Kapp Putsch, thereafter proved to be more accommodating towards the civil service (but later adopted a tougher position during his second tenure of office, 1930–32); Albert Grzesinski who held the office from the autumn of 1926 to early 1930 took a more robust if somewhat circuitous route to ensuring the removal of some doubtful Landräte and the appointment of politically reliable outsiders in their place.52 Under these ministers, a number of ordinances relaxing the stipulations concerning training and entry requirements of the 1906 law were passed enabling positions to be filled by non-traditionally trained candidates. The Republikschutzgesetz in  1922 gave the government a means to counter anti-republican activity among its traditional cohort of civil servants, who now had to actively demonstrate their loyalty. Jane Caplan has shown how this law allowed for a minor purge to take place; albeit this being the case, the Prussian decree of February 1919, mentioned above, already gave the interior minister sufficient powers to compulsory suspend officials who misbehaved.53 But in spite of these efforts, as both Wolfgang Runge and Caplan have shown, ‘outsider’ appointments in fact were made sparingly and preference given to career administrators.54 Moreover, in some cases, such as that of Württemberg, personnel policy ensured that Land’s administration remained broadly liberal and in no need of political reform, or were so small that the exercise had little impact.55 However piecemeal and limited these reforms may have been, the social and political configuration of

Renegade Authority: The Junker Landrat

165

Prussia’s field administration did begin to change under the republic.56 Indeed, even the district of Stettin, dismissed as a hotbed of reaction by its own head of administration, Dr Simons, had its democratic Landräte. In spite of progress, there were still pockets of defiance and contested authority, particularly in the backward and structurally weakened East Elbian provinces where the Junker continued to exert great influence in spite of revolution and reform.57 And it is to this region and this aspect of authority that we now turn. One of the insights of Muncy’s study is the observation that the Junker Landrat was essentially an opportunist who was prepared to work within the framework of the republic as long as it lay in his interests to do so.58 A close examination of the case files shows this opportunism at work in the understanding and practice of political and social power among these Landräte that transcended the republican ‘outer casing’ of the German state, and which in doing so clashed with the authority of the republican state. While it is the case that examples of such behaviour under the republic were the exception rather than the rule, they nonetheless frequently had political fallout that transcended their parochial boundaries. This happened in the case of the Landrat of Regenwalde, Herbert von Bismarck, whose struggle with Severing at the beginning of the 1930s became a cause célèbre among the nationalist right and which exposed the two cultures of authority in late Weimar politics. Before going on to discuss his particular case, a brief overview of the provincial terrain will be indispensable in contextualizing his activities.

The province By the mid-1920s, around half of Germany’s population lived in rural settlements or in small to medium-sized towns with less than twenty thousand inhabitants. And, apart from a small exodus from very small rural communities, there was little change over the next decade.59 Seen from a distance, provincial society appeared contented and unchanging. Life moved at a slower pace; social relations seemed more intimate; structures of authority more clearly delineated.60 In those regions with an atavistic landed elite deference to the lord was still expected, though not necessarily shown; in other areas, the local pastor (or priest in Catholic areas) and schoolteacher usually set the moral tone of the community. Voluntary associations were an important aspect of communal life; most small towns had a Heimatverein that acted as a guardian of the natural history of the community and its traditions; small towns and villages invariably boasted a Schutzenverein (rifle club), or similar association that frequently organized the social calendar; the inevitable Stammtisch comprising leading (male) citizens of the community met regularly in the more respectable tavern to discuss assorted business and matters considered of local importance, as well as to indulge in the delights of trivial gossip.61 In a period of upheaval and fractured authority, the province came to epitomize stability and safety. Indeed, in 1919 the newly elected National Assembly met in the relative safety of the provincial town of Weimar in order to escape the revolutionary dangers of Berlin. And it was not just revolutionary politics that were kept at bay in the province; the cultural trends pulsating through the republic’s metropolitan centres also seemed to bypass the sleepy hollows of the German province.

166

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

This provincial idyll, as the sociologist Valentin Lupescu noted at the time, was on the surface only. Indeed, below the superficial tranquillity of provincial life, tensions simmered.62 They surfaced intermittently before 1914 in ugly ways to explode the myth of communal cohesion.63 As we saw in Chapter 2, the strains of war both intensified and brought to the surface many social conflicts where they finally ignited in the revolutionary ferment of 1918.64 Even in the smallest towns and rural communities, Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils formed, turning the ordered world of the province on its head. In the countryside and especially in the East Elbian provinces, where conflicts were also overlaid by ethnic tensions, rural workers (and farmers) organized and armed themselves.65 During these months and in the ensuing two years, the eastern provinces became arenas of political and ethnic violence. Many of the brutal murders committed by the Free Corps and so-called Black Army were in fact perpetrated far from the cities, in small towns or on the Junker estates of Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Saxony and Thuringia, where rural workers had dared to mobilize to challenge the traditional authority of the landlord and the factory owner.66 Scholarship is often silent on the cultural ambivalences and political contradictions that inevitably characterized everyday life in the province, as much as they did in the city. True, small provincial towns such as Eutin in Schleswig-Holstein (its population hovered around seven thousand) frequently were strongholds of nationalist antirepublican politics that eventually produced resounding victory for Hitler, but they were not, as Lawrence Stokes suggests, necessarily typical.67 The communal elections in Prussia at the beginning of the republic show a varied picture, with many of the 423 counties returning socialist majorities.68 For example, the small town of Holzminden in the district of Weser, which was similar in social and economic structure to Eutin, was a bastion of Social Democracy; as too was Stadthagen in Schaumburg-Lippe, also similar in size and structure to Eutin. Like Linden and many of the semi-rural communities of the small Bremen state, Stadthagen was an enclave of republicanism that contrasted starkly with the rest of Schaumburg-Lippe (one of the first states to provide overwhelming support for the NSDAP in 1932).69 The counties of Thuringia in particular proved to be staunchly on the left, with places such as Saalfeld, Gera, Sonnenberg and Sonderhausen producing strong returns for the USPD (1919) and the Social Democrats and Communists thereafter. Even in the bastion of reaction, namely the backwater Prussian provinces east of the Elbe River, the picture is grainier once one gets to ground level. For example, in spite of East Prussia’s agrarian, small town and apparently conservative character, in some districts the SPD was the dominant party and came closest to a Volkspartei, or people’s party, fielding councillors from across the social spectrum. Thus, in the county of Angerburg, one of the twelve counties in the administrative district of Gumbinnen, the party list included two independent farmers, a teacher, two trades union employees, a joiner, a plasterer, a master potter (Töpferobermeister), a pensioner, a settler and a rural worker; by comparison, landed and local propertied men comprised almost entirely the German Nationalist People’s Party council faction.70 Combined, all twelve counties of Gumbinnen provided a substantial left/liberal vote (Table 7.1). Or indeed, in the allegedly reactionary district of Stettin in Pomerania, the SPD emerged as the strongest party in 1919 (Table 7.4). As we shall see, these provinces did indeed provide the bedrock of nationalist opposition to the republic, but they also accommodated a strong presence of liberal Catholicism (in Posen-West Prussia, Upper

7 6 7 80

Ragnitz

Stallupönen

Tilsit

Total

23

6

1

12

3

1

DVP

69

6

7

8

12

8

4

8

2

7

7

DDP

109

9

8

11

3

6

16

15

5

12

4

4

16

MSPD

15

2

1

5

4

2

1

USPD

8

4c

1b

3a

Others

337

28

28

31

29

24

30

29

28

29

28

26

27

Total seats

Source: Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz Rep. 77/5695 (1919), Bl. 10-11, Der Reg.Präs. Gesch.Nr. I T. 7118 to M.d.I. 22 November 1919, Betrifft Parteipolitische Zusammensetzung der Kreistage.

b

a

Lithuanians. Poles. c 3 Lithuanians, 1 Pole.

10

Pillkallen

33

3

Niederung

Marggrabowa

10

Furstenberg

Heydekrug

16

19

17

Goldap

Gumbinnen

14

Darkehmen

DNVP 4

Bürg.

Angerburg

County

Table 7.1  Distribution of seats Kreistage, Gumbinnen district, 1919 by political party

Renegade Authority: The Junker Landrat 167

168

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

and Lower Silesia) and Social Democracy (in Lower Silesia, Brandenburg, East Prussia, and Pomerania).71 It was in such contradictory environments that the authority of the Landrat and that of the republic either corresponded or clashed. In 1918, Landräte were caught between a rock and a hard place. They had been the embodiment of the myth of a tranquil and ordered society under the empire and now faced its overturning by revolutionary events. Their duty to Fatherland – if no longer to the Kaiser – required them to remain in post and to manage the crisis as best as they could. Overt opposition to the republic was first expressed during the Kapp Putsch in early 1920. There was widespread support for the monarchist Wolfgang Kapp within the Prussian administration and especially among the county managers in northern and eastern Germany (Kapp himself was a former Landrat of Guben in the district of Frankfurt Oder). For instance, in the district of Gumbinnen,72 practically the entire cohort of Landräte had to be dismissed. Only the Landrat in Oletzko remained in post because of the particularly sensitive nature of the coming plebiscite over the border to Poland. (Walzer had argued in his defence that he had merely been following the orders of the Oberpräsident Winnig and General von Estorff, the commanding officer for the region.)73 Similarly, the Landräte of the counties of Gardelegen, Osterberg (in the administrative district of Magdeburg), Bitterfeld, Delitzsch, Liebenwerda, Sangerhausen (in the administrative district of Merseburg), and Nordhausen and Schleusingen (the administrative district of Erfurt) had to be removed in the wake of the putsch.74 In spite of these loyalties to Kapp, Lüttwitz and Ludendorff, a number of counties, such as those of Gumbinnen, there was little popular support for the putschists. Indeed, the putsch exposed the deep political rifts between individual Landräte and the local community. At the time of the Kapp putsch the SPD and the liberal DDP had a combined majority on the Gumbinnen county councils (178 of 337 seats) and if one factored in the USPD, then the left/liberal representation on the councils rose to 57 per cent of seats, though this strong showing did not necessarily transfer to individual councils (Table 7.1). And it was primarily the vigilance of the socialists and affiliated trade unions in particular that thwarted plans to overturn the republican government in Berlin. In parts of Pomerania, for instance, groups of armed rural workers occupied the Junker estates, leaving a bitter legacy among their erstwhile masters.75 As we noted earlier in this chapter, nearly ninety Landräte were dismissed in the wake of the putsch and these were concentrated mostly in the eastern provinces.76 Ironically, the Kapp Putsch sought the restoration of Junker power (alongside that of the Kaiser), and yet it only hastened its demise. By the end of the 1920s, even in his East Elbian heartlands, the Junker Landrat had almost disappeared.77 * We noted above how there had been some success in ‘republicanising’ the field administration. After 1920, more effort was made to ensure that local administrations were carefully weeded of political malcontents. During the 1920s, educational programmes were held for civil servants as part of their continuing training (Fortbildung) and included lectures on civics, the constitution and democracy as part of inculcating a republican ethos in civil servants.78 Nevertheless, there still remained a small number of public officials who simply could not square their emotional loyalty to the old regime

Renegade Authority: The Junker Landrat

169

with a rational reconciliation with the republic. While not openly challenging the republic ‘they nevertheless undertook nothing to change their fundamental political outlook. Loyalty [to the republic] was thus an empty formula’, as historian Hans Fenske noted.79 Their thinly disguised ambivalence towards the Weimar state was captured by Julius Leber’s biting observation in 1926, “Loyal to the Constitution.” This phrase has become over the years for many civil servants an excuse. They do not do anything that is somehow expressly prohibited in the Constitution. But for the most part they sabotage the Constitution, make monarchist propaganda, declare their support for the imperial colours (SchwarzWeiß-Rot), and curse democracy and parliament.80

It is difficult to gauge with any certainty how widespread among Landräte (or any other group of civil servants) such ‘renegade’ attitudes towards the republic were over the course of the 1920s. But a small collection of disciplinary files provides some examples of low-level oppositional behaviour (as well as other non-political misdemeanours) among Landräte.81 These cases, even though small in number, provide interesting insights into the ‘renegade’ attitude of the Landrat in the day-to-day operations of his office. The remainder of this chapter attempts to gauge the extent of contested authority by looking at one particular example of misconduct, namely that of the Landrat of Regenswalde who provides a striking example of the behaviour Julius Leber describes in the above quote. While each minor transgression taken on its own is mundane and would hardly appear worthy of historical attention, when taken together and given the Landrat involved, had wider ramifications for late Weimar politics.

Renegade authority: The ‘königliche Landrat’ Heinrich Mann’s observation that there were entire social groups who after 1918 had constructed their own versions of ‘Germany’ as a counterpoint to the republic was nowhere more germane than in the backwaters of East Prussia, and Pomerania in particular.82 Until 1938, when it was transferred to the district of Köslin, Regenwalde had been one of the twelve counties that comprised the district of Stettin in Pomerania and was situated close to the Baltic coast (Map 7.1). Since 1945, it is a part of Poland. The county covered an area of 1,191 square kilometres and had a population of just under fifty thousand located in four small towns (the largest, Plathe had a population of 3,646 in 1939) and just over a hundred villages averaging between 200 and 300 inhabitants (the smallest numbered 77 inhabitants and the largest ten times that number); the administrative centre was the small town of Labes (today Łobez in Poland). This part of the Pomeranian province was dominated by ancient Junker dynasties living on estates of between 600 and 1,000 hectares (1,482.6 and 2,471 acres, and up to c. 3,000 acres), at whose apex were the Borckes, the von Krockows, the von Thaddens, Puttkamers, Schwerins and the Bismarcks, who were also mostly connected to each other through marriage.83 These powerful Pomeranian dynasties traditionally governed a total population of 1.8 million that was largely poor and lived in scattered villages. About half of this population was economically active, with the economy dominated by

Teterow

Neuruppin

r

d

Penkun

Eberswalde

e

n

b

Angermünde Königsberg i.N.

n

Pölitz

Wollin

u

r

g

Callies

Arnswalde

Driesen

Friedeberg

Bernstein

Stargard

Jacobshagen

Labes

Polzin

Mä-Friedland

Schloppe

Ratzebuhr Zippnow

Tempelburg

Dt. Krone

Baldenburg

Rummelsburg

Neustettin

Bublitz

Stolp

Pollnow

Schlawe

Köslin

Belgard

Dramburg

Kolberg

Regenwalde

Massow

Gollnow

Pyritz

Treptow

Greifenberg

Neugard

Greifenhagen

STETTIN

Schwedt

Prenzlau

Pasewalk

Uckermünde

Swinemünde

Cammin

Ronne

Source:  http://www.gonschior.de/weimar/Preussen/Pommern/uebersichtskarte.html

a

Zehdenick

Templin

Meckl Strelitz

Map 7.1  Pomerania 1900–1936.86

B

Rheinsberg

Fehrbellin

Kyritz

Waren

Wittstock

Röbel

Malchow

Neubrandenburg

Treptow

Neustrelitz

Stavenhagen

Schwerin

Krakow

Anklam

Gützkow

Wolgast

Bergen

Greifswald

Demmin

Grimmen

Dargun

Mecklenb -

Güstrow

Tessin

Rostock

Ribnitz

Stralsund

Barth

50 km

P

0

Schönlanke

Schlochau

Rogozno

Sepolno

Tuchola

Wagrowiec

Szubin

Naklo Bydgoszcz

Koronowo

POLS KA Wyrzysle

Chodziedz

Puck

Kosczerzyna

Chojnice

Bütow

Lauenburg

Leba

Pr.-Friedland

Flatow

Schneidemühl

n e s o

s e -W

re tp

n e ß u

170 Rethinking the Weimar Republic

Renegade Authority: The Junker Landrat

171

agriculture (41.2%) and industry and crafts (23.5%).84 Regenwalde mirrored its wider environment. While the county was deeply conservative, like the province in which it was situated, it also harboured a strong presence of Social Democracy, no doubt reflecting the fact that half its economically active population was working class. Regenwalde’s agriculture mirrored that of the region: poor, heavy soils, with monoculture concentrating on cereals, potatoes and beet crops.85 The estates were capital intensive and heavily indebted by the mid-1920s, not least because of the scissors effect of falling prices and high freight costs. A study by a group of economists from Heidelberg University estimated that the average estate of 3,000 acres was saddled with a debt of around 40,000 Marks – or 53 per cent of its unit value; and even those farms and estates yielding a profit faced crippling service charges on borrowing.87 During elections, especially the regional and local ones (Tables 7.2 and 7.3), alliances frequently shifted, but the fluidity tended to be within rather than between 86

Table 7.2  Elections Pomerania Landtag 1919–1933 1924

1938

1932

1933

80.5

77.5

82.4

86.9

4.2

1.5

44.7

55.9

43.5

49.0

41.5

17.2

17.1

2.1

2.4

4.9

0.8

-

10.2

14.1

6.4

5.5

1.1

0.6

0.6

0.7

0.9

1.0

1.2

1.1

DDP

19.2

-

3.7

3.9

1.5

0.4

SPD

41.9

29.3

24.6

30.2

23.6

16.3

USPD

1.4

4.6

-

-

-

-

KPD

-

3.2

5.8

6.1

7.7

7.5

Other

-

-

2.6

5.1

2.5

0.9

Partic.

1919

1921

77.0

79.8

Percentages NSDAP

-

DNVP

26.6

WP

-

DVP Centre

-

Source: http://www.gonschior.de/weimar/Preussen/Pommern/Uebersicht_LTW.html

Table 7.3  Distribution of seats Pomerania Provincial Landtag, 1925–1933, by political party NSDAP

DNVP

DVP

DDP

SPD

KPD

WP

Other1

Total seats

1925

–

37

5

3

20

4

3

4

76

1929

4

31

4

3

24

5

4

–

75

1933

44

14

–

–

13

4

–

–

75

Aufwertungspartei, 3 seats.

1

Source: http://www.gonschior.de/weimar/Preussen/Pommern/Uebersicht_PLW.html

172

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

political groupings. Even when its conservative representatives campaigned on a combined ‘apolitical’ ticket in  1929, this could not disguise the fact that the same councillors also campaigned under the banner of the DNVP/DVP at other elections, as we can see below in Table 7.4. Indeed, the entire region was a bastion of conservatism and arch-nationalism, with the DNVP or its ‘apolitical’ variant the Bürgerliche List  –  dominating the local Kreistage for much of the period.88 The corps of Landräte in the Stettin district remained largely stable with three changes occurring around 1927 (Anklam, Ueckermunde, Usedom), three in late 1931 (Greifenhagen, Naugard, Regenwalde) and again three in the autumn of 1932 (Anklam, Greifenhagen, Usedom).89 Each of these changes saw the removal of county managers whose political affiliation or behaviour made them suspect to the governing administration. Thus, in 1927 and 1931 changes took place after the Landräte concerned had behaved in such a way as to make their positions untenable, as we shall see below. Their replacements (barring one) were in turn also removed in the wake of von Papen’s coup against the Prussian state in the summer of 1932 and the purge of political appointees that followed. Information on changes that may have followed after April 1933 is not to hand. Overall, six counties were affected by these three purges; otherwise, it is probably fair to assume that the Landräte of the remaining six broadly reflected the political orientation of their respective counties. * Regenwalde county mirrored the political complexion of the district of Stettin and that of Pomerania more generally (Table 7.5). Throughout the 1920s and until July 1932, the DNVP dominated at the polls, achieving as much as 65 per cent of votes at its peak in December 1924 Reichstag election. Not even the Nazis could beat that in either July 1932 or in March 1933 when the party rode the crest of the nationalist wave. The Social Democrats who posed the only credible opposition to the landed magnates who dominated in Regenwalde managed 27 per cent at its peak in 1921 (which was contrary to the national performance, in 1928 when the country returned a Social Democrat government, it managed barely a quarter of the vote).90 At the local level, nationalists dominated the council. Bearing in mind its conservative make-up, it came as no surprise that when Regenwalde’s county manager died of influenza in mid-October 1918, Herbert von Bismarck, the great-nephew of the Iron Chancellor, was the unanimous choice of the Kreistag.91 Bismarck had barely turned 29  years old when he took up the position on a probationary basis in late November, before being confirmed as Landrat in August the following year after taking the oath of allegiance to the republican state.92 His oath was probably only skin-deep, whereas his original oath to the Kaiser, taken in 1912, lay deeper. As we shall see, over the course of his career as Landrat Herbert von Bismarck came to the attention of the authorities in Berlin for a number of low-level breaches of administrative protocol that appeared to contest the authority of the republic against that of his own as königlicher Landrat. He remained at his post in Regenwalde until March 1931 by when his ultra-nationalist behaviour put him into direct confrontation with the authorities in Berlin. As a member of the Stahlhelm and later the Harzburger

2

Cammin

2

Usedom-Wollin 102

90

2

14

10

1

2

2

[no data]

2

1

2

DVP

12

2

4

3

1

1

1

WP

29

6

1

1

1

1

1

1

DDP

83

77

8

9

4

7

11

6

5

5

8

5

9

SPD

7

13

1

3

3

1

1

1

1

1

1

KPD

Source: Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz Rep. 77/4087 (1929), Bl. 25–7, Reg.Präs. Pr. IVc 3327 II, 9 December 1929, Bl. 29.

3

2

1

4 74

36

6

Bürg Arbeitsgemeinschaft. In 1919, results were: DNVP: 12; DVP: 5; DDP: 4; MSPD: 8. USPD in 1919. a Regional interest party. b Poles. c Various undefined. d Christian conservative. e Mittelstand. f Rightwing var.

[1919

13

1

Uckermünde

Total

1

Saatzig

13

5

1

Regenwalde

Randow

9

4

Pyritz

11

12

7

DNVP

13

17

13

Bürg. Ag.1

Naugard

Greifenhagen

Greifenberg

Demmin

2

Anklam

NS

Table 7.4  Distribution of seats Kreistage Stettin district 1929 by political party

24 23

ca

30 d

26 f

103

30

335]

271

25 e

8

1

23 b

2

4

25

24 d

4

25

5a

4

1

24

b

22

Total seats

1a

Others

Renegade Authority: The Junker Landrat 173

Rethinking the Weimar Republic

174

Table 7.5  Political parties in Regenwalde Kreistag, 1919–1933 Bürg. 1919

DNVP

DVP

18

1921

13

2

DDP

M/SPD

3

8

1

6

USPD

Kampffront

Total seats 29

1

23

1925

18

2

5

25

1929

17

1

7

25

1933

16

2

7

25

Source: Collated from Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz Rep. 77/5695 (1919), 77/5696 (1925), 77/4087 (1929), 77/5698 (1933).

Front, he campaigned openly against the Prussian administration of Otto Braun during the autumn of 1930, and this led to his suspension in 1931 under much protest from local landowners, including his cousin, Count von Bismarck-Osten, and in spite of the strong support he received from the Oberpräsident Carl von Halfern (1930–33), a member of the DVP.93 After his suspension, Bismarck, who as Reich youth leader (Reichsjugendführer) of the roughly 42,000 strong Bismarckbund (the youth wing of the DNVP)94 and a Prussian deputy as well as sitting in the Reichstag, had become a cause célèbre of the DNVP; he was briefly appointed state secretary in the Prussian interior ministry by von Schleicher, but was suspended from this post on Göring’s orders in April and then finally dismissed from public office in June 1933.95 He retired with his family to his Pomeranian estate until the war when they moved to a family home in Berlin-Lichterfelde. But in the final months of the war, in which he served at the rank of major, Bismarck returned once again to Regenwalde as commissarial Landrat before finally having to flee the advancing Soviet army.96 Bismarck was born on 29 August 1884 in Stettin to Philip Count Bismarck and his wife Hedwig (né von Harnier) and grew up on the family estates of Kniephof (county Naugard) and Lasbeck (county Regenwalde). As the great-nephew of the ‘Iron Chancellor’ Prince Otto von Bismarck, Herbert was connected to the Puttkamers. In 1912, he married Maria Kleist-Retzow (whose father, incidentally, had been Landrat in neighbouring Belgard), with whom he raised seven of their eight children (the sixth child Herbert died) on the family estate at Lasbeck and Henkenhagen near Kolberg on the Baltic coast.97 Bismarck’s world was steeped in the traditions of the East Elbian Junker. He attended the König Wilhelm Gymnasium in Stettin, where he proved to be a conscientious and intelligent student and an excellent sportsman, graduating in 1903 with a set of good reports. After school, he studied law, history of law, legal medicine, literature and diplomatic history at the universities of Munich, Lausanne, the Friedrichs-Wilhelm University of Berlin (where he took a course on criminal law with Liszt) and finally returned to Pomerania to complete his studies with a dissertation on contract law at the university of Greifswald in 1906. Following the path of many law students before him and in keeping with his family tradition, Bismarck entered the civil service, taking the second state exam in November 1911 and gaining

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a position as Regierungsassessor the following January. During these early years, he made good progress, demonstrating a talent for efficient administration and working diligently wherever his superiors sent him on temporary assignment.98 This flair for administration and his connections to the region spoke in his favour when the Landrat position in Regenwalde became vacant, making his appointment inevitable.99 Bismarck was by all accounts a pragmatist but as it soon emerged, not a Vernunftrepublikaner, and in this respect he was no different from many others cast in the imperial mould. After wartime service as a desk officer with Formation Reichskanzler at General Headquarters, he remained a reserve officer on his return to civilian life. And like many of his class of Rittergutsbesitzer, his conservative predilections could not be entirely suppressed in the changed environment of the republic, and these quickly brought him into conflict with the local Rural Workers’ Association (Landarbeiterverband), especially during the Kapp putsch when he appeared to waver, but was nonetheless exonerated of any wrongdoing.100 As a scion of the Junker elites, he was not only immensely popular with his fellow estate owners (and further down the social scale with local businesses), but was also held in high esteem by Stettin’s district administrator (Regierungspräsident) Dr Höhnen, who described the new Landrat as possessing excellent interpersonal skills and displaying a quick grasp of key administrative areas – especially in finance – and who was, above all, a reliable civil servant. Thus, Bismarck could count on Oberpräsident Julius Lipmann’s support for a grade promotion to Oberregierungsrat in 1925 and in his applications for annual salary increments.101 * But not all was as it appeared to be on the surface, for Bismarck also came to the attention of his superiors in Berlin as complaints mounted of indiscretions in routine administration. For instance, Bismarck’s office continued to use the pre-war imperial stamps (Klebemarken) and letterheads (‘königlicher Landrat des Kreises Regenwaldes’), and this after eight years of republic. Moreover, each letterhead was ‘printed so prominently that it immediately stood out’.102 Bismarck shifted the blame elsewhere by explaining their use was a mistake by an eighteen year old office assistant. But then, deftly swung the issue around stating that he ordered their continued use in the name of good and economical housekeeping: his office possessed a sizeable stock of writing paper and envelopes bearing the imperial eagle, and out of thriftiness (and ‘good housekeeping’) Bismarck had ordered that these be used up, but claimed he had instructed that the old symbols of monarchy should be first crossed through (which evidently they had not).103 In particular, there was a problem with Bismarck and the symbols of the republic. In what seems to have been a widespread problem among Landräte in the east Elbian provinces, he failed to properly acknowledge the republic on civic holidays by allowing the former imperial colours and pre-1914 nationalist flags (these were made illegal after 1922) to fly from public buildings instead of the republican tricolour black– red–gold, which had been declared the national flag in April 1921. The flag not only symbolized the government in Berlin, but also symbolized the quintessential authority of the republic.104 As one official source put it, ‘The idea of the unity of the Reich and

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loyalty to it will be given a clear expression through the dignified prominence of the constitutionally determined colours of black-red-gold’.105 Moreover, public officials were legally required to show active support for the republic by defending its symbols.106 On a number of occasions, however, Bismarck as the responsible government official, failed to ensure that the republic’s authority symbolically represented through its flag was either tangible or dignified. Thus, during the inauguration of a war memorial in Labes on 1 August 1926, a nationalist flag (described to the interior ministry as being of gigantic proportions) was draped from an upper window of the Kreishaus itself. Upon his return, he found not only official buildings hanging imperial and Prussian flags, but private houses too. Bismarck claimed the imperial flag had been mistakenly hung by the son of one of his officials. But he went on to refer to the republican colours as ‘blackred-yellow’ instead of ‘black-red-gold’ in his report, a ‘slip’ for which he later apologized. Bismarck was able to escape censure during the mid-years of the republic because of the protection he received from Leopold Höhnen, the conservative district administrator in Stettin, much to the growing irritation of Lippmann, a member of the DDP.107 In his confidential report to the interior ministry, Lippmann pointed out that the substitution of ‘yellow’ for gold was a tactic that ‘the opponents of the republic commonly use to bring to light their denial of the [national] colours as well as their denial of the republican state form’. By employing such language Lippmann continued, Bismarck ‘betrays in every respect an embarrassing lack of political instinct’.108 Nevertheless in a remarkable suspension of his own judgement, Lippmann also concluded that Bismarck’s dedication to his post and his loyalty to the republican administration in Berlin could not be impugned because of this ‘error’. Lippmann’s ambivalence towards Bismarck is striking and suggests not only poor judgement but also a laxness when it came to clamping down on ‘renegade’ challenges to republican authority in the province.109 Severing, who at the time was Prussian interior minister, also gave Bismarck the benefit of the doubt in spite of his ‘grave misgivings’ over the affair and over the fact that Bismarck had referred to the war memorial in Labes as a Kriegerehrenmal as opposed to a Denkmal, thus implying a celebration of warriors rather than a site of commemoration.110 Meanwhile, the Kreistag, itself packed with Junker interests, expressed its full confidence in Bismarck, noting its surprise at all the fuss. Indeed, ‘In the county and in the town of Labes the description of the Reich flag as “black-red-yellow” is not seen as a diminution of the Reich colours’.111 His actions were downplayed as minor lapses of judgement and thus were seen as slight transgressions and hardly treasonable behaviour. Certainly, Bismarck’s conduct, when seen cumulatively, suggests a wilful challenge to republican authority. For the most part, his oppositional behaviour was mundane and embedded in everyday seemingly innocuous activities, or in his links to the local monarchist veterans league or the more questionable (and alleged) association with a group linked to the Roßbach Free Corps.112 But when his conduct is placed into the context of the mid-1920s that saw deep conflict over the question of the Reich’s flag, a resurgent right that had mobilized against Locarno and the expropriation of princely property, it takes on a different tone, especially because he was not alone in this type of behaviour. A shadow was cast over the loyalty of the Landrat of Anklam, a staunchly SPD county in the administrative district of Stettin. Von Rosenstiel had been a long-serving

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administrator (appointed in 1908) who had survived war, revolution and reform. He had long since fallen foul of the local SPD who complained on a number of occasions about his alleged anti-republican attitude and behaviour, although inquiries exonerated him of any wrongdoing. An incident over flags in 1927 sparked off a renewed campaign against him, and this time, in spite of loud protests from his conservative supporters, he was transferred to Stralsund and replaced by the Democrat von Philippsborn.113 At around the same time in Minden near Hannover, a dispute arose over the attitude of Landrat von Stockhausen who refused to take part in a republican event organized by the local Reichsbanner after having participated in a Pioneer Festival where the imperial colours were flown.114 Indeed, expressions of contempt for the republic were frequently embedded in local festivities or cultural activities, those usually associated with the Schützenverein (rifle club) or those of the nationalist veterans’ league, the Stahlhelm. As a leading local personality, the Landrat was often an honorary member of these organizations and would be expected to attend their events. But these events could quickly turn into rallies against the republic with a stunning array of imperial and regimental flags being flown, with paramilitary marching bands, and anti-democratic songs sung.115 As the political agent of the state, a Landrat was expected to actively defend the republic at all times, especially after the passing of the Republikschutzgesetz in 1922. No doubt there might be occasions when a Landrat could find himself trapped between republican obligation and a local revanchist culture, but in the examples cited here, this does not appear to have been the case.116 By the later 1920s, transgressions among Landräte, including Bismarck, were becoming more barefaced. Through his actions and his inertia to defend the republic, Bismarck encouraged anti-republican sentiment to flourish in Regenwalde, as we glimpsed in the episode above concerning flying the banned imperial colours. If anything, his behaviour had the calculated effect of bolstering his personal authority at the expense of the republican minister in Berlin.117 For as long as there was not a direct challenge to the republic, the Landrat could rely on the protection of Carl von Halfern, a member of the centre-right DVP, and the chief of the district administration. The situation began to change in  1930 when Bismarck, together with the Landräte in neighbouring Greifenhagen and Naugard signally failed to sign an official petition (Aufruf) as a response to the Stahlhelm’s and DNVP’s campaign for a plebiscite to remove Otto Braun’s administration of Prussia.118 Bismarck had already hinted at a retrenched politics when he is alleged to have led a ‘Hoch’ (‘cheer’) to Hindenburg and the fatherland but not to the constitution during the August Constitution Day celebrations and in which he hardly mentioned the constitution (as he was supposed to) in his speech but addressed instead the French withdrawal from the Rhineland.119 Confronted over the issue of the Harzburg Front’s plebiscite against the Prussian government, Bismarck at first claimed that he had not received any notice of the government’s counter-petition, a defence that was roundly rejected by his superiors and for the first time found himself accused of treasonable behaviour (Landesverrätischer Handlungen).120 Still in office, Bismarck threw all caution to the wind and campaigned for the Stahlhelm-DNVP plebiscite. At a well-attended meeting in Stralsund on 13 March 1931, he delivered a blistering speech in which he warned of the dangers of the left-of-centre government in Berlin, which he considered ‘anti-national’. Indeed,

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the banner draped across the stage from which he issued his tirade against the SPD read ‘Down with the red Government in Prussia’ (Prussia remained the bulwark of the republic after the fall of Hermann Müller’s SPD-led Reich coalition in early 1930).121 Carl Severing, recently reappointed as Prussian interior minister, responded robustly and ordered Bismarck’s immediate removal on the grounds that Such a lack of understanding of his duties as a civil servant in general and as a political officer in particular, and which have come to light repeatedly, the Landrat can no longer be left in his current position.122

Bismarck was duly suspended at the end of March and replaced by a career civil servant attached to the Oberpräsident’s office in Stettin. But the suspension did not deter him or his political colleagues from the campaign against the government; in fact, he now considered himself released from the oath of loyalty to the government.123 His removal catalysed the mobilization of the East Elbian Junker and the nationalist right in general. Needless to say, the nationalist members of the Regenwalde Kreistag condemned the ‘unfair’ dismissal and issued a ‘unanimous’ declaration in his support.124 A regional paper, the Greifenberger Kreisblatt in its 28 March issue carried the headline: ‘Severing’s Terror Act’. The Kreuz-Zeitung and the Pommersche Tagespost in particular joined the campaign, with the former claiming that Bismarck was the victim of the morally bankrupt ‘Severing System’ and seeing in his dismissal ‘the act of revenge of a teetering system’.125 In fact, Bismarck had been long indulged by the authorities in Berlin who had continued to pledge their confidence in the Regenwalde Landrat up to the end. The breach of this trust was felt bitterly. Severing’s right-hand man in the Prussian interior ministry, Dr Wilhelm Abegg, a career civil servant and a democrat, gave a sense of this betrayal in an interview in early January1933, when Prussia’s future and that of democracy was at stake. ‘No new appointment [since 1918] has demonstrated so clearly the change of course [in loyalty] as this one has, not one has so explicitly challenged the still-governing Prussian government’.126 If Abegg’s verdict reflected the government position, then Pomerania’s local press provided an insight to Bismarck’s view of what had come to pass. The Greifenberger Kreisblatt in June 1931 titled a long report on Bismarck’s campaign speech in the staunchly nationalist town of Greifenberg: ‘Our Struggle for Prussia’, in which the suspended Landrat listed a familiar litany of republican faults since 1918. The paper then reported more or less verbatim Bismarck’s justification for his action in which he claimed that he had given the republic the benefit of the doubt. One has accused me of a change in loyalty, because I had been a political official for twelve years. That is not true. I’ve never changed my attitude. When I returned from the war and saw how Hindenburg had put himself at the disposal of the new rulers, I thought at that time there would be at least the possibility to restore order. I wanted to help with my skill and knowledge, where I would be needed. I have never made a secret of my opinions to my superiors. But my hopes [for order] were false.127

The newspaper reported that Bismarck’s speech was met with thunderous applause and the meeting concluded with an ecstatic rendition of the national anthem

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(Deutschlandlied) after which the chairman called upon all those in the concert hall to ‘go and do everything for the fatherland’. Throughout his campaign speeches for the plebiscite, Bismarck repeatedly emphasized the loss of personality in German politics since 1918. The party list system had ruptured the relationship between the state and the elected with the consequence that ordinary citizens no longer knew where authority lay. He also expressed his unease at the concept of an opposition to the state, as implied in the term ‘National Opposition’, but noted also how this had become necessary not least because the state form represented by the republic was a consequence of the unholy alliance of Socialists (Gustav Bauer) and Catholics (Matthias Erzberger) in league with Germany’s enemies at Versailles. Everything was wrong about the republic: nationalist idealists accused of Fememord were hounded by the justice system while Rhineland separatists were allowed to threaten the integrity of the Reich; the civil service had been corrupted by political jobbery; Stresemann’s foreign policy, although well intentioned, had been on the wrong track; the Osthilfe had been inadequate while the entire East Elbian region was vilified by a metropolitan press; the Heidelberg study quoted above that had been carried out under the direction of allegedly ‘social democratic professors’, had called for the break-up of the estates, and thus the destruction of the Pomeranian Heimat. It was left to the likes of Bismarck and his party (the DNVP) to overturn these policies with a ‘national movement that put forward a national policy’ for renewal.128 At a DNVP rally in Cologne on 25 March, he called for ‘the end of the  red  administration in Prussia’.129 For Bismarck, the campaign for a plebiscite against the Prussian administration was the beginning of such a politics of renewal.130 After all, as the ‘real bulwark of the black-red November system, . . . the conscious sabotage of the national freedom movement particularly by Prussia, can be seen’.131 Thus, it was imperative to reclaim the Prussian state and thus the Reich. As Franz Seldte the leader of the Stahlhelm put it: ‘whoever has Prussia, has Germany’.132 Seldte might have added that whoever has the province has Prussia. For this reason, the Landrat Bismarck had declared his candidacy for the Prussian Landtag the previous August.133 But even in Regenwalde, where the DNVP had dominated from the outset of the republic and where Bismarck had appeared unassailable, the Nazi Party managed to usurp the old elite by the Landtag and Reichstag elections of 1932. In this process, the political fate of the former Landrat and other civil servants who had contested republican authority was soon sealed in spite of their own authoritarian leanings.

Conclusion From late summer of 1932, Bismarck served as state secretary in the Prussian interior ministry where he had replaced Wilhelm Abegg, who had fallen foul of von Papen’s purge of liberal and Social Democrat officials in the Prussian field administration that summer. By October of that year, 53 Landräte, mostly from the liberal-dominated counties in the west, had been removed from their posts (the changes in personnel also occurred as part of a wide-ranging rationalization of the administration which saw 111

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(out of 352) small counties merged to form 53 larger administrative units).134 But this conservative reclamation of Prussia was short lived soon succumbing to the National Socialist takeover from March 1933.135 According to Arnold Brecht, who had served as state secretary in the Prussian state ministry under the republic, nearly a third of the 1,663 higher civil servants were dismissed after 1933.136 Bismarck’s days as a public servant thus finally ended with the coming to power of the Nazis. But the polycratic nature of the Third Reich meant that at local level the Nazi Party district leader, the Kreisleiter, often in tandem with the Party’s political officer (politische Leiter) interfered into the affairs of the Landrat on a daily basis, further diminishing his authority.137 Indeed, during the Third Reich the presence of the ‘outsider’ within the field administration became more widespread than under the republic, an irony as Muncy points out, given the rhetoric of the NSDAP before 1933 and its own law for the ‘restoration of the professional civil service’ in April.138 If Bismarck had feared for administrative order under the republic, his fears would not have been allayed after 1933 when the Prussian field administration was flooded by Nazi place-men and a Landrat’s room for manoeuvre was severely curtailed.139 But this realization only came too late, by the mid-1930s. In 1932/33, the concern for authority of the likes of Bismarck related to old fashioned conservative ideas of patrimony and leadership. As we shall see in the next chapter, conservatives who had mourned the passing of strong authority in  1918 looked to the singular charismatic leader from 1932/33, whoever that might be.

8

Authority Between Democracy and Dictatorship

“Where is it marching to, the republic? It does not know. [It] Doesn’t even know if it is democratic.”1 “A bridge leads from democracy to dictatorship, but not from liberalism.”2 “They’re hopeless Romanticists, living in an unreal past. They’re dreaming of the day when a Kaiser-Messiah will return to place his benevolent (but firm) heel on the necks of the chattering parliamentarians.”3

Introduction As we have seen in the foregoing chapters, the question of authority underwrote the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, whether in the spheres of economy, foreign policy, culture and law where it was frequently challenged. This issue of authority was nowhere more visible than in the heavily contested discussions concerning the polity itself. There were, broadly speaking, three interrelated yet competing visions of political authority under the republic: that of democratic authority, authoritarian democracy and dictatorship. Their relationship to one another is the focus of this chapter. After briefly outlining the origins of these ideas in World War I, with particular reference to Hugo Preuß, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, we move to a discussion of the key provisions relating to the exercise of power and authority in Weimar Constitution. Here, the concept of ‘dictatorship within the bounds of the constitution’ plays a central part in shifting the republic from democratic authority towards authoritarian democracy. The final section of the chapter turns to the popular sphere where developments in ‘high politics’ towards authoritarian government had its counterpart in the mobilization of youth who increasingly sought a ‘strong leader’ or ‘dictator’ as an antidote to the alleged failed politics of the party machine, thus providing the foundations for Hitler’s charismatic dictatorship after 1933.4

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Discourses of authority The battle lines in the conflicting visions of authority under the Weimar Republic were drawn up in World War I and can be illustrated by looking at the work of Hugo Preuß, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, whose ideas shaped the political landscape.5 The definition of authority under the republic revealed fundamental differences of opinion among all parties. For some liberals, such as Max Weber and Friedrich Meinecke, reconciled to the fact of a republic, authority should be based on what they termed a Führerdemokratie, that is, a parliamentary democracy led by an elite caste.6 This idea drew its inspiration from the thwarted Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, composed of Germany’s social and political liberal elites. Weber developed his ideas on political authority in a series of articles published in the Frankfurter Zeitung over the course of the summer of 1917, at a point when the power relations between the military and civilian authorities were reaching crisis.7 Like many national liberals, he had come to be deeply critical of the Bismarckian state which he believed had stymied the nation’s energies. The Reichstag excluded from positive decision-making was rendered little more than a ‘talking shop’ where without the burden of responsibility political grandstanding occurred. This system of dominance (Herrschaft) had failed to cultivate a cadre of responsible political leaders with de facto authority based on democratic politics.8 In other essays, Weber developed his ideas on the components of this authority identifying its three principal sources: functional, traditional and charismatic.9 During the course of the 1920s, but from an entirely different political precept, this position also appealed to some members of the DVP10 and even found approval among some deputies from the more strident nationalist DNVP, such as Walther Graef and Count von Westarp; indeed, it found its way into the DNVP’s programme for constitutional reform in 1927, which sought to curtail party-based mass democracy, and it underpinned the party’s call for ‘more power to the president’.11 To the left of centre of German politics, the overturning of the old order in 1918 represented the culmination of the democratic ideals of 1848, as both the liberal Hugo Preuß and the Social Democrat Eduard David were at pains to point out in their contributions to the three debates on the Weimar Constitution in the National Assembly in July 1919.12 Preuß, a founding member of the liberal DDP and involved in Berlin’s municipal politics, had formulated his ideas on self-governing popular democracy in a number of writings before and during the war, most notably in The German People and Politics (1915) and with an essay ‘World War, Democracy and Germany’s Renewal’. In both these works, he substituted the authoritarian Obrigkeitsstaat with its emphasis on the passive subject (Untertan) with the democratic Volksstaat – or ‘citizen state’ organized on popular cooperativism.13 A very different vision of authority emerged at around the time Preuß wrote his treatise. In an influential essay published in 1916, the expert on constitutional law (at the University of Strasbourg until 1918) Carl Schmitt laid the intellectual groundwork for modern dictatorship, both as a state of exception and as a permanent form of government.14 In this article, Schmitt distinguished between the ‘exceptional dictator’ equipped with temporary overriding powers as a means to overcoming crisis when the machinery of parliament would prove too cumbersome, and the ‘sovereign dictator’

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whose authority was rooted in popular acclamation as an end in itself. The latter was a composite of the Obrigkeitsstaat and Volksstaat and was also favoured by Weber, since it allowed for the purest form of unity between state and society, rendering charismatic leadership a ‘social relationship’ by excluding intermediary institutions (in this case political parties).15 Schmitt’s ideas were forged in part by personal experience. When ‘Dictatorship and State of Siege’ was published in  1916, Schmitt was not an overly enthusiastic volunteer in Munich where he was assigned to Department P6 that oversaw censorship under the ‘state of siege’ in Bavaria.16 In this position, he observed at first hand the workings of the military in its capacity as executive power. Article 68 of the imperial constitution divided the country in time of war into 21 military regions (with an additional 3 military regions in Bavaria) whose commanding officers enjoyed de facto dictatorial authority.17 For Schmitt, this concentration of authority was not only functional, but also essential in a crisis. But because the civilian government continued to coexist as a war cabinet alongside the military command, there was a dilution of authority which in his view immobilized the state.18 The lesson he drew from wartime experience was that authority had to be singular, it could not be shared. Schmitt was part of that ‘reactionary modernism’ that saw nineteenth-century liberalism as a decayed politics unable to provide true leadership in the modern world.19 In Schmitt’s view, the republic as party-dominated state form (Parteienstaat) was a stymied polity, battered by storm and characterized by internal weakness and indecision. Observing this, his ideas on the ‘state of exception’ evolved into a manifesto for authoritarian dictatorship during the course of the 1920s and early 1930s, eventually providing the intellectual foundations for Hitler’s dictatorship. * The context from which these positions on the question of authority emerged had been the failure of the Kaiser and the Hindenburg-Ludendorff ‘dictatorship’ to provide credible leadership.20 The varying ideas on authority would both intersect with one another and interweave politics after 1918. Nonetheless, the deeper fault line running through the Weimar Republic between authoritarian and democratic visions of the modern state could not be disguised.21 This fault line is evident in a number of critical provisions of the Weimar Constitution. Six key Articles of the Constitution are of particular interest here, namely Articles 25, 35ii, 41i, 48ii, 53 and 54.22 The first of these empowered the president to dissolve the Reichstag; the second provided for oversight by the legislature via a standing committee during the hiatus between the dissolution of the Reichstag and the election (a maximum of sixty days was stipulated); the third Article created a plebiscitary president as a counterweight to the Reichstag; the fourth Article – seen as the most contentious by historians – allowed for government by presidential decree; the fifth empowered the president to appoint and dismiss a chancellor and his ministers; the sixth required a chancellor and his cabinet to have the confidence of the Reichstag. All of these articles were contested at some point or other, but the two principals in the debate on authority were undoubtedly Articles 48 and 54.23 Weimar’s Constitution was an amalgam of ideas on law, state and society going back to the different schools of German jurisprudence and political economy from the

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closing decade of the nineteenth century.24 More immediately, it derived its intellectual impetus not only from the ideas of Weber, Meinecke and Preuß, but also from the constitutional theorist Robert Redslob whose major work on ‘genuine and nongenuine forms of parliament in which executive and parliament stood in equilibrium to one another had recently been published’.25 As we saw in Chapter 2, the revolution swept away most though not all of the hubris of the old order. The task was to find a platform from which to launch a new political social order. There were few in Germany in late 1918 who did not believe that the quickest route to stability was parliamentary democracy.26 Having already drafted a constitution in 1917 for a Volksstaat, Preuß, who in the meantime had been appointed state secretary in the interior ministry (briefly becoming minister in Scheidemann’s cabinet from 13 February to 20 June 1919), was appointed on 15 November to chair a constitutional committee. This (exclusively male) committee convened in early December and its deliberations reflected the points of convergence and divergence within the broad spectrum of German liberalism, reflecting thus its membership.27 Within the committee, a number of models were proposed, and differences were less between parties as between those who favoured a strong plebiscitary authority, either of the French or North American type and those who laid greater store in the popular sovereignty of parliament.28 While Max Weber, Friedrich Naumann and Friedrich Meinecke among others advocated a democracy based on a plebiscitary president (Art. 41),29 the socialists Max Quarck (SPD) and Joseph Herzfeld (a member of the USPD and uncle of the artist John Heartfield) favoured the sole authority of the Reichstag. Hugo Preuß, with the support of the constitutional expert Gerhard Anschütz, believed that ‘parliamentary democracy is the surest means of expressing the real power of the people’s will’,30 and thus initially favoured steering political authority towards the Reichstag. But in the end, he too shied away from the ‘absolutism of parliament’ (i.e. parties).31 This shift occurred not least because of the belief that national divisions based on confessional, ideological and regional interests would be better overcome and united through a strong-personality leader than through parliamentary elections alone.32 Preuß was determined to deepen collaboration with the Social Democrats, not least because of their shared ideas on the unitary state, but he remained suspicious of a socialist vision in which one class prevailed over another, creating thus the ‘authoritarian state in reverse’.33 There was a fear that democratization of politics through universal suffrage would leave the left political parties with a permanent advantage in the Reichstag. In spite (or because) of their revolutionary rhetoric, the election to the National Assembly on 19  January had not produced a strong showing for the Independent Socialists (7.6% of votes), while the threat from the radical extra-parliamentary left, was in fact grossly exaggerated. The real problem for liberals, who had taken just under a fifth of the vote, was in fact Social Democracy with its overwhelming majority and a Marxist heritage.34 Thus, the prospect of an ‘Ebert dictatorship’ and the potential irreconcilability of vested interests steered liberals towards the plebiscitary presidency.35 For this reason, Preuß eventually came around to inserting into the constitution a provision for a presidency whose authority derived directly from the people. In order for the president to bypass parliamentary gridlock and thus to act

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‘above’ the politics of parties, he would be equipped with extraordinary powers for use in periods of crisis, not unlike the one facing Germany at the time the constitution was being formulated. Both Articles 41 and 48ii provided for a charismatic and a functional authority in the vein first discussed by both Schmitt and Weber; or in the words of Friedrich Meinecke, both articles provided for a ‘dictatorship of trust’ (Vertrauensdiktatur) in times of emergency.36 Neither of these two articles was conceived as an instrument of authority to supersede the democratic process; nor was either designed to create an ‘ersatz Kaiser’ or to function as a ‘reserve constitution’.37 Indeed, Preuß addressed this point when presenting the first draft to the National Assembly in February, arguing that in a ‘true’ parliamentary system legislative and executive should be finely tuned to one another.38 No less a conservative figure than Hindenburg extolled this fine tuning in his acceptance speech to the Reichstag upon being elected president in 1925.39 Thus, the various positions on singular authority and parliamentary pluralism converged in the Constitution of 1919. Schmitt’s ‘exceptional dictator’ was echoed in Article 48, while elements of his ‘sovereign dictator’ appeared in Article 41i (as advocated by Weber too); the instruments for the protection of the Reichstag against arbitrary authority and favoured by Weber and Preuß were mirrored in Articles 35ii and 54.40 None was thought to contradict the other.41 And yet, in practice this is what transpired. Within a few years, they became the battleground between those who saw in Article 48 a form of authoritarianism at odds with parliamentary democracy and those who argued that Article 54 was the root of a weakened authority through national disunity.

Dictatorship within the bounds of the constitution Histories of European dictatorship are coloured by the violence unleashed by the emergence of fascism and communism in the early to mid-twentieth century.42 Lost in the post-1945 accounts of dictatorship is a very different approach originating in the interwar period in which dictatorship was a more open concept, in spite of Mussolini in Italy.43 This aspect was already evident in the writings of Weber, Meinecke and Schmitt, and it was incorporated in Article 48, as we noted above. The American political scientist Clinton Rossiter referred to this as ‘constitutional dictatorship’.44 It was the topic for discussion by the constitutional theorist Richard Grau in his treatise on Article 48 and its implications for relations between Reich-Länder and again for sociologist Alexander Rüstow in his contribution to a lecture series in  1929 on ‘the problems of coalition politics’ where he sought to combine positive elements from democracy and dictatorship to create decisive government (in this case, via a strengthened chancellor); indeed, it was Rüstow who coined the phrase ‘dictatorship within the bounds of the constitution’.45 From the later 1920s, the idea assumed a less consensual and more authoritarian meaning for conservatives wishing to curb parliamentary prerogatives.46 The idea of a ‘dictatorship within the bounds of the constitution’ was based on a consensus between the executive and Reichstag. Indeed, Article 48 and the Enabling

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laws in the early years of the republic contained a rescinding clause that could be invoked by the Reichstag if it disapproved of certain measures. During the early years of the Weimar Republic, the passing of two Enabling Laws in October 1923 and again in December 1924 coupled with the extensive use of Article 48 were initially based on a negotiated agreement between government and the Reichstag and undoubtedly contributed to stabilizing the republic; ultimately, the Reichstag grew weary of self-emasculation, clawing back its agency through the withdrawal of its confidence in both cabinets of Stresemann and Marx.47 In later years, this consensual ‘dictatorship within the bounds of the constitution’ was in evidence through the Reichstag’s (and in particular the SPD’s) ‘negative toleration’ of Brüning’s unpopular fiscal policies implemented via Article 48, but increasingly the course was set for a political showdown as the parameters of the constitution were breached, notably under von Papen. Both periods were marked by crisis. The passive resistance to the occupation of the Ruhr had proven to be a disaster and Stresemann on succeeding Cuno in mid-August after the SPD withdrew its support, moved quickly to end it.48 But problems continued, not just with the economy. That autumn, there were serious political rumblings coming from the nationalist right in Bavaria and rapidly deteriorating relations between the left-coalition governments of Thuringia and Saxony and the army and Reich government.49 As a mechanism to protect the integrity of the Reich, Article 48 empowered the president to suspend a state government using armed force when it failed in its obligations and duties, or when its actions endangered the integrity of the Reich.50 Neither Dr Zeigner in Saxony nor August Frölich in Thuringia (both SPD) felt compelled to alter the political course of their respective governments by ending the coalition with Communists, and to curtail their socialization programmes.51 Moreover, with Free Corps detachments in Bavaria, the Saxony government set about creating armed Proletarian Hundreds as a form of self-defence but which breached the terms of the Versailles Treaty and were against Reich laws.  The army minister Geßler (DDP) declared a state of emergency in both Länder in September, followed by the suspension (Reichsexekution) first of Zeigner’s government at the end of October and then Frölich’s government a week later on 5 November, deploying military forces to restore ‘order’ in both states.52 While this particular emergency deserves fuller consideration in its own right,53 for our purposes, its significance is in the question it throws out in regard to the case that was made for suppressing the democratic process because the integrity of state authority was alleged to be threatened.54 The arguments for such an emergency were repeated again in the summer of 1932 when Papen used Article 48 to suspend the caretaker government of Prussia, and again in 1933 when Hitler used the Enabling Law of 23 March 1933 to ‘co-ordinate’ the autonomy and therefore authority of the federal states in three laws passed between 31 March 1933 and 31 January 1934.55 The suspension of the Saxony government deepened the divisions within Stresemann’s cabinet and caused a furore not only in the Reichstag where the KPD and DNVP tabled a vote of no confidence, but also in the media and among constitutional experts.56 Stresemann’s cabinet had already foundered on 3 September over the question of an Enabling Law, but remained in office until the end of

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November with a reshuffled cabinet. After the withdrawal of SPD ministers on 3 November, and losing a vote of confidence in the Reichstag on 23 November, he was a much damaged and beleaguered leader.57 On the same day the Thuringian government was removed, the liberal Vossische Zeitung published a long article by Helmut Francke, a former editor of the conservative Grenzboten, calling for a ‘dictatorship of the middle’ in the form of a cabinet Directory independent of the electorate. According to Francke, Germany since the late nineteenth century had undergone too many changes; ‘[in  1918] we moved from the Obrigkeitsstaat to a Volksstaat. This step also was too much’. According to Francke this had produced weak leaders who had failed the country, thus spawning chaos. Germany now needed to ‘rest on a platform. It is called dictatorship’.58 This view was shared by a number of army officers who saw dictatorship not as a temporary expedient but as a means to reordering both domestic politics and foreign policy.59 In correspondence with the chief of staff of the 6th Army Division in Münster, Colonel Alexander von Falkenhausen, Joachim von Stülpnagel, who in 1946 would face the gallows at Nuremberg after being tried for war crimes, held out the vista of a military-supported dictatorship in order to achieve Germany’s foreign policy aims in the Ruhr and Rhineland, which in Stresemann’s hands was ‘bound to fail’. ‘It is our misfortune’, Stülpnagel wrote, ‘that in Germany we do not have a man of great qualities who can and wants to govern dictatorially. This man we would support, but to play the man himself, we cannot. Until the Severing system and Entente controls are eliminated, the path for our work will not be free’.60 At the height of the crisis, the idea of a ‘national dictatorship’ comprising a three-man Directory gained some traction in government circles. While there was a preference for a civilian to head this, the head of the army Hans von Seeckt had suggested the Ambassador to Washington, Otto Wiedfeldt, von Seeckt himself was mooted by both the head of the Truppenamt, General Otto Hasse and Schleicher, at that time one of Hasse’s subordinates, and the DNVP as a possible ‘military-chancellor’ although this never crystallized, not least because of Seeckt’s own reluctance to see the army drawn further into politics.61 Already in  1923, there was a clear distinction emerging between those who saw dictatorship as the means to overturn the constitutional arrangements of the republic and those who found themselves closer to Schmitt’s idea of an ‘exceptional dictator’ who protected the constitution. Talk of a ‘national dictator’ in late 1923 was in the context of multiple crises and its prospect was seen as a means to prevent the total collapse of Germany’s ‘inner front’ in the face of an intransigent Paris.62 It was based on a consensus of sorts, partly conceded in the fact of Ebert transferring his authority as Supreme Commander of the Army (Oberbefehlshaber) to Seeckt at the height of the crisis, who had accommodated himself to the republic even though ‘it contradicts the fundamental principles of my political thinking’.63 Seeckt as part of the triumvirate including Ebert and the army minister Otto Geßler saw such ‘dictatorship’ as merely a temporary measure; but for those army officers we encountered above and for some conservatives, notably the leader of the DNVP in the Reichstag, von Westarp, the state of exception held out the promise for a more radical surgery of the republic’s constitutional arrangements.64

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Facing an acute situation, Stresemann had come to rely on Article 48 and then the Enabling Law to pass measures to get to grips with the country’s dire financial position, as would his successor, Wilhelm Marx. In such circumstances, the Reichstag could be expected to support government. Ebert had had some difficulty finding a chancellor to form a government. Marx, who he had first asked, finally acceded to Ebert’s appeal but made it a condition that he govern without the Reichstag.65 He had to convince its deputies to pass an Enabling Law (Ermächtigungsgesetz), which it did in two rounds of voting on 6 and 8 December.66 On the back of this legislation, Marx was able to implement sweeping measures, described by Major General Otto Hasse, an associate of Seeckt, as ‘naked dictatorship’, to combat the state’s parlous finances and restore order and above all, the authority of the state.67 That the Reichstag apparently was willing to abrogate its authority in favour of the executive was viewed by Schmitt as evidence of its inability to assume political responsibility.68 However, closer scrutiny shows that the Enabling Law was only possible after protracted and difficult negotiations, particularly with the SPD, now in opposition, who laid down a number of conditions in order to safeguard both the autonomy and the powers of the legislature to exercise oversight.69 By the following February, Marx could no longer rely on SPD toleration for extending the Law. By that date, his cabinet was losing momentum and unity of purpose; meanwhile, the Reichstag had lost its appetite for ‘dictatorship within the bounds of the Constitution’.70 On 13 March, Marx asked the president to dissolve the Reichstag and elections were set for early May. Returning as chancellor on 3 June, a somewhat chastened Marx with a slightly altered cabinet struggled to maintain his authority in the Reichstag. He continued against the odds until October, and on the 24th he again asked Ebert to dissolve the Reichstag. In spite of a more positive outcome in a second election in December, Wirth failed to form a new government, finally ceding to Hans Luther, who formed his first cabinet in January 1925.71 In this early period, the use of extraordinary powers either via Article 48 or through an Enabling Act was not thought of as particularly dangerous to the republic, providing the parties were prepared to work within the parameters of the Constitution.72 Indeed, the use of an Enabling Law and Article 48 under Ebert’s presidency can be viewed as a buttress for weak cabinets, thus fulfilling the original intention.73 Nevertheless, the legal historians Friedrich Karl Fromme and more recently Achim Kurz argued that the continual use of Article 48 in the period 1922/24, the Reichsexekution against Saxony and Thuringia, and the dissolution of the Reichstag in March 1924, not only pointed to the potentials of unbounded (Entgrenzung) presidential power from parliamentary controls but also created a dangerous precedence for the dismantling of parliamentary democracy in 1932/33.74 * The shakiness of state authority under Weimar’s parliamentary system in these early years led Schmitt to refine but not to fundamentally alter his ideas on dictator­ ship; this was to occur in the later period. By the time of the second edition in 1928 of Die Diktatur, Schmitt had added a substantial 46-page addendum that addressed the use of Article 48 during the period culminating in Stresemann’s hapless second cabinet. Schmitt argued that during these years of parliamentary weakness, the use

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of Article 48 did not contradict democracy, but indeed, protected it.75 This was a position he would go on to refine in a number of important works in the following years, each time contextualized by a political impasse between a chancellor and the Reichstag. The ability of the latter to bring down a government and therefore, in the eyes of conservatives, to weaken the country internally and externally steered a number of constitutional experts, Schmitt primary among them, towards an authoritarian model of the plebiscitary ‘exceptional dictator’ based on Articles 41 and 48. The mid-1920s saw an invigorated Reichstag withdraw its confidence in two cabinets, namely that of Hans Luther in January 1926 over the flag conflict as we saw in Chapter 6, and its successor under Wilhelm Marx. Behind the immediate issues triggering crisis lay deeper concerns. As ‘father’ of the constitution, Preuß had been particularly alarmed by the behaviour of some ministers in Luther’s first cabinet (January–December 1925), particularly that of the interior minister Martin Schiele who openly declared his hostility towards parliamentary democracy.76 In the case of Marx’s government, the issue leading to his resignation was the secret rearmament programme supported by the army minister Otto Geßler, but even more disturbingly, the obvious links to anti-democratic paramilitary organizations evoking the spectre of Bavaria in 1923/24. After a heated debate in the Reichstag in mid-December, the SPD tabled a motion of ‘no confidence’, which passed by a majority comprising DNVP, NSDAP and KPD votes.77 Not for the first time, the authority of government was left reeling from its clash with the Reichstag. Bringing down a government could be a double-edged sword. Hindenburg, like Ebert before him, was drawn into the protracted negotiations between the party groups in the Reichstag for a new cabinet and depending on one’s point of view, either this vindicated a ‘strong presidency’ or it tarnished the aura of a leader above politics, implicating the president in the hated ‘Weimar system’ of political trade-offs.78 Count Albrecht zu Stolberg-Wernigerode (DVP) wrote of the pressing need to curb parliamentary controls over the chancellor.79 This censure was not confined to rightcentre politicians. Kurt von Reibnitz, a member of the SPD, was also critical going so far as to claim that not even the president chose the chancellor. ‘Article 53 of the Constitution “the Chancellor and on his proposal, the Minister are appointed by the President of Germany,” was in the text. The chancellor did not suggest ministers who seemed suitable to him; he provided only the list of the factions, who had the majority. The President was nothing more than a “nomination and signature machine,” a “shadowy Erlkönig” as Bismarck said in 1882 in the Reichstag, “who, when one needed a new Minister, was brought out from the wings, signs and then disappears” ’.80 Not surprisingly, conservatives had little faith in Weimar’s party system, claiming that Article 54 held the nation hostage to the fickle mass. As Schiele claimed: ‘as long as this situation [Article 54] exists, the German Reich will be prevented from having strong leadership’.81 The leader of the DNVP, Graf Westarp, took the opportunity of a speech during the Commemoration of the Founding of the Reich (Reichsgrundungsfeier), to call for the article’s abolition. But like the party’s petition in the Reichstag in February 1926, and the attempt by the Stahlhelm to introduce a plebiscite also calling for its abolition, it fell on deaf ears.82

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Against this background, Schmitt began to harden his view that Weimar’s parlia­ mentary system with its ‘weak chancellors’ and the ‘horse trading’ between chancellors and the respective party factions for ministerial posts was inherently unstable.83 The next few years would see him develop a clearer case for dictatorship. The stand-off between Reichstag and executive gave credence to his ideas on ‘deleberare contra agere’ (words vs. action), an idea that found its more prosaic form in the DNVP’s election slogan ‘More Power to the President!’ in  1928. Presidential power derived from Articles 25 and 53 would be enhanced by the removal of Article 54 and validated by popular acclamation (Art. 41). Denounced as authoritarian by liberals and the left, but defended as a pouvoir neutre by the right, this call for a ‘Führer’ was continuously hindered by a Reichstag dominated by a liberal sentiment before 1932.84

Authoritarian democracy By the beginning of the 1930s, centre-right liberals argued the necessity for clear and strong leadership, but cautioned against an over powerful executive. The Centre Party deputy Georg Schreiber, whom we encountered in Chapter 6, summed up this position in a penetrating analysis of late Weimar’s crisis where he concluded that the remedy for Germany’s ills was a dose of ‘authoritarian democracy’ but not the ‘total state’ advocated by the extreme right.85 Schreiber saw in Brüning’s use of Article 48 a step in this direction, as too did Leipzig’s lord mayor Carl Goerdeler, who in  1933 would welcome Hitler’s plebiscitary dictatorship.86 For Hermann Pünder, Brüning’s loyal state secretary, government by presidential decree was an exercise of ‘healthy authority’ within the framework of the constitution and as such did not pose a threat to democratic authority.87 There was thus a consensus that Article 48 should be deployed as an exceptional instrument of government to overcome the crisis and to restore authority. However, for a great deal of the period it was used on pretty much a continuous basis, but always with the intention of being a short-term measure. While recognizing the need for some reform of Weimar’s parliamentary system, liberals cautioned against the increasing popularity of the Italian dictator Mussolini’s style of politics. As Schreiber put it, ‘Our people will not stomach a Latin fascism, but certainly a reformed democracy’.88 Friedrich Meinecke with reference to Brüning’s frequent utilization of Article 48 used the term ‘dictatorship of trust’ (Vertrauensdiktatur) as a primary need to overcome the multiple crises besetting Weimar democracy, but he failed to delineate the limits to such authority.89 There was clearly a danger in the way authority and democracy were being understood at the beginning of the 1930s; their meaning had been polyvalent from the outset of the republic and now they drifted into authoritarian waters as the calls for plebiscitary democracy flowed into calls for a plebiscitary dictator. By 1932, the ship of state was midway to this dictatorship, as Gregor Bienstock, a Social Democrat, lamented; ‘the Weimar state’, he wrote, ‘is being liquidated before our eyes. Of the true spirit of the Weimar Constitution, only a veneer (Schein) remains and that is meaningless’.90

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The intellectual impetus for authoritarian government came as ever – though not exclusively – from the pen of Carl Schmitt.91 In Der Hüter der Verfassung, published in 1929 at a time when talk of a ‘crisis of trust’ (Vertrauenskrise) in the political system was rife, Schmitt’s ideas on singular authority now focused on the role of Articles 41 and 48 at the expense of the parliamentary system; a year later, his essay Legality and Legitimacy went further to question the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy. Schmitt’s appointment in 1930 to the chair of jurisprudence once held by Hugo Preuß may seem an irony given their contrary positions; his inaugural lecture, however, praised Preuß’s work on the Weimar Constitution, while disagreeing over the question of constitutional versus plebiscitary authority. In his lecture, Schmitt indicated a subtle shift in his approach from a theory of the constitution (Verfassungslehre) to a theory of the state (Staatslehre) where the determinant factor was no longer the inviolability of the constitution with its privileging of the party system but the protection of the state through its executive.92 In Der Hüter der Verfassung, Schmitt had portrayed a ‘strong leader’ with his exceptional powers as the ‘protector’ of the Constitution, not as its demolisher, who represented ‘the continuity and permanence of the unity of the state’.93 Indeed, with his emphasis on the positive value of exceptional or plebiscitary dictatorship, Schmitt distinguished the authoritarian potentials of the Constitution from its weaker elements. Thus, one could thus argue against parliamentary democracy (an example of a weak potential) without breaching the Constitution (verfassungswidrig).94 Goerdeler too demanded Germany’s ‘release from the pendulum of party-political groupings, all of whom too easily forget the wellbeing and the future of the entire community in their consideration of the volatile mood of the masses’.95 In his view, Weimar’s parliamentary system represented politics without authority. In place of the ‘confusion’ of parliament, he recommended the plebiscitary leader not beholden to political parties. In a speech titled ‘Men versus the Herd’ delivered in his home city of Königsberg in late 1929, Goerdeler told his audience, [I] once again desire a man of the quality of a Friedrich Wilhelm I, who can create the conditions for a healthy order of things in our country, on which basis alone the will to freedom can also mature into action.96

Weimar’s constitutional system, and Article 54 in particular, militated against achieving such an ideal state of affairs. As Goerdeler noted: In these articles [of the Constitution] lie the reasons for the wretched development of our political and economic situation; and why a sensible leadership has not been able to assert itself so far. . . . A leader would be brought back into line whether by the masses, or by cabinet, or by the parliamentary groups, and the consequence is that the cabinet which only superficially has authority of conducting business of government is already eliminated.97

That Goerdeler called for the removal Article 54 on the tenth anniversary of the anchoring of parliamentary democracy in the Constitution was an unintended irony.

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As far as he was concerned, the decade since 1919 was characterized by politics without direction or authority; with the state driven down the ‘wrong beaten paths’ by an emotionally charged ‘herd’.98 The current crisis offered a fresh opportunity to renew its authority but through singular leadership. Only when we restore the responsibility of conscience and the force of legal responsibility unfettered by mass influences at the head of the state administration, will we come back to a clear construction of our governmental, national and family life on the basis of self-governance. The individual, not the mass – an alien, obdurate concept – must once again feel responsible to the state and nation (Volk) in his conscience, in his family, in his profession, in his community.99

For many observers, and not just those on the right, Germany had been in crisis since 1918. But influential intellectuals such as the historian Martin Spahn and his associates gathered in the ultra conservative Ring Kreis who followed Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the philosopher Leopold Ziegler and publicists of the ilk of Hans Zehrer, who had moved from the liberal Vossische Zeitung to the neo-conservative Die Tat, with their unabated attacks and sniping at the republic and its replacement by the ‘true democracy’ of a ‘Third Reich’ were fertilizing the ground for dictatorship after 1933.100 Until the autumn of 1932, Schmitt operated in that liminal space between authoritarian democracy and dictatorship freed from constitutional constraints.101 Like many conservatives, he ‘crossed the Rubicon’ of late Weimar politics in the late autumn of 1932, if not before.102 By the end of that year, he had followed Legality and Legitimacy with another important study, namely Concept of the Political, in which he posited a binary theory of ‘friend-foe’ in his selective analysis of the republican state.103 Importantly, since the summer he was actively participating in politics in his role as an advisor, first to Schleicher and then to Papen, in plans to substitute an emergency dictatorship for the democratic republic.104 Schmitt thus provided a theoretical framework for the radical assault on Weimar parliamentary democracy, which easily flowed into the Zeitgeist of late Weimar political culture with its talk of dictatorship. But his position was not unassailable. Hermann Heller, Schmitt’s sparring partner, chided the ‘uneducated German thinking that was in thrall to any sort of mass hypnotic or dictatorial superstitious miracle’.105 But even from his radically different perspective, Heller saw the growing clamour for a ‘dictator’ as a reflection of a desire for national unity in the face of the conflict between executive and legislative.106 The conservative case seemed overwhelming. There were many constitutional scholars such as Heinrich Herrfahrdt, who rejected the constitution and prescribed a plebiscitary government that anticipated Hitler’s charismatic dictatorship.107 Thus, a symbiosis developed between scholarly validations for authoritarian government and popular ideas on ‘strong man’ politics. As Werner Braatz observed, ‘by destroying the institutional framework of the democratic republic, they had paved the way for an age of caeserism under the sway of a single party – the Nazis’.108

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By the beginning of 1932, the quest for authority in Weimar politics had tipped in favour of presidential dictatorship with a plebiscitary character, but still within the parameters of the constitution.109 The perception of Brüning among the coterie of conservatives in the presidential palace was that of a spent force whose personality and government no longer provided strong leadership.110 The whispering campaign waged against Brüning by Schleicher, Oskar von Hindenburg and the president’s secretary Otto Meissner deepened the estrangement between Hindenburg and the chancellor. Brüning’s plan to end the subsidy of rural estates in the east, the so-called Osthilfe, in order to facilitate the creation of small economically viable farms, deepened the rift. Finally, the fact that Hindenburg’s re-election had only been possible due to the support of the centre and left, while his natural constituency had appeared to have deserted him, was perceived as weakening his own authority.111 Vilified by the right as an ‘agent of the Vatican’ and politically isolated, Brüning was dismissed at the end of May, his race against time and the ‘back room influences’, lost.112 One of these ‘influences’ was Kurt von Schleicher, who had grown impatient both with Brüning’s inability to master the crisis and the lack of progress with the much-vaunted constitutional reform. On Schleicher’s advice, Franz von Papen was appointed chancellor to lead a ‘cabinet of national concentration’. Papen had no intention of governing with the toleration of the Reichstag.113 One of the lessons that he had learnt from the preceding decade was that chancellors were caught between the rock of the presidency and the hard place of the Reichstag.114 Announcing his government programme in a radio broadcast to the nation on 4 June, he broke with convention to attack his predecessor’s alleged weakness vis-à-vis the political parties in a manner that took aback even seasoned observers inured to political shenanigans.115 As Kessler noted, ‘Papen, after the disastrous reception of his government in the press and the rude rebuff from the SPD and the Centre Party, did not dare to show himself before the dissolution of the Reichstag’.116 His programme for government was, again to quote Kessler, a ‘hardly believable document, a miserable stylized extract of darkest reaction against which the declarations of the imperial governments would compare as the brightest enlightenment’.117 For the outgoing state secretary in the chancellor’s office, Pünder, the programme was an ‘abomination’ for which he blamed not the new chancellor but his mentor, Schleicher.118 Denied a Reichstag majority and temperamentally unsuited to fostering a policy of toleration, Papen opted to continue his predecessor’s strategy of government by presidential decree. It was observed at the time that Papen’s utilization of emergency decrees was both more extensive and more draconian than the hated wartime emergency legislation under Ludendorff and Hindenburg.119 Indeed, while many of these decrees addressed Germany’s economic problems, increasingly their political purpose was unmistakable. Decree after decree gave the police and judicial authorities sweeping powers, while the army hovered in the background preparing itself for the eventuality of martial law.120 Where Brüning had resorted to Article 48 to break the gridlock of parliamentary interests, Papen utilized it to end parliament. Reibnitz summed this up aptly in his observation that ‘from authoritarian democracy [but] within the bounds of the Constitution, emerged the authoritarian presidential government’.121 Papen now led a full onslaught upon the liberal republic that had, in his eyes, rendered the

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German nation weak, both internally and externally.122 Looking back on these years, Papen defended his actions with the argument that the authority of the state had itself become a ‘plaything’ (Spielball) of conflicting interests. ‘The experiences of the Weimar period show that the so-called people’s will was nothing but the slogan-platform of many demagogues’.123 The intellectual discourse on authority and exceptional powers now converged with politics as von Papen sought to permanently break with parliamentary democracy by reconfiguring the balance of power between the key articles of the Constitution.124 Conditions in the country in early summer of 1932 seemed to vindicate this course of action. Germany was in turmoil: its foreign policy was at a critical juncture, while internally the rising tide of political violence on the streets threatened national unity; Papen believed that only exceptional powers would enable him to tackle the multiple crises facing the country. But he was also intent on going much further. Invited the previous October by the Agricultural Association (Landwirtschaftsverein) of the small town of Dülmen where he had been honorary mayor, Papen called for a ‘national dictatorship’ (‘Diktatur auf nationaler Grundlage’) not subject to the whims of Reichstag factions.125 He reiterated his aim in a speech given in Münster at the end of August. For fairness (Gerechtigkeit) to function, the state has to be strong and indepen­dent, so that all corporations (Ordnungen) of society, of self-administration (Selbstver­ waltung), of the economy, can find a firm support. It should not be a plaything of the forces of society, neither of parties nor of interest groups. Independent leadership dedicated to the service of the entire people is the fulfilment of the ideal of the state, which is based on authority and justice.126

His interior minister, Wilhelm von Gayl, DNVP, called for the ‘organically-bonded people’s community’ in place of the ‘rootless’ and divided republic.127 This view resonated among conservatives who were prepared to go further than merely rescinding Article 54, seeing in the crisis the opportunity to finally break with Weimar’s ‘Parteienstaat’ – democracy based on political parties.128 Meanwhile, in a keynote lecture to the influential Langnamverein, the industrialist association in the Ruhr that summer, Schmitt, told his audience I believe that today a [legal] government, if it decides to make use of all consti­ tutional means [at its disposal], can accomplish substantial reforms and programs. A government dependent on parliament, however, has not even the possibility of accomplishing even a five year plan.129

Papen subscribed to this view without reservation. As far as he was concerned, the Constitution with its political checks and balances was flawed – a Konstruktionsfehler (a formulation also cited by von Gayl in his Constitution Day speech earlier in August!), and he made it his mission to remove this ‘flaw’.130 But on 12 September 1932, just six weeks after overturning the Prussian administration of Otto Braun, Papen suffered a humiliating vote of no confidence in the Reichstag in its first session. In spite of the erosion of its authority over the previous two years, the Reichstag still

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had its trump card, namely Article 54, which Ernst Torgler, parliamentary leader of the KPD, used to table a vote of no confidence in von Papen’s government that also sought the rescinding of the 4 September emergency decree. Amid chaotic scenes and unable to address the assembled deputies, Papen walked out of the chamber placing on the Speaker’s podium the decree (Article 25) dissolving parliament as he left; this would give him sixty days of untrammelled power until the election on 6 November.131 The versions of what occurred are contradictory, but it is clear that the chancellor had come to the Reichstag with a decree for its dissolution that had been signed by Hindenburg already on 30 August.132 On the evening of the dissolution, Papen addressed the nation over public network radio: Only the formation of a truly non-party national government, a government which shows itself to be an inviolable stronghold of justice beyond the reach of party organizations, and which is founded on the power and authority of a president elected by the people, can lead us out of the present day decomposition of our national life to[wards] healthy future conditions.133

A natural ally of authoritarian government, Reinhold Quaatz, noted in an entry in his diary on 12 September how ‘we [the Reichstag] have forced the government onto the path of dictatorship’.134 Kessler was correct to see Brüning’s dismissal in 1932 and not his chancellorship, as the decisive moment in the transition from republican authority to authoritarianism.135 From this date, in politically fluid conditions, Germany was pushed along the road towards an authoritarian plebiscitary-style rule. Against a background of severe social and political unrest that provided the excuse to dismiss the Prussian administration on 20 July using Article 48,136 von Papen spoke of ‘authority and true democracy’, as opposed to Weimar democracy as ‘pseudo-state’137 and declared that the role of society was to serve the state, not vice versa. Papen’s aim therefore was nothing less than the constitutional reordering of the Reich. It is today clear to see that we are at the spiritual turning point of an epoch, the intellectual turning point of the liberal century, and it is just as clear to grasp that it is the highest duty to call on the nation to secure the resulting consequences for the restructuring (Neugestaltung) of our public life. . . . The Government has stressed since the first day [it came into office] that it sees its historic mission in the elimination of these flaws.138

Papen’s failure to impose authority (without consensus) and his subsequent torpedoing of Schleicher’s own attempt to establish a government based on a ‘concentration of the middle’ further narrowed the room for manoeuvre.139 In the end, both von Papen and Schleicher proved to be ‘weak dictators’ unable to garner a unified Volkswille as an expression of totalizing the identity of the state (Identitätsstaat).140 National disunity had been at the centre of interior minister von Gayl’s speech on Constitution Day and in which he called for radical constitutional reform that vested authority in a strong centralized state. The ‘era of anonymous responsibility’ associated with parliament was at an end as far as von Gayl was concerned, to be substituted with the ‘personal responsibility of leading men’.141

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In search of a Führer Commenting on the clamour for a ‘dictator’ in the early years of the republic, Hermann Martin concluded that ‘It is a primeval, liberal need of peoples, not to depend on the whim of a person or several persons, but to live by a constitution, which places barriers around the ruler and gives the ruled an institution to monitor and ensure compliance with these limits’.142 The evidence for this, even at the time Martin was writing, is less than clear-cut and by the end of the 1920s it pointed to the contrary as we have seen. But ‘strong government’ equipped with extraordinary powers did not necessarily mean stable government, as we can see in the examples of Stresemann’s, von Papen’s and Schleicher’s short-lived regimes. The dwindling authority at the centre of politics might explain the readiness of ordinary Germans to see in Hitler the answer to this problem. As the crisis deepened, strong government had become synonymous with strong and resolute leadership, an attribute ascribed to Hitler and carefully stage-managed by Nazi propagandists.143 The ease with which the ‘bohemian corporal’ established his personal authority in the critical period from 1930 to 1933 was conditioned in part by the discourse on dictatorship. It was also facilitated by a deeper craving for a ‘hero’. As we shall see, the calls for a dictator were confined neither to scholarly discourse nor to the realm of political intrigue, but rippled in ever wider circles across German society.144 Not all these calls looked to the military for leadership. In  1919, Heinrich Zellner, the head of the Public Chemical Laboratory in Berlin, engaged in an increasingly bizarre correspondence with Rathenau exhorting him to give up his wealth and lead the country as its messiah (Rathenau eventually asked Zellner to desist from writing to him).145 But of particular importance here is the quest for a ‘charismatic leader’ among bourgeois youth. The interaction between ‘high’ and popular politics with their respective emphases on a ‘strong leader’ prepared the ground for Hitler’s dictatorship initially within and then outside the bounds of the constitution. The myth of the ‘charismatic leader’ emerged simultaneously with the ‘myth of 1914’: the first with Hindenburg’s transmogrification into the ‘Wooden Titan’ and the latter with the idea of national unity under arms.146 After 1918, they became inseparable components of a desire for Germany’s national(ist) rehabilitation (Gesundung). The desire for a hero-leader had deep roots in nineteenth-century German romanticism, but the tenor of its call was determined throughout the 1920s by periods of apparent disunity and weak leadership and cut across the political spectrum. Having read Michail Kuzmin’s novel Deeds of the Great Alexander in the early summer of 1920, Thomas Mann mused in his diary ‘is an approximately similar mythologizing also possible with a historically close subject?147 Mann’s question is answered in the affirmative not only by republican attempts to enrol historical figures such as Goethe and Baron vom Stein to validate the republican project, but also by the nationalist focus on mythological characters as paragons of leadership such as Hagen from the Nibelung saga, the (apparently insatiable) appetite for the ever popular fridericus films glorifying Frederick I of Prussia and the cult of Bismarck.148 In real life, however, the early years of the republic seemed bereft of heroes. The fact of defeat in 1918 characterized the republic as a weakling, its leaders subjected to the bullying of the victor powers. Domestic politics were equally marked by a lack of cohesion and authority. During the war, Hindenburg (not the Kaiser) had come to

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personify national unity, and this appeared to depart with him once he stepped down from his post at the head of the army in 1919. Friedrich Ebert was never able to garner the same sort of unbidden trust of the population, in spite of his acknowledged qualities as a shrewd bridge-builder and his demonstration of decisive leadership as president of the republic.149 Moreover, his presidency was never validated at the ballot box; he was never the ‘plebiscitary president’ according to the terms of Article 41; instead, his legitimacy derived from a vote in the National Assembly and later the Reichstag. Thus, Weimar’s first president may have had the jovial appearance of a Frenchman (hardly a positive attribute at that time), but he lacked the charismatic quality defined by Weber. His authority was functional, while his address to the National Assembly was stilted.150 As president, he had to constantly defend his personal reputation and the dignity of his office against the vitriol of anti-republicans, as we saw in Chapter 5. Ebert’s premature death at the end of February 1925 changed the landscape not only in terms of the republic’s later fortunes, but more immediately in that it released a  pent up public euphoria with the election of Hindenburg to the presidency six weeks later.151 In spite of his ‘retirement’, Hindenburg the war hero was in fact never far from public view. Recent scholarship shows how he and his friends were careful to cultivate and keep alive the ‘Hindenburg Myth’ both before and during his political career.152 Thus, as part of his strategy as a presidential hopeful in 1922 (the election never took place because of domestic and international political tensions), Hindenburg with a small entourage of close advisers undertook a hugely successful tour of the borderland regions of East Prussia, where he was again hailed as the ‘victor of Tannenberg’.153 His election in 1925 coincided with an animated debate on the question of a national monument to commemorate Germany’s war dead.154 At the same time, a decision was taken to erect another monument close to the site of the Battle of Tannenberg (this was finally inaugurated with full military honours on 18 September 1927 in Hindenburg’s presence). The discussion on the Tannenberg Monument and Hindenburg’s election to the presidency added momentum to a nationalist reawakening. It also lent weight to Hindenburg as hero-soldier, especially among conservatives.155 The revitalization of the Tannenberg myth thus contributed to Hindenburg’s mythologization as heroleader; on his eightieth birthday on 2 October, barely two weeks after the inauguration, a depiction of him in the nationalist press portrayed him as the mythical Roland.156 An example, among many, of the power of the hero-myth can be found in the following ditty composed by a Kindergarten nurse and taught to her charges after his election to the presidency in 1925. Hurrah, to [our] dear Hindenburg, To the new President! O guide the German people through Make an end to all calamities. All around shout out loud: Hurrah! Hurrah! The Saviour is there!157

These naïve lines were typical of the letters that came from nurses and schoolteachers. Other verses and letters had more aggressive martial content, almost always referring to Tannenberg and the war. After 1933, this phenomenon of writing in a personal

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manner that also frequently assumed personal intimacy to Hindenburg as ‘brother in arms’ or as ‘father of the nation’ transferred to Hitler.158 This is a phenomenon common to the ‘good king’ folklore of the pre-modern age, and one that took a powerful hold of ordinary Germans especially during the Hitler dictatorship when trying to comprehend the clash between the image of the Führer state and the reality of everyday life conditions was at its most bewildering.159 Even before Hindenburg’s election triumph in 1925, the anecdotal evidence points to an almost irrational adulation among wide sections of Weimar society.160 The roots of Hindenburg’s popularity went deeper than the cultivated ‘myth of 1914’ or the cliché of an ersatz Kaiser.161 In legal-functional terms, his authority was rooted in the Constitution, and he was aware of this, as his acceptance speech before the Reichstag in May 1925 acknowledged.162 Writing at the time, Theodor Heuss (who would become the first president of the Bundesrepublik) remarked that the presidency was only as good as the qualities of the incumbent.163 On becoming president, Hindenburg confounded his critics by asserting his non-partisanship. Within a short time, he had earned the accolade ‘first citizen of the republic’ from a Social Democrat interior minister, as we saw in the Constitution Day celebration of 1928. Indeed, despite the later condemnation for appointing Hitler to the chancellorship, and, in spite of his ambivalence towards the republic, Hindenburg during his first period as president proved himself to be not only its ‘first citizen’ but also its ‘first democrat’.164 While not everyone was seduced by the aura surrounding Hindenburg, with some like the Social Democrat Albert Grzesinski recognizing its medial fabrication, and Theodor Lessing depicting him as a simpleton Junker backwoodsman and a ‘zero’,165 it is clear that the myth provided an antidote to the perceived lacklustre quality of the republic’s politicians. Ernst Troeltsch noted in 1919 a widespread disappointment with government and Reichstag in their handling of both foreign policy and domestic issues where ‘an expansive intellectual characteristic cannot be ascribed to either’.166 Troeltsch was not a critic hostile to the republic, quite the opposite in fact; but his comment mirrors a widespread view of the republic’s leaders even among its supporters. A decade later, Count Harry Kessler provided a withering description of Weimar’s political establishment at a state banquet in October 1930, hosted by the Prussian government at the former Hohenzollern Palace. The attendees made a ‘miserable impression’ on him. Whereas before such an occasion would have provided a grand and illustrious scene, now it revealed ‘a monotonous, shapeless grey mass, such as lice, that pushed through the old baroque splendour like a cloudy day. . . . It was as if grease had established itself in a plush court theatre’.167 There was a dim perception of the republic’s political class. The average Reichstag deputy allegedly ‘draws fat expenses, sleeps late, eats and drinks well in Berlin’s best establishments, and now and again goes to the Reichstag and there makes a mess of everything’.168

Plebiscitary authority as generational revolt By the beginning of the 1930s, criticism of the republic’s political elite, notably of Reichstag deputies, was becoming more vocal. Nor was it confined to anti-republicans

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as we have noted.169 The liberal scholar of international law, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy (who would leave Germany in  1933) observed ‘the astonishing thing about the German parties is that their most conspicuous faults and failings are not those which might easily be explained by their not having reached even their first centenary; on the contrary, they are those generally attributed to old age, or even senility. Garrulous to the point of gossiping and backbiting, obstinate and quarrelsome, these parties show the tendencies of old men . . .’170 This image of the Reichstag as a sanatorium filled with premature ‘old men’ engaged in endless rounds of infighting had seeped deep into the public consciousness by the time Mendelssohn Bartholdy made these comments. It is of little surprise therefore that a wave of nostalgia for a past filled with great men had become part and parcel of contemporary debate. Heinz Flügel, who was born in 1907, recounted how growing up his older brother was captivated by their father’s dress uniform tucked away in a chest in the family home in Berlin’s comfortable suburb of Grunewald. The father had been a general consul in Norway before the war and the family had travelled in South America. The revolution and the financial turbulence that followed ended this privileged life. Their father was forced to retire in 1924 (following the Beamtengesetz of that year), and this constituted a heavy psychological blow to the boys. For the Flügels, the ‘glory’ (Herrlichkeit) of the Kaiserreich was followed by the drab monotony of the republic which appeared to offer little perspective for the future. Heinz recalled how the republic ‘remained for us without glamour, without fascination. The republic radiated nothing. One could not get enthusiastic. It was far too stuffy for it to have meant something to us’.171 From Flügel’s account, the family remained loyal to the ex-Kaiser while at the same time became ‘rational republicans’; the older brother, however, rejected the republic and sought and found ‘glory’ in the paramilitarism of the Nazi Party.172 For the older Flügel boy, whose formative teenage years would have been marked by war and defeat, hunger and revolution, the republic’s leaders – the father generation – appeared lacklustre compared to the generals who had won at Tannenberg.173 In his mid-twenties by the time of the evacuation of the Rhineland and the onset of the depression, Flügel’s brother had experienced the emotions of frustration with a future marred by economic decline; thwarted national pride and resentment as Germany’s international ambitions continued to be dictated by the international community (viz France). Against this background, the republic’s leaders appeared toothless and uninspiring. In private correspondence with Franz Bracht, the lord mayor of Essen,174 Georg Brost, a leader of the arch-conservative German Association of Shop Assistants (Deutsche Handlungsgehilfen Verband  DHV), decried the republic for being a dried well rather than the ‘future font’ (Zukunftsquelle) of the nation’.175 For men such as Brost, the republic had failed to produce the necessary corpus of political personalities (Führerauslese).176 The decorated war hero-turned-journalist Wilhelm Schramm, in a popular book on the republic’s parties published in 1932, described them as composed of ‘men of yesterday’ unable to resolve the problems facing Germany.177 Indeed, there was a widespread sense that Weimar’s political leaders – with an average age in the mid-fifties – were unable to resonate with the people and, in particular, with the younger generation of the country.178

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Rethinking the Weimar Republic

Kessler’s comments on the ‘film of grease’ came barely a fortnight after Hitler’s ‘landslide’ elections on 14 September when six million voters returned 107 Nazi deputies to the Reichstag. Kessler clearly had been disturbed by the size of the gain (an almost tenfold increase in the number of deputies), and one suspects that his comments were partly a response to the failure of the established parties to both hold on to and to attract new votes, especially among youth.179 While the swing to Nazism must also be seen in the context of a general European crisis of parliamentary democracy, there were also factors peculiar to Weimar Germany.180 The 1930 election was a turning point in the republic’s fortunes, not least because it was believed to have been a revolt by the younger generation against ‘the stuff of old men’, as the renegade former Social Democrat August Winnig described the republic.181 In spite of some reservations, the idea of a generation revolt as the backdrop to the landslide election of 1930 has some purchase.182 In  1930, of the 42 million eligible voters, over half (52.38%) were under the age of forty; of these, 12.5 million voters were under the age of thirty, and just over half of these were between 20 and 25 years of age; a further five million were between 30 and 35 years of age.183 These three cohorts together made up the generation of ‘youth’ during the 1920s. In stark contrast, their political representatives were of a different generation altogether. Nearly a sixth of sitting deputies in the Reichstag between 1919 and 1933 had been born before the founding of the empire in 1871 (Table 8.1). Even ‘young turks’ such as the ‘renegade’ Landrat Herbert von Bismarck and his party colleague Gottfried Treviranus on the right of the political spectrum, or at its opposite end the communists Peter Maslowski and Martha Arendsee, or those in the middle such as the liberal Theodor Heuss, or indeed the Social Democrat and feminist Toni Sender, were men and women already in their mid-to-late forties by 1930.184 As Victor Engelhardt remarked at the time, the Reichstag comprised an ageing population; in each of the three parliamentary sessions between December 1924 and Table 8.1  Age profile of Reichstag deputies, 1919–1933 Deputies

Born before 1868

As % deputies

Communist

213

2

0.9

Socialist

341

61

17.9

Liberal

195

50

25.6

Centre

214

33

15.5

Conservatives

212

32

15.1

Others

43

7

16.3

Völkisch

27

3

11.1

1245

188

15.1

Total*

*Excludes the 339 deputies of the NSDAP. Source: Martin Schumacher, M.d.R. Die Reichstagsabgeordneten derWeimarer Republik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Düsseldorf, 1994), ‘Forschungsbericht’, p. 28; (percentages are rounded to nearest point).

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201

May 1928, the proportion of deputies older than fifty years of age rose from 39 per cent to 47 per cent.185 It is not surprising, therefore, that one commentator writing in the conservative Die Tat in 1930 spoke of the ‘Reichstag of old men’.186 The trend was only broken in 1930 with the influx of Nazis, two-thirds of who were under 40 years of age.187 In stark contrast to the mainstream of Weimar’s political elite, the Nazi leadership spanned a much younger cohort from the Front Generation, represented by Hitler and Goering, to those who missed the trench experience by a few years, but who came of age in the revolutionary period, such as Heinrich Himmler. In spite of Michael Kater’s study of the social profile of the Nazi Party and a number of pioneering regional and local studies, we still know relatively little about the cohort of Nazis who entered the Reichstag in September 1930.188 The first cohort of party joiners to the reborn NSDAP in Munich was mostly born in the decade 1890/1900;189 in their early to mid-thirties in 1930, they were a good two decades younger (if not more) than those parliamentarians they despised and sought to depose. Only twelve per cent of Nazi deputies were older than fifty, with Ernst Graf zu Reventlow born in 1869, who made only a short crossing in the Reichstag chamber from the völkisch NFSB to the NSDAP benches in 1927, being one of the oldest. When compared to the SPD, its closest rival in terms of size in the 1930 Reichstag, the NSDAP looked fresh; compared to the KPD, its closest rival on the street, there was little to distinguish it in age terms (Table 8.2). That Nazis entered politics at a young age (in their early twenties in some cases) was nothing unusual, the same can be said of their opponents when they began their political careers; rather, the significance of age is that in 1930 it chimed with a Zeitgeist that proclaimed the end of late nineteenth-century liberal political culture. As we saw in Chapter 2, the experience of war and revolution had taught Social Democrats the language of conciliation as they moved to the centre ground. But this position had become synonymous with stasis by the end of the 1920s, by when a revitalized language of activism had entered the vocabulary of Germany’s ‘youth’ that pitted a romantic Table 8.2  Age profile of the NSDAP, SPD and KPD: Reichstag and party compared to the German population 1930

1932

1931

1933

% of respective cohorts Reichstag deputies

Party

German population

NSDAP

SPD

KPD

NSDAP

SPD

NSDAP

SPD

1830

11.0

-

11.0

37.6

42.2

19.3

31.1

3140

55.0

12.0

58.0

27.9

27.8

27.4

22.0

4050

22.0

34.0

29.0

19.6

17.1

26.5

17.1

50

12.0

54.0

2.0

14.9

12.9

26.8

29.8

Source: Compiled from Victor Engelhardt, ‘Die Zusammensetzung des deutschen Reichstag’, in Die Arbeit 1931, p. 32; E. M. Doblin and C. Pohly, ‘The Social Composition of the Nazi Leadership’, in American Journal of Sociology li, July 1945, 43; Hans Gerth, ‘The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition’. The American Journal of Sociology, xlv, 4 (January 1940), 530.

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Rethinking the Weimar Republic

view of national regeneration of 1914 against the defeat of 1918, and which, as we saw in the case of the older Flügel brother, found its fit with the Nazi mould.190 * From the outset, a large slice of Germany’s youth and much of the so-called Front Generation rejected the republic.191 While many of those who came of age under the republic did not see active service, a number of them, especially students, had been attracted to Free Corps units during the revolutionary period. Many of these youthful Free Corps, referred to at the time as Noske’s ‘regiments of students and lieutenants’, were at the same time members of the notorious violent antisemitic Deutsche Völkische Schutz-und Trutzbund until its banning in 1922 in the wake of Rathenau’s murder. Having failed to see action on the Front in 1914–18, these young men joined such organizations and the Free Corps as part of the counter-revolution. Within a decade of the war’s end, bourgeois youth especially was ‘in the majority filled with a devotion to the nation’ and expressed this by being ‘more militaristic than ever’.192 By the beginning of the 1930s, they or their siblings filled the ranks of organizations with quasi-mythicized notions of ‘trench comradeship’ that either stood in radical opposition to republican democracy such as the Bismarckjugend (from 1931 led by Herbert von Bismarck), or which, like the Jungdeutsche Orden and its enigmatic leader Artur Mahraun, remained ambivalent towards the republic.193 Over time, such youth were to be found in the ranks of the Nazi Sturmabteilungen (S.A.), many having already joined after the dissolution of the Deutsch Völkische Schutz- und Trutzbund.194 While the ‘Front Generation’ went to war in their late teens, there were others too young to have seen action in  1914/18, for them their revolt against the republic was ‘their war’.195 These youth often came from conservative homes where they had been nurtured on a diet of romantic, indeed, Wagnerian, ‘Germanic’ leadership, that continued in school or in the university lecture hall. The Bismarckjugend by 1928 was the second largest youth organization with 42,000 members between the ages of 14 and 25 years of age (although over half its membership was over 20 years old, according to Wolfgang Krabbe) organized in  800 local branches throughout Germany. While most of its members came from middle and upper class families, in the East Elbian provinces they also included the progeny of noble families; while in some cities such as Berlin, it was not unusual for working-class youth to dominate local membership.196 A workingclass presence could be found in some branches of the Nazi Storm Troopers in the capital and in the cities of the industrial Ruhr, leading Conan Fischer to remark on the ‘sociological overlap’ in the ‘free floating’ radicalism of youth politics.197 Joseph Roth’s main character in the novella The Spider’s Web (Der Spinnennetz), the young politically confused Theodor Lohse, a former lieutenant with social aspirations to become ‘something’, is attracted not only to a violent anti-democratic secret organization but also beguiled by the aura of the degenerate prince who, together with shady army officers and senior police officials, endow the impressionable Lohse, one of Germany’s ‘youth without hope’, with a sense of national purpose and a veneer of power in their struggle against the authority-less republic.198 During the critical period leading to the parliamentary reforms of October 1918, Walther Rathenau had appealed to the younger generation to show a unity of will

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203

during the coming days of change. ‘We need leadership and dignity’, he wrote, but within the framework of a democratic state.199 Whether or not democracy based on democratic pluralism could provide this leadership and dignity was the key issue for many of the younger generation. Ernst Jünger (1895), seven-times wounded war hero who had been awarded Pour la mérite – Germany’s highest military honour – and who subsequently achieved fame through his literary accounts of the trenches, emerged as a spokesman of this younger generation. In an article published in the Völkischer Beobachter in September 1923, he complained of the country’s political leaders: ‘Everywhere but where it was demanded to independently create something new, the new leaders failed; they found themselves in front of nothing and clung to the sentiment of lack of vision, precisely in the conditions they claimed to combat’.200 Jünger wrote this in 1923 when the Reich (not republic) was thought to be at its most endangered since 1918, in the face of which the republic’s leaders appeared emasculated. Jünger had an enormous influence on bourgeois German youth. Flügel, for example, spoke of how for a time, he was utterly mesmerized by Jünger’s writings and the mythological power of a heroic ‘Nibelung’.201 The teenage Franz Meyer and his school comrades in the Rhineland felt as heroes when they ‘resisted’ the French by refusing to travel on the ‘Regiebahn’, the railway administered by the occupation authorities, preferring to walk home from Cologne to München-Gladbach.202 Dissatisfaction with what was seen as the debilitating effect of Weimar’s parlia­ mentary system on German ‘manhood’ led Jünger and the generation he spoke for to reject democracy.203 Instead, national renewal was sought through ‘revolution’ and strong leadership. Jünger’s biographer, Helmuth Kiesel, points to the commonplace idealism among bourgeois youth in the interwar period that reified an idea of revolution that was nonetheless distinctive from proletarian revolution. In correspondence with Carl Schmitt shortly after the election of 1930, Jünger wrote of the liberal ‘chatter that fills Europe’ in what he and others like him perceived as the twilight of liberal democracy and called for a clean break from it.204 The idea of a conservative revolution sweeping away the remains of a tattered parliamentary liberalism litters Goebbels’ diaries and also can be found in his vitriolic journalism attacking the republic and its representatives that frequently landed him in court. His defence lawyer, Rüdiger von der Goltz, himself representative of the Front Generation, noted that Berlin’s young Gauleiter merely expressed what millions thought. ‘It was about the freedom of the Reich, of the people, of youth, to which Goebbels also belongs’.205 The Nazi Party was a party of ‘youth’ – as we saw above, the majority (66%) of its 107 deputies in 1930 were in their thirties or younger, reflecting thus the broader movement.206 This is partly illustrated by the biography of Richard Schaller, a former building worker, who joined the NSDAP in 1923 at twenty years of age after a brief flirtation with communism. Schaller entered Cologne’s city council three years later; in 1930, at just 27 years old he entered the Reichstag. After 1933, he replaced Konrad Adenauer as lord mayor of the city, having already risen within the party to deputy leader of the Gau Cologne-Aachen.207 His party colleague Wilhelm Kayser, a clerical employee, was just 17 years old when he joined the NSDAP, becoming (briefly) leader of the Hitler Youth in Cologne.208 As the American political scientist Hans Gerth’s early study of the Nazi Party showed, the cohort of 18–30-year-olds was overrepresented

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Rethinking the Weimar Republic

when measured against the population at large, while that of over 40-year-olds was underrepresented.209 Gerth’s findings had been partly anticipated by Arthur Dix’s study of the September election first published in  1932. First, Dix demonstrated that although the extent of the swing to the Nazis did shock contemporaries, it conformed in his view, to political developments in Germany since 1928. In particular, Dix’s evidence pointed to the fact that the main political parties had peaked in 1924 and since then had been haemorrhaging deputies by around two-thirds of their number. The election in 1930 thus represented the first climax of what Dix was certain to be an ongoing crisis of the political middle.210 The younger cohort of voters, particularly those between the ages of 20 and 30 years whose formative years had been shaped by the war, were looking, in his assessment, for a more combative leadership, which they found in Hitler.211 Dix concluded that the rightward shift among voters, and especially among the young voter, was due in part to the failure – as he saw it – of republican leaders, and in particular of the SPD who had held power since May 1928, to comprehend the needs of this group of society. It represented a revolt against the older generation which appeared locked into a discredited past. Weimar’s leaders had failed to inspire, lead and channel the élan of youth in spite of the programme of republican pedagogy. The Nazi leadership knew how to tap into this emotion of dissatisfaction with the present; as Goebbels reputedly claimed: ‘Whoever has the future, has youth’.212 Their swing to Hitler was thus an expression of the generation gap that had opened between the republic’s leaders and youth. [The] Front generation and young voters found in the Hitler movement the momentum, the outer desire for freedom and the inner discipline that they were seeking. The radicalism was just right for them – and the strong dose of antiSemitism was not, as experience after wars and revolutions shows, a deterrent.213

Nevertheless, one should be cautious not to over emphasize youthful revolt in the turn to authoritarianism under the republic. The role of youth in the swing to the Nazis in September 1930 was challenged by some commentators. For example, Theodor Geiger in his examination of the 1930 election remained unconvinced by the claim that Hitler had overwhelmingly appealed to younger voters, concluding that ‘Even if half of the young new voters since 1928 were to have voted National Socialist that would be only around a million votes’.214 Moreover, neither the Centre Party nor the Bavarian People’s Party with their ageing profiles lost substantial youth votes in these critical years, in spite of some regional variation. Meanwhile, Dix also found that younger voters were as likely not to vote in  1930 as to vote for one of the extreme parties.215 These caveats notwithstanding, the evidence still points to a fatal attraction for a romanticized radical politics among bourgeois youth in particular. The American scholar Luke Springman has shown how this generation was fed on a literary diet of heroes and adventurers.216 By the beginning of the 1930s, it was seeking something radically new. In spite of his charismatic authority, Hindenburg represented the past. Moreover, he was by 1932 perceived by right-wing critics as tainted because of his accommodation with republican policies.217 By contrast, in the tradition of the mythological ‘stranger-king’, Hitler represented the

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205

‘hero outsider’ who returns to his ancestral lands as the ‘authentic’ saviour. Hitler’s appeal lay in the ability to tune into both dissatisfaction with the republic and to appear to offer something new.218 This appeal was put to the test in his challenge for the presidency. Even though Hindenburg prevailed in the end, the support for Hitler was significant, not least because it was mostly concentrated in the heartlands of traditional conservative nationalism.219 As we saw in Chapter 5, efforts were made to instil in students a sense of democratic republican ethos. But this was countered by a nationalist past with a heavy emphasis on myth and nation that also had some affinity to the George Circle in Heidelberg. Conservatives saw in the inherent conflict in Weimar’s parliamentary system an obstacle to a unified Volkswille (people’s will) that was needed to assert authority at both home and abroad. In his commemoration address on the founding of the Reich in 1931 to students and faculty at the University of Greifswald, Wolfgang Stammler, professor of German philology, noted that the Germans ‘torn into parties’ demanded a leader to provide unity. Stammler conjured up a past peopled by leaders who proved their worth by acts of heroism not words.220 Felix Genzmer, rector of the University of Marburg, had expressed similar sentiments albeit in a more provocative tone two years earlier in his inaugural address to faculty and students.221 Increasingly, youth saw in Hitler and those associations under his aegis the hero they sought. By the beginning of the 1930s, the traditional Burschenschaften – which harboured thinly disguised reactionary and antisemitic ideas usually fuelled by drink – were being augmented by membership to the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (NSDStB), which within four years of its founding in 1926 could count 25,000 members in at least 34 universities and institutes of higher learning.222 Outside the universities, the Hitler Youth was also gaining ground.223 Against this background, interior minister Joseph Wirth in his Constitution Day speech in August 1930 focused his attention on Germany’s youth many of whom seemed captivated by the style of leadership projected by the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. In a passage that may have surprised his listeners, Wirth acknowledged, ‘It is for me an almost unnatural if understandable phenomenon that the political youth today persistently calls for a leadership (Führertum) that is operational in the system of dictatorships’.224 But he went on to point out the pitfalls of such an attraction, not least the threat to individual liberty. Wirth concluded with an appeal to youth: You young German men and women don’t turn away even if you believe the political face of the representatives of the German people appears not to show traits that have an affinity and are kindly. Do not be impatient and above all, do not be arrogant. Those who helped you raise the Reich from the great rock of calamity truly do not deserve the dismissive gesture. Their concern, to create new conditions for the formation of political will in Germany and thus to secure the cooperation of all those well-disposed [to this end], is today no less great, as was their preoccupation with regaining external freedom. Radicalism has always killed its own children. It does not improve, it destroys, and there is no fertility in political hatred. Never and nowhere!225

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By the end of the 1920s as the republic’s political culture shifted to the right, ideas on strong leadership could be heard even within democratic circles.226 The attraction for strong authoritarian leadership was particularly pronounced in the generation born in the decade before and at the turn of the century, whose formative years had been overshadowed by war, defeat and humiliation.227 For this ‘generation of no compromise’, many of who would go on to play key roles in the murderous policies of the Third Reich, the republic was an object lesson in failed authority.228 Many of them, such as the jurists Dahm and Schaffstein whom we encountered in Chapter 5, or the constitutional historian Ernst Rudolf Huber from whose work we have drawn, had as young men drunk a lethal cocktail of ideas that drew from the romanticism of Stefan George and his Circle, the extreme national revolutionary activism popularized by Ernst Jünger (and which the young Alexander Mitscherlich found so attractive) and the amoral detachment of constitutional law theorist Carl Schmitt.229 In 1933, they and others like them welcomed Hitler’s appointment and in the early years of the regime, worked to bring about the much vaunted dictatorship of a ‘Third Reich’.230

Conclusion Papen had governed the country using Article 48 after dissolving the Reichstag in mid-September. Under the Constitution, he was obliged to hold new elections within 60 days. The election on 6 November brought little comfort. He had returned to the chancellor’s office for four weeks but without a mandate or the support from the other parties. (Hitler, whose party had suffered losses but still remained the largest faction in the Reichstag, also refused to join the proposed cabinet of ‘national concentration’.)231 Papen also faced dwindling support from within the president’s office. Hindenburg had become increasingly uneasy with the legal and constitutional implications arising from the semi-permanent use of Article 48, for this meant dictatorship in breach of the constitution; moreover, the suspension of Prussia’s caretaker government that summer had been judged illegal by the Reich Supreme Court (Reichsgericht) at the end of October.232 By the beginning of December, Papen found himself isolated and no longer in favour to lead government. In his final cabinet meeting on 3 December, von Papen expressed his satisfaction at having led an administration that had governed ‘in the spirit of conservative state leadership that spelled the end of the liberal era’, and he expressed his hope that the new cabinet headed by Kurt von Schleicher would continue in the same vein.233 By this time, even liberals recognized that the stand-off between the executive and legislature could not continue, but sought to fine tune the Constitution rather than allow its demolition.234 Hardly a democrat of the first degree, von Schleicher, who some saw as a possible ‘military chancellor-cum-dictator’ in the style of Seeckt almost ten years earlier, nonetheless sought a broad coalition spanning diverse political currents – the so-called Querfront – based on a rapprochement with the trades unions, the Centre Party, and the so-called left-wing of the NSDAP gathered around Gregor Strasser that would steer government away from cabinet dictatorship and apparently towards parliamentary politics.235 However, Schleicher’s attempt to lead a unity government

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foundered not least because this went against the grain of all that von Papen and his allies had sought to achieve. And this was his undoing for it alienated him from the bedrock of Germany’s elite, not even his own generals supported him.236 Within weeks of his appointment, Schleicher found himself politically isolated from all sides and without the support of Hindenburg, who had been swayed by the hawks. The arch intriguer Schleicher now became the victim of intrigue and as he fell so too did the last vestige of the republic’s authority.237 The sequence of events leading to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933 has been told in detail elsewhere.238 In a series of brokered negotiations, a Hitler chancellorship seemed inevitable. On 28 January, von Schleicher laid out the alternatives to the president: a majority cabinet under Hitler or a minority cabinet under the General with the likelihood of government by decree. Hindenburg did not want to face the prospect of the latter; that left Hitler.239 The turn to Hitler was part of the attempt by Papen and his ilk to find a consensus based on the unity of an invigorated national body. It was clear to Papen, whom Thomas Mann described as ‘this agile petty reactionary’,240 the presidential and Reichstag elections in the spring and summer had shown that Hitler was able to cut across class, gender and generational lines; his personal vote in the second round of the presidential elections, for instance, had topped a third of the electorate; and even though the Nazis went on to lose two million votes in November 1932, this was still 33 per cent of votes and gave it 196 seats in the Reichstag (down from 230).241 While it would be overstating the case to say that Hitler’s appointment in January 1933 was predetermined, there was an air of inevitability that his time had come, especially among influential industrialists from the Langnamverein, including the magnate Fritz Thyssen and Paul Reusch, who, by late November 1932, universally favoured a Hitler cabinet.242 But as Franz Bracht (Centre Party OB of Essen and a minister in both the Papen and Schleicher cabinets) noted in a private correspondence with his brother-inlaw, the historian Martin Spahn It seems to do less with a change in favour of Hitler than with the belief that a Hitler government cannot be avoided any longer. Under these circumstances one must accelerate Hitler’s entry into government, even if he does not prove himself satisfactorily, and his government, as sceptics in industrial circles assume, only lasts a few weeks.243

Neither Bracht nor Spahn appeared to acknowledge the signs of improvement in the economy that, as Harold James has pointed out, was to stabilize Hitler’s authority and to secure his hold on power.244 Their correspondence was also unclear about the form authoritarian government would take under Hitler. While there was not a clearly unified voice on the right in its call for a ‘revolution from above’ in the form of a unity dictatorship, the expectation in some quarters was that parliament would be excluded from the process of government for once and for all.245 Thus, at the very first cabinet meeting, von Papen, and not just Hitler, argued forcibly for an end to both elections and parliament, and proposed instead an Enabling Law.246 At this point, when conservatives believed that they could ‘box him in’ with the responsibility of government, as Papen later claimed, dictatorship based on the personal authority of Hitler was still neither predetermined nor inevitable.247

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Let us define: Dictatorship is a form of government where one or more members of the state in violation of previously existing law, openly and regularly practice forcibly-gained rule across the entire state without the participation of the nongoverning members.1 He moves into the Wilhelmstrasse not as a dictator who does not recognise any other law other than his own will. It is not a Hitler cabinet, but a Hitler/Papen/Hugenberg government, with many inner contradictions but certainly united in the aim to break fully with what has been. A dangerous experiment one can only accompany with the deepest concern and acute mistrust.2 . . . it is not the State as an impersonal entity which is the source of political power but rather political power is given to the Führer as the executor of the nation’s common will.3

Introduction A participation of the NSDAP in government had been on the table since the late summer of 1932 when negotiations were initiated, faltered and then resumed by the end of the year.4 The intensification of these discussions from the beginning of January resulting in Hitler’s leverage into the chancellorship at the end of the month had taken few by surprise.5 It was not quite ten years since his debut onto the national stage; nevertheless, few observers seemed to know much about his personality or his qualities beyond the obvious. Daniel Binchy, Ireland’s minister to Germany from 1929 to 1932, observed the transformation of the obscure housepainter whom he had first encountered in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich in  1921. ‘In the interval which has elapsed’, Binchy wrote, ‘[Hitler] has gone from strength to strength, and today he is Chancellor of the Reich’. Back in  1921, there was little about the Nazi leader’s physiological appearance to mark him out as a natural leader; indeed, off stage Hitler had appeared to Binchy as nondescript with an ‘opaque’ and ‘pasty’ demeanour. In the intervening years, a different character had emerged, one possessing the qualities of a charismatic Führer. Binchy asked: ‘One may well ask: what manner of man is this?’ and proceeded to provide the answer: Some have attempted to explain Hitler’s ascendancy by his eloquence, others by his genius for propaganda, others again by the fact that he stands on the same

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intellectual plain as the bulk of his followers. While these are contributory factors, the personality of the man himself cannot be left out of account. . . . the real secret of his power lies in his fanatical, almost mystic, belief in himself and his mission.6

Binchy’s conclusion on Hitler’s self-belief that partly accounted for his allure as a leader was not necessarily widely evident at the time he came to power. Carl Schmitt, for instance, in his diary contemptuously referred to ‘the dummy, derisory Hitler’.7 Older historical works portray Hitler as a cunning political operator with singular purpose, and yet the evidence also points to a man whose temperament was volatile and with a tendency to vacillation. The gap between the public persona and private personality was well known to Goebbels, whose diaries refer to Hitler’s charismatic authority in public and to his indecisiveness in private. Even carefully choreographed public encounters could be hit and miss in relation to ‘the boss’, as he liked to refer to Hitler. Indeed, we occasionally get a glimpse of Hitler in Goebbels’ diaries prior to 1932 as the charismatic leader without natural authority.8 And yet, within a short space of time of coming to power, Hitler was able to establish his unbounded authority. Like his Irish contemporary Binchy, the German writer-in-exile Sebastian Haffner domiciled in London in 1940 asked how did Hitler, a man with few talents and lacking in moral compass, emerge from the wings of Weimar’s political stage to occupy its centre as ‘leader’ of the nation? Everyone who is able and willing to seize power, to rule and to lead, will find in Germany an immense crowd to obey and follow him with joy and relief. . . . We cannot here go into details as to how and why. Suffice it to say that the justified wish for authority and good government has, with many Germans, turned into a cheap and vulgar worship of naked brute force. Sheer power empty of content is exercising an ever-increasing magic spell on the present generation of Germans. A sultry and oppressive mass-masochism is widespread. The “strong man” rouses their enthusiasm, the government that “strikes hard.” That is the state of mind which Hitler found and fostered.9

At the heart of Haffner’s polemic lies an astute observation that also requires some qualification.10 For there were three sources to this unbounded authority after 1933: first, popular acclamation as originally envisaged in Article 41 and underpinned by the oath of loyalty to Hitler as chancellor and Führer at the end of August 1934; secondly, unhindered legal empowerment to act independently of institutional constraints and finally, enforcement of power through the use of legal terror. In this brief postscript, we will see how the development of these three sources in the early years of the Third Reich paved the way for the unbounded authority of Hitler’s ‘Führer State’ that would eventually allow him to propel the country towards war and destruction in 1939.11 * In 1933, all parties to the right of the Social Democrats sought to participate in the so-called national rising (‘nationale Erhebung’), though this does not mean that they shared a common understanding of what this meant. The leader of the BVP Fritz Schäffer and Dr Kaas from the Centre Party complained bitterly that their parties had been excluded from the possibility of a national unity government in spite of their

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willingness to engage in negotiations with Hitler (and Papen).12 The stumbling block appears to have been the question of the future existence of the Reichstag, which Kaas still considered an integral part of constitutional arrangements. Hitler let it be known that the Centre Party had not been prepared to cooperate with his demand for a twelvemonth suspension of the Reichstag and therefore saw little common ground for cabinet collaboration.13 Hitler used this ‘failure’ to establish a ‘government of the majority’ as an excuse to ask Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections in the hope that the basis for a majority government (but based on a NSDAP/DNVP coalition, not a single party) could be achieved.14 With the Reichstag dissolved and elections set for 5 March, supported by Papen and Hindenburg’s secretary, Meissner, Hitler’s confidence grew. The election of 5 March and the local elections of 12 March in Prussia with their overwhelming support for the government were interpreted by Hitler as popular validation of his personal authority.15 Between both of these elections, the Nazi Party seized power at regional and local levels, so that by mid-March ‘the political situation had been clarified’, as Göring put it.16 On the evening of Hitler’s appointment, a torchbearing crowd estimated by the Berlin police to number between 15,000 and 17,000 paraded the Wilhelmstrasse erupting in jubilation when Hindenburg and Hitler appeared separately at windows in the old and new chancelleries.17 Harrison Brown in a broadcast for the BBC from Berlin noted: ‘This is the first time that there has been public acclamation of a new Chancellor’.18 Beyond his immediate supporters, this public euphoria was less for Hitler than for the government of national unity. Many ordinary Germans believed that in the duopoly of Hitler-Papen they had been finally delivered a strong and decisive government. Luise Solmitz, a conservative schoolteacher from Hamburg, captured middle-class expectations in her diary: And what did Dr H. bring us? The news that his double, Hitler, is Chancellor of the Reich! And what a Cabinet!!! One we didn’t dare dream of in July. Hitler, Hugenberg, Seldte, Papen!!! On each one of them depends part of Germany’s hopes. National Socialist drive, German National reason, the non-political Stahlhelm, not to forget Papen. It is so incredibly marvellous that I am writing it down quickly before the first discordant note comes, for when has Germany ever experienced a blessed summer after a wonderful spring? Probably only under Bismarck. What a great thing Hindenburg has achieved! Huge torchlight procession in the presence of Hindenburg and Hitler by National Socialists and Stahlhelm, who at long last are collaborating again. This is a memorable 30 January!19

The March election was not a plebiscite. But drawing on the conservative discourse on the national unity value of plebiscitary relations between leader and led, within eight months of the March elections Hitler appealed directly to the country in a straight yes/no vote on withdrawing from the League of Nations. The success of this plebiscite set the pattern for the remainder of his rule. He no longer needed the approval of the (emasculated) Reichstag, the Party, and after August 1934, of the presidency for his decisions, particularly in the field of foreign policy (where often, the plebiscite came

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after the act, not before). Instead, his authority was ‘mandated’ directly by the ‘will of people’. The idea of the ‘authentic national community’ was inextricably bound up with the idea of a charismatic plebiscitary authority. The basis for Hitler’s charismatic authority was much more complex, both before and after 1933, as his biographer Ian Kershaw has shown.20 But there was clearly also strong popular acclamation, first determined by domestic economic policy and then increasingly by foreign policy successes, as we saw in Chapter 3. But accompanying this positive element of Hitler’s plebiscitary leadership after 1933, which on the surface at least appeared little different to that debated by the republic’s founders or that found elsewhere,21 was a very different facet as we shall see. Meanwhile, his authority was bolstered by implementing a series of public works schemes resolving urban unemployment among males and diminishing the threat of the sort of communist radicalism discussed in Chapter 4, through the creation of  work battalions; thus, the country was quickly put back to work. Having learnt from the failure  of government in the previous two years, Hitler’s cabinet passed a number of measures to deal with Germany’s dire economic problems that also benefited from the economic cycle, as evidence suggested the nadir of the depression had been reached in the winter of 1932/33.22 Within a half year of announcing the ‘Battle for Work’, the regime saw the level of unemployment reduced by half, sinking to below three million by the spring of 1934 and continued to fall.23 An illustration of the drop in unemployment can be found in Lower Saxony in June 1935, where the number of unemployed had fallen by over 80 per cent of the level of 1933 to just 66,521. Nonetheless, there was grumbling over high dues on wages, especially among public employees, while in the private sector full employment brought with it a whole new set of difficulties for the regime, not least that of labour discipline. There were also complaints from within the old Mittelstand of trade and crafts that the regime did little to alleviate its ongoing precarious condition.24 But such complaints never posed a serious challenge to the regime. Moreover, middle and working-class stake-holding in the Third Reich became increasingly anchored in national fervour that hinged on Hitler’s foreign policy successes, notably the remilitarization of the Rhineland in February 1936.25 The grumbling Mittelstand were partly bought-off by material gains resulting from measures expropriating Jewish-owned businesses.26 In general, the regime mollified the sceptical through overturning the material insecurity and the ‘national shame’ that had plagued the republic while pursuing its opponents mercilessly. * The period between the dissolution of the Reichstag on 1 February and the elections of 5 March was critical for establishing Hitler’s unbounded authority as dictator. Karl Dietrich Bracher has referred to this period as ‘pseudo-plebiscitary’ in which Hitler’s authority was founded on popular acclamation but underpinned by terror.27 While there was no blue print for this, the pieces of the jigsaw for laying the foundations of untrammelled power fell into place. A combination of legal measures and intimidation was employed that reached from the cabinet table down to the

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local level. In particular, Frick, who had some experience of government having been education minister in Thuringia, together with Göring led the charge in cabinet (Hitler proved to be much more cautious), demanding new measures to curb communists allegedly engaged in ‘terrorist’ activity. It was Göring who at a ministerial meeting on 2 February pushed for the ‘seizure of power’ in Prussia via the ballot box, suggesting 12 March for elections to the local councils whose ‘composition no way at all corresponded to the mood of the population’. Meanwhile, at the same meeting Frick presented a draft for a decree for ‘the protection of the German people’, which was clearly aimed at curbing the ability of the opposition parties to wage a campaign during the coming election.28 The foundations for Hitler’s authority proceeded to be laid over the course of the next twelve months through a series of laws that provided a framework of legality to dictatorship, although some of these, such as the Enabling Act (23 March 1933), established untrammelled executive authority by removing parliament from political decision-making. Similarly, the Reichsstatthaltergesetz (7 April 1933) resolved the thorny issue of dualism arising from the jealously guarded autonomy of the federal states.29 This law, which was already in the making under von Papen, sought to centralize the decision-making authority of the Reich and was consolidated a year later with the Gesetz über den Neuaufbau des Reichs (30 January 1934), frequently portrayed as one of the cornerstones of Nazi ‘co-ordination’ (Gleichschaltung) but in effect implementing long-discussed reforms for a unitary state going back to the constitutional debates of 1919.30 The destruction of the Weimar political party system in the summer of 1933 was described by Goerdeler as ‘a great deed’ (‘große Tat’) on the path to the ‘authentic national community’, even though he saw the unchecked influence of the Nazi Party in the sphere of government administration as a hindrance to achieving this.31 The government also set about completing the work of the Reichsreform begun by von Papen and aimed at resolving the Reich/Land dualism. Here too, Schmitt played a role in the development towards dictatorship (although it must be pointed out, he was not alone in this among experts on state theory).32 His address to the Handelshochschule that January on the occasion of the founding of the Reich dealt with the issue of the unitary state, as too did a radio lecture in February.33 He had already by his own account become a ‘moderately famous man’ through his role in defending von Papen’s strike against the Prussian government heard before the Reichsgericht in the late autumn 1932. His formidable reputation arising from his role in this dispute led to his participation in formulating the Reichsstatthaltergesetz.34 Schmitt had quickly accommodated himself to the Third Reich. If he was still undecided about the potentials of the NSDAP in February,35 by March he was providing justification for the Enabling Law.36 His lecture at the spring conference of the Association for State Sciences Training (Vereinigung für Staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung) in Weimar (27 March) was on the ‘Law of Sovereignty and the Enabling Law (Souveränitätsrecht und Ermächtigungsgesetz)’, which was enthusiastically received by his audience (Großer Beifall) and which left him more than a little satisfied.37 But the early conservative euphoria surrounding the revitalization of authority quickly gave way to disillusionment in some quarters. The critique of the Party

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leadership contained in von Papen’s Marburg Speech on 17 June 1934, in which the vice chancellor called on Hitler to reassert conservative authority from above by curbing the excesses of the (SA-initiated) ‘revolution from below’,38 reflected conservative ideas on the exclusive role of pouvoir d’êtat. Another example of the gap between the conservative idea of authority and Hitler’s unfolding dictatorship is found in a reform programme formulated by Carl Goerdeler in the autumn of 1934. While Goerdeler praised Hitler for eliminating Weimar’s party-system, he complained about the retention of the Nazi Party as a pillar of the regime’s authority at the expense of the state, thus continuing the ‘curse of the Weimar system’ and polycratic chaos. In its place, he called again for strong plebiscitary leadership as the sole basis for the authoritarian state.39 According to Reinhard Mehring, Schmitt too appears to have had reservations about the development of a hydra-headed authority under Hitler long before Goerdeler or Papen expressed theirs. In a review critical of the ‘illegality’ of unbounded National Socialist radicalism published in July 1933, Schmitt made the case for the traditional national-conservative idea of authoritarian government by emphasizing the continuity from von Papen’s Reichsexekution against Prussia and the present policy of ‘co-ordination’ under Hitler’s ‘people’s chancellorship’.40 Schmitt may have liked to present himself as a radical thinker, but his instinct was for conservative order imposed from above, and not the excesses of revolution from below. Mehring argues that Schmitt soon realized that the regime had its own ideas on the nature of authority.41 But Schmitt was extremely adaptable, adjusting his politics to the time. He had moved to the University of Cologne that year – replacing the liberal professor of jurisprudence and state theory Hans Kelsen (who lost his position as a result of his Jewish ancestry). From this position, Schmitt produced article after article, very often for the Nazi Westdeutscher Beobachter legitimating the policies and actions of the regime (as we shall see below). But as with most nationalists and conservatives such as Goerdeler and Papen who had done so much to bring about the ‘total state’, Schmitt found himself after a phenomenal rise, eventually frozen out of the picture from 1936.42 Nevertheless, long after his star had reached its zenith, Schmitt still could not desist from trying to defend his status of ‘star lawyer’ of the Third Reich that had been gained in the early years of the Hitler state.43 * Post-war accounts often portray Hitler’s collaborators as having opted for a Hitlerled cabinet albeit dominated by traditional conservatives as the ‘lesser evil’ to avert a putative military dictatorship of Schleicher. Once in cabinet, they were outfoxed by the ‘bohemian corporal’ who could not be tamed by the responsibility of office.44 This version of events in 1933 suits those fellow travellers who survived the Third Reich for it exculpates them of primary responsibility for what followed by collectively reducing them to supporting cast at best. This is especially true where the question of the regime’s ultimate violent character is concerned.45 Even the realization from the mid1930s at the latest among a number of fellow travellers of the widening gap between their vision of authoritarian state and that of Hitler’s dictatorship cannot obscure the fact that in the early years of the regime the violent enforcement of the authoritarian state was condoned among elites.46 This legal ‘machinery of terror’, as Eberhard Kolb

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has referred to it, was vital to establishing the dictatorship during the first few months of 1933. There was already an indication of where things were going in the style and tone of Hitler’s presentation of his government’s programme in the Garrison Church at Potsdam on 21 March- the so-called Tag von Potsdam (Day of Potsdam).47 But the violent character of the new regime was revealed during the introduction of the Enabling Law, allegedly against Hindenburg’s better judgement, two days later to the assembled Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin’s Tiergarten.48 For nearly fifty minutes on the evening of 23 March, Hitler harangued the ninetyfour SPD deputies in the chamber,49 using humour, violent language and threats of physical violence against the so-called Marxist enemies of the ‘national revolution’ (‘nationale Erhebung’). They were to be ‘extirpated’ (‘auszurotten’) from the national body, and publicly hanged, a proposal that met with stormy applause from both Nazi and DNVP deputies.50 This speech, lasting around fifty minutes, should not be seen only as an example of Hitler’s characteristic intemperate demagogy, but also as a conscious announcement of authority grounded in violence. In the unlikely event that the Reichstag voted against the proposal, he concluded that his government was ‘determined and ready to deal with a rejection: Gentlemen, you can decide for yourselves if it is to be war or peace’. This throwing down of the gauntlet to a defeated opposition was interspersed by rowdy laughter and concluded with prolonged rapturous applause from the Nazi and DNVP deputies.51 In a brief (ca. ten minutes) and what can only be described as limp response to Hitler’s speech, the Social Democrat chairman Otto Wels vainly tried to justify his party’s policies since 1918 and even offered to cooperate with the government in the Reichstag (no doubt in the misplaced hope that this would obviate the need for the law).52 Hitler responded with a 25-minute tirade and taunts that also brimmed with violent references; and these too received an enthusiastic reception, while the SPD deputies sat mostly silently throughout the proceedings.53 This last sitting of the Reichstag based on the last (albeit questionable) election to occur under the Constitution lasted barely two hours, from a quarter past six until ten to eight in the evening. Outside the chamber, according to one British eye witness, thousands of young Nazis chanted ‘We demand the Enabling Law’.54 The episode can hardly be described as politics, but as a piece of staged political theatre that ended the remaining semblance of parliamentary authority, replacing it by ostensibly cabinet dictatorship for a period of four years.55 The Enabling Law was welcomed even by the liberal Vossische Zeitung, which described it as a ‘law of fate’ (Schicksalsgesetz) that was necessary to secure domestic stability as the precondition for Germany to strengthen its negotiating position visà-vis France and Britain in Geneva later that year.56 It was hailed as the ‘basic law’ of the Third Reich, even though as we have seen such a measure was not an invention of the Nazis. As required under the Weimar Constitution and as on the previous two occasions of its utilization, it had to have a two-thirds majority. This was achieved first by the hounding of Communist deputies from the Reichstag and the arrest or intimidation of a large number of Social Democrat deputies, and secondly, by securing the Centre Party’s acquiescence (the rump of the liberal Staatspartei also voted in favour, leaving the SPD an isolated minority). It is tempting to speculate how Hitler and von Papen would have reacted had this support not been forthcoming, given that

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Centre Party leaders Prelate Ludwig Kaas, Johannes Bell and Ludwig Perlitius had misgivings about suspending the Reichstag for a year let  alone the four years that was eventually voted on.57 The statements by Kaas and by Schäffer from the Bavarian People’s Party indicate that they believed that they and the Reichstag would have a role to play via a consultative committee, and which had been assured by Hitler – although final written confirmation was never forthcoming.58 Apparently, only Brüning expressed an objection to supporting the law during the intensive discussions within the leadership, but he acceded to the majority consensus and duly voted with his party.59 The vote on the 23rd was thus partly based on a false premise that the Reichstag would have a (albeit diminished) role to play in government (similar to its role under the Enabling Acts in the early 1920s); the leaders of the middle parties were however subjectively weakened and acted from a defensive position, even though objectively Hitler needed their support.60 However, their vote for this Enabling Act represented less an approval for a Hitler dictatorship than an affirmation of government by constitutional dictatorship as framed by more than ten years of Weimar state theory discourse. Meanwhile, buoyed by the success of his Reichstag performance and the foregone conclusion of the vote on the Enabling Law, Hitler returned to the cabinet table the next day ‘endlessly happy’ that ‘National Germany has come together’.61 * As we have seen elsewhere in this study, state-sponsored violence had been a feature of Weimar politics, especially during the early years of the republic. As such, the violence that accompanied the initial securing of the Nazi regime was not an innovation. It was an attribute that was common to the quest for authority in both its democratic and authoritarian contexts and mirrored the heightened tension of a ‘state of siege’ (whether actual or perceived). On 8 March in Machower Forest, the corpses of three workers from Berlin were discovered, two of whom, a house decorator (Tapezierer) Fritz Nitschmann and 19-year-old Hans Balkuschat, were riddled with bullet wounds. The following day in Braunschweig, a member of the SPD Hans Saile was murdered during a raid by SA men on the offices of the party newspaper Volksfreund. On 11 March, a 22-year-old worker Erich Maier from Spandau was ‘arrested’ by SA men enrolled as auxiliary police and beaten up; they then shot him and dumped his body just north of Potsdam.62 These killings were both part of the violent culture of ‘street politics’ that had characterized late Weimar (see Table 5.3) and an expression of the Nazi euphoria that accompanied the Reich elections of 5 March and the Prussian municipal elections a week later on 12 March.63 The violence of the early weeks and months of Hitler’s regime was frequently a ‘settling of scores’ as local Nazis sought retribution against their opponents – a notable instance of which was the murder of the Social Democrat Otto Eggerstedt and former police president of Altona in October by his Nazi guards in the concentration camp of Esterwegen in Emsland (Oldenburg).64 Thus, as in  1918, interpersonal violence in Hitler’s ‘national revolution’ of 1933 played an auxiliary role; it was mostly ad hoc and not necessarily centrally directed; indeed, the Nazi leadership like its conservative partners who recoiled at the violence was ambivalent for the most part but found it useful nevertheless.65 More important was the element of intimidation and uncertainty brought about by

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arrests. On coming to power, the Nazis or their close collaborators took control of the most important posts after the chancellorship: namely, the offices of the interior and justice ministries. At Reich level, the interior minister was now Wilhelm Frick, who had served time with Hitler at Landsberg Fortress prison in 1924. The justice ministry remained in the hands of one of Papen’s associates, Franz Gürtner, who had in 1924, as Bavarian justice minister played a key role in Hitler’s relatively light treatment. In the two largest states, Prussia and Bavaria, these key ministerial posts of the interior and justice were respectively held by Göring and Hanns Kerrl and Heinrich Himmler and Hans Frank. Within two weeks of passing the Decree, over 7,099 persons had been arrested in Prussia, mostly but not exclusively communists, including Ernst Torgler and the party leader Ernst Thälmann; a further 3,669 arrests were made by the end of the month; the round-ups continued into the summer. Those who had not yet been taken into ‘protective custody’, such as Rudolf Breitscheid, went on the run in fear of their lives although in Breitscheid’s case as in that of former Prussian interior minister Ernst Heilmann and Bavaria’s Social Democrat state prosecutor Wilhelm Hoegner, escape was brief.66 By the end of July according to official data, 26,789 people were in ‘protective custody’ throughout Germany, the overwhelming majority of who were in Prussia (14,906) followed by Saxony (4,500) and Bavaria (4,152).67 The mass arrests of political opponents under the pretext of ‘protective custody’ (Schutzhaft) first used in this manner during the final years of the war and in the revolutionary turmoil of late 1918–early 1919, and speed trials, first before the ordinary courts and from 23 March, before the Sondergerichte mentioned in Chapter 5, were instrumental in securing the regime’s and Hitler’s unbounded authority. The Decree for the Protection of People and State using Article 48 passed in the wake of the Reichstag fire on 28 February, but discussed well in advance of this, initiated the legal framework for state terror by suspending basic individual rights, while the Reich Law on the Passing and Carrying out of the Death Penalty on 29 March allowed for retrospective application of the death penalty for arson as laid down in the February Decree by rescinding the principle of nullum crimen sine poena in order to impose a death sentence on Marinus van der Lubbe, the alleged culprit.68 The significance of these two measures lies in their transgressive nature.69 Hindenburg expressed his unease with a decree that applied punishment retro­ spectively nor did he think van der Lubbe’s public hanging desirable; even Gürtner’s representative at cabinet, state secretary Franz Schlegelberger, cautioned against a retrospective application of law, but this did not deter Hitler, Frick and Göring. As Hitler declared to the cabinet, ‘The German public expected that van der Lubbe should hang. He [Hitler] could not accept the principle “law must remain law” if it meant that the entire life of the state would be destroyed as a result’.70 The ‘Reichstag Fire’ decree was an emergency measure passed using Article 48, and as stipulated by the constitution could only be of temporary duration. It was passed, however, ‘until further notice’, and, together with the Enabling Law, provided the legal basis for dictatorship.71 Thus, it soon became clear that such exceptional measures were part of a more thoroughgoing transformation of the state from ‘dictatorship within the bounds of the constitution’ to unbounded dictatorship outside the constitution in which law was retrospectively

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harnessed to the extra-legal state. Law thus assumed a completely different quality to its authoritarian version that we discussed in Chapter 5. A dramatic example of this retrospective application of law to legalize extra-legal acts came in the wake of the murderous purge of the SA at the end of June that finally settled any challenges (real or putative) to Hitler’s leadership as well as old scores.72 As we saw earlier in this book, authority in 1918 had been caught in a matrix that was either being cast from above or radically engineered from below. In 1933, Hitler and his conservative allies found themselves in a similar situation that culminated in the so-called Röhm Affair of 30 June, a bloody purge that had much wider implications for the establishment of unbounded authority than simply ending the so-called second revolution demanded by the grass roots of the Nazi movement. Von Papen initially shocked and outraged at his own detention as well as the arrest of five of his close advisers  and the murder of two, Hans von Böse and Edgar Julius Jung, must have realized that he was cast in the role of Faust to Hitler’s Mephisto. Clearly, Hitler did not need to be told how to keep his house in order, least of all by his erstwhile ‘mentor’.73 Papen wrote to the chancellor on 14 July (after Hitler had publicly exonerated him of any suspicion of being disloyal) declaring his unswerving fidelity.74 The paradox with ‘Operation Kolibri’ on 30 June is that while it represented a pact between Hitler and the national-conservative elites, especially the military, it also freed him from the potential constraints of this arrangement. Over one hundred persons were murdered over a two to three day period, of which around half belonged to the SA.75 Among the murdered included erstwhile fellow travellers turned foe: Gustav von Kahr, the former commissar of Bavaria at the time of the Beer Hall Putsch; Gregor Strasser, his rival within the leadership of the party; and General von Schleicher, who had sought to neutralize Hitler in 1932. At this point at the very latest, it must have been clear what the true nature of the regime was and on what Hitler’s authority was based.76 To allay the widespread unease among the population that had emerged in the days following the purge (in spite of some public satisfaction that the over-weaning S. A. had been curbed), Hitler gave a one and half hour speech to the Reichstag on 13 July justifying the murderous action as an act of state self defence.77 He sent a clear message to those who would dare challenge his authority (including those among the conservative fellow travellers associated with the reactionary Herrenklub) that he alone decided what constituted a ‘national emergency’ and that he would always be decisive and take ruthless action beyond the bounds of legality in order to defend his position.78 As Schmitt had bluntly asserted in 1922, ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the [state of] exception’.79 In an interview with Professor Pearson, the Director of the College of Liberal Arts at Drake University Des Moines and a former American ambassador to Poland and Finland, Hitler reiterated that his action sought to pre-empt a ‘military mutiny’ that would have led to civil war.80 Other accounts depict Hitler returning to Berlin from Bavaria on the evening of the 30th as chastened by the whole affair.81 Nonetheless, his Reichstag speech was a personal triumph and exuded the confidence of assured leadership. If before the 13 July, the public response to the purge had shifted from initial acceptance to consternation at the scale and scope of the killings, Hitler’s speech removed the crisis of trust in the regime and in his leadership in particular that had

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briefly arisen in the days following the murders. According to foreign consular reports, the mood lifted and a general approval of his decisive action could be registered. But the event had exposed unequivocally the violent foundations of his authority. Hitler’s sober comment on the affair in cabinet on 3 July made this clear: ‘The example he has made [of Röhm et al] would be a healthy lesson for all time’.82 Germany’s conservative elite was thus intimidated into silence. But there were also those who openly welcomed this act of violence. Hindenburg sent a message (probably written by Meissner) to both Hitler and Göring thanking them for their decisive action thwarting a national catastrophe.83 In a later interview, Major General Walter von Reichenau praised Hitler’s ‘decisionism’ and justified von Schleicher’s murder stating that the former military chancellor had brought it upon himself by swaying too far into the murky world of politics.84 Reichenau was himself implicated in the action of the 30 June and therefore could hardly state the contrary. Carl Schmitt on the other hand was an observer from the sidelines, and his selfimportance (and possibly a sense of self-preservation given his earlier association with Schleicher) moved him to add a legal gloss to this event. The regime retrospectively ‘legalised’ the action on 3 July with the introduction of the Laws on Measures of State Self Defence (Gesetz über Maßnahmen der Staatsnotwehr).85 In direct reference to this law and to Hitler’s Reichstag speech on 13 July, Schmitt published a headline article ‘The Führer Protects the Law’ in the Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, in which law was made synonymous with Hitler’s ‘will’.86 In this article, Schmitt attacked the ‘empty legalism’ of law resulting in ‘inauthentic neutrality’ under the republic. He went on to agree with Hitler’s comment in his Reichstag speech that the Bismarckian state had collapsed in 1918 because it had failed to use its wartime powers at the decisive moment. Instead, it had become paralysed by the liberal concept of a state governed by the ‘rule of law’ (‘Rechtsstaat’) and thus unable to act against mutineers and state enemies.87 ‘All the experiences and warnings of the history of Germany’s misfortune are alive in [Hitler]. . . . The Führer takes the lessons of German history seriously’.88 And according to Schmitt’s reasoning, this allowed Hitler, on the basis of his position as ‘the true leader’ (‘der wahre Führer’) and thus the nation’s highest legal office (oberster Gerichtsherr), to unleash the bloody purge of 30 June in a decisive act of national defence. ‘In truth, the act of the Führer was true justice. It is not subordinated to justice, but was itself the highest form of justice’. And for Schmitt, this authority unlike the use of dictatorial powers under the republic was neither bounded by legal paragraphs nor was it temporary.89 Citing his student, Ernst Rudolf Huber, Schmitt pointed out that in the Führer state, there was no separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. ‘Content and scope of justice is determined by the Führer himself ’.90 Such a justification of exclusive authority did much to underpin the developing (legal/extra-legal) ‘dual state’ that Ernst Fraenkel was to incisively deconstruct a few years later.91 Importantly, Schmitt constantly referred back to the war and revolution of 1918 as the supreme justification for Hitler’s purge of the ‘inner enemy’. Schmitt had already signalled a rejection of bourgeois legal principles at the Gau conference of the BNSDJ in Cologne in February 1934, where he defended the lex van der lubbe and made the distinction between ‘legitimate’ law based on the spirit of National Socialism and the norms of legal

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formalism.92 The potentials for the instrumentalization of law elucidated in this lecture to the assembled (Nazified) legal profession were fully realized in ‘The Führer Protects the Law’. In many respects, Schmitt’s article represented the logical outcome of his thinking on ‘exceptional dictatorship’ and the themes of ‘legitimacy and legality’ and ‘the protector of the constitution’, as well as his barely concealed opportunism. The broader implication of this was the signal it gave for the synchronization of the state with the person of Hitler. As far as Schmitt was concerned and in common with conservative thinking as we have seen, electoral suffrage under liberal democracy based on political pluralism had ‘atomized’ the Volk and paralysed the state. The Third Reich with Hitler as the ‘nomos of the German people’ unified people and state and activated the nation.93 If Schmitt and others provided a legal theoretical ‘forward defence’ of the ‘Führer state’ as a total state, the ‘people’ through its ‘will’ sanctioned it with their consent.94 As Pearson concluded in his interview with Hitler, the average man and woman in the street approved of the bloody action and placed trust fully in ‘their Führer’.95

Conclusion While the dictatorship that unfolded under Hitler shared certain traits with conser­ vative ideas of the authoritarian state, it also had its own distinguishing features which increasingly came to the fore.96 Until the mid-1930s, the dictatorship appeared in its key features to merely realize nationalist discourses on authority. The Papen-Hitler Enabling Law not only removed the Reichstag from law making, but also limited the presidential prerogative since this was rendered superfluous by the law which gave the cabinet carte blanche to govern without recourse to emergency legislation.97 It is also worthy to remind ourselves that Hitler in his letter to Frick ‘requesting’ the merger of the office of chancellor with that of the position of party leader in August 1934, under the pretext that the title of ‘Reich president’ had become synonymous with the person of Hindenburg and therefore unrepeatable, consigned to history the Weimar institution of the presidency. The resulting statute formally inaugurated the ‘Führer state’ while the plebiscite of 19 August underpinned its popular base.98 The Danish ambassador to Berlin remarked how Hitler, the ‘charismatic leader’, was now equipped with powers greater than any world leader.99 Some might have quibbled with that assertion; certainly, other foreign diplomats while acknowledging the expansion of Hitler’s authority, did not go quite as far as Herluf Zahle in his assessment. One reason for this was the preparedness on the part of some of the population to reject the Führer state in a visible show of defiance at the plebiscite.100 But while there were grumblings of dissatisfaction within the population, such open defiance had all but disappeared by the plebiscite of March 1936 in the wake of the remilitarization of the Rhineland with its 99 per cent ‘Yes’ vote of approval for this action; thus, on the surface at least, Hitler appeared to finally achieve the total state that had been debated and proposed but never realized, since 1916.101 Indeed, popular responses to the regime by 1935/36 (including the perennial grumbling over regulations, the allegations of corruption of the so-called little Hitlers – the local party leaders, the complaints about material shortages, prices and the economy generally)

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suggest a disappointment that the realization of the Volksgemeinschaft – as an expression of the harmonious unity of the people – had still not been achieved, as we saw in the complaint by Goerdeler (conversely, elements within the regime complained of the lack of ‘national socialist understanding’ on the part of the population).102 Manipulation and coercion notwithstanding, the total support for Hitler in the plebiscite of 1936 might be understood as a cementing from below this desire for unity a sort of ‘charisma from below’ that vindicated unbounded authority.103 And there is no doubt that Hitler’s personal popularity hardly wavered in the pre-war years of the regime.104 Thus, it was the powerful and sustaining myth of authority as a response to crisis and originating in World War I that enabled Hitler and his paladins to exert authoritarian controls over the population as it was steered towards war and eventual genocide. Functional dictatorship in the modern world could only operate in tandem with the assent of the people in a symbiosis of authoritative order (Herrschaftsordnung) and popular order (Volksordnung) that provided the foundation for unbounded dictatorship.105 Under the republic, plebiscitary authority was enshrined in Article 41 of the Weimar Constitution and its broad principle of plebiscitary acclamation was never directly challenged, either before or after 1933. Indeed, after the passing of the Law on Plebiscites (14 July 1933), it became both the bedrock and the fig leaf of Hitler’s unbounded authority.106 Germans lost their rights as active citizens after the passing of the February Decree, and now they were recast as passive-active (acclamatory) citizens of the total state; ‘unity’ with the Führer meant his actions were the expression of their will.107 As Schmitt put it, under liberalism Germans had enjoyed individual liberties but not the collective ‘freedoms’ encapsulated in the unrestrained authority of the Führer state.108 A comment by Thomas Mann in his diary on the psychological condition of Germans at that time probably sums up better than most, the grounds for enthusiasm for Hitler. ‘The German will to legend and myth, which is purely a will against truth, against intellectual honesty, emerges again at this time and is particularly striking’.109 This (psychological) proclivity was to manifest itself again in 1936 when German troops entered the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland and in 1938 with the so-called Anschluss of Austria in March 1938. Nevertheless, the ‘pseudo plebiscitary’ character of the regime with its myth of the ‘unity of people and leader’ could not disguise its violent nature. The resort to deadly terror even against Nazism’s own ranks left little doubt about the true nature of Hitler’s dictatorship. Schmitt’s concept of ‘friend/foe’ was not only mirrored in the language of ‘political enemies’, ‘social outsiders’ and especially in the spectre of the ‘traitor’ – a trope frequently invoked by Hitler, but also articulated in physical terror too.110 The removal of legal or constitutional constraints to authority as Germany became transformed into an unbounded dictatorship between 1934 and 1936, left every one uncertain about where they stood in the new national community as Hitler, the unbounded dictator, determined who was ‘friend’ and who the ‘foe’ with all the deadly consequences.111

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Notes Chapter 1 1 Fritz Stern, ‘Adenauer and a Crisis in Weimar Democracy’. Political Science Quarterly, LXXIII, 1 (March 1958), 1–27, here 1. Eberhard Jäckel, ‘Wie kam Hitler an die Macht?’, in Erdmann and Schulze (eds), Selbstpreisgabe, pp. 305–12 and discussion: 313–21. 2 Karl Dietrich Erdmann, ‘Die Weimarer Republik als Forschungsproblem’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 3 (1955), 1–19. Hans Rothfels, ‘Germany: After the Catastrophe’. Journal of Contemporary History, 2, 1 (January 1967), 79–91. 3 Gerhard Schulz, ‘Aufbau und Fehlschlag einer Demokratie’, in Weimar als Erfahrung und Argument. Aussprachen und Referate anläßlich der Feier des 25jährigen Bestehens der Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien (Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 1977), pp. 5–24. See Sebastien Ullrich, Der Weimar-Komplex. Das Scheitern der ersten deutschen Demokratie und die politische Kultur der frühen Bundesrepublik 1945–1959 (Göttingen, 2009), p. 21. 4 Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany. Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ, 2007); Nadine Rossol, ‘Chancen der Weimarer Republik’. Neue Politische Literatur, 55, 3 (2010), 393–419. 5 Oswald Spengler, ‘Neubau des deutschen Reiches’ (1924), in idem, Politische Schriften 1919–1926 (Waltrop and Leipzig, 2009), pp. 179–83. 6 August Winnig, Das Reich als Republik 1918–1928 (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1928). 7 Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken ind er Weimarer Republik. Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933, 4th edn (Munich, 1983). 8 Friedrich Meinecke, Die Deutsche Katastrophe (Berlin, 1947), p. 88. 9 Theodor Eschenburg, Die improvisierte Demokratie: gesammelte Aufsätze zur Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1963). 10 The classic examples are: Harold Lasswell, The Analysis of Political Behaviour: An Empirical Approach (London, 1948), Ch. III: ‘The Psychology of Hitlerism as a response of the Lower Middle Classes to Continuing Insecurity’, first written in 1933. Hans Gerth, ‘The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition’. The American Journal of Sociology, xlv, 4 (January 1940), 530. But see Sidney Mellen, ‘The German People and the Postwar World: A Study Based on Election Statistics, 1871–1933’. The American Political Science Review, xxxvii, 4 (August 1943), 601, 623 for a critical antidote to such interpretations. 11 Felix Schottlaender, Zwang und Freiheit. Ein Versuch über die Entstehung des Terrors in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1946), pp. 9–10, 26, 35. For Preuss, ‘Volksstaat oder verkehrter Obrigkeitsstaat?’. Berliner Tageblatt, 47 Jg., Nr. 583 (14 November 1918) Morgen-Ausgabe. See also Golo Mann, Reminiscences and Reflections: Growing up in Germany (London, 1990, orig. German, 1987).

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12 Eschenburg was born in 1904. After a career in private industry and then in public administration, he became professor of political sciences at the University of Tübingen. Rudol Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 6: Die Weimarer Verfassung (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1981), p. 222, note 82. 13 Biographical notes at http://www.akademie-stuttgart.de/schottlaender.htm. 14 See in general, Eberhard Kolb, Die Weimarer Republik 4th edn (Munich, 1998), pp. 148–50. 15 Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik ([Villingen 1955] Düsseldorf, 1984). 16 Walter Ganßer, Abwehrbereit. Demokratie und Verfassungsschutz (Munich, 1985), p. 18. 17 Hans Mommsen, Die verspielte Freiheit. Der Weg der Republik von Weimar in den Untergang 1918–1933 (Berlin, 1989). 18 Ursula Büttner, Weimar die überforderte Republik 1918–1933; Leistung und Versagen in Staat, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft und Kultur (Stuttgart, 2008). 19 Hendrik Thoß, Demokratie ohne Demokraten? Die Innenpolitik der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 2008). 20 For West German historiography, Hans Mommsen, ‘Der lange Schatten der untergehenden Republik: Zur Kontinuität politischer Denkhaltungen von den späten Weimarer zur frühen Bonner Republik’, in Karl Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds), Die Weimarer Republik 1918–1933. Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft (Düsseldorf, 1987), pp. 552–86; for East German historiography, Andreas Dorpalen, ‘Weimar Republic and Nazi Era in East German Perspective’. Central European History, 11, 3 (September 1978), 211–30. For an example of recent revisionist approaches, Eric D. Weitz, ‘Weimar and its Histories’. Central European History, 43 (2010), (special issue ‘Culture of Politics – Politics of Culture: New Perspectives on the Weimar Republic’ ed., Kathleen Canning), pp. 581–91; Jochen Hung, ‘Introduction: Beyond Glitter and Doom. The New Paradigm of Contingency in Weimar Research’, in Jochen Hung, Godela WeissSussex, Geoff Wilkes (eds), Beyond Glitter and Doom: New Perspectives of the Weimar Republic (Munich, 2012), pp. 7–13. 21 Detlef Lehnert, ‘Forschungsprojeckt “Politische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik, Identitäts- und Konsensprobleme in einer fragmentierten Gesellschaft”’ (Berlin Free University, 1985). 22 See the useful review by Dagmar Barnouw of John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period. The New Sobriety, 1919–1933 (London, 1978), in The German Quarterly, 53, 2 (March 1980), 268–69. 23 Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 2002); Nadine Rossol, Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany: Sport, Spectacle and Political Symbolism, 1926–36 (London and New York, 2010); John Bingham Weimar Cities: The Challenge of Urban Modernity in Germany, 1919–1933 (London, 2007); Leif Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of Metropolis, 1895–1930 (Manchester, 2007); David Crew, Germans on Welfare. From Weimar to Hitler (Oxford and New York, 1998); Young Sun-Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933 (Princeton, 1998). 24 Detlev J. K. Peukert The Weimar Republic. The Crisis of Classical Modernity, (trans. Richard Deveson, London, 1991). For a perceptive critique see: Peter Fritszche, ‘Did Weimar Fail?. Journal of Modern History, 68 (September 1996), 629–56. 25 Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher 1918–1937. Politik, Kunst und Gesellschaft der zwanziger Jahre (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 4th edn, 1979), Berlin, 2 October 1930,

Notes

26 27

28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35 36 37

38 39

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p. 643. For a brilliant reappraisal of subjectivity of the self in the context of the change referred to by Kessler, see Moritz Föllmer, Individuality and Modernity in Berlin. Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge, 2013). Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford, 1994); Helmuth Lethen, Verhaltenslehren der Kälte. Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt am Main, 1994). Peter Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider (Harmondsworth, 1974); Carola Hepp, Avantgarde: Moderne Kunst, Kulturkritik und Reformbewegungen nach der Jahrhundertwende (Munich, 1987); August Nitschke, Gerhard A. Ritter, Detlev J. K. Peukert, Rüdiger vom Bruch (eds), Jahrhundertwende: Der Aufbruch in der Moderne 1880–1930, 2 Vols (Reinbek, 1990); Stephan Lamb, Anthony Phelan, ‘Weimar Culture: The Birth of Modernism’, in Rob Burns (ed.), German Cultural Studies (Oxford, 1996), pp. 53–99. Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience. Modernity and Crisis (London, 2001). John Wheeler Bennett, ‘The End of the Weimar Republic’. Foreign Affairs, 50, 2 (January 1972), 351–71, here 352. Tim Mason, ‘The Legacy of 1918 for National Socialism’, in Anthony Nicholls and Erich Matthias (eds), German Democracy and the Triumph of Hitler (London, 1971), pp. 215–39. McElligott, The German Urban Experience, Ch. 5. Lewis E. Hill, Charles E. Butler, Stephen A. Lorenzen, ‘Inflation and the Destruction of Democracy: The Case of the Weimar Republic’. Journal of Economic Issues, 11, 2 (June 1977), 299–313, here 307. These authors posit a simplistic argument based entirely on secondary sources available in English that conjoin the inflation and Hitler’s later rise to power. A better analysis is offered by Arthur van Riel and Arthur Schramm, ‘Weimar Economic Decline, Nazi Recovery, and the Stabilization of Political Dictatorship’. The Journal of Economic History, 53, 1 (March 1993), 71–105. Abraham Diskin, Hannah Diskin, Reuven Y. Hazan, ‘Why Democracies Collapse: The Reasons for Democratic Failure and Success’. International Political Science Review/Revue internationale de science politique, 26, 3 (July 2005), 291–309, here 293, 295. See also Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA, 1998) and idem, The Turbulent World of Franz Göll. An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, 2011). Howard Becker, ‘Monuments: German Personality Types Foreshadowing the Collapse of the Weimar Republic’. American Sociological Review, 8, 5 (October 1943), 525–30, here 525. See the perceptive comments by Dagmar Barnouw, ‘Review Essay: Men and Women in Dark Times?’. The German Quarterly, 57, 1 (Winter 1984), 119–33. For a useful discussion largely in agreement with this position, Michael Dreyer, ‘Weimar als “wehrhafte Demokratie” – ein unterschätztes Besipiel’, in Michael Schlutheiß (ed.), Die Weimarer Verfassung – Wert und Wirking für die Demokratie (Erfurt, 2009), pp. 161–89; idem, ‘Weimar as a “Militant Democracy”’ in Hung, Weiss-Sussex, Wilkes (eds), Beyond Glitter and Doom, pp. 69–86. Edmund Schultz (ed.), with an Introduction by Friedrich Georg Jünger, Ein Bilderwerk zur Geschichte der deutschen Nachkriegszeit: Das Gesicht der Demokratie (Leipzig, 1931), p. 7. Barch N2001/258, Bl. 1-15, copy of letter from Wilhelm Abegg to Carl Severing, 31.5.1947.

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40 Christoph Gusy (ed.), Weimars lange Schatten. ‘Weimar’ als Argument nach 1945 (Baden-Baden, 2003). 41 The best approach to this is, Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf (eds), ‘Die Krise’ der Weimarer Republik. Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt and New York, 2005). 42 The term is borrowed from Helmuth Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2008). For a discussion of it in relation to 1933, see the contributions to Benjamin Ziemann, Christian Szeinmann (guest eds), ‘Forum: The Nazi “Seizure” of Power’ in Politics, Religion and Ideology, Issue 3 (October 2013). 43 Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (New York, 1963, orig. Princeton, 1948). 44 Thomas Mergel, ‘Dictatorship and Democracy, 1918–1939’, in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), pp. 423–53, here 430–6.

Chapter 2 1 Albert Ballin. See note 73 below. 2 Schulthess Europäischer Geschichtskalender N.F. 34 Jg. 1918 (Munich, 1922), p. 432; Herbert Michaelis, Ernst Schraepler (eds), Ursachen und Folgen. Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart 26 Volumes (Ursachen und Folgen) (Berlin, 1958–1979), vol. 2, Docs. 524, 524a, 525. Only Ludwig III of Bavaria – who had been toppled on 8 November – and his son Crown Prince Ruprecht refused to renounce the hereditary right of the Wittelsbachs to the throne. Stefan Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer. Deutscher Adel und Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2004); Lothar Machtan, Die Abdankung. Wie Deutschlands gekrönte Häupter aus der Geschichte fielen (Berlin, 2008). 3 Vossische Zeitung Nr. 575 Abend-Ausgabe, 9 November 1918, ‘Die Umwälzung in Berlin’. Schulthess Europäischer Geschichtskalender, op cit, 451 for the full text of the speech. Also in: Ernst Rudolf Huber, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte Vol. 3: Dokumente der Novemberrevolution und der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1966), Doc. 2. According to Scheidemann, Ebert was infuriated by his action, Philipp Scheidemann, Das historische Versagen der SPD. Schriften aus dem Exil (Lüneburg, 2002), p. 102; Friedrich Stampfer, Die ersten 14 Jahre der deutschen Republik, 2 edn (Offenbach-Main, 1947), p. 55. See the description of the declaration of the republic in Käthe Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher 1908–1943 edited and with a postscript from Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz, new edition (Munich, 2007), 9 November 1918, p. 378. 4 Gustav Noske, Vom Kiel bis Kapp. Zur Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Berlin, 1920), pp. 7–54, here 28, 45–6. 5 Friedrich Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution. Ursachen und Tatsachen’, in Gerhard Anschütz, Richard Thoma (eds), Handbuch des Deutschen Staatsrechts I (Tübingen, 1931), p. 98. See Ludendorff ’s upbeat report to the Bundesratsausschuss on 2 January 1918, in Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 280a. 6 Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg. Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich, 2007), pp. 329–31.

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7 For examples of both positions, Bütower Anzeiger, 55 Jg., Nr. 253, 30 October 1918, ‘Feindliche Angriffe überall gescheitert’. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 329 for Friedrich Naumann, Professor Jäckhs, the industrialist Robert Bosch and others to Ludendorff on 11 February 1918 calling for peace negotiations. See also Ballin’s account of a meeting with the Kaiser on 5 September 1918 in which he claims he found the monarch completely misinformed as to the progress of the war and the need for peace negotiations, Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 3, Doc. 352a. 8 Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der Weimarer Republik in Tagebüchern, Leitartikeln und Briefen des Chefredakteurs am ‘Berliner Tageblatt’ und Mitbegründers der ‘Deutsche Demokratische Partei’ introduced and edited by Bernd Sösemann (Boppard am Rhein, 1984), p. 475, 28 January 917. 9 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Culture of Defeat. On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (London, 2003, orig. Die Kultur der Niederlage, Berlin, 2001). See also Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, p. 98 and Andreas Wirsching, ‘Die paradoxe Revolution 1918/19’. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 50–51 (8 December 2008), 6–12, here, 8. 10 Wolfgang Elben, Das Problem der Kontinuität in der deutschen Revolution. Die Politik der Staatssekretäre und der militärischen Führung vom November 1918 bis Februar 1919 (Düsseldorf, 1965), pp. 162–3, 165; Alexander Gallus, ‘Deutsche Revolution 1918/19: die Etablierung der Weimarer Republik’, idem (ed.), Deutsche Zäsuren. Systemwechsel seit 1806 (Cologne, 2006), pp. 139–63, here pp. 137–38. Heinrich August Winkler, ‘Die Revolution von 1918/19 und das Problem der Kontinuität in der deutschen Geschichte’. Historische Zeitschrift 250 (1990), 303–19. 11 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 3, Doc. 526. Cf, Schulthess Europäischer Geschichtskalender, 453. 12 Fred S. Baumann, Um den Staat. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Revolution in Hamburg 1918/18 (Hamburg, 1924), pp. 51–3, 97. See also Sabine Mecking, Immer treu! Kommunalbeamte zwischen Kaiserreich und Bundesrepublik (Eessen, 2003), and Achim Bonte, Werbung für Weimar? Öffentlichkeitsarbeit von Großstadtverwaltungen in der Weimarer Republik (Mannheim, 1997), pp. 201–19. 13 Vossische Zeitung Nr. 575, Abend-Ausgabe, 9 November 1918, ‘Der Vorfälle in Reich’. See also, Bütower Anzeiger 55 Jg., Nr. 262, 9 November 1918, ‘Der Kaiser Wilhelm entsagt dem Thron’, for a similar report of a calm transition. 14 Elben, Das Problem der Kontinuität in der deutschen Revolution, p. 173. Heinrich August Winkler, ‘Revolution by Consensus? Germany 1918–19’, in Reinhard Rürup (ed.), The Problem of Revolution in Germany 1789–1989 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 93–107, here 97–8. Leo Lippmann, Mein Leben und meine amtliche Tätigkeit: Erinnerungen und einen Beitrag zur Finanzgeschichte Hamburgs. Aus der Nachlaß, edited by Werner Jochmann (Hamburg, 1964), pp. XX (editor’s introduction). 15 Franz J. Bauer, Die Regierung Eisner 1918/19, Ministerprotokolle und Dokumente (Düsseldorf, 1987), Doc. 1. Bauer writes that this had less to do with anti-democratic sentiment as with legal concerns regarding their previous oath to the Bavarian king, ibid., note 1. On Eisner, Bernhard Grau, Kurt Eisner: 1867–1919; eine Biographie (Munich, 2001); for the revolution and Räterepublik in Munich, Allan Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria 1918–1919: the Eisner regime and the Soviet Republic (Princeton, NJ, 1965); Michaela Karl, Die Münchener Räterepublik. Porträts einer Revolution (Düsseldorf, 2008). 16 For a concise introduction see, Eberhard Kolb, Die Weimarer Republik, third edition (Munich, 1993), pp. 1–22, 157–68; Heinrich August Wnkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918 bis 1924 (Berlin, 1985), pp. 19–26.

228

Notes

17 Winkler, Von der Revolution, pp. 19–26; Wolfgang Kruse, ‘The First World War: The True German Revolution?’, in Rürup (ed.), The Problem of Revolution, pp. 67–92, here p. 67. The classic studies informing part of the argument in this chapter: Jürgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg (Göttingen, 1973, 2nd edn, 1978) translated as Facing Total War: German Society 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1984), references are to the English edition; Wolfgang Mommsen, Die Urkatastrophe Deutschlands. Der Erste Weltkrieg 1914–1918  Gebhardt Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, Vol. 17 (Stuttgart, 2004), pp. 78–134; idem, ‘The German Revolution 1918–1920: Political Revolution and Social Protest Movement’, in Richard Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger (eds), Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany (London, 1981), pp. 21–54; Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1998); idem, The Great War and Urban Life in German: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2007); Ute Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft. Beruf, Familie und Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 1989) translated as The War from Within, German Working-Class Women in the First World War (Oxford, New York, 1997); Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (New York, 2000). 18 Walther Rathenau, Nach der Flut (Berlin, 1919), pp. 43–4. 19 Schulthess Europäischer Geschichtskalander N.F. 30 Jg., 1914 (Munich, 1917), p. 371. It is difficult to judge how genuine Wilhelm’s declaration was given his subsequent vacillation on the issue of reforming the Prussian franchise, Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf, 1974), pp. 31ff., 319. Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914. Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 65–6. 20 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1914–1949 (Munich, 2002), pp. 74, 87, 90f. 21 Ibid., p. 94. 22 Walther Rathenau, Von kommenden Dingen (Berlin, 1917), pp. 219–23. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, p. 72. 23 Walther Rathenau, ‘Deutschlands Rohstoffversorgung, Vortrag gehalten in der “Deutschen Gesellschaft 1914” am 20 Dezember 1915’, in Walther Rathenau. Gesammelte Schriften in fünf Bänden: fünfter Band (Berlin, 1918), pp. 23–58, provides a more rosy picture; cf., his letters to Georg von Diezelsky, 10.10.14, Freiherr Langwerth von Simmern, 29.3.15, Gustav Steinbömer, 19.9.16, 21.10.16, 14.11.16, 1.12.16, in Alexander Jaser, Clemens Picht, Ernst Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe Teilband 2: 1914–1922 (Düsseldorf, 2006), pp. 1382–3, 1426, 1567–8, 1571, 1581–2, 1585–6. 24 Wilhelm Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik im Weltkrieg 1914–1918, Erster Teil (Düsseldorf, 1970), Doc. 189 (Gen. Hohenborn, 16 September 1916, ‘Auszüge aus dem Protokoll’); Ibid., Doc. 213 (Ludendorff to Groener, 26 Januar 1917). Jörg Berlin (ed.), Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19. Quellen und Dokumente (Cologne, 1978), pp. 34–5. 25 Hugo Lindemann, Die deutsche Stadtgemeinde im Kriege (Tübingen, 1917), pp. 63–94; Jahresbericht des Arbeiterrates GroßHamburg, Geschäftsjahr 1920, p. 32; Lippmann, Mein Leben, pp. 222–28; Chickering, Freiburg, 1914–1918, pp. 162–79; Davis, Home Fires, pp. 191–204. 26 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, p. 89. 27 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 149a. Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik I, Doc. 154; Kocka, Klassengesellschaft, p. 14; Daniel, The War from Within, p. 150; Volker Ullrich, Kriegsalltag. Hamburg im ersten Weltkrieg (Cologne, 1982), p. 39ff. Anne

Notes

28 29 30 31

32

229

Roerkohl, Hungerblockade und Heimatfront. Die kommunale Lebensmittelversorgung in Westfalen während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Stuttgart, 1991). See also the important study by Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge, 2004). Daniel, The War from Within, pp. 26, 28–31. Landesarchiv Berlin (hereafter LAB), Rep. 142, STK 1051. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich (StJbDR) 39 Jg., 1918 (Berlin, 1918), pp. 158–62; StJbDR 40 Jg., 1919 (Berlin, 1919), pp. 348–52. Lippmann, Mein Leben, p. 229. Roerkohl, Hungerblockade und Heimatfront, p. 360. Further data in Dietmar Petzina, Werner Abelshauser, Anselm Faust, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III. Materialien zur Statistik des Deutschen Reiches 1914–1945 (Munich, 1978), p. 21. For comparisons see the essays in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War. Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1918 (Cambridge 1999). According to official sources, the victims of the blockade over the duration of the war were as follows: as % of pre-war deaths (1913  100)

Year

Total

1915

88235

9.5

1916

121174

14.3

1917

259627

32.2

1918

293760

37.0

Source: Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 149.

33 [Max Bauer], Konnten wir den Krieg vermeiden, gewinnen, abbrechen? Drei Fragen beantwortet vom Oberst Bauer (Berlin, 1919), pp. 23, 41. 34 Kocka Klassengesellschaft, pp. 40ff., 71ff.; Ullrich, Kriegsalltag. p. 43. Chickering, Freiburg, 1914–1918, pp. 181, 190, 196. For examples of war-time misdemeanors see, Anthony McElligott, ‘Petty Complaints, Plunder and Police in Altona 1917–1920. Towards an Interpretation of Community and Conflict’, in Peter Assion (ed.), Transformationen der Arbeiterkultur (Marburg, 1986), pp. 110–25, here 112–15. 35 Ullrich, Kriegsalltag, 40ff.; Hellmut G. Hassis Spuren der Besiegten 3: Freiheitsbewegungen vom demokratischen Untergrund nach 1848 bis zu den Atomkraftgegenern (Reinbeck, 1984), pp. 898–9. 36 LAB 142/2 StK 717, Preisprüfungsstelle München, 28.10.1916, ‘Bericht im Sinne des Ersuchens des stellv. Generalkommandos I.B.A.K. v. 21.10.1916’; and reports 21 October (Cologne), 26 October (Stettin), 31 October (Dresden), 6 November (Leipzig), 17 November (Frankfurt am Main). 37 Ullrich, Kriegsalltag, pp. 45–7. 38 LAB 142/2 StK 717, reports from 10 November (Königsberg), 19 October and 20 November (Dortmund). Hassis Spuren, pp. 900–2; Daniel, The War from Within, pp. 141–4; idem, Frauen (Frankfurt, 1997), pp. 189ff; idem, ‘Der Krieg der Frauen 1914–1918: Zur Innenansicht des Ersten Weltkriegs in Deutschland’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Irina Renz (eds), Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch . . . Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkriegs (Essen, 1993), pp. 172–3. 39 LAB 142/2 StK 717, Magistrat [Paderborn] IV1399 zum Erlaß v. 26.9.1916 Nr. 6574 L. 4.10.1916, ‘An der Landrat’; also, Mappe 12: ‘Besondere Wünsche und Anregungen’ (Ludwigshafen).

230

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40 LAB 142/2 StK 717, Abschrift der Kriegsminister Nr. 186/16 geh. B6 11 Aug. Geheim! Berlin 31 Aug. 1916 (sic): copy of letter 2 September 1916 ‘Mehrere Magdeburger Bürger’. 41 [Bauer], Konnten wir den Krieg vermeiden, gewinnen, abbrechen?, pp. 23, 41; Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik I, Doc. 127; Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, pp. 103f.; Ullrich, Kriegsalltag, pp. 65, 195; Chickering, Freiburg 1914–18, pp. 208–61 passim; Davis, Home Fires, pp. 216–18, 229–36. Ute Frevert, Frauen-Geschichte zwischen bürgerlicher Verbesserung und Neuer Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt/Main, 1986), pp. 159–62. 42 See Franz Osterroth, and Dieter Schuster (eds), Chronik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, Volume 1: Bis zum Ende des ersten Weltkrieges; Volume 1: Bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (Berlin, Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 1975), pp. 177–9, 182, 187–8. 43 Evidence of Dr Ernst Mayer, editor of Spartacus Letters, in Ralph Haswell Lutz (ed.), The Causes of the German Collapse in 1918: Sections of the Officially Authorized Report of the Commission of the German Constituent Assembly and by the German Reichstag, 1919–1928 (Stanford, Calif., 1934), p. 108. 44 Icarus (pseud.), The Wilhelmshaven Revolt: A Chapter of the Revolutionary Movement in the German Navy, 1918–1919 (London, 1944), p. 14. 45 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 113; Davis, Home Fires, pp. 146–52. Background in Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, pp. 71–111. 46 LAB 142/2 StK 717, report Stettin, 26 October 1916. 47 Frevert, Frauen-Geschichte, pp. 149, 162; McElligott, ‘Petty Complaints’, pp. 115–20. 48 Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik I, Doc. 154, pp. 378–82, here p. 380; Daniel, Frauen, p. 147. 49 Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik II, Doc. 274, p. 699; Davis, Home Fires, pp. 80–8; McElligott, ‘Petty Complaints’, p. 121. For Bavaria; Kocka, Klassengesellschaft, pp. 43–9. 50 Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik I, Doc. 126, pp. 294–9, here p. 295. 51 Ibid., Doc. 125. 52 This reshuffle of army command is referred to in the literature as the Third OHL. Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deustche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 4: Struktur und Krisen des Kaiserreichs (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1969), p. 544. Pyta, Hindenburg, pp. 205, 216ff., 221–2. Wolfgang Brenner, Walther Rathenau. Deutscher und Jude (Munich and Zurich, 2007), pp. 329–31. 53 Manfred Nebelin, Ludendorff, Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2010), p. 225. 54 Erich Ludendorff, Mein militärischer Werdegang. Blätter der Erinnerung an unser stolzes Heer (Munich, 1933); idem, Kriegsführung und Politik (Berlin, 1923), pp. 108–62. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellshaftsgeschichte, pp. 107, 115. In general see, Nebelin Ludendorff, Chapter 9 passim. For an insight into Bauer’s thinking: Konnten wir den Krieg vermeiden, gewinnen, abbrechen? 55 Gerhard A. Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter. The Problem of Militarism Germany. Vol. III: The Tragedy of Statemanship – Bethmann Hollweg as war Chancellor (1914–1917), (Florida, 1972), p. 346. 56 Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik I, Doc. 197, here pp. 509–10, Telegram des Kaisers an den RK über die Dringlichkeit des Hilfsdienstgesetzes, 6 November 1916; Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Docs. 7 and 8. Erich Ludendorff, Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914–1918 (Berlin, 1919), pp. 258–75. Brenner, Walther Rathenau, pp. 325, 357. Gerald Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1966).

Notes

231

57 Brenner, Walther Rathenau, pp. 310–26; and generally pp. 293–381 for Rathenau’s role and politics during the war. Lothar Gall, Walther Rathenau. Portrait einer Epoche (Munich, 2010), pp. 175–97. 58 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 7, here p. 17. 59 Gerhard A. Ritter, ‘Die Entstehung des Räteartikels 165 der Weimarer Reichsverfassung’. Historische Zeitschrift, 258, H. 1 (February 1994), 73–112. 60 For the law as inner Ordnungsmacht see Werner Bramke, Ulrich Heß, ‘Die Novemberrevolution in Deutschland und ihrer Wirkung auf die deutsche Klassengesellschaft’. Zeitschrift für Geschichte 36 (1988), 1059–73, here 1066–7. 61 Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Band 5 Weltkrieg, Revolution und Reichserneuerung 1914–1919 (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1978), pp. 58ff, 74ff., 216. Machtan, Die Abdankung, p. 107; Martin Kitchen, The Silent Dictatorship. The Politics of the German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1916–1918 (London, 1976), Ch. 1 passim. Pyta, Hindenburg, pp. 205, 216, 220, 222, 241. 62 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, pp. 75, 113, 117. 63 Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, pp. 101–2; Walther Rathenau, Tagebuch 1907– 1922  edited and commented by Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 220–23; Brenner, Walther Rathenau, pp. 357, 360; Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter, p. 347. Background in Pyta, Hindenburg, chapter 10. 64 This was during a cabinet meeting on 9 October, and reiterated a little over a week later. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 406; Doc. 418. Rathenau to Gustav Steinbömer, 1.12.16, 26.5.17, in Jaser, Picht, Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe, pp. 1585–6, 1692–3. See also, Brenner, Walther Rathenau, pp. 342, 351. 65 Gross Domestic Product fell by 25 per cent whereas that of Britain and Italy grew. Ship production also fell by a quarter of pre-war capacity, whereas the United States was building fourteen times the number of ships by the end of the war. Brenner, Walther Rathenau, p. 329. See Ludendorff ’s comments to Reichstag deputy, Dr Struve on the limits to submarine-building capacity by the end of December, Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 108. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War 1914–1918 (London, 1998), pp. 248–81; David Stephenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (Cambridge, MA, 2011). 66 Ritter, Scepter, pp. 346, 352–72; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, pp. 75, 83. Brenner, Walther Rathenau, pp. 331–2. 67 Daniel, The War from Within, pp. 42–3, 47. 68 Berlin, Die deutsche Revolution, p. 39. Petzina, Abelshauser, Faust, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III, p. 114, for slightly varying figures. Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, pp. 290–8. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, pp. 134–5. 69 Ursachen und Folgen, vol.1, Doc. 127, p. 204 (for Groener); Ibid., Docs. 131, 132, pp. 220–5 (for Ludendorff); also, Bauer, Konnten wir den Krieg vermeiden, gewinnen, abbrechen?, pp. 48, 53, 55. For the Reichszentrale, Johannes Richter, Die Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst. Geschichte der ersten politischen Bildungsstelle in Deutschland und Untersuchung ihrer Rolle in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1963). 70 Friedhelm Boll, Massenbewegungen in Niedersachen 1906–1920 (Bonn, 1981), p. 207; Daniel, The War from Within, p. 231; Machtan, Die Abdankung, p. 189. 71 Anne Schmidt, ‘Eine Staatsführung in der Vertrauenskrise. Deutschland 1918’, in Ute Frevert (ed.), Vertrauen. Historische Annäherungen (Göttingen, 2003), pp. 279–305. Boll, Massenbewegungen, pp. 201–6. On the issue of ‘trust’ as a

232

72 73 74

75 76

77

78 79 80 81

82 83

84

85

Notes historical category, see Geoffrey Hosking, ‘Trust and Distrust: A Suitable Theme for Historians?’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (2006), 95–115. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, pp. 85, 124. Letter dated 4 April 1917, Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 165, here p. 318. Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte, p. 39. Report of the Bavarian interior ministry, 28 June 1918, in Hellmut G. Haasis, Spuren der Besiegten vol. 3: Freiheitsbewegungen vom demokratischen Untergrund nach 1848 bis zu den Atomkraftgegnern (Reinbek, 1984), p. 914. For a similar occurrence in Munich in June 1916 when the mishandling by the authorities led to an escalation of conflict, Kurt Kreiler (ed.), Fanal. Aufsätze und Gedichte von Eric Muhsam 1905–1932 (Berlin, 1977), p. 88. The state of siege law is discussed in Chapter 5. Rosenberg, Entstehung und Geschichte der Weimarer Republik, pp. 67–100; Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, pp. 292, 302, 320, 334–5. Wirsching, ‘Die paradoxe Revolution 1918/19’, p. 10. I am of course, playing on the concept of ‘negative integration’ coined by Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus: die deutsche Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt/Main, 1973). See Miller, Die Bürde, pp. 23–69, for the SPD’s participation in von Baden’s cabinet. Winkler, Von der Revolution, p. 38, describes the position of the SPD leadership as ‘Vernunftmonarchismus – ‘rational monarchism’. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, p. 106. Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917. The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, MA, London, 1955, 1983); Richard N. Hunt, German Social Democracy 1918–1933 (Yale, 1964). Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, p. 285; Rosenberg, Entstehung und Geschichte der Weimarer Republik, pp. 107–9. Eugen Payer, Geschichte der USPD (Berlin, 1921). Hartfried Krause, USPD. Zur Geschichte der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Frankfurt/Main, 1975), pp. 42–57. Ibid., pp. 58, 87 note 155; Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, pp. 156–77. The following account draws on Miller’s account. See also Icarus (pseud.), The Wilhelmshaven revolt, p. 15. Krause, USPD, pp. 86–92; Peter Brandt and Reinhard Rürup, Volksbewegung und demokratische Neuordnung in Baden 1918/19. Zur Vorgeschichte und Geschichte der Revolution (Stuttgart, 1991), p. 59; Icarus (pseudo.), Wilhelmshafen Revolt, pp. 14–15 who describes a seven-way division of the left. Krause, USPD, p. 303; Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf, p. 298; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, p. 122. Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik II, Doc. 315, pp. 786–7: ‘Auszug aus dem Protokoll der Sitzung des preußischen Kronrats und des Staatssekretärs des Reichsmarinamts zur Reform des preußischen Wahlrechts’, 9 July 1917; see also Doc. 272 in ibid; Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, p. 99; Bergstrasser, Geschichte der Politischen Parteien, p. 125. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde,‘Der Zusammenbruch der Monarchie und die Enstehung der Weimarer Republik’, Karl-Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds), Die Weimarer republik 1918–1933. Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft (Düsseldorf, 1987), pp. 1–43, here p. 29. See also the excellent overview by Wirsching, ‘Die paradoxe Revolution 1918/19’. Edmund Schultz and Friedrich Georg Jünger, Das Gesicht der Demokratie. Ein Bilderwerk zur Geschichte der Deutsche Nachkriegszeit (Leipzig, 1931), pp. 2–3.

Notes

233

86 Friedrich von Payer, Von Bethmann Hollweg zu Ebert. Erinnerungen und Bilder (Frankfurt am Main, 1923), p. 82; Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919, p. 489, 16 March 1917. On ‘reform from above’: J. Wheeler Bennett, Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan (London, 1936), pp. 15, 17; Theodor Eschenburg, Die Republik von Weimar. Beitrage zur Geschichte einer improvisierten Demokratie (Munich orig. 1963, 1984), p. 47; Kitchen, The Silent Dictatorship, p. 255. Volker Ullrich, Die nervöse Großmacht 1871–1918 (Frankfurt am Main, 2007), pp. 557–60. 87 Huber, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte 3, Docs. 331 and 332. Kurt Riezler, Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente, edited and introduced by Karl Dietrich Erdmann, (Göttingen, 1972), Doc. 711, 4 April 1917, p. 423. See the memorandum (Denkschrift) by the Prussian interior minister, Bill Drews, in Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 141, here p. 270; and Drews to the Regierungspräsidenten, March 1918, Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 180. See also the lead article in Vorwärts Nr 92, 3 April 1917, in Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 122. 88 Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919, p. 496, 30 March 1917. 89 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 180. 90 Eschenburg, Die Republik von Weimar, p. 41. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, p. 109. 91 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 163. 92 Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, p. 99. 93 Baden, Erinnerungen, p. 353, n.1; Werner Freiherr von Rheinbaben, Kaiser, Kanzler, Präsidenten. Erinnerungen (Mainz, 1968), p. 43. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 398, 430–32, 500–8. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 282; Pyta, Hindenburg, pp. 326–28. Nor do the Four Aims appear to have been discussed in the German press, http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, described by Theodor Wolff as ‘the gravediggers’ had engineered Bethmann Hollweg’s downfall in July 1917, Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919, pp. 510–11, 513, 515–6, 7, 8 July, 11 and 13 July for the reference to ‘gravediggers’.   94 Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, pp. 98, 104–5; Pyta, Hindenburg, pp. 327, 334. Adolf Köster, Konnten wir im Herbst 1918 Weiterkämpfen? (Berlin, n.d.), p. 29.   95 On the ‘revolution from above’ as a counterfoil to ‘revolution from below’, see state secretary von Hintze quoted in Berlin, Die deutsche Revolution, Doc. 98; Friedrich Meinecke, Straßburg-Freiburg-Berlin 1901–1919 in Werke 8: Autobiographische Schriften edited and introduced by Eberhard Kessel (Munich, 1969), p. 307. Huber, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte vol. 3, Doc. 349. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 141, here pp. 259–69.   96 Diary note Colonel von Thaer, Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 368, here p. 323. Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, p. 59; Nebelin, Ludendorff. pp. 463–69. See the remarkable diary comment of 18 September 1918 by General von Kuhl, the C-C of Army Group Crown Prince Ruprecht in which he observes how Hindenburg and Ludendorff blamed everyone but themselves for the military disaster, Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 357.   97 Pyta, Hindenburg, pp. 334–5, 337, 340–1.   98 As well as Rürup and Kluge fn. 18, and Böckenförde, fn. 74, see Boris Barth, ‘Dolchstoßlegende und Novemberrevolution’, Gallus (ed.), Die vergessene Revolution, pp. 117–39. In his memoirs, Max von Baden writes that it was the OHL that pressed for negotiations against his advice, Max von Baden, Erinnerungen und Dokumente (Stuttgart, 1927), pp. 346–49. v. Baden’s cabinet foreshadowed the ‘Weimar Coalition’ and included Majority Socialists Gustav Bauer and Philip Scheidemann, Reichstag

234

  99 100 101 102

103

104 105

106 107

108 109 110

111

Notes leader of the Centre Party Adolf Gröber and the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei led by Friedrich von Payer, who was also deputy chancellor. According to Max von Baden, Ludendorff had ‘lost his nerve’, Erinnerungen, p. 448. See also comments by Ludendorff ’s adjutant, Bauer, Konnten wir den Krieg vermeiden, gewinnen, abbrechen?, p. 66. Nebelin, Ludendorff, pp. 441, 454–9, 462–9. Harry Graf Kessler, Das Tagebuch 1880–1937: Sechster Band 1916–18, edited Günter Riederer, Roland S. Kamzelak und Ulrich Ott (Stuttgart, 2006), pp. 648–51, 18 November 1918. Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg, Aus meinem Leben (Leipzig, 1920), p. 429. Heinrich Potthoff, ‘Der Parlamentarisierungserlaß vom 30 September 1918’, in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 20 Jg., Heft 3 (July 1972), 319–32, here 320. Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden, prepared by Erich Matthias (Düsseldorf, 1962), Doc. 92, ‘Aufzeichnung RK v Baden’, 25 October 1918, p. 355; ibid., Doc. 95, here p. 363 for von Haeften’s observations of Ludendorff ’s emotional condition. Von Haeften was at that time the OHL’s liaison officer (Verbindungsoffizier) between OHL and the government. On the rupture between Ludendorff and Hindenburg, Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, Erinnerung (Leipzig, 1936), pp. 220–1. Testimony of General Kulz in Lutz (ed.), The Causes of the German Collapse in 1918, pp. 53–91. Bauer, Konnten wir den Krieg vermeiden, gewinnen, abbrechen?, p. 56. Ernst von Wrisberg, Der Weg zur Revolution 1914–1918 (Leipzig, 1921), pp. 137, 141, 177–9. Heinz Brauweiler, Generäle in der Deutschen Republik: Groener, Schleicher, Seeckt (Berlin, 1932), p. 12. Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik I, Doc. 258, here pp. 673, 675. Alfred Niemann, Revolution von oben – Umstürz von unten. Entwicklung und Verlauf der Staatsumwälzung in Deutschland 1914–1918 (Berlin, 1927), p. 114. Walther Rathenau, Der Kaiser: eine Betrachtung (Berlin, 1919), p. 39, argues that it was the failure of Ludendorff and Hindenburg to give way to reforms and to step down that focused attention on the Kaiser. See Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919, p. 442, 6 October 1916. Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden, Doc. 95, here p. 363. Cited in Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, p. 380. Georg Bernhard, ‘Ludendorff ’ in Vossische Zeitung Nr. 550 Sonntags-Ausgabe, 27 October 1918. Nebelin, Ludendorff, pp. 469, 472, 482. See also the interesting claim by Friedrich von Berg (head of the Secret Civil Cabinet) who not only shared Rathenau’s view, but believed had Ludendorff not been dismissed there would not have been a revolution. Friedrich von Berg. Erinnerungen aus seinem Nachlaß, prepared by Heinrich Potthoff (Düsseldorf, 1971), Doc. 26, here p. 196. Willibalt Apelt, Geschichte der Weimarer Verfassung (Munich, 1946), pp. 35–6; Wirsching, ‘Die paradoxe Revolution 1918/19’, p. 9. Winkler, Von der Revolution, pp. 27–9. Schmidt, ‘Eine Staatsführung in der Vertrauenskrise’, p. 287. Weber to Gerhard von Schulze-Gaevernitz, 11 October 1918, cited in Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 623, 629; cf., Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 1921, pp. 477ff. Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919, 31 October 1918, p. 639. See Robert Bosch to Conrad Haußmann, 24 October 1918 in Wolfgang Ruge and W. Schumann (eds), Dokumente zur deutschen Geschichte 1917–1919 (Berlin, 1975), p. 53. Kessler notes how the Kaiser’s birthday (27 January) was met with general disinterest, Das Tagebuch 6, p. 259. Winkler, Von der Revolution, pp. 30–1.

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112 Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik II, Doc. 499, here p. 1351. Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden, Doc. 127a, meeting of the Reichstag inter-party committee, 5 Novemer 1918, pp. 509–24, here 512–15. For discussion of the Kaiser’s personality see: Ernst Müller, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Eine historische und psychiatrische Studie: ein Beitrag zur Physiognomik der Hohenzollern (Gotha, 1927); John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy 1888–1900 (Cambridge, 2004); Christopher M. Clark, Wilhelm II, the Last Kaiser (Harlow, 2000); Isabel V. Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918 (Cambridge, 1982); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Der Erste Weltkrieg. Anfang vom Ende des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (Frankfurt, 2004), pp. 61–78; idem, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II and German Politics’. Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990), 289–316. Two collections with important contributions: John C. G. Röhl and Nicolaus Sombart, Kaiser Wilhelm II. New Interpretations: The Corfu Papers (Cambridge and New York, 1982); Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (eds), The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2003). 113 ‘Ein dunkler Tag’ in Vossische Zeitung, Nr 512, 7 October 1918; see his letter to Preuß 7.10.18, in Jaser, Picht, Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe, p. 1985. On this period see also Arnold Brecht, Aus nächster Nähe, Lebenserinnerungen 1884–1927 (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 154–62. 114 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 395, Prince Max von Baden to Wilhelm, 30 October 1918, p. 369. Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, pp. 291–92. See Bauer’s comments regarding troop morale and the home front by the end of July 1918, Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik II, Doc. 464. 115 The Times, 6 November 1918, p. 5. 116 Riezler, Tagebücher, Doc. 749, 19 October 1918, p. 484. 117 Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, p. 107. Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, pp. 492–4. 118 Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden, Doc. 96, meeting of the war cabinet, 26 October 1918, pp. 365–77, and Doc. 97, ‘Richtlinien der Zentrale für Heimatdienst zu den vom Reichstag beschlossenen Verfassungsänderungen’, pp. 378–82. Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, p. 106. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, edited Arthur S. Link et al., Vol. 51, 14 September–8 November 1918 (Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 419. For the reference to ‘crypto parliamentary state’ see Miller, Burgfrieden, pp. 320–31, here 323. Eschenburg, Die Republik von Weimar, p. 41. 119 Kessler, Das Tagebuch 6, p. 612, 3 November 1918. 120 Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden, Doc. 127a, meeting of the Reichstag inter-party committee, 5 November 1918, here p. 516. 121 Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden, Doc. 123, meeting of the Reichstag inter-party committee, 4 November 1918, pp. 497–503. 122 Schulthess Europäischer Geschichtskalender, 34 Jg. 1918, 399; Vossische Zeitung Nr 572 Morgen-Ausgabe, 8 November 1918, ‘Die Sozialisten fordern Abdankung des Kaisers’; Vossische Zeitung Nr 573 Abend-Ausgabe, 8 November 1918, ‘Noch keine Entscheidung des Kaisers’. Cf., Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 499. 123 Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, p. 106, and idem, Straßburg-Freiburg-Berlin, p. 310. See the similar comment by Robert Bosch to Conrad Haußmann, in Wolfgang Ruge and W. Schumann (eds), Dokumente zur deutschen Geschichte 1917–1919 (Berlin, 1975), p. 53. 124 Kessler, Das Tagebuch 6, 29 October 1918, here pp. 600–01. 125 Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg, Aus meinem Leben (Leipzig, 1920), p. 403. 126 Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik II, Doc. 286, here p. 717; von Westarp, Das Ende, p. 90; Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 615–19.

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127 Evidence of Deputy Dr [Albrecht] Philipp, in Lutz (ed.), The Causes of the German Collapse in 1918, p. 173. Philipp was a member of the Konsertive Partei from 1916 to 1918 and then the DNVP; he was a history teacher by training. Eugen Wolff, Die Fehler der Demokratie (Kiel, 1919), p. 6. For a sophisticated conservative critique of Western liberal democracy see Moeller van den Bruck, ‘An Liberalismus gehen die Völker zu Grunde’, Die Neue Front (Berlin, 1922), pp. 18–35, reprinted in Karl-Egon Lönne (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik 1918–1933Quellen zum politische Denken der Deutschen im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert, Freiherr vom Stein-Gedächtnisausgabe, Vol. 8 (Darmstadt, 2002), pp. 181–93. See also Erich Otto Volkmann, Der Marxismus und das deutsche Heer im Weltkrieg (Berlin, 1925). 128 Meinecke ‘‘Die Revolution’, pp. 104–5. Icarus (pseud.), Wilhelmshafen Revolt, pp. 16–18. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 1, Doc. 133 a-e, pp. 225–32 for the mutiny in April 1917. Wilhelm Deist, ‘Die Politik der Seekriegsleitung und die Rebellion der Flotte Ende Oktober 1918’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 14 (1966), 341–68, here 362. 129 Rainer Herwig, Konstruierte Nation. Der Alldeutsche Verband 1890 bis 1939 (Hamburg, 2003). 130 Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden, Doc. 122, meeting of the war cabinet, 4 November 1918, pp. 487–97, here 491–3, 495–7; Ibid., Doc. 123, meeting of the Reichstag inter-party committee, pp. 497–503, here 498–9. Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, p. 107. 131 Bernhard Rausch, Am Springquell der Revolution: die Kieler Matrosenerhebung (Kiel, 1918), pp. 9–11. Prince Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, pp. 561–88, here pp. 584–6. 132 Rausch, Am Springquell, pp. 6, 10. Dittmann, Die MarineJustizmorde, p. 98. 133 Wilhelm Dittmann, Die MarineJustizmorde von 1917 und die AdmiralRebellion von 1918 (Berlin, 1926), pp. 91–100. Niemann, Revolution von oben, pp. 239, 252; Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik II, Docs. 501–8, pp. 1358–84; Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 650–56. 134 Lothar Popp and Karl Artelt, Ursprung und Entwicklung der November-Revolution 1918: wie die deutsche Republik erstand (Kiel, 1918), pp. 10–16. The dynamic arising from this incident challenges Niemann’s assertion that ‘a ruthless successful action, albeit in only one place, would have worked miracles’. Niemann, Revolution von oben, p. 246. 135 This was reserve lieutenant Steinhäuser. The reports of his death were based on rumours that carried over into the literature. He later appeared before a commission on 20 January 1919 to give evidence on the events that day: BA-MA RM31.2373, Bl. 23RS, 24. I would like to thank Dr Mark Jones (IRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Centre for War Studies, UCD) for this information and for the reference. 136 See Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 472, Docs. 473a, 475, 476, for biographical details of the council members. Gustav Noske, Vom Kiel bis Kapp. Zur Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Berlin, 1920), pp. 8–29. 137 Deist, Militär und Innenpolitik II, Docs. 503, 505; Rausch, Am Springquell, pp. 17–18; Popp and Artelt, Ursprung, pp. 21–2. Wilhelm Souchon 1864–1946, Admiral and Chief of Marine Station d. Ostsee and from 31 October, governor of Kiel. For Noske, see Wolfram Wette, Gustav Noske: eine politische Biographie (Düsseldorf, 1987). 138 Noske, Vom Kiel bis Kapp, p. 12. 139 Ludwig Bergstrasser, Geschichte der politischen Parteien Deutschlands (Munich and Vienna, 1965 [1926]), pp. 128f. 140 Rausch, Am Springquell, p. 19. 141 Ibid., p. 20. Also quoted in Hermann Müller, Die November Revolution. Erinnerungen (Berlin 1931), p. 25.

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142 Ibid., p. 24. For the soldier’s demands,, p. 16. See Wheeler-Bennett, Hindenburg, p. 22 and Helmuth Heiber, The Weimar Republic, pp. 7–8, who downplay the revolutionary content of the mutiny. 143 Rausch, Am Springquell, p. 25. For an older history revealing all the conservative prejudices of its author: S. Miles Boulton, And the Kaiser Abdicates (New Haven, London, 1920), pp. 133–4. 144 For exemplary regional studies see: Volker Ullrich, Die Hamburger Arbeiterbewegung vom Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Revolution 1918/19 (Hamburg 1976); Helmut Metzmacher, ‘Der Novemberumsturz 1918 in der Rheinprovinz’, in Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein insbesondere das alte Erzbistum Köln Heft 168/169 (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp 135–265; Erich Kittel, ‘Die Revolution von 1918 in Lippe’. Lippische Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Landeskunde 37 (1968), 32–153. 145 See Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher, entries, 6 and 8 December 1918. Victor Klemperer, Leben sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum. Tagebücher 1918–1924, edited Walter Nowojski (Berlin, 1996), pp. 19–34, especially p. 25, 14 December 1918. 146 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Docs., 498, 498a; Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 662–63, 682–84. 147 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 656–9. A sympathetic account in Kuno von Westarp, Das Ende der Monarchie am 9. November 1918: abschließender Bericht nach den Aussagen der Beteiligten, edited with a postscipt from Werner Conze (Berlin, 1952). F. A. Krummacher, ‘Die Auflösung der Monarchie’, Walter Tormin (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik (Hannover, 1973), pp. 69–71. As Riezler noted, ‘In der Kaiserfrage hat man zu spät eingesehen, daß man nachgeben müßte’, Riezler, Tagebücher, Doc. 751, 5 November 1918, 487, also Brauweiler, Generäle in der Deutschen Republik, p. 10 for the narrowing room for manoeuvre. 148 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 632–3; 676. 149 Results of the survey in Oberst a.D. Hünichen, ‘Das Frontheer und der 9. November 1918: Erlebnisse eines Regimentskommandeurs’, Artilleriekorps-Blätter 4 Jg., Nr. 7, reproduced in Niemann, Revolution von oben, pp. 437–44, here, p. 442; von Westarp, Das Ende, pp. 201–6. See also, Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden, Doc. 127a, meeting of the Reichstag inter-party committee, pp. 515, 517. 150 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 676–67; Schulthess Europäischer Geschichtskalender 34 Jg (1918), 402; Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 525; Brauweiler, Generäle in der deutschen Republik, p. 75. Joachim Petzold et al., Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg Vol. 3: November 1917 bis November 1918 (East Berlin, 1970). pp. 539, 541; Watt, The Kings Depart, pp. 182–92, 199–200. Machtan, Die Abdankung, pp. 218–26; Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer, pp. 228–46. 151 Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, pp. 539, 545, 553–4, note 1, 558, 561–2. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Docs. 498, 501. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 682–4. See Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 507, p. 567 for Wilhelm’s own account of his abdication. 152 Helmut Neuhaus, ‘Das Ende der Monarchien in Deutschland 1918’, Historisches Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft Nr. 111 (1991), 102–36, here pp. 110–13, 130–2; The description of Wilhelm as a ‘shadow monarch’ is from Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, pp. 101–2, 105; Petzold et al., Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg, Vol. 3, p. 537. Pyta, Hindenburg, p. 358. 153 Vossische Zeitung Nr. 575, Abend-Ausgabe 9 November 1918. ‘Niemand sollte dieser Versammlung der Souveränen Vertretung des Volkes, Vorschrift machen. Ihre Beschlüsse über den künftigen Aufbau der Nation werden für Alle binden sein müssen’. Schulthess Europäischer Geschichtskalender, 34 Jg. (1918), 418–20, 422, 429.

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155

156

157

158

159 160 161 162 163

Notes Also, Runkel, Die deutsche Revolution. p 146; Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, p. 405. Walter Mühlhausen, Friedrich Ebert 1871–1925. Reichspräsident der Weimarer Republik, second rev. (Berlin, 2007), p. 250. D. K. Buse, ‘Ebert and the German Crisis, 1917–1920’. Central European History 5 (1972), 234–55. Udo Bermbach, Vorformen parlamentarischer Kabinettsbildung in Deutschland. Der Interfraktionelle Ausschuß 1917/18 und die Parlamentarisierung der Reichsregierung (Cologne and Opladen, 1967), p. 220. Der Zentralrat der Deutschen Sozialistischen Republik 19.12.1918-8.4.1919 Quellen zur Geschichte der Rätebewegung in Deutschland 1918/19 Bd.I, Der Zentralrat 18.12.1918-8.4.1919, edited Eberhard Kolb with Reinhard Rürup (Leiden, 1968). Kurt Eisner, Die neue Zeit: Reden und Schriften (Munich, 1919), p. 33. Hermann Müller, Die November Revolution. Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1931); Hugo Preuss, ‘Die Sozialdemokratie und der Parlamentarismus’, in Else Preuss (ed.), Staat, Recht und Freiheit (Tübingen, 1926), pp. 144–72. For an astute analysis from a conservativeliberal position, Dr Ferdinand Runkel, Die deutsche Revolution. Ein Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig, 1919), ‘Fünfter Abschnitt: Rechtsstaat oder Diktatur’, pp. 145–77. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 714–25; idem, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte. 3, Docs., 5, 8. Walter Tormin, Zwischen Rätediktatur und sozialer Demokratie: Die Geschichte der Rätebewegung in der deutschen Revolution (Düsseldorf, 1954), pp. 126–8. Schulz, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur, p. 80; Karl Dietrich Erdmann, ‘Rätestaat oder Demokratie. Neuere Forschungen zur Novemberrevolution 1918 in Deutschland (Copenhagen, 1979), pp. 8–10, 17, 19–20. Dietrich Orlow, ‘1918/19: A German Revolution’. German Studies Review, 5, 2 (May 1982), 187–203, here 202–3; Wirsching, ‘Die paradoxe Revolution 1918/19’, pp. 11–12. General overview and discussion in Ulrich Kluge, Die deutsche Revolution 1918/1919 (Frankfurt/Main, 1985); see also the editor‘s introduction in Gallus (ed.), Die vergessene Revolution. Arthur Rosenberg, Die Enstehung der deutschen Republik 1871–1918 (Berlin, 1928) reprinted in Entstehung und Geschichte der Weimarer Republik edited and introduction by Kurt Kersten (Frankfurt, 1961), pp. 217–9; also idem, Geschichte der Weimarer Republik in ibid, pp. 20–21. I have used this later version. Eberhard Kolb, ‘1918/19: Die steckengebliebene Revolution’, in Carola Stern and Heinrich A. Winkler (eds), Wendepunkte deutscher Geschichte 1848–1990 (Frankfurt/Main, 1994 (1979), pp. 99–125. Cited in Reinhard Rürup, Probleme der Revolution in Deutschland 1918/19 (Wiesbaden, 1968), p. 51; idem, ‘Problems of the German Revolution’ Journal of Contemporary History, 3, 4, (October 1968), 109–35, here 119, where he contests Rosenberg’s view that the councils were opposed to the October reforms; idem, ‘Demokratische Revolution und “dritter Weg.” Die deutsche Revolution von 1918/19 in der neueren wissenschaftlichen Diskussion’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 Jg., (1983) Heft 2, 278–301. Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden, Doc. 123. For background see, Richard Breitman, German Socialism and Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), pp. 9–21. Theodor Heuß, Führer aus deutscher Not: 5 politische Porträts (Berlin, 1928), p. 101. Winkler, Von der Revolution, pp. 37–58 passim. Müller, Die November Revolution, p. 43. Volkswille 246, 19 October 1918, cited in Berlin, Die deutsche Revolution, Doc. 104, p. 125.

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164 Philip Scheidemann, Der Zusammenbruch (Berlin, 1921), cited in Niemann, Revolution von oben, p. 313. 165 Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden, Doc. 129, cabinet meeting 5 November 1918, p. 534 for the first quote and Eschenburg, Die Republik von Weimar, p. 193 for the second quote. See Bergstrasser, Geschichte der Politischen Parteien, pp. 117–23; Rürup, ‘Problems of the German Revolution’, p. 130; Winkler, Von der Revolution, pp. 37–58 passim. In general, Peter Lösche, Der Bolschewismus im Urteil der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Berlin, 1967). 166 Miller, Die Bürde der Macht, pp. 62–9, and in particular, p. 68. 167 Die Regierung der Volksbeauftragten 1918/19 Erster Teil, prepared by Suzanne Miller and Heinrich Potthoff (Düsseldorf,1969), Doc. 55. See Meinecke’s comments, Straßburg-Freiburg-Berlin, p. 311. 168 Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher, 27 October 1918, p. 377. 169 Günter Bers, Der Jülicher Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat im November 1918 (Jülich, 1974); Helmut Metzmacher, ‘Der Novemberumsturz 1918 in der Rheinprovinz’, in Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein insbesondere das alte Erzbistum Köln Heft 168/169 (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 135–265; Erich Kittel, ‘Die Revolution von 1918 in Lippe’. Lippische Mitteilungen aus Geschichte und Landeskunde 37 (1968), 32–153. 170 William H. Maehl, The German Socialist Party: Champion of the First Republic, 1918–1933 (Lawrence, Kansas, 1986), p. 21, describes Ebert’s relationship to Groener, wrongly in my view, as imprudent. Cf., Breitman, German Socialism, pp. 27–8, 32–3. 171 Die Regierung der Volksbeauftragten 1918/19 Erster Teil, Doc. 44a. Winkler, Von der Revolution, pp. 97–113. Meinecke, Straßburg-Freiburg-Berlin, pp. 312. 172 Heinrich Schäfer, Reichsverfassung und Rätesystem. Diktatur oder Demokratie? (Cologne, 1920), p. 11; Heinrich Ströbel, Die deutsche Revolution. Ihr Unglück und ihre Rettung (Berlin, 4th edn, 1922), pp. 156–63; Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, pp. 115–19; Walter Tormin, Zwischen Rätediktatur und sozialer Demokratie (Düsseldorf, 1954), pp. 97–100, 136; Erdmann, Rätestaat oder Demokratie, pp. 10–14; Gerhard Schulz, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur I, Die Periode der Konsolidierung und der Revision des Bismarckschen Reichsaufbaus 1919–1930, second edn (Berlin and New York, 1987), pp. 65–100; Böckenförde, ‘Der Zusammenbruch’, pp. 29–31; Eckehard Jesse, Henning Köhler, ‘Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19 im Wandel der historischen Forschung. Forschungsüberblick und Kritik der ‘herrschenden Lehre’. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (1978), Beilage 45/78, 3–24. 173 Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Der Anfang’, Rote Fahne, 18 November 1918, reprinted in Lönne (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik, pp. 79–82; see also her speech at the founding congress of the German Communist Party, Hermann Weber (ed.), Die Grundungsparteitag der KPD. Protokoll und Materialien (Frankfurt, 1969), p. 180. Dr Heinrich Laufenberg, Zwischen der ersten und zweiten Revolution (Hamburg, 1919), pp. 3, 5, 48. Icarus (pseud.), The Wilhelmshaven Revolt, pp. 27–9. Vladimir I. Lenin, Staat und Revolution. Die Lehre des Marxismus vom Staat und die Aufgaben des Proletariats in der Revolution (Berlin-Wilmersdorf, 1918), pp. 6, 15–21, 83, 93. Background in Winkler, Von der Revolution, pp. 114–33. 174 Vossische Zeitung Nr. 275 Morgen-Ausgabe, 9 November 1918, ‘Demokratie oder Klassenherrschaft’. Meinecke, Straßburg-Freiburg-Berlin, p. 309. 175 Thomas Mann, Briefe, Nr. 18/73, 3 October 1918, 251. 176 Die Regierung des Volksbeauftragten 1918/19 Erster Teil, Doc. 44b. 177 Tormin, Zwischen Rätediktatur und sozialer Demokratie, pp. 55–9, 65–7, 128, 137; Schulz, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur, pp. 79–80.

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178 Rosa Luxemburg, Die Rote Fahne Nr. 5, 20 November 1918, reprinted in Huber, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte 3, Doc. 35. 179 Emil Barth, Aus der Werkstatt der deutschen Revolution (Berlin, n.d.), p. 57. 180 Barth, Aus der Werkstatt, pp. 57, 134. See also anon, Die Berliner Spartakus-Unruhen im März 1919 (Berlin, n.d.), p. 3. 181 Barth, Aus der Werkstatt, p. 59. 182 Clara Zetkin, ‘Um Schein und Sein voller Demokratie’, in Leipziger Volkszeitung, Frauenbeilage, 2 December 1918, cited in Lönne (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik, pp. 82–8, here, 83–4. 183 Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher, entries 17 November 1918, 8 December, 19 January 1919. 184 Kessler, Das Tagebuch 6, p. 694. See Kollwitz, Die Tagbücher, 1 December 1918, p. 386, who describes the imperial black-white-red colours as the ‘dear German’ flag. 185 Albert Grzesinski, Inside Germany (New York, 1939), p. 75. 186 ‘Es war keine Revolution’, Die Welt am Montag, 6 November 1919, reprinted in Walther Rathenau. Nachgelassene Schriften, Erster Band (Berlin, 1928), p. 106. 187 Allgemeiner Kongreß der Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte Deutschlands, 16. bis 21. Dezember 1918 im Abgeordnetenhause zu Berlin. Stenographische Berichte, (Berlin, 1919), cols. 209–48, p. 184. See also Eduard Bernstein, Die deutsche Revolution von 1918/19. Geschichte der Entstehung und ersten Arbeitsperiode der deutschen Republik, edited and introduced Heinrich August Winkler and annotated by Teresa Löwe (Bonn, 1998), pp. 123–45, orig., Die deutsche Revolution: ihr Ursprung, ihr Verlauf und ihr Werk (Berlin-Fichtenau, n.d.). Figures from Sabine Roß, ‘Politische Partizipation und nationaler Räteparlamentarismus. Determinanten des politischen Handelns der Delegierten zu den Rätekongressen 1918/19. Eine Kollektivbiographie’. Zentrum für Historische Sozialforschung Köln 1999 (Historical Social Research Supplement vol. 10), pp. 140–1. Cf., Groß-Berliner Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte in der Revolution 1918/19. Dokumente der Vollversammlungen und des Vollzugsrates. Vom 1. Reichsträtekongreß bis zum Generalstreiksbeschluß am 3. März 1919, edited Gerhard Engel, Bärbel Holz, Gaby Huch and Ingo Materna (Berlin, 1997). 188 E. J. Gumbel, Vier Jahre politische Mord (Berlin-Friedenau, 1922). 189 Helga Grebing, The History of the German Labour Movement. A Survey, rev. edn (Leamington Spa, 1985), p. 104. Cf., Sabine Roß, ‘Revolution ohne Revolutionäre? Kollektive Biographie des deutschen Rätekongresses 1918/19’. Historical Social Research 23 (1998), 38–57. 190 Meinecke, ‘Die Revolution’, p. 119.

Chapter 3 1 Edgar Salin, Die Deutschen Tribute. Zwölf Reden (Berlin, 1930), p. 21. 2 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Großmachtstellung und Weltpolitik. Die Außenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1870–1914 (Berlin, 1993). The classic study of Germany’s expansionary aims is: Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht. Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18 (Düsseldorf, 1961). Andreas Hillgruber, ‘Unter dem Schatten von Versailles – die außenpolitische Belastung der Weimarer Republik: Realität und Perzeption der Deutschen’, in Karl-Dietrich Erdmann and Hagen Schulze (eds), Weimar: Selbstpreisgabe einer Demokratie (Düsseldorf, 1980), pp. 51–67; idem, ‘Kontinuität und Diskontinuität in der deutschen Außenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler’, in idem, Großmachtpolitik und Militarismus im 20.Jahrhundert.

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8

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10 11 12 13

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3 Beiträge zum Kontinuitätsproblem (Düsseldorf, 1974), pp. 11–36. Gregor Schöllgen, Jenseits von Hitler. Die Deutschen in der Weltpolitik von Bismarck bis heute (Berlin, 2005), pp. 86–7. U.S. Government Printing Office, The Treaty of Versailles and After. Annotations of the Text of the Treaty (New York, 1944, repr. 1968), pp. 413–25. Carl Schmitt, ‘Die Rheinland als Objekt internationaler Politik (1925)’, in idem, Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar – Genf – Versailles 1923–1939, third edition (Berlin, 1994 [1940]), pp. 29–37, here, 34, 36; and repeated in greater detail in: ‘Völkerrechtliche Probleme im Rheingebiet (1928)’, in ibid., pp. 111–23. Cf., Reichszentrale für Heimatsdienst, Die Sicherheitsfrage 1918–1925 (Berlin, 1925), focusing on mutual security needs of Germany and France. But see the interesting comments of Albert Ballin to Rathenau: if Germany had been the victor, then he would have little doubt that the Kaiser would be dictating peace terms to Buckingham Palace, letter 17 October 1918, in Alexander Jaser, Clemens Picht, Ernst Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe Teilband 2: 1914–1922 (Düsseldorf, 2006), pp. 2002–03. National Versammlung 327, 39th Session, 12 May 1919, 1082, 1084. Herbert Michaelis, Ernst Schraepler (eds), Ursachen und Folgen. Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart 26 Volumes (Berlin, 1958–1979), vol. 2, Docs. 290, 293. Under the terms of Brest-Litovsk, Russia was to cede about a third of its territory, including its wealthiest and highly industrialized regions. These points are contained in German White Book Concerning the Responsibility of the Authors of the War (New York, 1924). Robert E. Ireton, ‘The Rhineland Commission at Work’. The American Journal of International Law, 17, 13 (July 1923), 460–9. Ernst Troeltsch, Spektator-Briefe. Aufsätze über die deutsche Revolution und die Weltpolitik 1918/22 edited H. Baron (Tübingen, 1924, repr. 1966), p. 47. See, Eberhard Kolb, ‘Internationale Rahmenbedingungen einer demokratischen Neuordnung’, in Karl Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds), Die Weimarer Republik 1918–1933. Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987), pp. 257–84 and Gerd Meyer, ‘Die Reparationspolitik. Ihre außen- und innenpolitischen Rückwirkungen’, in ibid., pp. 327–42. Still a useful short introduction to German foreign policy in the inter-war years, John Hiden, Germany and Europe 1919–1939, second edition (Harlow, 1993). See also, Ursula Büttner, Weimar, Die Überforderte Republik (Stuttgart, 2008), pp. 153–65. Albert Ströhle, Der Vertrag von Versailles und seine Wirkungen für unser deutsches Vaterland (Stuttgart, 1921). Jacques Bariéty, Les relations franco-allemandes après la première guerre mondiale (Paris, 1977). National Versammlung 327, 34th Session, 10 April 1919, 931, 943. Klaus Schwabe (ed.), Quellen zum Friedensschluss vom Versailles  Ausgewählte Quellen zur Deutschen Geschichte der Neuzeit, vol. 30 (Darmstadt, 1997), p. 12. Baron Werner von Rheinbaben, ‘How the Treaty Looks to Germany’, in Listener (London, England, 13 June 1934), n. p. Wolfgang Elz, ‘Versailles und Weimar’, in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 50–51/2008, 8 December 2008, 31–8, here, 33; Thomas Lorenz, ‘Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht’. Der Versailler Vertrag in Diskurs und Zeitgeist der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt, New York, 2008), p. 74; Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 2005), p. 233.

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14 There are many biographies of Stresemann. An early hagiographic account written during Stresemann’s lifetime is that by Rocchus Freiherr von Rheinbaben, Der Mensch und der Staatsmann (Dresden, 1928), while that by Rudolf Olden, Stresemann (Berlin, 1929) is iconoclastic. Recent scholarly treatments include the following: Henry Ashby Turner, Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic (Princeton, 1963); Manfred Berg, Gustav Stresemann. Eine politische Karriere zwischen Reich und Republik (Göttingen, 1992); Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (Oxford, and New York, 2002; paperback 2004). See also the essays in Wolfgang Michalka and Marshall Lee (eds), Gustav Stresemann (Darmstadt, 1982), and in Karl Heinrich Pohl (ed.), Politiker und Bürger. Gustav Stresemann und seine Zeit (Göttingen, 2002), especially the useful discussion of biographical works on Stresemann by Wolfgang Michalka, ‘Stresemann im Lichte seiner gegenwärtigen Biographien: Stresemann aus deutscher Sicht’, in ibid., pp. 267–89. 15 Two excellent overviews are Gottfried Niedhart, Die Außenpolitik der Weimarer Republik (Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte, 53; Munich, 1999), and Wolfgang Elz, ‘Weimar Foreign Policy’, in Anthony McElligott (ed.), The Short Oxford History of Germany: Weimar Germany (Oxford, New York, 2009), pp. 50–77. 16 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 282; Hans-Dietrich Schultz, ‘Deutschlands “natürliche” Grenzen’, in Alexander Demandt (ed.), Deutschlands Grenzen in der Geschichte (Munich, 1990), pp. 32–93, here 48–75. 17 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 2, Doc. 280c. 18 Rheinbaben, Der Mensch und der Staatsmann, emphasises Stresemann’s policy of revisionism as a break from Wirth and Rathenaus’s failed policy of fulfilment and a return to Bismarckian visions of Germany, pp. 175, 177. Peter Krüger, Die Aussenpolitik der Republik von Weimar (Darmstadt, 1985), pp. 507–55, especially 551–55; Wright, Gustav Stresemann, pp. 492–525; Eberhard Kolb, ‘Die Weimarer Republik und das Problem der Kontinuität vom Kaiserreich zum “Dritten Reich”’, in Jost Dülffer, Bernd Martin, Günter Wollstein (eds), Deutschland in Europa. Kontinuität und Bruch. Gedenkschrift für Andreas Hillgruber (Frankfurt/Main, Berlin, 1990), pp. 273–89; Schöllgen, Jenseits von Hitler, pp. 33–152 passim. For an emphasis on continuity: Marshall Lee and Wolfgang Michalka, German Foreign Policy 1917–1933: Continuity or Break? (Leamington Spa, Hamburg, New York, 1987); a more nuanced approach can be found in Andreas Rödder, Stresemanns Erbe: Julius Curtius und die deutsche Außenpolitik 1929–1931 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, 1996), who connects the earlier policy to the shift in direction up to 1931. For a succinct discussion on continuity that manages to avoid any mention of Weimar see Konrad H. Jarausch, ‘From Second to Third Reich: The Problem of Continuity in German Foreign Policy’. Central European History, 12, 1 (March 1979), 68–82. 19 Anthony McElligott, ‘Reforging Mitteleuropa in the Second World War’, in Peter Stirk (ed.), Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects: 1815–1990 (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 129–59. 20 On the connection between these two spheres: Hermann Graml, Zwischen Stresemann und Hitler. Die Außenpolitik der Präsidialkabinette Brüning, Papen und Schleicher (Munich, 2001). 21 Emil Stutzer, Die deutschen Großstädte, einst und jetzt (Berlin, Braunschweig, Hamburg, 1917), reprinted in Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience 1900–1945. Modernity and Crisis (London and New York, 2001), pp. 2–4.

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22 Walther Rathenau, ‘Deutschlands Rohstoffversorgung, Vortrag gehalten in der “Deutschen Gesellschaft 1914” am 20 Dezember 1915’, in Walther Rathenau. Gesammelte Schriften in fünf Bänden: fünfter Band (Berlin, 1918), pp. 23–58, here 26–7. 23 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 319, 39th Session, 5 April 1916, 856–7 (Spahn); Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 311, 128th Session, 1 December 1917, 3977 (Ledebour); Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 312, 157th Session, 3 May 1918, 4907 (v. Schulze-Graevenitz). 24 Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 5 Weltkrieg, Revolution und Reichserneuerung 1914–1919 (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1978), p. 1173. America did not ratify the Treaty, instead it signed a separate one with Germany in August 1921, Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 7: Ausbau, Schutz und Untergang der Weimarer Repulblik (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1984), p. 18. 25 National Versammlung 326, 7th Session, 14 February 1919, 79. Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik (ADAP) Serie A: 1918–1925, I, Doc. 95. 26 Schwabe (ed.), Quellen, Doc. 19, letter Johann Heinrich Graf von Bernstorff to Wilhelm Solf, here p. 69. 27 National Versammlung 326, 1st Session, 6 February 1919, 1 (Ebert); Ibid., 7th Session, p. 79 (Keil). For Brockdorff-Rantzau’s position, Schwabe (ed.), Quellen, Doc. 26, Interview with the Danish newspaper Politiken 24 December 1918, and Doc. 34, interview with foreign press 24 January 1919. 28 National Versammlung 327, 34th Session, 10 April 1919, 924. 29 Ibid., p. 961. 30 Lorenz, ‘Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht’, p. 75. 31 ADAP Serie A, I, Doc. 238, pp. 452–53, von Brockdorff-Rantzau, 29 April 1919, reprinted in Schwabe, Quellen, Doc. 87. Edgar Stern-Rubarth, Graf BrockdorffRantzau, Wanderer zwischen Zwei Welten. Ein Lebensbild (Berlin, 1929), pp. 83–6, 96–110. Alma Molin Luckau, The German Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference (New York, 1941). Udo Wengst, Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau und die außenpolitischen Anfänge der Weimarer Republik (Bern, Frankfurt Main, 1973), pp. 46–7. Peter Krüger, Deutschland und die Reparationen 1918/19 (Stuttgart, 1973), pp. 161–209. 32 National Versammlung 326, 7th Session, 14 February 1919, 66. 33 Is Germany Guilty? German White-book concerning the Responsibility of the Authors of the War (Berlin, 1919), p. 5, also in Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau, Dokumente und Gedanke um Versailles (Berlin, 1925), pp. 70–3. See also his Note to Clemenceau of 13 May where he reiterates Germany’s position and the injustice of Art. 231 and blanket reparations, Is Germany Guilty?, pp. 9–10, and the memorandum, ‘Observations on the Report of the Commission of the Allied and Associated Governments concerning the Responsibilities of the Authors of the War’ in which the signatories Hans Delbrück, Max Weber, Count Max Montgelas and Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy called for an impartial inquiry in ibid., pp. 43–55. Udo Wengst, Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau und die außenpolitischen Anfänge der Weimarer Republik (Bern and Frankfurt am Main, 1973). 34 Wengst, Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau, pp. 51–2. 35 Schwabe (ed.), Quellen, Doc. 98, letter Walter Simons (state secretary with the delegation) to his wife, 10 May 1919. While Simons was clearly impressed by the minister’s action, it went down badly among members of the Entente powers, including Woodrow Wilson. Peter Krüger, Die Aussenpolitik der Republik von

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36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55

Notes Weimar (Darmstadt, 1985), pp. 74–5; Schöllgen, Jenseits von Hitler, p. 109. Brockdorff-Rantzau appears to have had postcards of this event as a momento, leaving one for Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der Weimarer Republik in Tagebüchern, Leitartikeln und Briefen des Chefredakteurs am ‘Berliner Tageblatt’ und Mitbegründers der ‘Deutsche Demokratische Partei’ introduced and edited by Bernd Sösemann (Boppard am Rhein, 1984), p. 743, 22 June 1919. Akten der Reichskanzlei, Kab. Scheidemann, Doc. 133. Schwabe (ed.), Quellen, Doc. 130, Note 16 June 1919, Clemenceau to BrockdorffRantzau. ADAP Serie A, II, Doc. 5, pp. 7–17, Friedensprotokoll, 8 May 1919. ADAP Serie A, II, Doc. 122, pp. 90–1. Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Dokumente und Gedanken um Versailles (Berlin, 1925); Schwabe, Quellen, Doc. 95, telegram to Geschäftsstelle für die Friedensverhandlungen, 8 May 1919. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 3, Doc. 719, pp. 360–2. See also, Schwabe, Quellen, Doc. 116. For background, Wengst, Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau, pp. 72–93. Akten der Reichskanzlei, Kab. Scheidemann, Docs. 117, 118. See also Docs. 114, 116. See also the report from Gisbert Freiherr von Romberg to Scheidemann in ibid, Doc. 109, 12 June 1919, in which the diplomat argued that the Entente would seek to advance on a line from Stuttgart-Marburg-Schlüchten-Hamm,thereby severing the Rhineland from the rest of Germany. Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919, 8, 10, 18, 21 June, pp. 729–32, 736, 740. Schwabe, Quellen, Docs. 137 and 138 (cf. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 3, pp. 386–87). Gustav Bauer to the National Assembly in Weimar on 22 June 1919, cited by Philipp Scheidemann during a later debate on the Dawes Plan, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 381, 18th Session, 25 July 1924, 677. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, p. 1173; idem, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 17. Bernhard Fulda, Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford, 2009), pp. 48–50, 55. Troeltsch, Spektator-Briefe, p. 53. Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, edited Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt, 2003), 16 December 1918, p. 109. Walther Rathenau, ‘Versailles’, Der Spiegel, 15 May 1919, reprinted in Walther Rathenau, Nachgelassene Schriften Erster Band (Berlin, 1928), p. 101. Cf., ‘Das Ende’, Die Zukunft, 31 May 1919. National Versammlung 327, 39th Session, 12 May 1919, 1081. Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919, pp. 710–12, 12 May 1919. National Versammlung 327, 39th Session, 12 May 1919, 1082. Lorenz, ‘Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht’, pp. 79–80. For the response of Social Democracy to defeat and the Treaty, see Ulrich Heinemann, Die verdrängte Niederlage: politische Öffentlichkeit und Kriegsschuldfrage in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 1983). William Maehl, ‘The German Socialists and the Foreign Policy of the Reich from the London Conference to Rapallo’. Journal of Modern History, 19, 1 (March 1947), 35–54, here 36. Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher 1918–1937. Politik, Kunst und Gesellschaft der zwanziger Jahre (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 4th edn, 1979), 22 June 1919, p. 184. On Kessler’s politics and his transformation from nationalist to republican democrat,

Notes

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57 58

59

60 61

62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73

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Jonathan Steinberg, ‘The Man Who Knew Everybody’. London Review of Books (23 May 2013), 35–6. For the press campaign against Erzberger as well as the attempts on his life, Fulda, Press and Politics, pp. 48–63. For similar attacks on Rathenau, some with antiSemitic undertones, see his letters to DNVP deputy, Reinhard Mumm, 27.5.1919, and Johann Goettsberger, 14.12.21, in Jaser, Picht, Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe Teilband 2, pp. 2193–5, 2623–5. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, 20 June 1919, p. 269. See also his diary for 21 June 1919, p. 270. Ibid., p. 273. Kessler, Tagebücher, 23 June 1919, pp. 185–6. Wolfgang Stresemann, ‘Mein Vater, der Kanzler und Außenminister’, in Rudolf Pörtner (ed.), Alltag in der Weimarer Republik. Erinnerungen an eine unruhige Zeit (Düsseldorf, Vienna, New York, 1990), p. 102. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Culture of Defeat. On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (London, 2003, orig. Die Kultur der Niederlage, Berlin, 2001). Richard Bessel, ‘Die Krise der Weimarer Republik als Erblast des verlorenen Krieges’, in Frank Bajohr, Werner Johe, Uwe Lohalm (eds), Zivilisation und Barberei. Die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne (Hamburg, 1991), pp. 99–111, here 110. Lorenz, ‘Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht’, p. 197. Käthe Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher 1908–1943, edited with a postscript by Jutta BohnkeKollwitz (Berlin 1989, new edn, 2007), p. 427; Victor Klemperer, Leben sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum. Tagebücher 1918–1924, edited Walter Nowojski (Berlin, 1996), p. 129, 20 June 1919. National Versammlung 330, 92 Session, 7 October 1919, 2880. See Sally Marks, ‘The Myth of Reparations’. Central European History, 11/3 (September 1978), 231–55. The phrase ‘Welle von Rechts’ is taken from Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 33. Heinemann, Die verdrängte Niederlage, pp. 29–35, for the division between SPD and USPD over ‘war guilt’. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 33. Both Kapp and Lüttwitz were also motivated by the question of restricting the army to 100,000. Ibid., pp. 148, 155–6, 179ff. For the debate on Spa, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 363, Anlage Nr. 187: ‘Auswärtiges Amt, Die Konferenz in Spa vom 5. Bis 16. Juli 1920’. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 348, 2656–882; cf. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 366, Drucksache Nr. 1640, p. 133. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 349, 26 April 1921, 3471–80. So Lloyd George cited in Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgschichte 7, p. 174. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, pp. 172–4, 180–91, for details. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 349, 3629–51. The Centre Party, MSPD and USPD voted unanimously in favour; the DDP voted 17 for but 21 against; the DVP voted 6 for but 41 against; the BVP voted 2 for and 15 against; there was 1 KPD vote in favour with the remaining 17 voting against; the DNVP and the Bauernbund voted unanimously against. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 197. Cited in Maehl, ‘The German Socialists and the Foreign Policy’, p. 41. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 349, 110th Session, 2 June 1921, 3742. See also Wirth, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 352, 160th Session, 26 January 1922, 5557.

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74 Cited in Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 217. Cf., Walther Rathenau, ‘Ja oder Nein’, Berliner Tageblatt, 10 May 1921, reprinted in Nachgelassene Schriften, pp. 244–9, here 246. 75 Die Wiesbadener Protokolle vom 6. und 7. Oktober 1921 (Berlin, 1921). 76 Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Die Kabinette Wirth I und II: 10. Mai 1921 bis 26. Oktober 1921/26. Oktober 1921 bis 22. November 1922, prepared by Ingrid Schulze-Bidlingsmaier 2 vols (Boppard am Rhein, 1973), vol. 1, Docs. 97, 107 note 9. 77 Walther Lambach, Diktator Rathenau (Hamburg, Leipzig, 1918), pp. 23, 33, 41–3. Rathenau to Sophie von Benckendorff und Hindenburg, 22.11.192, in Jaser, Picht, Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe Teilband 2, pp. 2619–20. 78 Jakob Reichert, Rathenaus Reparationspolitik. Eine kritische Studie (Berlin, 1922). Reichert a DNVP deputy is untypical in his criticism of Rathenau in that he purports admiration for the minister while at the same time decrying his policies as a sell-out to the French. For an emphasis of the continuity between Rathenau and Stresemann, see Adolf Neumann, ‘Rathenaus Reparationspolitik’ (Phil. Diss Leipzig University, 1930), pp. 16–55, 71. 79 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 372 Drucksache Nr. 4140: Aktenstücke zur Reparationsfrage vom Mai 1921 bis März 1922’. 80 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 232. Anne Orde, British Policy and European Reconstruction after the First World War (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 255, 259, 261–2. 81 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, pp. 221–2. Rathenau was officially an independent but his political outlook was close to the DVP. 82 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 355, 231st Session, 21 June 1921, 7922–97. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 244. 83 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 352, 161 Session, 27 January 1922, 5609–19, 5621–22. 84 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 352, 160 Session, 26 January 1922, 5563–74, here; Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 222. On Westarp and conservative politics, Henry Bernhard, Reventlow, Hugenberg und die anderen (Berlin, 1926); Larry Eugene Jones, ‘Kuno Graf von Westarp und die Krise des deutschen Konservatismus in der Weimarer Republik’, in idem and Wolfram Pyta (eds), ‘Ich bin der letzte Preuße’. Der politische Lebensweg des konservativen Politikers Kuno Graf von Westarp (1864–1945) (Cologne, 2006), pp. 109–46. 85 Ibid., p. 116 for the ferocious attack upon Rathenau by DNVP politician Henning in the Konservative Monatsschrift immediately prior to his assassination. Reichert, Rathenaus Reparationspolitik, pp. 8–9, 280–302, for a fierce attack on Rathenau’s role in the Wiesbaden Agreement. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, pp. 252–3. 86 Die Kabinette Wirth I und II, vol. 2, Docs. 404, 408. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 270. 87 And in this reiterated the policy of his predecessor in the note of 14 November to the Reparations Commission. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 357, 273 Session, 24 November 1922, 9099–105, here 9101. 88 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 275. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 361, 378 Session, 8 August 1923, 11749–58. Hermann J. Rupieper, The Cuno Government and Reparations 1922–1923. Politics and Economics (The Hague, Boston, London, 1979), pp. 211–17, and 174–217 passim. 89 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 278.

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90 Eduard Rosenbaum, Der Wirtschaftskrieg nach dem Versailler Vertrag (Leipzig, 1932), pp. 28–33. Jacques Bariéty, ‘Die franzöische Politik in der Ruhrkrise’, in Klaus Schwabe (ed.), Die Ruhrkrise 1923 (Munich, 1986), pp. 11–27, here, p. 12. 91 See the three reports by the German Government: Auswärtiges Amt, Aktenstücke über die franzöisch-belgischen Einmarsch in das Ruhrgebiet (Berlin, 1923); idem, Übersicht über das Reparationsproblem (Berlin, 1923); idem, Das Reparationsproblem (Berlin, 1929). 92 Orde, British Policy, pp. 237–45; Margaret Pauley, The Watch on the Rhine. The Military Occupation of the Rhineland, 1918–1930 (London, New York, 2007), pp. 81–97; Conan Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis, 1923–1924 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 49–107, 243–9. For a detailed study of conditions under the occupation, Martin Süß, Rheinhessen unter franzöischer Besatzung. Vom Waffenstillstand 1918 bis zum Ende der Separatistenunruhen im Februar 1924 (Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, 1988). 93 Elz, ‘Versailles und Weimar’, p. 34. 94 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT, 2001). 95 German Government, Sammlung eidlicher Aussagen über Gewaltakte der franzöischbelgischen Truppen im Ruhrgebiet [3 parts] (Berlin, 1923). On propaganda in the Ruhr, Franziska Wein, Deutschlands Strom – Frankreichs Grenze: Geschichte und Propaganda am Rhein 1919–1930 (Essen, 1992). 96 The Burden of Military Occupation. Representative Cases and Statistics Compiled from the Memoranda of the German Ministry of Finance (Leipzig, 1923), p. 8. 97 Sally Marks, ‘Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and Prurience’. European Studies Review, 13, 3 (1983), 297–333; Gisela Lebzelter, ‘Die “Schwarze Schmach” in Vorurteile-Propaganda-Mythos’. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985), 37–58; Juliana Roos, ‘Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’. German History, 30, 1 (March 2012), 45–74. 98 Wolfgang Elz, ‘Versailles und Weimar’, p. 34, makes the intriguing observation that the Ruhr crisis represented the last battle of World War I. 99 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 304. 100 Ibid., p. 305. Huber talks of the ‘selbstausschaltung’ of the Reichstag – a dangerous precedent to the Enabling Act 1933, ibid., p. 335. 101 See Chapter 8. Anthony McElligott, ‘Political Culture’, in idem, Weimar Germany, p. 34. 102 ‘Der Passive Widerstand’ reprinted in Rocchus von Rheinbaben (ed.), Stresemann. Reden und Schriften, 2 vols (Dresden, 1926), vol. 2, pp. 58–87; see also his ‘Fraktionspolitik oder Volksgemeinschaft?’ in ibid., pp. 87–100. 103 Cited in Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 337. 104 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 376 Drucksache Nr. 5471; Ver. RT 358, 9526ff. Prussian Landtag 1921–23, Vol. 10, col. 14548. 105 ADAP Serie A, Vol. X, 7 April bis 4 August 1924, Doc. 235, ‘Aufzeichnung des Ministerialdirektors von Schubert’, 31 July 1924, pp. 591–2. See also the telegrams from Stresemann to Berlin, in ADAP Serie A, Vol. XI, 5 August bis 31 Dezember 1924, Doc. 7, pp. 16–18, Doc. 21, pp. 50–3, Doc. 65 (Freiherr von Maltzan), pp. 149–50. 106 Orde, British Policy, pp. 253, 256. Heinrich Klümpen, Deutsche Außenpolitik zwischen Versailles und Rapallo: Revisionismus oder Neueorientierung? (Münster, 1992), p. 131. Elspeth Y. O’Riordan, Britain and the Ruhr Crisis (Basingstoke, 2001),

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107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116

117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

Notes pp. 125–76. There was also much sympathy for Germany among the British intellectual elite, Colin Storer, ‘Weimar Germany as Seen by an Englishwoman: British Woman Writers and the Weimar Republic’. German Studies Review, 32, 1 (February 2009), 129–47, here 131–3. ‘In the Ruhr’. Advocate for Peace and Justice, 85, 4 (April 1923), 146–7. Walter James Shepard, ‘The German Elections’. The American Political Science Review, 18, 3 (August 1924), 528–33, here 529. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 381, 18th Session, 25 July 1924, 661 (von Reventlow, NSDAP), 662, 664–71 (Berndt, DNVP), 681–5 (Rosenberg, KPD). Shepard, ‘The German Elections’, p. 532. Elmer D. Graper, ‘The Reichstag Elections’. The American Political Science Review, 19, 2 (May 1925), 362–70, here 367. ADAP Serie A, Vol. XII, 1 Januar bis 25 April 1925, Doc. 25, Ambassador Hoesch in Paris to AA Berlin, 15 January 1925, pp. 60–1. Karl Heinrich Pohl, Weimars Wirtschaft und die Außenpolitik der Republik, 1924–1926. Vom Dawes Plan zum Internationalen Eisenpakt (Düsseldorf, 1979), pp. 29, 31–2, 40, 43. Andreas Hillgruber, ‘“Revisionismus” – Kontinuität und Wandel in der Außenpolitik der Weimarer Republik’. Historische Zeitschrift 237 (1983), 597–621. ‘The Locarno Treaties’. Bulletin of International News, 1, 21 (2 November 1925), 2–3; Krüger, Aussenpolitik, pp. 280–2, 294, 300. Wright, Stresemann, pp. 330–9, here 333. Klaus Megerle, Deutsche Außenpolitik 1935: Ansatz zu aktiven Revisionismus (Frankfurt, 1973), p. 131. Klümpen, Deutsche Außenpolitik, pp. 132–3. Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, Erinnerungen (Leipzig, 1936), p. 219, cites correspondence from Hindenburg in which the president expressed his mistrust of Stresemann and his unhappiness at the outcome at Locarno. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 384, 8th Session, 19 January 1925, 92. The speech was originally scheduled for the afternoon of the 16th, after the first cabinet meeting but was postponed until the 19th, Akten der Reichskanzlei Kab. Luther I und II, vol. I, Docs 1 and 3. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 384, 8 Session, 19 January 1925, 93. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 385, 63 Session, 19 May 1925, 1886–94 (Breitscheid, SPD); pp. 1894–903 (Westarp, DNVP). Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 381, 18th Session, 25 July 1924, 679. On the London Conference, Orde, British Policy and European Reconstruction, pp. 254–65. Rupieper, The Cuno Government, pp. 160–1, (Appendix D: Critical Votes on Foreign Policy Issues in the German Reichstag from 1923 to 1929). Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 381, 18th Session, 25 July 1924, 701. Barry A. Jackisch, ‘Kuno Graf von Westarp und die Auseinandersetzungen über Locarno’, in Jones and Pyta (eds), ‘Ich bin der letzte Preuße’, pp. 147–62. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 391, 262nd Session, 3 February 1927, 8792. For the lifting of controls, see: ‘Alleviation of Allied Control in the Rhineland’. Advocate of Peace through Justice, 88, 2 (February 1926), 81–2. For an interesting view on the day-to-day operation of the British occupation authorities vis-à-vis nationalist-motivated transgressions of laws enacted by the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission as a template for post-1945 policy, see: F. L. Carsten, ‘The British Summary Court at Wiesbaden, 1926–1929’. The Modern Law Review, 7, 4 (November 1944), 215–20.

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125 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 391, 262nd Session, 3 February 1927, 8793. 126 Documentation on the Hague Conference in Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945 (ADAP), Serie B: Vol. X: 1 September–31 December 1928, Vol. XI, 1 January–31 May 1929, Vol. XII 1 June–2 September 1929. 127 Ernst Meier, Zeittafel der deutschen Reparation 1918–1930 (Berlin, 1930), pp. 27–38, here 32–3. 128 Stresemann in an interview with the editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, Theodor Wolff, reprinted in Wolfgang Elz (ed.), Quellen zur Aussenpolitik der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Darmstadt, 2007), Doc. 96, pp. 186–7 (orig. Gustav Stresemann, Vermächtnis. Der Nachlass in drei Bänden, edited Henry Bermhard, vol. 3 (1933), pp. 563–6). 129 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Doc. 1728f. Here p. 227 for Curtius’s praise. See also Julius Curtius, Der Young-Plan (Stuttgart, 1948). 130 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Doc 1701. Franz Knipping, Deutschland, Frankreich und das Ende der Locarno-Ära 1928–1931. Studien zur internationalen Politik in der Anfangsphase der Weltwirtschaftskrise (Munich, 1987), pp. 96–104. 131 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 427, 140th Session, 12 March 1930, 4371. 132 ‘Rhineland and Reparations’. Advocate for Peace and Justice, 90, 10/11 (October– November 1928), 617–18, here 617. The French saw the situation from the other side of the coin, demanding full and final reparations settlement before considering ending occupation, ibid., p. 618. 133 ADAP Serie B, 1925–1933, Vol. VIII, Doc. 121, pp. 259–61, here 260. 134 ADAP Serie B, 1925–1933, Vol. IX, Doc. 88. 135 ADAP Serie B, 1925–1933, Vol. XV, Doc. 113, pp. 269–71 and Doc. 114, 271–3, here 272. 136 ‘Memorandum Defining the Relations Between the Allied Military Authorities and the Interallied Rhineland High Commission’. The American Journal of International Law, 13, 4, Supplement: Official Documents (October 1919), 409–10; German Government, Das Rheinland Abkommen und die Ordonnanzen der Interalliierten Rheinlandkommission in Coblenz [Nr 1–257] (Berlin, 1924); Werner Vogels, Die Verträge über Besetzung und Räumung des Rheinlandes und die Ordonnanzen der Interalliierten Rheinlandoberkommission in Coblenz: Textausg. d. Verträge u. d. Ordonnanzen 1–302 u. d. Anweisungen 1–26 in franz. u. dt., nebst e. Kt. d. besetzten Gebiets (Berlin, 1925). 137 ‘The Geneva Agreement regarding Rhineland Evacuation’. Bulletin of International News, 5, 6 (29 September 1928), 3–10. ‘International Agreement on the Evacuation of the Rhineland Territory’. The American Journal of International Law, 24, 2, Supplement: Official Documents (April 1930), 144–52. Krüger, Aussenpolitik, pp. 461–5; Wright, Stresemann, pp. 337–8, 428–39, 479–82. 138 Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Der Kölner Dom als Nationaldenkmal’. Historische Zeitschrift 233 (1981), 595–613, here 599. 139 Hans-Peter Schwarz, Adenauer I: Der Aufstieg: 1876–1952, third rev. edn (Munich, 1991), pp. 293, 295. 140 Knipping, Deutschland, Frankreich und das Ende der Locarno-Ära, pp. 142–8. On Rhineland Separatism, see the account by one of its leaders, Hans A. Dorten, ‘The Rhineland Movement’. Foreign Affairs, 3, 3 (April 1925), 399–410. For the attacks against separatists considered to have ‘collaborated’ with the Occupation, see ADAP Serie B, Vol. XV 1 May bis 30 September 19130, Docs, 119, 124, 125. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Doc. 1718b.

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141 The role of the Reichskunstwart is discussed in Chapter 6. 142 Material in Barch R32/434 Bde. 1–3. In this context, ‘Strom’ can also be understood as ‘pulse’ or ‘current’. 143 Barch R32/281, Bl. 128. 144 Edwin Redslob, Befreiungs-Festspiel Deutschlands Strom. Chorische Dichtung zur Feier der Rheinland-Befreiung Wiesbaden 19., 20. und 21. Juli 1930 (Offenbach, 1930). 145 Details in Barch R32/279 and 280. 146 Barch R32/281, Bl. 127. 147 Barch R32/280, Bl. 52. ‘Wir sind das Volk und wir/Mußten es tragen/Wollen die Ketten der/Knechtschaft zerschlagen!’. 148 A temporary bridge later collapsed killing between 30 and 40 spectators. 149 Barch R32/280, Bl. 53–4. 150 Ibid., Bl. 55; Barch R32/281, Bl. 129. 151 Barch R32/542, for press responses. On totality and art, Stephan Lamb and Anthony Phelan, ‘Weimar Culture: The Birth of Modernism’, in Rob Burns (ed.), German Cultural Studies (Oxford, 1996), pp. 79–80. 152 Eberhard Kolb, Die Weimarer Republik, third edn (Munich, 1993), p. 99. Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford, 1993), p. 273. 153 Berliner Tageblatt 375, 11 August 1930, R32/437, Bl. 51. 154 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Doc. 1718f, here p. 228. See also, Doc. 1719 in ibid. 155 Barch R32/437, Bd. 8, for press reports. Rödder, Stresemanns Erbe, p. 112, citing Curtius asserts that the impact of achieving the early evacuation of the Rhineland was a ‘damp squib’ (‘verpufft’) on public opinion. The evidence shows the contrary. 156 Barch R32/434, Bl. 26, unidentified letter 29 July 1930; Knipping, Deutschland, Frankreich und das Ende der Locarno-Ära, p. 146. 157 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Doc. 1718a. 158 Barch R32/280, Bl. 1, Ministerialrat Dr Eugen Mayer Reichsministerium für die besetzten Gebiete to Redslob 30 July 1930. 159 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Doc. 1718c-e. Hindenburg had already made plain his desire that the tour remain limited to a few key cities, Barch R32/281 Bl. 40, ‘Der Reichsminister für den besetzten Gebiete I 1/509, 29 April 1930’. 160 As well as Salin, Die Deutschen Tribute, see Heinrich Schnee and Hans Draeger (eds), Zehn Jahre Versailles 3 Vols (Berlin, 1929); Graf Max Montgelas, Leitsätze zur Kriegsschuldfrage. Als Manuskript gedruckt von der Zentralstelle für Erforschung der Kriegsursachen (Berlin, 1929). For a republican perspective, Karl Bröger, Deutsche Republik: Betrachtung und Bekenntnis zum Werke von Weimar (Berlin, 1926), idem, Versailles! – Eine Schrift für die Schuljugend (Berlin, 1929). 161 A typical example of this is the contradictory position adopted by one of its spokesmen for the ‘younger generation’, Lindeiner-Wildau during the debate on Germany’s entry into the League of Nations, Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 6, Doc. 1377b. 162 The signature campaign achieved 10.2 per cent of eligible voters, 0.2 per cent above the threshold, but with phenomenal support in the provinces east of the Elbe and negligible support in the Rhine and Ruhr, Lower Bavaria and Baden, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, Neue Folge, Vol. 372 (Berlin, 1930), Anhang: Volksbegehren und Volksentscheid über den Entwurf eines ‘Gesetzes gegen den Versklavung des Deutsche Volkes’. 163 Ernst Otto Bräunche, ‘Die Reichstagwahlen 1919–1930: Die politischen Parteien der Pfalz und ihre Wähler’, in Wilhelm Kreutz and Karl Scherer (eds), Die Pfalz unter

Notes

164 165

166 167 168

169 170 171

172 173 174

175 176

177

251

französischer Besetzung: (1918/19–1930) (Kaiserslautern, 1999), pp. 77–103, here 92, 102. National data in J. Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1986), p. 72; Alfred Milatz, ‘Das Ende der Parteien im Spiegel der Wahlen 1930 bis 1933’, in E. Matthias, R. Morsey (eds), Das Ende der Parteien 1933 (Düsseldorf, 1960), pp. 744–58. The tone was set by a spokesman for the Deutsche Freiheitspartei, later NSDAP, on foreign policy von Reventlow in 1924, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 381, 18th Session, 25 July 1924, 670. Hitler Reden Schriften Anordnungen Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, Band III Zwischen den Reichstagswahlen Juli 1928-Septembeer 1930, Teil 3: Januar 1930-September 1930, edited and with a commentary by Christian Hartmann (Munich, New Providence, London, Paris, 1995), p. 243. Pohl, Weimars Wirtschaft und die Außenpolitik, pp. 15–59, 264–6, 274–8. Manfred J. Enssle, ‘Stresemann’s Diplomacy Fifty Years After Locarno: Some Recent Perspectives’. The Historical Journal, 20, 4 (December 1977), 937–48. Klümpen, Deutsche Außenpolitik, pp. 116, 122, 124. Pohl, Weimars Wirtschaft und die Außenpolitik, p. 266. The former foreign minister Brockdorff-Rantzau was a keen advocate of Ostpolitik, Elz, Quellen, Doc. 15, pp. 51–2. Krüger, Aussenpolitik, pp. 166–83. Wright, Stresemann, pp. 354–59. Die Kabinette Wirth I und II, vol. 1, Introduction, LXIV. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Doc. 1721 and Elz, Quellen, Doc. 116 (note by von Bülow on discussions on Eastern borders and revision of Versailles between Brüning and the Italian foreign minister Grandi, 27 October 1931). Rochus von Rheinbaben, Liberale Politik im neuen Reiche (Karlsruhe, 1928), pp. 51–5. Rheinbaben uses the adjective kämpferisch but a direct translation into ‘combative’ would alter the meaning in this context. Stresemann’s nationalist outlook has been emphasized by a number of scholars, Larry E. Jones, ‘Gustav Stresemann and the Crisis of German Liberalism’. European Studies Review 4, 2 (1975), 141–63; and especially Enssle, ‘Stresemann’s Diplomacy’, pp. 940–1. ADAP Serie B: Vol. IX, Doc. 210, pp. 514–17; Christian Holtje, Die Weimarer Republik und das Ostlocarno-Problem 1919 bis 1934. Revision oder Garantie der deutschen Ostgrenze von 1919 (Wurzburg, 1958), pp. 23–47, 106–30. Gottfried Niedhart, Internationale Beziehungen 1917–1947 (Paderborn, 1989), p. 35. Wright, Gustav Stresemann, p. 485. Wright follows closely the argument originally put forward by Rödder, Stresemanns Erbe, pp. 113–19. See the important essay by Erich Hahn, ‘The German Foreign Ministry and the Question of War Guilt in 1918–1919’, in Carole Fink, Isabell Hull, MacGregor Knox (eds), German Nationalism and the European Response, 1890–1945 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1985), pp. 43–70. Private letter Ernst von Weizsäcker to his mother, 16 March 1930, in Elz, Quellen, Doc. 99, p. 190; Curtius to the Reichstag, 25 June 1930, in ibid., Doc. 102, pp. 193–4; Julius Curtius, Sechs Jahre Minister (Heidelberg, 1948), p. 171. Reinhard Frommelt, Paneuropa oder Mitteleuropa. Einigungsbestrebungen im Kalkül deutscher Wirtschaft und Politik 1925–1933 (Stuttgart, 1977), pp. 80–93. See the letters from Weizsäcker to his mother, 26 December 1930, 21 March 1931, 4 May 1931, in Elz, Quellen, Docs. 108, 112a and b, pp. 201–2, 206. This is not to ignore the issue of disarmament that also dominated political aspects of foreign policy from 1932 until 1933, when Hitler abandoned the conference at Geneva. The classic study is Henry Cord Meyer, Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815–1945 (The Hague, 1955). Peter M. R. Stirk, ‘The Idea of Mitteleuropa’, in idem

252

178 179

180

181 182

183 184 185 186 187 188

189 190 191

192 193

Notes (ed.), Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 1–35. A basic overview can be found in Jörg Brechtfeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics 1848 to the Present (Basingstoke, 1996), Ch. 4. Hermann Haß, Herrschaft in Mitteleuropa Bismarcks Bündnispolitik (Hamburg, 1933), pp. 191–201. Trade figures and networks in Rosenbaum, Der Wirtschaftskrieg, p. 20; Hartmann Freiherr von Richthofen, ‘Die Lahmlegung des deutschen Außenhandels’, Schnee and Draeger (eds), Zehn Jahre Versailles I, pp. 226–8. Meyer, Mitteleuropa, pp. 58–65, for the limitations to establishing the Middle European project. Background in Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deustche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 4: Struktur und Krisen des Kaiserreichs (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1969), pp. 1076–7. Andreas Peschel, Friedrich Naumanns und Max Webers ‘Mitteleuropa’: eine Betrachtung ihrer Konzeptionen im Kontext mit den ‘Ideen von 1914’ und dem Alldeutschen Verband (Dresden, 2005). Theodor Heuss, Friedrich Naumann: der Mann, das Werk, die Zeit (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1949). Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1915), pp. 19, 58, 101, 231. Ulrich Prehn, ‘Die “Entgrenzung” des Deustchen Reichs: Europäische Raumordnungsentwürfe in der Zeitschrift Volk und Raum (1925–1944)’, in Carola Sachse (ed.), ‘Mitteleuropa’ und ‘Südosteuropa’ als Planungsraum. Wirtschafts- und kulturpolitische Expertisen im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Göttingen, 2010), pp. 169–96. Naumann, Mitteleuropa, pp. 177–8. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 307, 40th Session 6 April 1916, 870. Ibid., p. 868. Stresemann’s claims were not fanciful, see the data in League of Nations, Europe’s Trade (New York, 1941). Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 307, 40th Session, 6 April 1916, 872. Ibid., p. 870. On Stresemann’s ideas for German hegemony, Marvin L. Edwards, Stresemann and the Greater Germany 1914–1918 (New York, 1963). See Theodor Wolff ’s comments to Bernhard von Bülow, Deutsche Politik (Berlin, 1916), in Tagebücher 1914–1919, p. 397, 2 July 1916. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 311, 128th Session, 1 December 1917, 3977. Karl Kautsky, Die Vereinigten Staaten Europas (Stuttgart, 1916), pp. 11, 42–3. See in general, Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of German Imperialism (Oxford, 1986). See Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Docs. 1723–36, for the attempts to form a union with Austria; for French opposition to a union with Austria, ADAP Series B, Vol. IX, Docs., 198 and 263. Hans Paul Höpfner, Deutsche Südosteuropapolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), pp. 125, 140–60, 267ff. Petra Svatek, ‘Hugo Hassinger und Südosteuropa. Raumwissenschaftliche Forschungen in Wien (1931–1945)’, in Sachse (ed.), ‘Mitteleuropa’ und ‘Südosteuropa’, pp. 290–311. Konstantin Loulos, Die deutsche Griechenlandpolitik von der Jahrhundertwende bis zum Ausbruch der Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York, 1986), p. 90. Höpfner, Deutsche Südosteuropapolitik, pp. 125, 140–60, 267ff. Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934–1940, 7 Vols (Salzhausen, Frankfurt am Main, 1980), Vol. 1: 1934, Teil B: Übersichten (Prag am 8. January 1935), pp. 831–49, here 840. The report nonetheless also emphasized the limits of German economic foreign policy, p. 834; Peter M. R.

Notes

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195 196 197

198

199 200

201 202

253

Stirk, ‘Ideas of Economic Integration in Interwar Mitteleuropa’, in idem, The Idea of Mitteleuropa, pp. 86–111, here 96–7, 102–6. In general, Dietrich Orlow, Nazis in the Balkans (Pittsburgh, 1967). See the following publications for trade data and analysis: ‘Der Warenaustausch mit Südosteuropa’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 December 1938; ‘Deutschland-Südosteuropa’, Germania 14 January 1938; ‘Macht Deutschland eine Wirtschaftsoffensive im Südostraum?’, Völkischer Beobachter, 12 October 1938, all located in Barch, NS22/522H. Radandt, ‘Berichte der Volkswirtschaftlichen Abteilung der I. G. Farbenindustrie AG über Südosteuropa’. Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte IV (1966), 289–314; idem, ‘Die IG-Farbenindustrie AG und Südosteuropa 1938 bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges’. Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1 (1967), 77–146. See also Verena Schröter, ‘The IG Farbenindustrie AG in Central and SouthEast Europe, 1926–38’ and Harm Schröter, ‘Siemens and Central and South-East Europe between the two world wars’, both in Alice Teichova and P. L. Cottrell (eds), International Business and Central Europe 1918–1939 (Leicester, New York, 1983), pp. 139–72, 173–92, with commentaries, pp. 192–206. See the extensive material on this activity for the later 1930s and the war period in Barch R7/1041. Mirko Lamer, ‘Die Wandlungen der ausländischen Kapitalanlagen auf dem Balkan’. Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, 48/3 (1938), 470–524. Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands Sopade, 6 Jg. Nr. 7 (1939) (reprint Verlag Petra Nettelbeck Zweitausendeins Salhausen/Frankfurt am Main 1980), pp. 941–61. Höpfner, Deutsche Südosteuropapolitik, pp. 149–56; Hans-Joachim Hoppe, ‘Deutschland und Bulgarien 1918–1945’, in Manfred Funke (ed.), Hitler, Deutschland und die Mächte. Materialien zur Außenpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Düsseldorf, 1976), pp. 604–11. ADAP Serie B, 1925–1933 Vol. XIX, 16.Okt. 1931 bis 29.Feb. 1932 (Göttingen, 1983), Doc. 109, 10 December 1931 [Friedberg], pp. 248–50; ibid., Vol. XX, Doc. 4, von Bülow to Ambassador in Vienna, 2 March 1932, pp. 8–13; ibid., Doc. 33, 30 March 1932, pp. 69–73. See also von Bülow’s notes on a meeting with the French ambassador, ibid., Doc. 10, 5 March 1932, pp. 23–5. ADAP Serie C, 1933–1937, Doc. 189, Memorandum 17 January 1934, pp. 364–5. Höpfner, Deutsche Südosteuropapolitik, p. 353. Hans-Jürgen Schröder, ‘Die deutsche Südosteuropapolitik und die Reaktion der angelsächsichen Mächte, 1929–1933/34’, in Josef Becker Klaus Hildebrand (eds), Internationale Beziehungen in der Weltwirtschaftskrise 1929–1933. Referate und Diskussionsbeiträge eines Augsburger Symposions, 29. März bis 1. April 1979 (München, 1980), pp. 343–60. By the end of the 1930s, practically every Balkan state depended on Germany for as much as 50 per cent of trade. W. Schumann (ed.), Griff nach Südosteuropa. Neue Dokumente über die Politik des deutschen Imperialismus im Zweiten Weltkrieg (East Berlin, 1973). Secret Memorandum, The Minister in Greece to the Foreign Ministry, Athens, 12 December 1935, in Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series C, Vol. IV (1935–36). In particular the lesson of surviving a hostile blockade, Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Das Kabinett von Papen 1. Juni bis 3. Dezember 1932, prepared by Karl-Heinz Minuth, 2 vols (Boppard am Rhein, 1989), vol. 2, Doc. 135, here p. 553, Doc. 143, here p. 590; Doc. 166, here p. 757; ‘Nationalsozialismus und Autarkie’, in Der Angriff 10 Mai 1932; Völkischer Beobachter 28 Juli 1940: ‘Der Südosten in der neuen Wirtschaftsordnung’, in Barch NS22/522; McElligott, ‘Reforging Mitteleuropa’,

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203 204 205 206 207

208 209 210 211 212

Notes p. 132. Debates on the merits and dismerits on autarky were already evident at the beginning of the 1930s, Ferdinand Fried, ‘Wo stehen wir?’ in Die Tat 23 Jg., Heft 8 (August 1931) reprinted in Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Doc. 1657a, pp. 4–5; Carl Driever, ‘Die Irrelehre von der Autarkie’, Kölnische Volks-Zeitung, 20 March 1932 reprinted in ibid., Doc. 1657b, p. 6. William Carr, Arms, Autarky and Aggression. A Study in German Foreign Policy, 1933–1939, 2nd edn (London, 1979). Circular, Foreign Ministry, Berlin 17 August 1936, Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series C, Vol. VI (1936–37), p. 903. Akten der Reichskanzlei Regierung Hitler Part I 1933/34, Vol. 1, Doc. 93, pp. 311–27, here 313–26 passim for the following argument. Ibid., Doc. 126, p. 447. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 457, 3rd Session, 17 May 1933, 47–54. Alan Bullock, ‘Hitler and the Origins of the Second World War’, in Esmonde M. Robertson (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1971), pp. 189–224, here 195–6, 209–10, 213–14. Andreas Hillgruber, Großmachtpolitik und Militärismus im 20. Jahrhundert. 3 Beiträge zur Konituitätsproblem (Düsseldorf, 1974), pp. 11–36; Klaus Hildebrand, Deutsche Außenpolitik 1933–1945, fourth expanded edition (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 30–42, 78–93. Marie-Luise Recker, Die Außenpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Munich, 1990). A clear overview of the various interpretations of ‘Hitler’s foreign policy’ in English is offered by Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th edn (London, 2000), pp. 134–60. Akten der Reichskanzlei Regierung Hitler I vol. 1, Doc. 93, p. 314. Ibid., Vol. 2, Doc. 264, note 13, p. 1012. On the congruence of aims, see William Mulligan, ‘The Reichswehr and the Weimar Republic’, in McElligott (ed.), Weimar Germany, pp. 78–101. Akten der Reichskanzlei Regierung Hitler I vol. 1, Doc. 126, note 6, p. 449. Ibid., Vol. 2, Doc. 243, pp. 939–41, here, 940–1. See the private notes of the German Ambassador in Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, in Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 10, pp. 417–18. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–45: Nemesis (New York, London, 2000), pp. xxxv–xl.

Chapter 4 1 Vicki Baum, Menschen im Hotel (Berlin, 1929), pp. 294–5. 2 Gustav Stolper, supplemented by Karl Häuser and Knut Borchardt, The German Economy 1870 to the present (London, 1967, orig. 1940), pp. 73–4. Knut Borchardt, ‘Wachstum und Wechsellagen 1914–1970’, in Hermann Aubin and Wolfgang Zorn (eds), Handbuch der deutschen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Vol. 2: Das 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 685–740, here 696–712; Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (New York and Oxford, 1993). Thomas Childers, ‘Inflation, Stabilization, and Political Realignment in Germany 1924–1928’, in Gerald D. Feldman, Carl Ludwig Holtfrerich, Gerhard A. Ritter, Peter-Christian Witt (eds), The German Inflation/Die Deutsche Inflation. Eine Zwischenbilanz (Berlin and New York, 1982), pp. 409–31; Heinrich Bennecke, Wirtschaftliche Depression und politischer Radikalismus, 1918–1938 (Munich and Vienna, 1970); Charles P. Kindleberger, Financial History of Western Europe (London, Boston, Sydney, 1984), pp. 311–28.

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3 In addition to the previously cited literature, the classic study of the postwar inflations is League of Nations, Economic, Financial and Transit Department, The Course and Control of Inflation: A Review of Monetary Experience in Europe after World War I (Geneva, League of Nations, 1946); see also, Michael Kaser and E. A. Radice (eds), The Economic History of Eastern Europe 1919–1975. Volume 1 Economic Structure and Performance between the Wars (Oxford, 1985), pp. 40–5. 4 Derek Aldcroft, The European Economy 1914–2000, 4th edn (London, New York, 2001). 5 Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic. The Crisis of Classical Modernity, translated Richard Deveson (London, 1991).On the causes and variations of fascism in Europe see Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison, 1995). 6 Martin Geyer, Verkehrte Welt. Revolution, Inflation und Moderne: München 1914–1924 (Göttingen, 1998), p. 150. 7 Niall Ferguson, ‘Constraints and the Room for Manoeuvre in the German Inflation of the Early 1920s’. The Economic History Review, New Series, 49, 4 (November 1996), 635–66. 8 Harold James, ‘The Weimar Economy’, in Anthony McElligott (ed.), The Short Oxford History of Germany: Weimar Germany (Oxford, New York, 2009), p. 111. See also Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, The German Inflation 1914–1923: Causes and Effects in International Perspective (Berlin, 1986), p. 93. 9 For the culmination of this in the 1934 labour law, see Tim Mason, ‘Zur Entstehung des Gesetzes zur Ordnung der nationalen Arbeit vom 20. Januar 1934: Ein Versuch über das Verhältnis “archäischer” und “moderner” Momente in der neuesten deutschen Geschichte’, in Hans Mommsen, Dietmar Petzina, Bernd Weisbrod (eds), Industrielles System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik, 2 vols, I (Düsseldorf, 1977), pp. 322–51. 10 Gerd Hardach, The First World War 1914–1918 (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 150–5. 11 Ibid., pp. 155–60; Peter Christian Witt, ‘Tax Policies, Tax Assessments and Inflation’, in idem, Wealth and Taxation in Central Europe. The History and Sociology of Public Finance (Leamington Spa, 1987), p. 141, note 9. 12 Knut Borchardt, Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy, trans. Peter Lambert (New York and Cambridge, 1991), pp. 133, 135. Feldman, The Great Disorder, pp. 25–51. 13 Robert Kuczyinski, ‘Öffentliche Finanzen und Valute’, Finanzpolitische Korrespondenz Nr. 5, 5.12.1919, cited in Jens Flemming, Claus-Dieter Krohn, Dirk Stegmann, Peter-Christian Witt (eds), Die Republik von Weimar vol.2: Das sozialökonomische System (Königstein/Ts., Düsseldorf, 1979), p. 316. But it should be pointed out that this policy of ‘cheap money’ meant that there was some benefit as foreign investment flowed to Germany as speculators took advantage of buying German securities cheaply in the expectation of rising value later. As a result capital inflows are estimated at between 7.6 and 15 billion, that is, between 5 and 10 per cent of NDP between 1919 and 1922. See James, ‘Weimar Economy’, p. 110. 14 Karl Hardach, Wirtschaftsgeschichte Deutschlands im 20.Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1976). 15 Ferguson, ‘Constraints’, pp. 637–8, 650. C. Bresciani-Turroni, The Economics of Inflation: A Study of Currency Depreciation in Post-war Germany, 1914–1923, translated (London, 1937). 16 Borchardt, Perspectives, pp. 134, 136. James, ‘Weimar Economy’, pp. 109–10; Ferguson, ‘Constraints’, p. 659, argues that the political dangers are exaggerated.

256

Notes

17 Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, ‘Political Factors of the German Inflation, 1914–1923’, in Nathan Schmukler and Edward Marcus (eds), Inflation through the Ages. Economic, Social, Psychological and Historical Aspects (New York, 1983), pp. 400–16. 18 Niall Ferguson, ‘Keynes and the German Inflation’. The English Historical Review 110, 436 (April 1995), 368–91; idem and Brigitte Granville, ‘Weimar on the Volga’: Causes and Consequences of Inflation in the 1990s Russia Compared with 1920s Germany’. The Journal of Economic History, 60, 4 (December 2000), 1061–87. James, ‘Weimar Economy’, p. 107, interprets the inflation as a policy disaster. 19 Heinrich Bechtel, Wirtschaftsgechichte Deutschlands, Band 3: Im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich 1956), pp. 426, 428. 20 Arno Klönne and Hartmut Reese, Die deutsche Gewerkschaftsbewegung. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Hamburg, 1984), p. 93. 21 Keynes was citing the former First Lord of the Admiralty and a close collaborator of Lloyd George, Sir Eric Geddes, John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Peace (London, 1919), p. 131. Stolper, The German Economy, p. 76. 22 Figures cited D. Petzina, W. Abelshauser, A. Faust (eds), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III. Materialien zur Statistik des Deutsche Reiches 1914–1945 (Munich, 1978), p. 151. 23 See Herbert Michaelis, Ernst Schraepler (eds), Ursachen und Folgen. Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart 26 Volumes (Berlin, 1958–1979), vol. 4, Part VI, 2: ‘Reparationen, Wiederaufbauleistungen und Sanktionen’, pp. 266–437. 24 Eugeni Xammar Das Schlangenei. Berichte aus dem Deutschland der Inflationsjahre 1922–1924 translated Kirstin Brand (Berlin, 2007), pp. 21–33. 25 Borchardt, Perspectives, p. 137. 26 Ibid., p. 138. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War 1914–1918 (London, 1998), pp. 421–8; and 395–432 passim. 27 These were Hermann Müller: March–June 1920, Konstantin Fehrenbach: June 1920–21, Joseph Wirth: May 1921, Wilhelm Cuno: November 1922–July 1923, Gustav Stresemann: August–October 1923, October–November 1923, Wilhelm Marx: November 1923–June 1924. 28 Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Die Kabinette Marx I und II: 30 November bis 3 Juni 1924/3. Juni 1924 bis 15. Januar 1925, prepared by Günter Abramowaski 2 vols (Boppard am Rhein, 1973), vol. 1, Doc. 2. 29 Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability. Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 200, 203. 30 Borchardt, Perspectives, pp. 135–6. Winkler, Weimar, pp. 244–6. 31 Rudolf Tschirbs, ‘Der Ruhrbergbau zwischen Privilegierung und Statusverlust: Lohnpolitik von der Inflation bis zur Rationalisierung (1919–1927)’, in Feldman, Holtfrerich, Ritter, Witt (eds), The German Inflation, pp. 308–46. 32 Rudolf Meerwarth, Adolf Günther, Waldemar Zimmermann, Die Einwirkung des Krieges auf Bevölkerungsbewegung, Einkommen und Lebenshaltung in Deutschland (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig, 1932). Gerhard Bry, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945 (Princeton, 1960). 33 Jens Flemming, Klaus Saul, Peter-Christian Witt (eds), Familienleben im Schatten der Krise. Dokumente und Analysen zur Sozialgeschichte der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Düsseldorf, 1988), p. 81. Wilfried Deppe, Drei Generationen Arbeiterleben. Eine sozio-biographische Darstellung (Frankfurt/Main, 1982), pp. 83–4.

Notes

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34 Andreas Kunz, ‘Verteilungskampf oder Interessenkonsensus? Zur Entwicklung der Realeinkommen von Beamten und Angestellten in der Inflationszeit 1914–1924’, in Feldman, Holtfrerich, Ritter, Witt (eds), The German Inflation, pp. 347–84; idem, Civil Servants and the Politics of Inflation, 1914–1924 (Berlin, 1986). 35 Gustav Böß, Die Not in Berlin. Tatsache und Zahlen (Berlin, 1923), pp. 13–14. Bernard von Brentano, Der Beginn der Barbarei in Deutschland (Berlin, 1932), p. 174. Data on infant mortality in Dietmar Petzina, Werner Abelshauser, Anselm Faust, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III. Materialien zur Statistik des Deutschen Reiches 1914–1945 (Munich, 1978), p. 33. 36 See above all Feldman, The Great Disorder, chapter 12 passim. 37 Rudolf Küstermeier, ‘Die Proleterisierung des Mittelstandes und die Verwirklichung des Sozialismus’. Die Arbeit. Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde 8 (1931), H. 10, 761–4, here pp. 763–4. Anthony McElligott, Contested City. Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona (Ann Arbor, 1997), Ch. 5 in particular. 38 Max Rolfes, ‘Landwirtshaft 1914–1970’, in Aubin and Zorn (eds), Handbuch, pp. 741–95, here 753; cf. Frieda Wunderlich, Farm Labor in Germany 1810–1945. Its Historical Development within the Framework of Agricultural and Social Policy (Princeton, New Jersey, 1961), pp. 14–15, for slightly lower figures. 39 Robert Moeller, German Peasants and Agrarian Politics, 1914–1924. The Rhineland and Westphalia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986); Jonathan Osmond, Rural Protest in the Weimar Republic: The Free Peasantry in the Rhineland and Bavaria (New York, 1993). See also their contributions to Gerald D. Feldman, Carl Ludwig Holtfrerich, Gerhard A. Ritter, Peter Christian Witt (eds), The German Inflation: A Preliminary Balance/ Die Deutsche Inflation: Beiträge zu Inflation und Wiederaufbau in Deutschland und Europa 1914–1924 (Berlin, New York, 1982). 40 Borchardt, Perspectives, p. 138. 41 Greg Eghigian, ‘Pain, Entitlement, and Social Citizenship in Modern Germany’, in idem and Paul Betts (eds), Pain and Prosperity. Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German History (Stanford, Cal., 2003), pp. 16–34, here 26–7. Idem, ‘The Politics of Victimization: Social Pensioners and the German Social State in the Inflation of 1914–1924’. Central European History 26 (1993), 375–403. 42 Michael Hughes, ‘Economic Interest, Social Attitudes, and Creditor Ideology: Popular Responses to Inflation’, in Feldman, Holtfrerich, Ritter, Witt (eds), The German Inflation, p. 407. 43 McElligott, Contested City, pp. 140–1. See Peter J. Lyth, Inflation and the Merchant Economy. The Hamburg Mittelstand, 1914–1924 (New York, Oxford, Munich, 1990), p. 18, who quotes Franz Eulenberg’s study of 1924 showing that between 150 to 160 billion marks of investor savings (as of 1914) had been wiped out by 1924. 44 Meerwarth, Günther, Zimmermann, Die Einwirkung des Krieges, p. 194; Petzina, Abelshauser, Faust Sozislgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III, p. 105. 45 Hughes, ‘Economic Interest, Social Attitudes, and Creditor Ideology’, pp. 392–4; Childers, ‘Inflation, Stabilization, and Political Realignment in Germany 1924–1928’, pp. 415–16. See also David B. Southern, ‘The Impact of the Inflation: Inflation, the Courts and Revaluation’, in Richard Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger (eds), Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany (London, 1981), pp. 55–76.

Notes

258

46 The bands were based on the following income groups:

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

1913

1926

1928/1936

M

RM

RM

0   1,200 1,200   3,000 3,000   5,000 5,000   9,000 9,000   12,000 12,000   16,000 16,000   25,000 25,000  100,000 100,000  

0   1,200 1,200   3,000 3,000   5,000 5,000   8,000 8,000   12,000 12,000   16,000 16,000   25,000 25,000   50,000 50,000  100,000 100,000  

0   900 900   2,100 1,200   3,300 3,300   5,500 5,500   8,500 8,500  10,500 10,500  16,500 16,500  30,500 30,500  70,000 70,000  

Source, as Table 4.1.

47 Fleming et al., Familienleben, pp. 63–4. Meerwarth, Günther, Zimmermann, Die Einwirkung des Krieges, p. 127. 48 Meerwarth, Günther, Zimmermann, Die Einwirkung des Krieges, pp. 200, 209. 49 Theodor Geiger, Die soziale Schichtung des deutschen Volkes. Soziographischer Versuch auf statistischer Grundlage (Stuttgart, 1932). 50 See Lyth, Inflation and the Merchant Economy, and the contributions to Gerald D. Feldman, Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, Gerhard A. Ritter and Peter-Christian Witt (eds), Die deutsche Inflation. Eine Zwischenbilanz/The German Inflation Reconsidered. A Preliminary Balance (Berlin and New York, 1982). 51 McElligott, Contested City, pp. 144–53 especially and Ch. 5 passim. 52 Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter. The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill and London, 1983), Ch. 2 especially. 53 See Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg: Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich, 2007), chapters 16 and 17 especially. On the diversity of interest among the Mittelstand, see Küstermeier, ‘Die Proleterisierung des Mittelstandes’, pp. 767–8. 54 In a letter to Lloyd George in November 1920, Woodrow Wilson had refused to accept the link between allied debts and German reparations. The changed circumstances of 1922/23 forced both Germans and allies to rethink the need for a new consensus, James, ‘The Weimar Economy’, p. 113. 55 Until April 1917, Britain had been the principal lender: the equivalent of $3.8 billion (France lent about $½ billion); America’s entry into the war was underwritten by a financial package that saw it taking over financing war needs. Thus, the USA lent $7 billion, half of which went to Britain, which was then recycled as British loans to its allies (mainly Russia, Italy and France). At the end of the war, a complicated triangular pattern of inter-allied loans and debts existed. Theo Balderston, Economics and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 58–9; Hardach, The First World War, p. 148; Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression 1929–1939 (London, 1973), pp. 41–55. 56 Hardach, Wirtschaftsgeschichte, pp. 39–40. 57 Ibid., pp. 40–1, notes 18 and 19. 58 Klaus Lorenzen-Schmidt, ‘Die Landvolkbewegung in Schleswig-Holstein’, in Urs J. Diederichs and Hans-Hermann Wiebe (eds), Schleswig-Holstein unter dem

Notes

59

60

61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70

71

259

Hakenkreuz (Evangelische Akademie Nordelbien Dokumentation 7. Bad Segeberg, Hamburg, n.d.), pp. 44–5; Gerhard Stoltenberg, Politische Strömungen im Schleswigholsteinischen Landvolk 1918–1933. Ein Beitrag zur Politischen Meinungsbildung in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1962), pp. 95, 108; Dieter Gessner, Agrarverbände in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1976), pp. 91–2. Petzina, Abelshauser, Faust Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III, pp. 111–12, and Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 5 Weltkrieg, Revolution und Reichserneuerung 1914–1919 (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1978), p. 115. Michael Schneider, ‘Zwischen Machtanspruch und Integrationsbereitschaft: Gewerkschaften und Politik 1918–1933’, in Karl Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds), Die Weimarer Republik 1918–1933. Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft (Düsseldorf, 1987), pp. 179–96. Bechtel, Wirtschaftsgechichte Deutschlands, pp. 377, 379; Bry, Wages, 45–9; Petzina, Abelshauser, Faust (eds), Sozialgeschichtliches, Arbeitsbuch III, p. 110; Michael Schneider, Streit um Arbeitszeit. Geschichte des Kampfes um Arbeitszeitverkürzung in Deutschland (Cologne, 1984), pp. 104–46. Ibid., p. 120. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 7, Doc. 1652. Ludwig Preller, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik, (1949, repr. Düsseldorf, 1978), pp. 310–17. Petzina, Abelshauser, Faust (eds), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III, pp. 91, 114–17. Preller, Sozialpolitik, pp. 399–405. Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 6: Die Weimarer Verfassung (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1981), pp. 1138–46; Ursula Hüllbüsch, ‘Der Ruhreisenstreit in gewerkschaftlicher Sicht’, in Mommsen, Petzina, Weisbrod (eds), Industrielles System I, pp. 271–89. Heinrich August Winkler, Der Schein der Normalität: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1924 bis 1930 (Berlin etc, 1985), pp. 557–72. Details in Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, p. 1139. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 7, Doc. 1652. Jürgen von Kruedener, ‘Die Überförderung der Weimarer Republik als Sozialstaat’. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985), 358–76. Borchardt, Perspectives, pp. 156–7; idem, ‘Wirtschaftliche Ursachen des Scheiterns der Weimarer Republik’, in Karl Dietrich Erdmann (ed.), Weimar: Selbstpreisgabe einer Demokratie; eine Bilanz heute (Düsseldorf, 1980), pp. 211–49, here 228–33, esp. 232, 233–38. See also James, ‘Weimar Economy’, pp. 102, 107. Borchardt’s argument points to ‘high wages’ as being the real cause of mass unemployment from 1930. Jürgen Kuczynski, Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter in Deutschland Band I (Berlin, 1947), p. 324; Heinrich Bechtel, Wirtschaftsgechichte Deutschlands, Band 3: Im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1956), p. 386; Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich 49 (1930), 275; Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich 52 (1933), 279; Preller, Sozialpolitik, p. 158; Petzina, Abelshauser, Faust (eds), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III, pp. 98, 100, 107; Gerhard Bry, Wages in Germany; Klönne and Reese, Die deutsche Gewerkschaftsbewegung, pp. 132, 147; Rolfes, ‘Landwirtshaft’, p. 754. Castellan, ‘Zur sozialen Bilanz der Prosperität 1924–1929’, in Mommsen, Petzina, Weisbrod (eds), Industrielles System I, p. 108.

260

Notes

72 Alfred Braunthal, ‘Die Legende von den überhöhten Löhnen’. Die Arbeit. Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde 9, H. 6, (1932), 329–39, here 329 and 333, 337–8; see also the earlier study by Max Victor, ‘Verbürgerlichung des Proletariats und Proletarisierung des Mittelstandes: eine Analyse der Einkommenumschichtung nach dem Kriege’. Die Arbeit: Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde, 8, H. 1, (1931), 17–31, here 21–2, 25–7. 73 Preller, Sozialpolitik, p. 227. 74 Ibid., p. 254. 75 See for example, Akten der Reichskanzlei Das Kabinett Müller II/1 (June 1928–July 1929), prepared by Martin Voigt (Boppard am Rhein, 1970), Doc. 17, pp. 66–8. 76 Preller, Sozialpolitik, pp. 363–76; Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, p. 1097f. 77 Fritz Terhalle, Die Finanzwirtschaft des Staates und der Gemeinden (Berlin,1948), pp. 55, 57; Petzina, Abelshauser, Faust (eds), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III, pp. 147, 150, Hardach, Wirtschaftsgeschichte, p. 257. More generally on housing: Michael Rück, ‘Der Wohnungsbau im Schnittpunkt von Sozialund Wirtschaftspolitik. Problemen der öffentliche Wohnungspolitik in der Hauszinssteuerera 1924/25–1930/31’, in Werner Abelshauser (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik also Wohlfahrtsstaat Zum Verhältnis von Wirtschaft- und Sozialpolitik in der Industriegesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 91–123. 78 Balderston, Economics and Politics, pp. 69–71; and above all, Balderston’s opus magnum The Origins and Course of the German Economic Crisis. November 1923 to May 1932 (Berlin, 1993). Data in Petzina, Abelshauser, Faust (eds), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III, p. 65. 79 Between 1919 and 1932, 57, 457 smallholdings were created averaging at 10.5 hectares (total area: 602,110 ha.). Bechtel, Wirtschaftsgeschichte III, pp. 412–13, 469; Wunderlich, Farm Labor in Germany, pp. 20–2; Rolfes, ‘Landwirtshaft’, p. 763; Manfred Jatzlauk, ‘Landarbeiter, Bauern und Großgrundbesitzer in der Weimarer Republik’. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 39 (1991), 889. 80 Otto Rühle, Vom Untertan zum Staatsbürger (East Berlin, 1958), pp. 80–1. Rolfes, ‘Landwirtschaft’, pp. 754–5. 81 Alexander Graf Stenbock-Fermor, Deutschland von Unten. Reisen durch die proletarische Provinz 1930 (Stuttgart, 1931, reprint Lausanne and Frankfurt a.M., 1980); Rühle, Vom Untertan, p. 82. 82 Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, Erinnerungen (Leipzig, 1936), pp. 218–23; Detlef Gotter: Oldenburg-Januschau, ein Repräsentant des preußischen Junkertums (HalleWittenberg, Univ., Diss., 1978). Eric D. Kohler, ‘Revolutionary Pomerania, 1919–20: A Study in Majority Socialist Agricultural Policy and Civil-Military Relations’. Central European History, 9, 3 (September 1976), 250–93, here 261, 263, 266–68, and passim. See Chapter 6 of this study. 83 Oldeburg-Januschau, Erinnerungen, p. 217. Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 7: Ausbau, Schutz und Untergang der Weimarer Repulblik (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1984), pp. 768, 820–1, 889–91, 911. See Dietrich Orlow, Weimar Prussia 1925–1933: Illusion of Strength 1925–1933 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1991), pp. 180–4 on the poor management of these large estates. 84 ‘Reports and Enquiries: “Recent Official Enquiries into Wages and Hours of Work in Various Industries in Germany” I & II’. International Labour Review, 20 (1929), 408–19; 22 (1930), 807–16. 85 See volumes for 1931 and 1938 of Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich. 86 Bry, Wages, pp. 81–118, 202–09, 219–33, and especially pp. 93–101, 205–6.

Notes

261

87 Uwe Westphal, Die Berliner Konfektion und Mode 1836–1939: Zerstörung einer Tradition, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1992), pp. 61, 66. 88 Mein Arbeitstag - mein Wochenende. 150 Berichte vonj Textilarbeiterinnen, Collected and edited by Deutschen Textilarbeiterverband (Berlin, 1930), p. 224. 89 Ibid., p. 150. 90 See, Karen Hagemann, Frauenalltag und Männerpolitik: Alltagsleben und gesellschaftliches Handeln von Arbeiterfrauen in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 1990). 91 Produced and directed by Edgar Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Menschen am Sonntag Germany, 1930. Gudrun Szczepanek, ‘Wochenend und Tanzpalast’, in Burkhart Lauterbach (ed.), Großstadtmensch. Die Welt der Angestellten (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), pp. 405–29. 92 Sandra Coyner, ‘Class Patterns of Family income and expenditure during the Weimar Republic: German White Collar Employees as Harbingers of Modern Society’ (PhD. Rutgers University, New Brunswick New Jersey, 1975); idem, ‘Class Consciousness and Consumption: The New Middle Class During the Weimar Republic’. Journal of Social History, 3 (1977), 310–31. 93 ‘The German Family Budget Enquiry of 1927–1928’. International Labour Review, 22 (1930), 524–32; Flemming, Saul, Witt (eds), Familienleben, pp. 73–7. Jakob Marschak, ‘Löhne und Erspärnisse’. Die Arbei: Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde, 7 Jg., Heft 8 (1930), 505–22. See Meerwarth, Günther, Zimmermann, Die Einwirkung des Krieges, pp. 204, 208–09 for poor diets of Beamte. 94 Harry Graf Kessler, Die Kinder Hölle in Berlin (Berlin, 1920), p. 5. 95 Alf Lüdtke, ‘Hunger in der Großen Depression. Hungererfahrungen und Hungerpolitik am Ende der Weimarer Republik’. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 27 (1987), 145–76; Landesarchiv Berlin (LAB) Rep. 142/2 StK 1052, ‘Zusammenstellung’, (Allied blocade). Nick Howard, ‘The Social and Political Consequences of the Allied Food Blockade of Germany, 1918–19’. German History, 11, 2 (June 1993), 161–88. 96 Kessler, Die Kinder Hölle, p. 6. Cf., Brentano, Der Beginn der Barbarei, p. 174. 97 Ibid., p. 4. 98 Professor Dr E. Friedberger, Untersuchungen über Wohnungsverhältnisse insbesondere über Kleinwohnungen und deren Mieter in Greifswald (Jena, 1923), pp. 34–8. 99 William H. Hubbard, Familiengeschichte. Materialien zur deutschen Familie seit dem Ende des 18.Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1983), pp. 216–18. See also, Alice Salomon and Marie Baum, Das Familienleben in der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1930), pp. 42–3. 100 Flemming, Saul, Witt (eds), Familienleben, p. 101; Reinhard Sieder, Sozialgeschichte der Familie (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), pp. 69–76; Detlef Lehnert, ‘Mietskasernen – Realität und Gartenstadt Träume, zur Wohnsituation Jugendlicher in Großstädten der 20er Jahre’, in Deutscher Werkbund e.V. und Württemburgischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (eds), Schock und Schöpfung: Jugendästhetik im 20.Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 338–41. In general: Otto Baumgarten, ‘Der sittliche Zustand des deutschen Volkes unter dem Einflüß des Krieges’, in idem, Erich Förster, Arnold Rademacher, Wilhelm Flittner (eds), Geistige und Sittliche Wirkungen des Krieges in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1927), pp. 1–88. 101 Kurt Tucholsky, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (Amherst, MA, 1972, orig. 1929), pp. 118–23. 102 Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1935), pp. 100–20. 103 Flemming, Saul, Witt (eds), Familienleben, p. 101.

262

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104 Preller, Sozialpolitik, pp. 235, 286–8, 483–95; Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934–1940, 7 Vols (Salzhausen, Frankfurt am Main, 1980), Vol 7, 1938, p. 1106. Peter Flora, Franz Kraus, Winfried Pfennig, State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe 1815–1975. A Data Handbook in Two Volumes: Vol. II: The Growth of Industrial Societies and Capitalist Economies (Frankfurt, London, Chicago, 1987), p. 306; McElligott, Contested City, p. 90; Karl-Christian Führer, ‘Anspruch und realität. Das Scheitern der nationalsozialistischen Wohnungsbaupolitik 1933–1945’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 45 (1997), 225–56, here 230–4 shows that under the Nazis the housing crisis here was fully evident already by 1936. 105 Rüdiger Hachtmann, ‘Arbeitsmarkt und Arbeitszeit in der deutschen Industrie 1929 bis 1939’. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 27 (1987), 177–237. 106 Max Gottschalk, ‘Employment and Unemployment in Some Great European Ports’. International Labour Review, 2 (1930), 522–27. In general see the contributions to Peter Stachura (ed.), Unemployment and the Great Depression in Weimar Germany (London, 1986) and Richard J. Evans and Dick Geary (eds), The German Unemployed. Experiences and Consequences of Mass Unemployment from the WeimarRepublic to the Third Reich (New York and London, 1987). 107 Deppe, Drei Generationen Arbeiterleben, pp. 71–2. 108 Hubbard, Familiengeschichte, 162, for the data; Ingrid Peikert, ‘“. . . manchmal ein leises Weh . . .” die Arbeit im Leben proletarischer Kinder’, in Wolfgang Ruppert (ed.), Die Arbeiter. Lebensformen, Alltag und Kultur (Munich, 1986), 207–14; individual cases in: McElligott, Contested City, pp. 79–80. Deppe, Drei Generationen Arbeiterleben, pp. 84–5. 109 Hugo Lindemann, Die deutsche Stadtgemeinde im Kriege (Berlin, 1917), pp. 59–62; Küstermeier, ‘Die Proleterisierung des Mittelstandes’, p. 773; Erich Engelhard, ‘Die Angestellten’, Kölner Vierteljahreshefte für Soziologie, N.F. X Jg. (1931/32), (479–520), 41–82, here 71–5 (509–13). 110 The figures are calculated from the annual volumes of the Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich. 111 ‘Sehnsucht, selbst einmal in die Oberschicht einzurücken’, Küstermeier, ‘Die Proleterisierung des Mittelstandes’, p. 771. 112 Szczepanek, ‘Wochenend und Tanzpalast’, pp. 406–7. 113 Baum, Menschen im Hotel, pp. 293–4. 114 Leonhard Achner, ‘Die Lebenshaltung der Mittelstandes in der Vorkriegszeit und Gegenwart’. Allgemeine Statistisches Archiv 15 (1926), 371; Meerwarth, Günther, Zimmermann, Die Einwirkung des Krieges, p. 210. Max Victor, ‘Verbürgerlichung des Proletariats und Proletarisierung des Mittelstandes: eine Analyse der Einkommenumschichtung nach dem Kriege’. Die Arbeit: Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde, 8 Jg., Heft 1 (1931), 17–31, here 21–4, 27–31. 115 Terhalle, Die Finanzwirtschaft, pp. 140–6, especially: 142–4. Bruno Gleitze, ‘Der Streit um die Höhe des deutschen Volkseinkommens’. Die Arbeit: Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde, 7 Jg., Heft 8 (1930), 522–38. 116 International Industrial Relations Institute (ed.), International Unemployment. (Proceedings of the World Social Economic Congress, Amsterdam, August 1931), p. 173. 117 The debate can be followed in Jürgen Baron von Kruedener (ed.), Economic Crisis and Political Collapse: The Weimar Republic, 1924–1933 (New York, 1990); Ian

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119

120 121 122 123

124 125 126 127 128 129 130

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Kershaw (ed.), Weimar: Why did German Democracy Fail? (London, 1990); and with a good overview in Balderston, Economics and Politics, pp. 88–98. Ursula Büttner, ‘Politische Altenrativen zum Brüningschen Deflationskurs. Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion über “ökonomische Zwangslagen” in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 37 (1989), 209–51. Borchardt, Perspectives, pp. 144, 146, 148. See Brüning’s own account of priorities, Wolfgang Michalka and Gottfried Niedhart (eds), Deutsche Geschichte 1918–1933: Dokumente zur Innen- und Außenpolitik (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), Doc. 109, pp. 202–03. Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Die Kabinette Brüning I und II: 30. März 1930 bis 10. Oktober 1931/10. Oktober 1931 bis 1. Juni 1932, 3 vols, prepared by Tilman Koops (Boppard am Rhein, 1982), vol. 1, Doc. 112, here p. 426. Wilhlem Treue, ‘Der deutsche Unternehmer in der Weltwirtschaftskrise 1928–1933’, in Werner Conze and Hans Raupach (eds), Die Staats- und Wirtschaftskrise des deutschen Reichs 1929/33 (Stuttgart, 1967), pp. 82–125, here 108–09. Viktor Klemperer, Leben Sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum. Tagebücher 1925–1932, edited Walter Nowojski (Berlin, 1996), 26 September 1930, p. 659. LAB StB 2846; StB 2230 I; Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 7, Doc. 1590L, ‘Adolf Hitler manifesto to the German people, 10 September 1930’, pp. 371–2. Klemperer, Leben Sammeln, pp. 658–69, 15 September 1930. Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter. The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, London 1983), p. 156. Alfred Braunthal, ‘Die Ökonomischen Würzeln des Nationalsozialistischen Wirtschaftsprogramms’. Die Gesellschaft IX (1932) 1, 487, 491; F-J. Heyen, Nationalsozialismus im Alltag: Quellen zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus vornehmlich im Raum Mainz-Koblenz-Trier (Boppard am Rhein 1967), p. 74. Landesarchiv Schleswig (LAS) 301/4691 Report, 23 September 1930; Johnpeter Horst Grill, Nazi Movement in Baden 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill, 1983), p. 200; Heyen, Nationalsozialismus im Alltag, p. 23. Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Sämtliche Fragmente. Teil 1, Aufzeichnungen 1924–194: Vol.1 27.6.1924-31.12.1930, pp. 602–4 (entries for the 13, 14 and 15 September). Jürgen Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik. Materialien zum Wahlverhalten 1919–1933 (Munich, 1986), p. 108. Falter et al., Wahlen, pp. 92–3. Thomas Childers, ‘The Limits of National Socialist Mobilisation: The Elections of 6 November 1932 and the Fragmentation of the Nazi Constituency’, in idem (ed.), The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1919–1933 (London and Sydney, 1986). The previous record had been held briefly by the SPD who in 1919 won 11.5 million votes. Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 41, 86–113, passim. Theodor Geiger, ‘Panik im Mittelstand’, in Die Arbeit. Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde (1930), pp. 637–54, here 649; Brentano, Der Beginn der Barbarei, pp. 176–201. See also, Kate Pinsdorf, ‘The Nature and Aims of the National Socialist Labor Party’. American Political Science Review, XXV (1931), 377–88. William Sheridan Allen, ‘Farewell to class’ in ‘Symposium: Who Voted For Hitler?’: Central European History XVII/1 (1984), 54–62. And even more vehemently, Richard Hamilton in a flawed analysis of support for the NSDAP in

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138 139

140 141 142 143

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Notes Schleswig-Holstein’s capital, Kiel, ‘The Rise of Nazism: A Case Study and Review of Interpretations – Kiel, 1928–1933’. German Studies Review, 26/1 (2003), 43–62. Generally, Detlef Mühlberger, The Social Bases of Nazism, 1919–1933 (Cambridge, 2003). The classic study is Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism. Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986). Liselotte Krull, Wahlen und Wahlverhalten in Goslar während der Weimarer Republik (Goslar, 1982), pp. 36, 130. Eric G. Reiche, The Development of the SA in Nürnberg 1922–1934 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 96–7. Gerhard Hetzer, ‘Industriestadt Augsburg. Eine Sozialgeschichte der Arbeiteropposition’, in Martin Broszat et al. (eds), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, Vol. 3 (Munich and Vienna, 1981), pp. 1–71. Ernst-August Roloff, ‘Die bürgerliche Oberschicht in Braunschweig und der Nationalsozialismus: Eine Stellungnahme’. Central European History, XVII/1 (1984): Symposium: Who Voted for Hitler?, 37–44. Ursula Büttner, Hamburg in der Staats- und Wirtschaftskrise 1928–1931 (Hamburg, 1982), p. 403; McElligott, Contested City, pp. 29–36, 154–59. See Richard Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton, NJ, 1982), for a misrepresentation of the socioeconomic structure of both cities. Franz-Josef Heyen, Nationalsozialismus im Alltag: Quellen zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus vornehmlich im Raum Mainz-Koblenz-Trier (Boppard, 1967), Doc. 10, p. 19. Ibid., Doc. 19, p. 67. On the political volatility of the Mittelstand per se, Küstermeier, ‘Die Proleterisierung des Mittelstandes’, pp. 769, 773; on the relationship between white collar employees and Nazism see Hans Speier, Die Angestellten vor dem Nationalsozialismus. Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis der deutschen Sozialstruktur 1918– 1933 (Göttingen, 1977; 2nd edn, Frankfurt/Main, 1989). In general, Rudy Koshar and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt in Rudy Koshar (ed.), Splintered Classes. Politics and the Lower Middle Classes in Interwar Europe (New York, 1990). A small selection can be found in Bennecke, Wirtschaftliche Depression und politischer Radikalismus, 351: ‘Landvolk im Not!’; 354: ‘Hältest Du den Hunger für Notwendig?’; on the impact of the Emergency Decrees, 362, 369: ‘Du mußt Zahlen!’. Geiger, ‘Panik im Mittelstand’, pp. 648–9. Henry Ashby Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York and Oxford, 1985, pbk 1987), pp. 195–6, 203. McElligott, Contested City, pp. 160–1. GStAPrK I Rep. 77 4043, Bl. 62–73 (Polizeipräsident Altona, Landeskriminalpolizeiamt, reports, 15 and 16 Sept. 1929), and Bl. 180–224, ‘Landvolkbewegung und Verhetzung der bäuerlichen Bevölkerung’ (45 page report Prussian interior ministry, unidentified author). Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Zeitungsausschnitt-Sammlung 55a: Prozeß gegen d. Bombenattentäter 1930.This episode of revolt and its implications for republican authority is brilliantly captured by Hans Fallada in his novel, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (Berlin, 1931). The classic study written in 1934 of the relationship between farmers and Nazism is Rudolf Heberle, From Democracy to Nazism (Baton Rouge, 1945). Gerhard Stoltenberg, Politische Strömungen im Schleswig-holsteinischen Landvolk 1918–1933. Ein Beitrag zur Politischen Meinungsbildung in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1962); Hans Beyer, ‘Landbevölkerung und Nationalsozialismus in SchleswigHolstein’. Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 12 (1964), 69–74;

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147 148 149

150 151 152 153

154

155

156

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Rudolf Rietzler, Kampf in der Nordmark. Das Aufkommen des Nationalsozialismus in Schleswig-Holstein 1918–1928 (Neumünster, 1982). Preller, Sozialpolitik, pp. 387–90; Dan Silverman, ‘A Pledge Unredeemed: The Housing Crisis in Weimar Germany’. Central European History 3 (1970), 112–39. See especially Hong-sun Yong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1918–1933 (Princeton, 1998); and her ‘Weimar Welfare System’, in McElligott (ed.), Weimar Germany, pp. 175–206; Adelheid von Saldern, ‘ “Neues Wohnen”: Housing and reform’, in ibid., pp. 207–33. Arthur Dix, Die deutschen Reichstagswahlen 1871–1930 und die Wandlungen der Volksgliederung (Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr 1930), p. 32. Max Schneider, ‘Frauen an der Wahlurne’, Gie Gesellschaft XI 1933. Helga Timm, Die deutsche Sozialpolitik und der Bruch der grossen Koalition im März 1930 (Düsseldorf, 1952), p. 128. Peter Lewek, Arbeitslosigkeit und Arbeitslosenversicherung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1927 (Stuttgart, 1992). For different aspects of unemployment and its impact, see the essays in Stachura (ed.), Unemployment and the Great Depression in Germany and Evans and Geary (eds), The German Unemployed. Christian Barringer, Sozialpolitik in der Weltwirtschaftskrise: die Arbeitslosenversicherungspolitik in Deutschland und Grossbritannien im Vergleich, 1928–1934 (Berlin, 1999). Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, p. 1103. Die Kabinette Brüning I und II, vol. 2, Doc. 289, here p. 1043. Eugen Varga, Die große Krise und ihre politischen Folgen. Wirtschaft und Politik 1928–1934 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1934); Timm, Die deutsche Sozialpolitik, pp. 130–9. Ernst Rudolf Huber, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte Vol. 3: Dokumente der Novemberrevolution und der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1966), Doc. 410, p. 444; idem, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, pp. 843–7, 863–5; Die Kabinette Brüning I und II, vol. 2, Doc. 454, here p. 1612, note 21; Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Doc. 1662. Vierteljahreshefte zur Konjunkturforschung, 7 Jg. Heft 1, Teil A, 55. Dieter Rebentisch, ‘Kommunalpolitik, Konjunktur und Arbeitsmarkt in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik’, in Rudolf Morsey (ed.), Verwaltungsgeschichte. Aufgaben, Zielsetzungen, Beispiele, Vorträge und Diskussionsbeiträge der Verwaltungsgeschichtlichen Arbeitstagung 1976 an der Hochschule für Verwaltungsgeschichte Speyer (Berlin, 1977), pp. 107–57. S. Wronksy, ‘Die Aspekte der Wohlfahrtspflege um die Jahreswende 1932/33’. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Wohlfahrtspflege 8, H. 10 (1932/33), 309–13, cited in Longerich, Die erste Republik, pp. 409–411. See the reports by Carl Goerdeler, who favoured a complete withdrawal of the Reich from unemployment support provisions, Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Das Kabinett von Papen 1. Juni bis 3. Dezember 1932, prepared by Karl-Heinz Minuth, 2 vols (Boppard am Rhein, 1989), vol.1, Doc 97, here pp. 369–70. Akten der Reichskanzlei Die Regierung Hitler Erster Teil: 1933/34, vol. 1 30 Januar bis 31 August 1933, prepared by KarlHeinz Minuth (Boppard am Rhein, 1983), Doc. 99, pp. 343–49, here 345. Barch R43 I/2372, Bl. 657–723, ‘Vorstand der Deutsche Städtetag’ (Mulert), 13 August 1931. Preller, Sozialpolitik, pp. 396–400. Hans Mommsen, ‘Die Stellung der Beamtenschaft in Reich, Ländern und Gemeinden in der Ära Brüning’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 21 (1973), 151–65.

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157 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, p. 1103. For Lange’s article published anonymously in the Kölner Zeitung, Die Kabinette Brüning, I und II, vol. 3, p. 2366. 158 LAB, Rep. 142, StB 561, ‘Betr. Erhebung des Preussischen Städtetages über die durchschnittlichen Kosten je Wohlfahrtserwerbsloser in den Monaten Oktober 1931–January 1932’. 159 Büttner, Hamburg, pp. 245–8. 160 Bruno Nelissen Haken, Der Fall Bundhund: ein Arbeitslosenroman (Jena, 1930). See also his Stempelchronik: 261 Arbeitslosenschicksale (Hamburg, 1932). Moritz Föllmer, ‘Suicide and Crisis in Weimar Berlin’. Central European History, 42 (2009), 195–221. 161 ‘Reports and Enquiries: “Recent Official Enquiries into Wages and Hours of Work in Various Industries in Germany” I & II’. International Labour Review, 20 (1929), 408–19; 22 (1930), 807–16. Bechtel, Wirtschaftsgeschichte III, p. 429. 162 Stenbock-Fermor, Deutschland von Unten, p. 12. 163 H. R. Knickerbocker, Deutschland so oder so? (Berlin, 1932), p. 15. 164 ‘The Economic Depression and Public Health’, p. 845. Lüdtke, ‘Hunger’, p. 146. 165 Eugen Diesel, Germany and the Germans (London, 1931), transl. of Die deutsche Wandlung das Bild eines Volks (Potsdam 1929, 2nd edn, Stuttgart, 1931), pp. 255–6. 166 ‘Economic Depression’, 845. 167 Büttner, Hamburg, pp. 267–71; McElligott, Contested City, pp. 64–6. 168 Petzina, Abelshauser, Faust (eds), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III, p. 155. Reinhard Spree, Soziale Ungleichheit vor Krankheit und Tod (Göttingen, 1981), p. 43. 169 ‘Economic Depression’, p. 845. Brentano, Der Beginn der Barbarei, p. 175. 170 Fritz Kahn, Das Leben des Menschen: Eine Volkstümliche Anatomie, Biologie, Physiologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen, Vol. IV (Stuttgart, 1929), pp. 72, 77–8; Harry Graf Kessler, Künstler und Nationen. Aufsätze und Reden, 1899–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), p. 214. 171 Kenneth Ingram Wiggs, Unemployment in Germany since the War (London, 1933), p. 200. 172 LAB, Rep. 142, StB 2846, (Finanzlage der Gemeinden): Stadtrat to Deutsche Städtetag’ ‘Not in Brand-Erbisdorf!’, 15 April 1931; Der Rat der Stadt Pirna, ‘Sonderhaushaltsplan der Krisenfürsorge und Fürsorge für Wohlfahrtserwerbslose für 1931/32’, 7 April 1931; Magistrat Ratibor to Deutsche Städtetag, Betr. Haushaltsplan 1931, 25 May 1931. Brentano, Der Beginn der Barberei, p. 175; Flemming, Saul, Witt (eds), Familienleben, pp. 268–9. 173 ‘Oberbürgermeister Brauer zu den Notverordnungen. Rede im Preußischen Staatsrat am 26. Oktober’. Amtsblatt der Stadt Altona, 12 Jg., Nr. 44 (6 November 1931). 174 Elizabeth Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford, 1993), pp. 132–51; 277–88; Dan P. Silverman, Hitler’s Economy. Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933–1936 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 69–96. 175 Marie Hirsch, ‘Zur sozialen und geistige Lage der Arbeitslosen’. Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus 2 (1931), 119–25, cited in Peter Longerich (ed.), Die Erste Republik. Dokumente zur Geschichte des Weimarer Staates (Munich, 1992), p. 399. 176 Kessler, Kinder Hölle, p. 4 and plate VII showing the bed of an 11 year old daughter of a postal worker covered in rags. Stefan Bajohr, ‘Illegitimacy and the Working Class: Illegitimate Mothers in Brunswick, 1900–1933’, in Richard J. Evans (ed.), The German Working Class: 1888–1933. The Politics of Everyday Life (London, 1982), pp. 142–73. McElligott, Contested City, pp. 62–4.

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177 Gertrud Staewen-Ordemann, Menschen der Unordnung. Die proletarische Wirklichkeit im Arbeiterschicksal der ungelernten Großstadtjugend (Berlin, 1933), p. 81, cited in Longerich, Die Erste Republik, pp. 403–6. 178 Preller, Sozialpolitik, p. 165. Wolfgang Zorn, ‘Sozialgeschichte 1918–1970’, Aubin and Zorn (eds), Handbuch, pp. 876–933, here 878. 179 Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, Morgen-Ausgabe 57 Jg., Nr. 533, 19 October 1932: ‘Familie geht in den Tod’. For data on suicides see, Statistisches Bundesamt, Bevölkerung und Wirtschaft 1872–1972: herausgegeben anläßlich des 100jährigen Bestehens der zentralen amtlichen Statistik (Stuttgart, Mainz, 1972), p. 121; Petzina, Abeslhauser, Faust (eds), Arbeitsbuch III, p. 136. 180 Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Hans Zeisel, Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal. Ein soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen langandauernder Arbeitslosigkeit (1933, reprint Frankfurt am Main 1975), pp. 82ff; Flemming, Saul, Witt (eds), Familienleben, pp. 250, 260, 268–9. 181 Christoph Timm, ‘“Eine Art Wildwest”. Die Altonaer Erwerbslosensiedlungen in Lurup und Osdorf von 1932’, in Arnold Sywottek (ed.), Das Anderer Altona: Beiträge zur Alltagsgeschichte (Hamburg, 1984), pp. 159–75. Rosenhaft, ‘The Unemployed in the Neighbourhood’, p. 202. 182 Karen Hagemann, ‘“Wir hatten mehr Notjahr als reichliche Jahre. . .” Lebenshaltung und Hausarbeit Hamburger Arbeiterfamilien in der Weimarer Republik’, in Klaus Tenfelde (ed.), Arbeiter im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart 1991), provides a more positive picture of solidarity networks. 183 The film was given an adult rating on its release and in April 1933 was banned by the Censorship Board. A copy of the Board’s decision can be accessed at http:// www.deutsches-filminstitut.de/zengut/df2tb517z.pdf. See also the account of conditions in Waldenburg in Stenbock-Fermor, Deutschland von Unten, pp. 37–53. Eve Rosenhaft, ‘The Unemployed in the Neighbourhood: Social Dislocation and Political Mobilisation in Germany 1929–33’, in Evans and Geary (eds), The German Unemployed, pp. 194–227, Lüdtke, ‘Hunger’, pp. 172–3; Herbert Kühr, Parteien und Wahlen im Stadt- und Landkreis Essen in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Verhältnisses von Sozialstruktur und politischen Wahlen (Düsseldorf, 1973), pp. 263ff. 184 Born in 1896, Jutzi was a member of the KPD from the beginning of 1928 until the end of 1929; he joined the NSDAP in March 1933, http://www.cinegraph.de/lexicon/ Jutzi_Phil/biografie.html and http://www.cinegraph.de/filmmat/fm5/fm5_10.html (both accessed 28.08.2011); Christa Hempel-Küter, Hamburg, ‘Der Fall Bundhund und der Fall Haken. Eklat um einem Arbeitslosenroman 1930’, unpublished mss. I wish to express my gratitude to Dr Hempel-Küter for making her work available to me during a collaboration at an earlier stage in our careers. 185 Anthony McElligott, ‘Mobilising the Unemployed: The KPD and the Unemployed Workers’ Movement in Hamburg-Altona during the Weimar Republic’, in Evans and Geary (eds), The German Unemployed, pp. 228–60. See Christa Hempel-Küter, ‘ “Gestempelt wurde jeden Tag”: Zur Situation der Arbeitslosen in Altona in den ersten Jahren der Weimarer Republik (November bis Ende 1923)’, Arnold Sywottek (ed.), Das Andere Altona Beiträge zur Alltagsgeschichte (Hamburg, 1984), pp. 126–39, for similar protests from the beginning of the 1920s. 186 Staatsarchiv Bremen (StABr) 4,65 II E.1.a.3 vol. 4, RM.d.I, Nachrichtenstelle, IAN Z164, d/20.9 (30 August 1932), 10, and RM.d.I, Nachrichtenstelle, IAN Z164 d/7.11.a (22 November 1932), 13.

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187 StABr 4,65 II E.1a 3 vol. 4, Bremen police, report BNr 1966/33, 3 March 1933. 188 StABr 4,65 II E.1.a.3. vol. 2, RM.d.I, IA AN z164 d/SH 2/25.9, Abschrift: ‘Resolution der Prager Konferenz über die Erwerbslosenfrage’. 189 StABr 4,65 II E.1.a.3. vol. 2, Abschrift IA AN Z164, d/SH 2/25/9, n.d. 190 KPD Wasserkante, Bericht der Bezirksleitung Wasserkante, 2–4 December 1932’, pp. 65–8, 80. 191 StABr 4,65 II E.1.a.3 vol. 4, RM.d.I, Nachrichtenstelle, IAN 2164 d/30 January 1932, 5 February 1932. This was the party’s campaign slogan for January–March 1932. 192 StABr 4,65 II E.1.a.3 vol. 2, copy: Polizei Präs. in Bochum, Nachrichtenstelle I Nr. 922/30, 14 August 1930, Betr. komm. Kampfkongress am 31 August 1930 in Dortmund. – an die Polizei Bremen. 193 StABr 4,65 II E.1.a.3.vol. 2, ‘Aufruf zum Reichs-Erwerbslosentag’, 10 September 1930. 194 StABr 4,65 II E.1.a.3. vol. 2, Auszug aus dem Lagebreicht der M.d.I Sachsen, Nr. 33040/11 (22 December 1930). 195 Die Kabinette Brüning I und II, vol. 3, Doc. 695, here p. 2366. 196 Armin and Renate Schmid, Frankfurt in Stürmischer Zeit 1930–1933 (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 34–5, 81, 156–7. 197 Rote Sturmfahne, December 1932, cited in Bericht der Bezirksleitung Wasserkante, 2–4 December 1932, pp. 57, 92–9, 104, 112. Schmid, Frankfurt, p. 83. As well as Klaus Mallmann’s masterly study of the KPD, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik: Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionären Bewegung (Darmstadt, 1996), see three studies in English that concentrate on the social context of neighbourhood politics: Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1929–1933 (Cambridge, 1983); McElligott, Contested City; Pamela E. Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933 (Cambridge and New York, 2004). 198 Rote Fahne 169, 4 September 1931: ‘Mobilmachung der Erwerbslosen!’. Still useful for this period, Siegfried Bahne, Die KPD und das Ende von Weimar: das Scheitern einer Politik 1932–1935 (Frankfurt am Main, 1976). 199 McElligott, Contested City, pp. 33–5, 182–5; Herbert Kühr, ‘Parteien und Wahlen in Essen in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik’, in Otto Büsch, Monika Wölk, Wolfgang Wölk (eds), Wählerbewegung in der Deutschen Geschichte. Analyse und Berichte zu den Reichstagswahlen 1871–1933 (Berlin, 1978), pp. 409–27; Günter Plum, ‘Gesellschaftsstruktur und politischer Bewußtsein’, in ibid., pp. 444–7; Mallmann, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 242–61. 200 David Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic. Political Economy and Crisis, second rev. edn (New York, 1986 [1981]). 201 Borchardt, Perspectives, p. 160; As well as Silverman, Hitler’s Economy, Richard Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932–1938, second edn (Cambridge, 1996 [London, 1982]). 202 Baum, Menschen im Hotel, pp. 295–6. 203 David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution. Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933–1939 (1966, reprint 1980); Tim Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich. The Working Class and the ‘National Community’, 1918–1939 (New York, Oxford, Munich, 1993). Schoenbaum contends the Nazis through their work programmes successfully integrated all classes into compliance with the Third Reich, while Mason argues the superficiality of integration, especially in relation to the working class.

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Chapter 5 1 Landgerichtsdirektor Dr Weiß, Berlin, ‘Der Kampf um das Recht und der deutsche Richterbund’. Deutsche Richterzeitung, Heft 6, 17 Jg (15 May 1925), cols. 310–27, here col. 313. 2 Franz Neumann, Behemoth. The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944 (1942, 1944, reprint 1963, edn. New York 1983), pp. 20–3. 3 Erich Kuttner, Bilanz der Rechtsprechung (Berlin, 1922); Dr Otto Warnmeyer, ‘Rechtsentwicklung in den letzten zehn Jahren’. Die Justiz V (1929/1930), 4–16; Dr K[urt] Rosenfeld, ‘Justiz und Republik’. Deutsche Justiz VI (1930/1931), 475–84, here 476. Ernst Toller, Justiz Erlebnisse (Berlin, 1927). Paul Levi, Der Jorns-Prozess. Rede des Verteidigers Dr Paul Levi (Berlin, 1929). 4 Bundesminister der Justiz [Gerhard Fieberg], ‘Im Namen des deutschen Volkes!’ Justiz und Nationalsozialismus. Katalog zur Ausstellung des Bundesministers der Justiz (Cologne, 1989), pp. 340–1. 5 Wilhelm Hoegner, Die verratene Republik. Deutsche Geschichte 1918–1933 (Munich, 1958), p. 261. Gerhard Kramer, ‘The Courts of the Third Reich’, in Maurice Baumont, John M. E. Fried, Edmond Vermeil (eds), The Third Reich (New York, 1955), pp. 600–01. 6 Elizabeth Hannover-Druck and Heinrich Hannover, Politische Justiz 1918–1933 (Frankfurt am Main 1966), p. 12 cited in Michael Kißener, Zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie. Badische Richter 1919–1952 (Konstanz, 2003), p. 12. The second edition of Politische Justiz was published by Attica Verlag in Hamburg in 1977 without Bracher’s introduction. I have used the later edition. The main thrust, however, is still echoed in the literature, for example, Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London, 2003), p. 138. 7 E. J. Gumbel, Vier Jahre politische Mord (Berlin-Friendenau, 1922). 8 Kurt Kreiler (ed.), Traditionen deutsche Justiz: Große politische Prozeße der Weimarer Zeit. Ein Lesebuch zur Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1978), editor’s introduction, and p. 9 especially. 9 Gotthard Jasper, ‘Justiz und Politik in der Weimarer Republik’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 30 (1982), 167–215, here 169–70. In particular, Jasper was levelling his criticism at works such as that by Hans Hattenhauer, ‘Zur Lage der Justiz in der Weimarer Republik’, in Karl-Dietrich Erdmann and Hagen Schulze (eds), Weimar: Selbstpreisgabe einer Demokratie (Düsseldorf, 1980), pp. 169–76; An overview in Anthony McElligott, ‘Sentencing towards the Führer’‚ in Anthony McElligott and Tim Kirk (eds), Working towards the Führer. Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw (Manchester, 2003), pp. 153–85. 10 Gotthard Jasper, Der Schutz der Republik. Studien zur staatlichen Sicherung der Demokratie in der Weimar Republik 1922–1930 (Tübingen 1963). Christoph Gusy, Die Weimarer Reichsverfassung (Tübingen, 1997), pp. 194–223. 11 Lothar Gruchmann, Justiz im Dritten Reich 1933–1940: Anpassung und Unterwerfung in der ära Gürtner third revised edition (Munich, 2001). Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers. Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung (Munich 1969), pp. 403–22. See also Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, passim. 12 Examples of this in the general literature can be found in Paul Bookbinder, The Weimar Republic (Manchester, 1996), pp. 113, 117; Andreas Wirsching, Die Weimarer Republik, Politik und Gesellschaft (Munich, 2000), pp. 107–08.

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13 Wolfgang de Boor and Dieter Meurer (eds), Über den Zeitgeist. Deutschland in den Jahren 1918–1995, Vol. 2 (Marburg, 1995), p. 1. 14 Ralph Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, 1919–1945: Krisenerfahrung, Illusion, politische Rechtsprechung (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), p. 19. 15 See for example the heated exchange between Grossmann and the Chairman of the Prussian Judges Association Dr Pracht in Die Justiz I (1925/26), pp. 541–6. 16 ‘Der Bankrott der Strafjustiz’, in Deutsche Juristen Zeitung 1928, Cited by Otto Landsberg (SPD) in Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 394, 367 Session, 25 January 1928, 12392; Dr Haas (DDP), in ibid., 369 Session, 27 January 1928, 12422. Dr [Kurt] Rossenfeld, ‘“Der Bankrott der Straffjustiz”’. Die Justiz III (1928), 225–32, and Landgerichtsrat von Zastrow (Breslau), ‘Nochmals: Bankrott der Strafjustiz?’, in ibid., 395–403. 17 Ernst R. Huber, Verfassungsrecht des Grossdeutschen Reiches (Hamburg 1937), p. 280. 18 Rüdiger von der Goltz, Tribut-Justz. Ein Buch um die deutschen Freiheit (Berlin, 1932), p. 104. On this generation, see section three below and Chapter 8 of the present work. 19 Reichsgesetzblatt (RGBl.) 1922 I, pp. 585–90. 20 Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, pp. 33–4, 36. On the Law for the Protection of the Republic, Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgechichte, 7, p. 256; Gotthard Jasper, Der Schutz der Republik. Studien zur staatlichen Sicherung der Demokratie in der Weimar Republik 1922–1930 (Tübingen 1963). The law was renewed in 1929. 21 Warren Rosenblum, Beyond the Prison Gates. Punishment and Welfare in Germany, 1850–1933 (Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, 2008), pp. 177–94. 22 Figures gleaned from Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 24 Jg. (1919), 77, 251, 332, 486, 586, 659, 825. 23 Statistik des Deutschen Reichs (1936), p. 554. Cf., figures in Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, p. 19: 1917: 10,713; 1919: 10694; 1921: 10031; 1931: 10133. 24 Wilhelm Schwister, ‘Die soziale Schichtung der jungen Juristen’. Deutsche Richterzeitung Jg. 23, Heft 4 (1931), 125–9. 25 Klaus Bästlein, ‘Als Recht zu Unrecht wurde: Zur Entwicklung der Strafjustiz im Nationalsozia­lismus’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament B13–14/89 (24 March 1989). 26 With nearly 12,000 judges, prosecutors and lawyers, Prussia judiciary was Germany’s largest cohort. Cf., Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, pp. 10–12. 27 Gruchmann, Justiz, p. 238. Hans-Konrad Stein-Stegmann, ‘In der “Rechstabteilung” des “Unrechts-Staates”. Richter und Staatsanwälte in Hamburg 1933–1945’, in Hamburg Justizbehörde (ed.), “Für Führer Volk und Vaterland . . .” Justiz im Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg, 2000), p. 152. McElligott, ‘Sentencing towards the Führer’, pp. 154–9. Michael Kißener, Zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie. Badische Richter 1919–1952 (Konstanz, 2003), p. 68. 28 Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, p. 41. 29 Ernst Fraenkel, Soziologie der Klassenjustiz und Aufsätze zur Verfassungskrise 1931–32 (orig. 1927–1932, reprint Darmstadt 1968), p. 8. See also A. Cohen, ‘Soziologie des Beamtentums’. Die Justiz, VII (1932), 331–39; Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, pp. 12–13. 30 Fraenkel, Soziologie, p. 10; Hannover-Druck and Hannover, Politische Justiz, pp. 24–5. Background on relationship between judiciary and the Bismarckian/ imperial state, Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 3: Bismarck und das Reich (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1963), pp. 1056–62.

Notes

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45

46 47 48 49

271

Michael Stürmer, Das kaiserliche Deutschland: Politik und Gesellschaft 1870–1918 (Frankfurt am Main, 1977). Detlev J. K. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik. Krisenjahre der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), pp. 219–21. Fraenkel, Soziologie, p. 10, 12. Hamburg was the only state that did not employ assistant judges in this way. Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 24 Jg., 1919, cols. 342–45. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 17 Jg., 1925, cols. 291–92, ‘Beamtenbezüge ab 1 Dezember 1924’. Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 24 Jg., 1919, cols. 348, 481, 491, 674. Sabine Schott, ‘Curt Rothenberger – eine politische Biographie’ (D.Phil jur., MartinLuther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 2001), pp. 33–4. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 13 Jg. (1921), col. 255; ibid., 25 Jg., Heft 21 (1933), col. 325. Dieter Schenk, Hans Frank. Hitlers Kronjurist und Generalgouverneur (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), p. 34. Fraenkel, Soziologie, p. 13. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 13. Jg (1921), col. 259. Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, p. 22. David B. Southern, ‘The Impact of the Inflation: Inflation, the Courts, and Revaluation’, in Richard Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger (eds), Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany (London, 1981), pp. 55–76, here 65. Fraenkel, Soziologie, pp. 12–16. Ludwig Preller, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1978, orig. 1949), pp. 317, 359. Reichsgerichtspräsident Dr Simons, ‘Erklärung des Richtervereins beim Reichsgericht zur Aufwertungsfrage’, in Juristischen Wochenschrift, 15 January 1924, p. 90, repr. in Ernst Rudolf Huber, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte 3: Dokumente der Novemberrevolution und der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Stuttgart, 1966), Doc. 355, pp. 383–4. Preller, Sozialpolitik, pp. 396–9. Ernst Ottwalt, Denn sie wissen was sie tun. Ein deutscher Justiz-Roman (Berlin, 1931), p. 11. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 25 Jg., Heft 12 (1933), col. 325. Kißener, Zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie, pp. 63–5. In general, Thomas Childers, ‘Inflation, Stabilization, and Political Realignment in Germany 1919–1928’, in Gerald D. Feldman, Carl Ludwig Holtfrerich, Gerhard A. Ritter, Peter-Christian Witt (eds), Die Deutsche Inflation/The German Inflation (Berlin, New York, 1982), pp. 409–31. Stein-Stegmann, ‘In der “Rechstabteilung”’, p. 166. Figures extracted from Martin Schumacher (ed.), M.d.R. Die Reichstagsabgeordneten der Weimarer Republik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Politische Verfolgung, Emigration und Ausbürgerung 1933–1945. Eine biographische Dokumention, 3rd rev. edn (Düsseldorf, 1994). Stein-Stegmann, ‘In der “Rechstabteilung”’, p. 161. Kißener, Zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie, pp. 122–3. Ibid., pp. 111–20. Justizrat Dr Süßheim (Nuremberg), ‘Politik und Justiz in Bayern’. Die Justiz, IV/1 (1928/29), 106–10. Hermann Weinkauff, Die Deutsche Justiz und der Nationalsozialismus. Ein Überblick (Stuttgart, 1968), p. 108; Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, pp. 43–4; SteinStegemann, ‘In der “Rechtsabteilung”’, pp. 161, 174. For Werner, Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, pp. 57–8.

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50 Gruchmann, Justiz, pp. 219, 221. Gruchmann points out that by the end of the 1930s, the number had increased to around 21,000 judges and state prosecutors from a total 104,000 members. According to Freisler, 54 per cent of judges and prosecutors belonged to the Party or one of its sub-organizations. 51 Dr jur. Otto Palandt, ‘Drei Monate Prüflinge: aus dem Gemeischaftslager der preußischen Referendare’. Deutsche Justiz, 95 Jg. (1933), 640–1; Oberstaatsanwalt Spieler, ‘Preußischer Geist im Gemeinschaftslager in Jüterborg’, in ibid., pp. 641–4, here 642. Deutsche Justiz, 96 Jg. (1934), 237–39, ‘Die Bedeutung des Gemeinschaftslager der Referendare in Preußen. Eine Unterredung des Preußischen Justizministers Staatsrates Hanns Kerrl mit der Presse’. 52 Peter Weber, ‘Republikanische Richter auf verlorenem Posten’, Vortrag, gehalten auf der fünften wissenschaftlichen Fachtagung vom “Forum Justizgeschichte” am 4.10.2003 in der Deutschen Richterakademie in Wustrau, accessed at http://www. forumjustizgeschichte.de/Dr-Peter-Weber.48.0.html. Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl, Massenmord und schlechtes Gewissen. Die deutsche Bevölkerung, die NS-Führung und der Holocaust (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), p. 22. For students and their relationship to right-wing politics, see Ulrich Herbert, ‘“Generation der Sachlichkeit”. Die völkische Studentenbewegung der frühen zwanziger Jahre in Deutschland’, in Frank Bajohr, Werner Johe, Uwe Lohalm (eds), Zivilisation und Barbarei. Die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne (Hamburg, 1991), pp. 115–44. 53 Deutsche Deutscherichterzeitung, Heft 8/9 (1931), 283. The Richterbund was founded on 1 January 1909 from an amalgam of existing regional associations of judges and public prosecutors and disbanded in 1933, http://www.drb.de/cms/index. php?id53&L0; Präsidium des Deutschen Richterbundes (ed.), Justiz und Recht im Wandel der Zeit: Festgabe 100 Jahre Deutscher Richterbund with a forward by President Prof Dr Horst Köhler (Cologne, 2009). 54 Geheimes Staatsarchiv Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz (GstAPrK) Rep. 84a/3156, 84a/3157. Birger Schulz, Der Republikanische Richterbund (1921–1933) (Frankfurt/ Main und Bern, 1982). Of 24 of the 69 presiding judges and senior public prosecutors of the OLGs whose political affiliation under the republic was known, only three could be called liberal (2 Centre Party, one Deutsche Demokratische Partei), 4 belonged to the right-of-centre German People’s Party (DVP) and the rest were members of the nationalist right. Gruchmann, Justiz, p. 288, footnote 114. Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, p. 41. Charles E. McClelland, The German Experience of Professionalization. Modern Learned Professions and their Organizations from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era (Cambridge, 1991), p. 198. 55 Theo Rasehorn, Justizkritik in der Weimarer Republik: das Beispiel der Zeitschrift ‘Die Justiz’ (Frankfurt/Main, 1985). 56 Deutsche Richterzeitung, 13 Jg., Heft 8 (1 October 1921), cols. 228–32. 57 Landgerichstpräsident (Limburg) de Niem, ‘Durch Nacht zum Licht’. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 11 Jg., Heft 1/2 (1919), cols. 1–6, here col. 5; ibid., Landgerichtsrat Dosenheimer, ‘Die deutsche Richters­chaft und die Revolution’, cols. 12–15. Fraenkel, Soziologie, p. 14. Gotthard Jasper, ‘Beamtentum und Richterschaft’ in Everhard Holtmann (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik Vol. 3: Der brüchige Frieden 1924–28   Bayerische Landeszentrale für Politische Bildungsarbeit (Munich, 1994) pp. 298, 302. 58 ‘Reform des Richtertums’, Senatspräsident Daub, Celle, Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 24 Jg., 1919, cols. 456–61; ‘Zur Reform des deutschen Richtertums’, Landrichter Dr Schroeder, Köslin, in ibid., cols. 884–87. The latter was a rebuttal of a report (Dr Mügel) from the Justice Ministry on the need for overhauling the judiciary.

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59 Gruchmann, Justiz, p. 224. 60 Bracher, Auflösung, p. 173. Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, p. 11. 61 Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 25 Jg. 1920, Heft 21/22, cols. 800, 803. Biographical details for von Staff who transferred to Berlin as chairman of the Kammergericht in 1921– 22 before retiring in 1922, at http://www.bundesarchiv.de/aktenreichskanzlei/19191933/0000/adr/adrsz/kap1_1/para2_420.html. 62 Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 28 Jg. 1923, Heft 21/22, cols. 670–71. 63 Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 25 Jg. 1920, Heft 1/2, cols. 31–7; Deutsche Juristen Zeitung 31 Jg. 1926, Heft 2, col. 137. 64 Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 24 Jg. 1919, Heft 11/12, col. 473. Dr Roesner, ‘Justizstatistik’, in Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 35 Jg. 1930, Heft 1, cols. 84–7. 65 Fraenkel, Soziologie, p. 31. 66 Friedrich Dessauer, Recht, Richtertum und Ministerialbürokratie. Eine Studie über den Einfluß vom Machtverschiebungen auf die Gestaltung des Privatrechts (Mannheim, 1928). Cited by Fraenkel, Soziologie, pp. 44–5. 67 Fraenkel, Soziologie, p. 14. 68 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 3, pp. 928–9. 69 Ibid., pp. 1042–55. GstAPrK, I Rep. 84a 11657, Kammergerichtspräsident [Eduard] Tigges (Berlin) to Prussian Justice Minister, IA 30/A 1433, 7 April 1924. Although these were originally envisaged for the duration of the war, they were only finally withdrawn on 1 January 1924. 70 GStAPrK, I Rep. 84a 11653, von Staff, ‘Das Verfahren vor den ausserordentlichen Kriegsgerichten’, this is a 36 page report on the development of the extraordinary courts. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 3, pp. 1042–55, Art. 68 Imperial Constitution: introduced 31 July 1914 and rescinded 12 November 1918. 71 Barch R3001/6624, Bl. 169. GStAPr.K, Rep. 353/179, Preußen, Tätigkeit. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 3, p. 1051, idem, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 5 Weltkrieg, Revolution und Reichserneuerung 1914–1919 (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1978), pp. 45–7. 72 GStAPr.K I Rep. 84a 11653, Bl. 46–47, 353–55. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, p. 48. 73 Barch R3001/alt. R22/1469, Bl. 114–15. R3001/22086 (6668), Bl. 114–15. 74 GStAPrK I 84a 11655 Bl. 356–57, Der Oberlandsgerichtspräsident (OLG Hamm) to Prussian Justice Minister, XIV/62/812, 5 May 1920, who also reported cases of revenge attacks against judges. For similar reports see Ibid. Bl. 362, OLG Düsseldorf, report 5 June 1920. Cf, Tigges to Prussian Justice Minister, IA 30/A 1433, 7 April 1924, p. 9 (Bl. 174). A number of senior judges were concerned that the courts were being instrumentalized by the military in pursuit of its own agenda; there was also confusion over whether the courts were under military or civilian jurisdiction. Meanwhile, the military lamented the weak organization of the court system, GStAPrK I 84a 11655 Bl. 370–76, Wehrkreiskommando VI Abt JB No. 210 (Münster) 5 June 1920, ‘Denkschrift über die Mängel der ausserordentlichen Strafrechtspflege im rheinisch-westfälischen Industriegebiet’ (Major General v Lossberg). 75 GStAPrK. I Rep. 84a 11654, Bl. 364–65. Volksblatt f. Halle 51, 4 March 1918. 76 Walther Rathenau, ‘Es wird in Deutschland zu viel Prozessiert’, Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 12 December 1916, in Walther Rathenau, Nachgelassene Schriften Zweiter Band (Berlin, 1928), pp. 406–7. 77 Barch R3001/22086 (6668), Bl. 8.

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78 GStAPrK. I Rep 84a 11655, Bl. 91, Der Staatskommissar, Jr.Nr. 35 33/19 11 Nov. 1919. Barch R3001/22071, Bl. 160–80, ‘Zusammenstellung 1919–1923’, it was invoked 16 x in 1920; 3 x in 1921; 1 in 1922; 4 x in 1923. For the courts: GStAPrK. I Rep 84a 11657, Bl. 229–235, ‘Übersicht über die außerordentliche Kriegsgerichten und die außerordentlichen Gerichte in Preußen seit Anfang September 1919’; Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, pp. 1091–92. It should be noted that it is almost impossible to say with accuracy exactly how frequently the state of siege was invoked, according to one account it was deployed over fifty times between January and July 1919, Berlin Lokal Anzeiger Nr. 579, 2 December 1919. 79 RGBl. 1921 I, Nr. 38, 1 April 1921, pp. 371–74, ‘Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten über die Bildung außerordentlicher Gerichte. 29. März 1921’. Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 6: Die Weimarer Verfassung (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1981), p. 720. Ingo J. Hueck, Der Staatsgerichtshof zum Schutze der Republik (Tübingen, 1996), p. 28. 80 Barch R3001/alt 22/4105, Bl. 2-1; R3001/21617, Bl. 146–49. 81 Lippmann, Mein Leben, pp. 279–81. 82 GStAPr.K I Rep 84a 11654, Bl. 186–91; 373–75. 83 Barch R3001/6626, Bl. 182 and R3001/6627, Bl. 35 for similar cases in Saxony. 84 Notably the left-wing press, Die Freiheit, Nr 496, 14 October 1919 Abendausgabe, ‘Belagerungs­zustand’; but see the later discussion and justification by a senior official in the Prussian justice ministry in the liberal Vossische Zeitung Nr 226, 13 May 1924, ‘Vom Ausnahmezustand’ discussed below. Further press clippings can be found in GStAPrK I Rep 84a 1146. 85 GStAPrK I Rep. 84a, 11654, Bl. 222f. Pr. Landesversammlung Sten. Bericht, 38 Session, 27 Juli 1919, cols. 2707, 2901–02. Freymuth later joined the Republican League of Judges and championed legal reform throughout the 1920s. 86 GStAPrK I Rep. 84a 11656, Bl. 309ff., Pr. Landesversammlung Sten. Bericht, 28 Session 19 June 1921, cols. 1789–90. Born in 1881, Heilmann was Deputy for Frankfurt an der Oder, and a member of the Prussian Landtag. He was murdered in Buchenwald in 1940. 87 Barch R3001/22068, ‘Die Lage in Mitteldeutschland’. 88 Between 1919 and 1922, there were 354 political murders committed by the right, for which the perpetrators received a total of ninety years imprisonment. The left carried out twenty-two political killings in the same period, for which ten of its adherents faced execution, and 248 years of prison was meted out, Gumbel, Vier Jahre, pp. 73–81. 89 GStAPrK I Rep. 84a 11656, Pr. Landesversammlung Sten. Bericht, Dr Cohn, USPD, col. 1892. 90 Barch R3001/22069, Bl. 140, for recommendation of taking more draconian measures. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 5, p. 1105 for his notorious shoot to kill order of 19 March 1919. Otmar Jung, ‘“Da gelten Paragraphen nichts, sondern da gilt lediglich der Erfolg . . .”. Noskes Erschießungsbefehl während des Märzaufstandes in Berlin 1919 – rechthistorisch betrachtet’. Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 45 (1988), 51–79; Klaus Gietinger, ‘Nachträge betreffend Aufklärung der Ümstände, unter denen Frau Dr Rosa Luxemburg den Tod gefunden hat’. Internationale Wissenschaftiche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 28/3 (1992), 319–73. idem, Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal. Die Ermordung der Rosa L. (Berlin, 1995). 91 Barch R3001/22069, Bl. 140, 146. GStAPrK I 84a 11655, Bl. 91–107, here Bl. 95, Der Staatskommissar 11 November 1919. For Heine’s refusal to end the state of siege,

Notes

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95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104 105

106 107

108 109

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see: Berliner Tageblatt 111, 19 March 1919; Die Freiheit, Nr 496, 14 October 1919, ‘Belagerungszustand’. GStAPrK I 84a 11655, Bl. 119–121, Heine to Reich chancellor 29 November 1919. GStAPrK I 84a 11654, Bl. 48–49; ibid., Bl. 322, ‘Verzeichnis der beim Gen.K. 11-12 Juli Streiklage’ (22 reports Kr. Franzberg). Gumbel, Vier Jahre, 57–58. Gruchmann, Justiz, p. 228. This is in sharp contrast to his role in the Altona Bloody Sunday Trial in 1933 when in the absence of any evidence, he demanded – and got – the death penalty against four defendants. Anthony McElligott, ‘Dangerous Communities and conservative authority: the judiciary, Nazis, and rough people, 1932–33’, in Tim Kirk and Anthony McElligott (eds), Opposing Fascism. Community, Authority and Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 33–47. For a similar case at around the same time as the Magdeburg trial, Saenger (SPD), on the Perlach workers’ murders in 1920, in Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, 388, 147 Session, 23 January 1926, 5122. Die Freiheit, Nr. 118, 12 June 1919, ‘Die Schande der Schutzhaft’. Die Freiheit, Nr. 325, 29 October 1919. Frankfurter Zeitung Nr. 400, 1 June 1919. Der Tag, Nr. 280, 1 December 1918. Pr. Landesversammlung Sten. Bericht, 27 June 1919, 36 Session, col. 2719. Barch R3001/22086, Bl. 25. Cf., Deutsche Richterzeitung 13 Jg., 1921, col. 225. Barch R3001/22056, Bl. 24. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, 397, III Wahlperiode 1924/28, Interpellation Nr. 181, Müller u. Gen., (8 January 1925); ibid., Interpellation Nr. 201, Stoecker u. Gen., (10 January 1925). Akten der Reichskanzlei Kabinett Müller I, Doc. 8, note 3; Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 7: Ausbau, Schutz und Untergang der Weimarer Repulblik (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1984), p. 113. The putschists were eventually amnestied under a presidential directive of 17 August 1925. GStAPrK I 84a 11655, Bl. 96–7, Der Staatskommissar 11 November 1919; Barch R3001/6627, Bl. 94. See Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, p. 46, for examples of contrasting sentences for working class and anti-republicans defendants. Barch R1501/25639, Gesetz zum Schutz der Republik, 21.7.22, Bd. 1, 1926–31. See also: Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, 397, III Wahlperiode 1924/28, Interpellation Nr 181, Müller u. Gen., ibid., Interpellation 201, Stoecker u. Gen. Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, p. 46 for examples of biased sentencing. Cited by Diemut Majer in Die Zeit Nr. 8, 14 February 1986, p. 70. Cf., Angermund, Deutsche Richter, p. 35. Radbruch was minister between 26 October 1921 and 14 November 1922. Dr Johannes Leeb (Munich), ‘Babel. Ein Schrei in die Zeit’. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 13 Jg., Heft 8 (1921), cols. 224–27; [Theodor] von [der] Pfordten, ‘Die geistige Lage der Gegenwart und das Recht’, in ibid., cols. 227–32. Leeb was the editor of the Richterzeitung. Von der Pfordten was a judge at the Bavarian Hugh Court. See below for Pfordten’s role in the Beer Hall Putsch. Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, p. 134. Friedrich Karl Kaul, Geschichte des Reichsgerichts 4: 1933–1945 (East Berlin, 1971), pp. 56–8; Johnn Heinrich Lüth and Uwe Wesel, ‘Arnold Freymuth (1878–1933), Hermann Großmann (1878–1933 (?)), Alfred Orgler 1876–1943 (?)), Drei Richter für die Republik’, in Thomas Blanke (ed.), Streitbare Juristen: eine andere Tradition (Jürgen Seifert, Mitherausgeber der Kritischen Justiz, zum 60. Geburtstag) (BadenBaden, 1988), pp. 204–18; Thomas Henne, ‘Jüdische Jüristen am Reichsgerichtshof

276

110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118

119 120 121 122

Notes und ihre Verbindungen zur Leipziger Juristen Fakultät’, in Stephan Wendehorst (ed.), Bausteine einer jüdischen Geschichte der Universität Leipzig (Leipzig, 2006), pp. 188–204, here p. 203. Dr Liebmann, Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, Heft 2, (1926), cols. 59–60. Cf, Landgerichstrat Martin Rauck, ‘Die “Republikfeindlichkeit” der Richter’. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 18 Jg., Heft 2 (1926), cols. 147–9. Dr Weiß, ‘Der Kampf um das Recht und der deutsche Richterstand’. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 17 Jg., Heft 6 (1925), cols. 309–27, here 313. See also Deutsche Richterzeitung, Heft 8/9 (1931), ‘Das Amt des Richters’, cols. 281–86. Rosenfeld, ‘Justiz und Republik’, pp. 477–78. Fraenkel, Soziologie, p. 8: ‘Nun soll er “Im Namen des Volkes!” recht sprechen, des Volkes, in dessen Verachtung er groß geworden ist. Einen glitt der Feder aus, und er schrieb, was Hunderte dachten: Im Namen des Pöbels!’. Dr Ernst Müller (Memingen, Rat an Obersten Landgericht Munich), ‘Zuverlässige Richter in der deutschen Republik’. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 17 Jg., Heft 7 (September 1925), cols. 422–23. Rechtsanwalt Dr Oelenheinz (Mannheim), ‘Gesetz und Richter’. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 17 Jg., Heft 9 (1 November 1925), cols. 517–24. Deutsche Richterzeitung, 25 Jg., Heft 1 (1933), col. 325. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 3, p. 1056. Cited in Fraenkel, Soziologie, p. 9. Akten der Reichskanzlei Die Kabinette Stresemann I und II, prepared by Karl Dietrich Erdmann and Martin Vogt (Boppard am Rhein, 1978), Vol. 2, Doc. 248, pp. 1055–6, here 56 and note 3. Landtagsabgeordneten Dr [Wilhelm] Hoegner, ‘Die bayerische Justiz vor dem Untersuchung­sausschuß’. Die Justiz, III (1927/28), 315–23; Gruchmann, Justiz, pp. 29–48. Lothar Gruchmann (ed.), Der Hitler-Prozess 1924: Wortlaut der Hauptverhandlung vor dem Volksgericht München I. Teil 1, 1-4 Verhandlungstag (München, 1997); Popular but well-researched and useful, Otto Gritschneder, Der Hitler-Prozeß und sein Richter Georg Neithardt. Skandalurteil von 1924 ebnet Hitler den Weg (Munich, 2001) and idem, Bewährungsfrist für den Terroristen Adolf H. Der Hitlerputsch und die bayerische Justiz (Munich, 1990), also Klaus Gietinger, Hitler vor Gericht: der Prozess nach dem Putsch von 1923. Fakten, Hintergründe, Analysen (Munich, 2009). See also, Reinhard Weber, ‘“Ein tüchtiger Beamter von makelloser Vergangenheit”. Das Disziplinarverfahren gegen den Hochverräter Wilhelm Frick 1924’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 42. Jg., 1. H. (January 1994), 129–50. On the putsch, Harold J Gordon Jr, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch (Princeton, 1972). Deutsche Richterzeitung, Jg., 16 (1924), col. 122. On the Fechenbach Trial see the original report by Max Hirschberg and Friedrich Thimme, Der Fall Fechenbach, juristische Gutachten (Tübingen, 1924). Deutsche Richterzeitung, 11 Jg., Nr. 1/2 (1 January 1919), cols. 5–6. Fraenkel, Doppelstaat, p. 25. Cited in Rosenfeld, ‘Justiz und Republik’, pp. 480–2. Dr Oelenheinz, Mannheim, ‘Gesetz und Richter’. Deutsche Richterzeitung, Heft 9 17Jg., (1 November 1925), cols. 518–24, 529–31. Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, 35 Jg., Heft 6 (1930), col. 400; A. Feisenberger, ‘Neues aus dem Rechtssprechung’. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft, 43, Heft 1 (1922), 455–530, here 520–21, 523–24. Born in 1860 Lobe was Senatspräsident at the Reichsgericht between

Notes

123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

142

277

1921 and 1928, before becoming a Reichstag deputy for the Volksrechtspartei in 1928: http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz52015.html#index & http://www. bundesarchiv.de/aktenreichskanzlei/1919-1933/1001/adr/adrhl/kap1_5/para2_161. html. Lobe also edited a history of the Reichsgericht, Fünfzig Jahre Reichsgericht am 1 Oktober 1929 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1929). Ludwig Foerder‚ ‘Die Judenrepublik in der Rechtsprechung’. Die Justiz, 1, Heft 5 (1926), 519–33. Kramer, ‘The Courts of the Third Reich’, pp. 609–10. Barch R1501/25653, 25654, ‘Beschimpfung der rep. Staatsform und Reichsfarben’. See Chapter 7 for an example of this from Landrat Herbert Bismarck. Karl Schultz, Die deutsche Flagge (Berlin, 1928), p. 75. Dr Max Weiß (ed.), Der nationale Wille. Werden und Wirken der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918–1928 (Leipzig, 1928). Barch R1501/125653, Bl. 36–43. Barch R1501/125653, Bl. 97–114, Preussische Justizminister: Strafsache gegen Schulz, 7 Oct. 1927; Bl. 119, Reichsgericht, Abschrift Z.D. 963/1927/IXöl 242, 12 Jan. 1928. Barch R1501/125653, Bl. 152. Kreuz-Zeitung, Nr. 164, 7 April 1927. Barch R1501/125653, Bl. 106–08. Barch R1501/125653, Bl. 122–23: Reichskommissar f. Überwachung der öffentlichen Ordnung 2623/28 I, 11 April 1928, Strafsache. Redakteur Dertinger & Rechtsanwalt Kleybolte. Emphasis in original. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 7, pp. 581–5. Barch, R1501/126554, Bl.1–7, the following quotes are based on this document. Childers, ‘Inflation, Stabilization, and Political Realignment’, pp. 427, 429. Barch R1501/125653, Bl. 138, Berliner Tageblatt 423, 7 Sept. 1928, ‘Ein skandalöser Freispruch’. Morgenpost 45, 21 Feb. 1929: ‘Die Reichsfarben sind Schutzlos’. Anon., ‘Calumniare audacter! Neuer Gebrauch eines alten Rezeptes’. Die Justiz VIII Doppelheft 2/3 (1932), 106–22; ibid., Heft 4, 201–02. Deutsche Zeitung 12 March 1924: ‘Der Dolschtoß der S.P.D’. The press clippings can be accessed at the Leibniz-Informationszentrum für Wirtschaft, http://zbw.eu/beta/ p20/person/4447/about.de.html. RGBl. 1922 I, p. 586, Paragraph 7 I. On the trial: Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 533; de Boor and Meurer (eds), Über den Zeitgeist, pp. 91–100; Mühlhausen, Ebert, pp. 936–66. Ibid., pp. 946, 964. Also, Weber, ‘Republikanische Richter auf verlorenem Posten’ passim. Dr Haas (DDP), Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, 389, 163 Session, 17 Feb.1926, 5628–9; ibid., 390, 187 Session, 26 March 1926, 6771–2. Cf., Der Richterbund Sachsen-Anhalt, Bezirksgruppe Magdeburg, Magdeburger Justiz in der Weimarer Republik, accessible at http://forumjustizgeschichte.de/MagdeburgerJus.212.0.html Dr Levi (SPD), Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, 384, 33 Session, 10 March 1925, 983. See also the press clippings cited in note 120, and Deutsche Richterzeitung 1925, cols. 114–15, 191–95, ‘Die preußischen Richter gegen dem Republikanischen Richterbund’, for the vitriolic exchanges over the Magdeburg trial. Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, pp. 33–4, 39.

278

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143 Haas, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, 389, 163 Session, 17 Feb. 1926, 5629. 144 Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Die Kabinette Brüning I und II: 30. März 1930 bis 10. Oktober 1931/10. Oktober 1931 bis 1. Juni 1932, 3 vols, prepared by Tilman Koops (Boppard am Rhein, 1982), vol. 2, Doc. 454, 1607–08, Strafantrag gegen Hauptman a.D. Martini. Also Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Das Kabinett von Papen 1. Juni bis 3. Dezember 1932, 2 vols, prepared by KarlHeinz Minuth (Boppard am Rhein, 1989), vol. 1, Doc. 99, here pp. 377–8 for the Strafantrag against the editor of the Catholic Munich weekly, Der gerade Weg (The Upright Path) for insulting the government. 145 Barch R3001/21617 Bl. 18–19, Rundschreiben RJM (sig. Schmidt), 24 Jan. 1931. 146 Deutsche Richterzeitung, 13. Jg. (1921), col. 130; also cited in Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, p. 31 and in Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, p. 27. A slightly fuller and different translation can be found in Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, p. 135. For Leeb’s biography, see http://www.drb.de/cms/index.php?id596. 147 Deutsche Richterzeitung, 17 Jg., Heft 2 (5 February 1925), col. 17; also cited in Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, p. 48 and Kramer, ‘The Courts of the Third Reich’, p. 602. For Reichart’s appointment to the Reichsgerichtshof, Deutsche Richterzeitung, 18 Jg., Heft 2 (1926), col. 61. For his biography see, http://www.drb. de/cms/index.php?id600&L0 148 Ignaz Wrobel (Kurt Tucholsky), ‘Die zufällige Republik’. Die Weltbuhne, XVIII 13 Jg., Nr. 28 (July 1922), 29. On p. 24 Tucholsky points out that this tension between ‘state’ and ‘republic’ could be also found among leading Social Democrats. See also Deutsche Zeitung 119, 14 March 1919, and Berliner Tageblatt 111, 15 March 1919, for reports on a debate in the Prussian Landtag on the use of emergency laws in which Wolfgang Heine privileges the German state over the republic. 149 Rosenfeld, ‘Justiz und Republik’, 482. For biographical details, see: http://biosop. zhsf.uni-koeln.de/biosop_db/biosoprecherche.php; and Wilhelm Heinz Schröder, Sozialdemokratischer Parlamentarier in den deutschen Reichs- und Landtagen 1867–1933 Biographien, Chronik, Wahldokumentation. Ein Handbuch (Düsseldorf, 1995 [1986]), p. 186. 150 Staatsanwalt Dr Max Bautzen, ‘Zur Justizkrise’. Deutsche Richterzeitung, Heft 9 (1926), cols. 304–06. Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, p. 40. Robert Kuhn, Die Vertrauenskrise in der Justiz (1926–1928). Der Kampf um die Republikanisierung der Rechtspflege in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 1983). See also Daniel Simons, ‘Die “Vertauenskrise der Justiz” in der Weimarer Republik’, in Moritz Foellmer and Rüdiger Graf (eds), Die ‘Krise’ der Weimarer Republik: zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt, New York, 2005), pp. 139–63. 151 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 392, 275 Session, 22 Feb. 1928, 9168. See Otto Wels’ earlier attack in the Reichstag against the ‘scandalous justice’, notably in Bavaria, and with a call for its reorganization, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags (Protokoll ds Reichstags, 25 June 1922, p. 8042. Bundesminister der Justiz, Im Namen, pp. 39–43, table showing ‘class justice’ is based on Hannover and Hannover-Drück, Politische Justiz, p. 231 and Gumbel, Vier Jahre, p. 99. See also E. Könnemann, G. Schulze (eds), Der Kapp-Lüttwitz-Ludendorff Putsch. Dokumente (Munich, 2002), Doc. 689, p. 1038 and note 1 for independent evidence. 152 Vossische Zeitung Nr 226, 13 May 1924, ‘Vom Ausnahmezustand’. 153 Theodor Lessing, Haarmann: die Geschichte eines Werwolfs (Berlin, 1925). Kerstin Brückweh, Mordlust. Serienmorde, Gewalt und Emotionen im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, New York, 2006).

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154 Martin Geyer, Verkehrte Welt. Revolution, Inflation und Moderne: München 1914–1924 (Göttingen, 1998), Ch. 8; Bernd Widdig, Culture and the Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2001), Ch. 5 especially. On the press generally: Bernhard Fulda, Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford, 2009). 155 Deutsche Richterzeitung, 18 Jg., Heft 7 (15 July 1926), ‘Zeitspiegel’, cols. 223, 226. 156 R. J. Evans, Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century (London and New Haven, CT., 1998), Chapters 3 & 4 in particular. 157 Moritz Föllmer (ed.), Der ‘Krise’ der Weimarer Republik. Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt, New York, 2005). 158 Gottfried Zarnow (pseud. for Ewald Moritz), Gefesselte Justiz (n.p., 1931). 159 A good overview can be found in Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600–1987 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 487–525. See also the important study by Richard F. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal. A History of German Criminology 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC., 2000). 160 Rosenblum, Beyond the Prison Gates, p. 165; pp. 159–62 (Bielefeld System), and Chapter 6 passim. On constructing a ‘table of life events’ see Adolf Lenz, Grundriß der Kriminalbiologie (Berlin 1927), and on how it was put to very different use after 1933, Friedrich von Rohden, ‘Methoden der Kriminalbiologie’, in Emil Abderhalden (ed.), Handbuch der biologischen Arbeitsmethoden, Abt. IV, Teil 12 1/1: Methoden der gerichtlichen Medizin und Kriminalistik 1 Hälfte, Band 1 (Berlin and Vienna, 1938), pp. 627–8. 161 Barch R3001/alt R22/887, Bl. 6, Prof Dr Oetker (Würzburg), ‘Grundprobleme der Nationalsozialistischen Strafrechtsreform’, this undated document (probably 1933/34) encapsulates the general argument found among right-wing critics of liberal reform. 162 Georg Dahm and Friedrich Schaffstein Liberales oder autoritäres Strafrecht?’ (Hamburg, 1933). Georg Dahm, ‘Autoritäres Strafrecht’. Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtreform Jg. 24 (1933), 171. 163 Dr Hirschberg, ‘Die Verschlechterung der Strafrechtspflege durch Notverordnungen’. Die Justiz Bd. VIII, Doppelheft 2/3 (1933), 131–32. Douglas G. Morris, Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor, 2005). 164 The best account is by Kerstin Brückweh, Mordlust: Serienmorde, Gewalt und Emotionen im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt and New York, 2006). For Haarmann see the classic study by Theodor Lessing, Haarmann: die Geschichte eines Werwolfs (Berlin, 1925), and for Kürten, Peter Hüttenberger, Düsseldorf: Die Industrie- und Verwaltungsstadt (20. Jahrhundert) (Geschichte von den Ursprüngen bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, general editor Hugo Weidenhaupt (Düsseldorf, 1989), pp. 408–12. 165 Christian Engeli, Gustav Böß: Oberbürgermeister von Berlin 1920–1930 (Stuttgart, 1971); Donna Harsch, ‘Der Sklarek-Skandal 1929 und die sozialdemokratische Reaktion’, in Ludger Heid and Arnold Paucker (eds), Juden und deutsche Arbeiterbewegung bis 1933. Soziale Utopien und religiös-kulturelle Traditionen (Tübingen 1992), pp. 193–213. 166 F. Exner, ‘Die Reichskriminalstatistik für 1930’. Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform, Jg. 24 (1933), 424–26; and Walter Mannzen, ‘Neue kriminalistische Unter­suchungen’. Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform, Jg. 24 (1933), 425–34.

280

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167 Rudolf Sieverts and Werner Hardtwig, ‘Sittlichkeitsdelikte’, Sonderdruck: Die Sexualität des Menschen. Handbuch der medizinischen Sexulaforschung, edited Hans Giese (Stuttgart, 1955), p. 624. 168 Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, 48; Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik, p. 150. 169 Patrick Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher. Konzeptionen und Praxis der Kriminalpolizei in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik und des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg, 1996), pp. 19–25, 74–5. 170 Michael Grüttner, ‘Working-Class Crime and the Labour Movement: Pilfering in the Hamburg Docks, 1888–1923’, in Richard J. Evans (ed.), The German Working Class 1888–1933. The Politics of Everyday Life (London, 1982), pp. 54–79. 171 Mannzen, ‘Neue kriminalistische Untersuchungen’, p. 427. 172 Ibid., pp. 424–6. 173 Dr Wilhelm Gallas, ‘Die Krise des Strafrechts und ihre Überwindung im Staatsgedanken’. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafwissenschaft, 53 (1934), 11–28. 174 Verhandlungen des Pr. Landtags III Wahlperiode 1928–32, Bd. 16, col. 22100, Pr.IM (Severing) report 14 October 1931. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, pp. 894, 1039–70. 175 RGBl. 1930 I, 25 July 1930, p. 352; RGBl. 1931 I, 28 March 1931, p. 77; ibid., 28 March 1931, p. 79: ibid., 17 July 1931, p. 371. Cf., Die Kabinette Brüning I und II, vol. 2, Doc. 457, pp. 1624–36; Barch R3001/21617, Bl. 56–7, Der Vorstand Abt. Strafgericht Amtegerichtes, München, 28 Nov 1931 (gez. Dr Frank); Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, pp. 809–10. 176 Barch R3001/21617, Bl. 43–54, here 53, Der Preussische Justizminister I 4225 to the Reichsminister der Justiz, 15 October 1931. For examples of invoking Paragraph 212 before the decree, ibid, Bl. 56, Der Vorstand Abteilung Strafgericht Amtsgerichtes München, 28 February 1931, ‘Anordnung’; ibid., Bl.58, Sächsisches Ministerium der Justiz 144 e II/31 to Reichsminister der Justiz, 20 March 1931. 177 Barch R3001/22086, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung Nr. 443, 26 Sept. 1931, ‘Unsere Meinung’; Berliner Tageblatt Nr. 280, 17 Nov. 1931; Hamburger Fremdenblatt Nr. 349 17 Dec. 1931; Vossische Zeitung Nr. 203 28 April 1932. 178 Barch R3001/21617, Bl. 13, Verhandliungen des Deutschen Reichstags 444, 26 Session, 14 Feb. 1931, p. 1046, ‘. . . aus dem imaginären Lande der Dichter und Denker ein Land der Richter und Henker geworden ist’. 179 Ibid. 180 For further examples, see, Barch R3001/21617, Bl. 143, Berliner Tageblatt 280, 17 Nov. 1931, ‘500 Jahre Gefängnis, 50 Jahre Zuchthaus’; ibid., Bl. 167, Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 17 Dec. 1931; ibid, Bl. 183, Vossische Zeitung 213, 28 April 1932, ‘Der Schnellverfahren’. 181 Barch R3001/21617, Bl. 47–55, Der Preussische Justizminister I 4225 to the Reichsminister der Justiz, 15 Oct. 1931, Anlage zu I 4225: ‘Übersicht über die Aburteilungen auf Grund der §212 StPO für die Zeit von 1 April bis 30 Juni 1931’. 182 Die Kabinette Brüning I und II, Vol. 2, pp. 1624–36, Rundschreiben des RMdI an die Obersten Reichs- und Landesbehörden, 29 August 1931, here 1636. 183 R3001/22086, Bl. 139–43, undated (1932) transcript of guidelines. 184 Barch R3001/22086, Bl. 22–26 (Außerordentliche Gerichte/Aktenvermerk 8); ibid., Bl. 296–309 (Sondergericht Gladbach-Rheydt). 185 Arnold Brecht, Vorspiel zum Schweigen. Das Ende der deutschen Republik (Vienna, 1948), pp. 94–6. McElligott, Contested City, Chapter 6; idem, ‘Authority, Control and

Notes

186

187 188

189

190 191 192

193

194 195

196

197 198

281

Class Justice: The Role of the Sondergerichte in the Transition from Weimar to the Third Reich’. Criminal Justice History, 15 (1995), 209–33. Dahm and Schaffstein Liberales oder autoritäres Strafrecht?’, p. 98. Carl Schmitt’s Strassburg University Habilitation (second dissertation) Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen (Tübingen, 1914) was a treatise on law in the interests of the community at the expense of the individual and anticipated legal philosophy of the Third Reich. Dahm, ‘Autoritäres Strafrecht’, p. 175. Clemens Jabloner, ‘Introduction: Hans Kelsen’, in Arthur J. Jacobsen and Bernhard Schlink (eds), Weimar A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley, 2000), p. 70. Peter Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law. The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham USA., London, 1997), pp. 41–2. Roland Freisler, ‘Nationalsozialistischer Strafrecht. Denkschrift des Preußischen Justizministers’ (1933), in Martin Hirsch (ed.), Recht, Verwaltung und Justiz im Nationalsozialismus: ausgewählte Schriften, Gesetze und Gerichtsentscheidungen von 1933 bis 1945 mit ausführlichen Erläuterungen und Kommentierungen, second edn (Baden-Baden, 1997 [Cologne, 1984]), pp. 432–34. Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers. Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung (Munich 1969), p. 591. Franz Gürtner (1881–1941) was Bavaria’s justice minister (1922–32) and later Reich Justice Minister from 1932 under von Papen and then under Hitler until his death in late January 1941. Quote in Gruchmann, Justiz, p. 982. RGBl. 1932 I, 9 August 1932, p. 404. Eberhard Kolb, ‘Die Maschinerie des Terrors. Zum Funktionieren des Unterdrückungs- und Verfolgungsapparates im NS-System’, in Karl-Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds), Nationalsozialistische Diktatur 1933–1945. Eine Bilanz (Bonn, 1983), pp. 270–84. ‘Ministerialbesprechung vom 21 März 1933, 16. Uhr’, Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik: Die Regierung Hitler Teil 1: 1933/34, bearb. von Karl-Heinz Minuth, 2 Vols (Boppard am Rhein 1983), p. 244. Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice. The Courts of the Third Reich (London, 1991), pp. 45, 52–3; McElligott, ‘Sentencing towards the Führer’, passim. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich 1935 (Berlin 1935), p. 529. Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, pp. 407–09. Detlev Peukert, Die KPD im Widerstand (Wuppertal 1980), p. 73. Supreme Court Judge Otto Schwarz, cited in Müller, Hitler’s Justice, pp. 153–54; Anthony McElligott, ‘Authority, Control and Class Justice: The Role of the Sondergerichte in the Transition from Weimar to the Third Reich’. Criminal Justice History, 15 (1995), 209–33. ‘Bildung von Sondergerichten. AB. d. IM. v. 9. 8. 1932 (I 4197)’, Justiz-MinisterialBlatt für die preußische Gesetzgebung und Rechtspflege, Jg. 94, Nr. 31, 10 August 1932, Sondernummer Ausgabe A, 195–196. For further details on the operational procedures of the Sondergerichte, see Gruchmann, Justiz, pp. 949–50, and Werner Johe, Die gleigeschaltete Justiz: Organization des Rechtswesens und Politisierung der Rechtsprechung, 1933–1945 dargestellt am Beispiel des Oberlandesgerichtsbezirks Hamburg (Hamburg, 1967), pp. 81–116. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungeschichte 7, pp. 1053–5. Peter Hüttenberger, ‘Heimtückefälle vor dem Sondergericht München’, in Martin Broszat, Elke Fröhlich, Anton Grossmann (eds), Bayern in der NS-Zeit IV (Munich,

282

199 200 201 202 203 204 205

206

207 208 209 210 211 212

Notes Vienna 1981), pp. 435–526. For the earlier period, Barch R3001/21617, Bl. 60–73. Klaus Bästlein, ‘Die Akten des ehemaligen Sondergerichts Kiel als zeitgeschichtliche Quelle’. Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte, 113 (1988), 157–211. McElligott, ‘Sentencing towards the Führer’, p. 168. Gallas, ‘Die Krise des Strafrechts’, pp. 12–14, 16–19. Angermund, Deutsche Richterschaft, p. 36. Svend Reimers, ‘Autorität – wofür?’. Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform, Jg. 24 (1933), 222–26, here 223. Vossische Zeitung, Nr 226, 14 May 1924, ‘Vom Ausnahmezustand’. Ibid., Nr 544, 17 November 1926, ‘Das Diktaturgesetz’. GStAPrK I 84a 11655, Bl. 95. Dr Crohne, “Bedeutung und Aufgabe der Sondergerichte” Deutsche Justiz (1933), pp. 384–385. Barch R3001/altR22/887, Bl.6, Professor Dr Oetker (Würzburg) ‘Grundprobleme der Nationalsozialistischen Strafrechtsreform’ (undated mss, probably 1935). Klaus Bästlein, ‘Als Recht zu Unrecht wurde: Zur Entwicklung der Strafjustiz im Nationalsozialismus’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament B13–14/89 (24 March 1989). Johe, Die gleichsgeschaltete Justiz, p. 107. International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg Trials Major War Criminals, Vol. 16 (London 1947), p. 281. See also the evidence of former secretary of state at the Reich Justice Ministry Franz Schlegelberger, ibid., Vol. 20, p. 233. On the creation and remit of the courts, RGBl. 1932 I, ‘Verordnung der Reichsregierung über die Bildung von Sondergerichten. Vom 9. August 1932’, pp. 404–07, and RGBl 1933 I, ‘Verordnung der Reichsregierung über die Bildung von Sondergerichten. Vom 21. März 1933’, pp. 136–8. Huber, Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 1054. Excepting that before 1923 they had fallen under the jurisdiction of the military and interior ministry. Barch R3001/22086, Bl. 22–6 (undated report, Aktenvermerk: ‘Außerordentlichen Gerichte’). Brecht, Vorspiel zum Schweigen, pp. 146–9. Schenk, Hans Frank, p. 92. According to Martin Broszat around 25,000 persons had been taken into Schutzhaft by the early spring Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, pp. 407–9. Deutsche Juristen Zeitung (1 August 1934), col. 945ff. Schenk, Hans Frank, p. 99. We return to Schmitt and this article in the final chapter of this book. GStAPrK. I Rep. 84a 11746, Bl. 30–31, Berlin Lokal Anzeiger 579, 2 Dec. 1919, ‘Die außerordentliche Kriegsgerichte’. Ian Kershaw, ‘The Nazi State: An Exceptional State?’. New Left Review, 176 (1989), 47–67.

Chapter 6 1 Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst, Deutscher Lebenswille (Berlin, 1930), p. 29. 2 Eberhard Kolb, Die Weimarer Republik, third edn (Munich, 1993), pp. 92–106. Theo Stammen (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik, Vol. 1. Das schwere Erbe 1918–1923, second edn (Munich, 1992 [1987]), p. 357. 3 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. xi, xii.

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4 John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic. The New Sobriety 1917–1933 (New York, 1978); idem, The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short (London, 1984); Jost Hermand and Frank Trommler, Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1978); Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, translated by Richard Deveson (London, 1991). For two recent restatements of Gay’s thesis, see Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany. Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ, 2007), and Peter Hoeres, Die Kultur von Weimar. Durchbruch der Moderne (Berlin, 2008). 5 Stephan Lamb, Anthony Phelan, ‘Weimar Culture: The Birth of Modernism’, in Rob Burns (ed.), German Cultural Studies (Oxford, 1996), p. 60. Brief but good is the review of the 1999 exhibition of Weimar modernism in the Schlossmuseum Weimar by Jonathan Osmond, ‘German Modernism and Anti-Modernism. Weimar’. The Burlington Magazine, 141, 1158 (September 1999), 574–5. 6 Thomas W. Kniesche, Stephen Brockman (eds), Dancing on the Volcano. Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (Columbia, SC, 1994); Cornelius Partsch, Schräge Töne: Jazz und Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart etc., 2000), p. 72. 7 Weitz, Weimar Germany, p. 209. 8 Henry Pachter, Weimar Etudes (New York, 1982), pp. 302–08; Larry E. Jones, ‘Culture and Politics in the Weimar Republic’, in Gordon Martel (ed.), Modern German Reconsidered 1870–1945 (London, New York, 1992), pp. 74–95, here 74; Ursula Büttner, Weimar: die überforderte Republik (Stuttgart, 2008), pp. 296–334, especially 298–9; Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London, 2003), pp. 118–38 for ‘Culture Wars’ as part of a chapter dealing with the ‘failure of democracy’. 9 Gotthard Jasper (ed.), Von Weimar zu Hitler 1930–1933 (Cologne and Berlin, 1968); Hans Mommsen, Bernd Weisbrod, Dietmar Petzina (eds), Weimarer Republik, industrielles System (Düsseldorf, 1974); Hans Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History, translated by Philip O’Connor (Oxford, 1990), idem, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, translated Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones (Chapel Hill, 1996); Ian Kershaw (ed.), Weimar: Why did German Democracy Fail? (London, 1990). Jens Flemming, Claus-Dieter Krohn, Dirk Stegmann, PeterChristian Witt (eds), Die Republik von Weimar vol. 2: Das sozialökonomische System (Königstein/Ts., Düsseldorf, 1979); Michael Stürmer (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik. Belagerte Civitas (Königstein, 1980). 10 Gordon Craig, Germany 1866–1945 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 469, 475–6. Helmut Heiber, The Weimar Republic, translated by W. E. Yuill (Oxford, 1993). Edgar J. Feuchtwanger, From Weimar to Hitler, 1918–1933, second edn (Basingstoke, 1995). 11 Goetz A Briefs, ‘The Dualism of Weimar Culture’. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 3, 3, Essays in Memory of Franz Oppenheimer, 1864–1943 (April 1944), 321–34. Andreas Wirsching, Weimarer Republik, pp. 84–7, for a summary of the recent literature. 12 Bärbel Schräder and Jürgen Schebera, Kunstmetropole Berlin 1918–1933: Die Kunststadt in der Novemberrevolution, Die ‘Goldenen’ Zwanziger, Die Kunststadt in der Krise (Berlin, Weimar, 1987), idem, The Golden Twenties, Art and Literature in the Weimar Republic (New Haven, London, 1990); Thomas Friedrich, Berlin between the Wars (New York, 1991); Adelheid von Saldern, ‘Massenfreizeitkultur im Visier. Ein Beitrag zu den Deutungs- und Einwirkungsversuchen während der Weimarer Republik’. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 33 (1993), 21–58; Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton,

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16 17 18 19

Notes NJ, 1998); Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (University of California Press, 1997); Mila M. Ganeva, Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918–1933 (New York, 2008); Ute Daniel, Inge Marszolek, Wolfram Pyta, Thomas Welskopp (eds), Politische Kultur und Medienwirklichkeiten in den 1920er Jahren (Munich, 2010). In addition to the literature cited in note 9, see Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA, 1993). A number of younger scholars are increasingly inspired by the ‘performative’ turn that reassesses politics within the framework of theatre. Tim Brown, Weimar Radicals Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (New York and Oxford, 2009); Henning Grunwald, From Courtroom to ‘Revolutionary Stage’: Party Lawyers and Political Justice in the Weimar Republic (New York and Oxford, 2012). For a pioneering study of politics as ‘performance’ see David Blackburn, ‘Politics as Theatre: Metaphors of the Stage in German History, 1848–1933’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 37 (1987), 149–67. Gerhard Brunn, ‘Berlin – Zwischen Metropole und kleinstädtischen Milieus’, in Harm Klueting (ed.), Nation – Nationalismus – Postnation: Beiträge zur Identitätsfindung der Deutschen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 1992), pp. 93– 106, here 93; Hugh Ridley, ‘The Culture of Weimar: Models of Decline’, in Michael Laffan (ed.), The Burden of German History, p. 15. A good critique of retrospective constructions of ‘Weimar culture’ is offered by Paul Betts, ‘Die Bauhaus Legende’, in Alf Lüdtke, Inge Marßolek, Adelheid von Saldern (eds), Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1996), pp. 282, 285–8; and by Jürgen Reulecke, ‘Das Berlinbild: Was ist Imagination, was Wirklichkeit? Einige abschließende Überlegungen’, in Gerhard Brunn and Jürgen Reulecke (eds), Berlin. Blicke auf die deutshe Metropole (Essen, 1989), pp. 251–63. Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories, The last of Mr Norris and Goodbye to Berlin (New York, 1963, orig. 1935); Stephen Spender, The Temple (London, 1988); The Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907–1963, paperback edition, edited Nigel Nicolson (London, 2004); The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan: Count Harry Kessler, 1918–1937, translated and edited by Charles Kessler (London, 1991). Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2001). See also, Karl Christian Führer, ‘Weimar Culture’, in Anthony McElligott (ed.), Weimar Germany (Oxford, 2009), pp. 260–81. For an excellent overview, Elizabeth Harvey, ‘Culture and Society in Weimar Germany: The Impact of Modernism and Mass Culture’, in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), German History Since 1800 (London, 1997). Lothar Ehrlich, Jürgen John (eds), Weimar 1930. Politik und Kultur im Vorfeld der NS-Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 1998). Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1918–1939 (Göttingen, 2005). Bernd Buchner, Um nationale und republikanische Identität. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und der Kampf um die politischen Symbole in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2001). Buchner’s study is very much in the tradition of an earlier and important discussion on the mobilization of and conflict over political symbols under the republic. See Gottfried Korff, ‘Rote Fahnen und geballte Faust. Zur Symbolik der Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik’, in Dieter Petzina (ed.), Fahnen, Fäuste, Körper. Symbolik und Kultur der Arbeiterbewegung (Essen, 1986), pp. 85–103.

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20 Winfried Speitkamp, Die Verwaltung der Geschichte. Denkmalpflege und Staat in Deutschland 1871–1933 (Göttingen,1996). 21 Christian Welzbacher (ed.), Der Reichskunstwart. Kulturpolitik und Staatsinszenierung in der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Weimar, 2010); Nadine Rossol, Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany. Sport, Spectacle and Political Symbolism, 1926–36 (London and New York, 2010). 22 Detlef Lehnert and Klaus Megerle (eds), Politische Identität und Nationale Gedenktage. Zur politischen Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Opladen, 1989), pp. 11–16, 22–3. 23 Speitkamp, Die Verwaltung der Geschichte, p. 159. Hagen Schulze, Weimar. Deutschland 1917–1933 (Berlin, 1982), pp. 123–38. Kolb, Die Weimarer Republik, p. 92ff. Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918 (Basingstoke, 2003). 24 Wolfgang J Mommsen, Bürgerliche Kultur und politische Ordnung. Künstler, Schriftsteller und Intellektuelle in der deutschen Geschichte 1830–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), pp. 158–63, Wolfgang Martynkewicz, Salon Deutschland. Geist und Macht 1900–1945 (Berlin, 2009). 25 Werner Mittenzwei, Der Untergang einer Akademi oder die Mentalität des ewigen Deutschen. Der Einfluß der nationalkonservativen Dichter an der Preußischen Akademie der Künste 1918–1947 (Berlin, 1992). Ulrich Raulff, Kreis ohne Meister: Stefan Georges Nachleben (München, 2009). 26 Peter Paret, Die Berliner Secession: moderne Kunst und ihre Feinde im Kaiserlichen Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, 1983). Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperial Germany 1867–1918. Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State (London, 1995), Chapter 7. 27 Wolfgang Kaschuba, Kasper Maase (eds), Schund und Schönheit. Populäre Kultur um 1900 (Cologne, 2001). 28 Mommsen, Bürgerlich Kultur und politische Ordnung, pp. 158–77 passim. 29 Georg Simmel, ‘Die Krisis der Kultur’ Frankfurter Zeitung 13 February, 1916, repr. in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds), Simmel on Culture (London, 1997), p. 96. 30 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Der Erste Weltkrieg. Anfang vom Ende des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (Frankfurt/Main, 2003), pp. 138–41. 31 The Reichszentrale was subsumed into the government’s press office from mid-1919 from where its main function was to act as a propaganda office for the republic, and in particular in promoting German interests in conflicted areas such as Silesia and the Rhineland. Johannes Karl Richter, Die Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst: Geschichte der ersten politischen Bildungsstelle in Deutschland und Untersuchung ihrer Rolle in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1963). Klaus Wippermann, Politische Propaganda und staatsbürgerliche Bildung. Der Rechszentrale für Heimatsdienst in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 1976). 32 Willy Schumann, ‘“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” und “Der Lindenbaum”. Betrachtungen zur Schlußscene von Thomas Mann’s “Der Zauberberg”’. German Studies Review, 19, 1 (February 1986), 29–44, here 31. 33 Speitkamp, Die Verwaltung der Geschichte, pp. 164–5. 34 V. Hansen and G. Heine (eds), Fragen und Antworten. Interviews mit Thomas Mann 1909–1955 (Hamburg, 1983), p. 51, cited in Mommsen, Bürgerlich Kultur und politische Ordnung, p. 174. See idem, Imperial Germany, pp. 123–4, 127. 35 Notably in his speech, ‘Von deutscher Republik’ Rede for Gerhard Hauptmann (1922), described by Mann in a letter to Ernst Betram as a ‘call to pedagogical action’,

286

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38 39 40 41

42 43

44

45 46

47 48 49

Notes in Hans Bürgin and Hans-Otto Mayer (eds), Die Briefe Thomas Manns. Regesten und Register (Frankfurt, 1977), 22/117: 25 December 1922, p. 348. Georg Bollenbeck, ‘German Kultur, the Bildungsbürgertum, and its Susceptibility to National Socialism’. The German Quarterly, 73, 1, Millenial Issue (Winter 2000), 67–83. Kristina Kratz-Kessemeier, Kunst für die Republik. Die Kunstpolitik des preußischen Kultusministeriums 1918 bis 1932 (Berlin, 2008). Bärbel Holtz, ‘Preußens Kunstpolitik in der Demokratie (1918 bis 1933)’, in Acta Borussica Neue Folge: 2 Reihe, Preußen als Kulturstaat: Das preußische Kultusministerium als Staatsbehörde und gesellschaftliche Agentur (1817–1934) (Berlin, 2010), pp. 552–613; for the Reichskunstwart, see below. Oberregierungsrat Richard I. W. Wicke, ‘Staatswille – Kulturwille’. Deutsche Tonkünstler Zeitung, 29 Jg., Nr. 532, Heft 19 (5 October 1930), 264–66, here 264, col. 2. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 426, 108/109th Session, 3 Dec. 1929, 3410. Mann, Register, letter to Gerhard Hauptmann, 13 Nov. 1927. Peter Labanyi, ‘Images of Fascism: Visualization and Aesthetization in the Third Reich’, in Michael Laffan (ed.), The Burden of German History 1919-1945: Essays for the Goethe Institute (London, 1988), pp. 151–77, here 153. See George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940–1948 (London, 1968), p. 276. David Hughes, Shock of the New Art and the Century of Change, revised and enlarged (London, 1991); Jones, ‘Culture and Politics’, p. 79. Dadaist W. Rubin cited in Stationen der Moderne. Die bedeutendsten Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Exhibition Catalogue) (Berlin, 1988), p. 157. ‘Baargeld’s Fluidoskeptrik’ refers to Johannes Theodor Baargeld, the co-founder of the Cologne Dadaists. For an introduction to the work of the Dadaists, Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA, 1989). See the not-untypical example of the artist Kurt Schwitters, Dorothea Dietrich, The Collages of Kurt Schwitters. Tradition and Innovation (Cambridge, 1993). For a critique of New Objectivity, Joseph Roth, ‘“Schluß mit der ‘Neuen Sachlichkeit”!’. Literarische Welt, Jg., 6, Heft 3 (1930), 3. Hans Ostwald, Sittengeschichte der Inflation (Berlin, 1931); Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (New York, 1972). In general, Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley Calif., 2001). Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags I Period 1920/1924, 201 Session, 3 April 1922, 6825–6. On the night club culture of Berlin around this time, Eberhard Buchner, Variété und Tingeltangel in Berlin  Großstadt-Dokumente Nr. 22 (Berlin etc., 1908). Colin Storer makes the valuable observation that Berlin’s notorious nightlife was probably exaggerated, Colin Storer, ‘Weimar Germany as Seen by an Englishwoman: British Woman Writers and the Weimar Republic’. German Studies Review, 32, 1 (February 2009), 129–47, here 143. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 354, 201 Session, 3 April 1922, 6827. Ibid. For Schairer see Erich Schairer, Bin Journalist, nichts weiter. Ein Leben in Briefen, edited Manfred Bosch and Agathe Kunze (Tübingen, 2002). Not least by the positive intervention by Edwin Redslob, the Reichskunstwart as expert witness during the court case against Arthur Schnittler’s ‘Reigen’,

Notes

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51 52 53

54 55

56

57 58 59

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Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, I Period 1920/1924, 201 Session, 3 April 1922, 6828–9. See also, BarchBL R32/93 Bd. I, Denkschrift des RKW, 1921; A. Pfoser, K. Pfoser-Schweig, G. Renner, Schnitzler’s ‘Reigen’ 2 vols. Vol 2: Die Prozesse, Analysen und Dokumente (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), p. 331. On the Reichskunstwart, see below. Cited in Justus H. Ulbricht, ‘Im Herzen des “geheimen Deutschland”. Kulturelle Opposition gegen Avantgarde, Moderne und Republik in Weimar 1900 bis 1933’, in Ehrlich and John (eds), Weimar 1930, p. 144. Johst was the author of the play Schlageter, 1933, and became head of the Reichsschrifttumskammer during the Third Reich. See, Gerwin Strobl, ‘Staging the Nazi Assault on Reason: Hanns Johst’s Schlageter and the ‘Theatre of Inner Experience’. New Theatre Quarterly, 21 (2005), 307–16. ‘I have already said that the tool of the homeland is art’. Hanns Johst, ‘Das Drama und die nationale Idee’ Berliner Tageblatt (25 October, 1922), cited in Kaes, Jay, Dimendberg (eds), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, p. 536. Bürgin and Mayer (eds), Die Briefe Thomas Manns, 19/25, 18 March 1919 to Otto Clar, p. 262. Harvey, ‘Culture and Society in Weimar Germany’, p. 280; Margaret F. Stieg, ‘The 1926 German Law to Protect Youth against Trash and Dirt: Moral Protectionism in a Democracy’. Central European History, 23, 1 (March 1990), 22–56. Klaus Petersen, ‘The Harmful Publications (Young Persons) Act of 1926. Literary Censorship and the Politics of Morality in the Weimar Republic’. German Studies Review, 15, 3 (1992), 505–23. For a contrary argument see the perceptive essay by Luke Springman, ‘Poisoned Hearts, Diseased Minds, and American Pimps: The Language of Censorship in the Schund und Schmutz Debates’. The German Quarterly, 68, 4 (1995), 408–29. Jones, ‘Culture and Politics’, pp. 80–4; Ulbricht, ‘Im Herzen des “geheimen Deutschland”, pp. 144–5. Dietrich, The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, p. 207. See the articles by Gerichtsassessor Dr Albert Hellwig, ‘Zur neueren Entwicklung der Schundliterature’, ‘Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Verbrechenreizes durch Schundliteratur’ and ‘Kinotheater und Verbrechensverfolgung’. Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsycholgie und Strafrechtsreform, 11 Jg. (1914/18), 388–89, 560–62, 670–72. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags Bd.: 330 Wahlperiode 1919/20 (Nationalversammlung), 100th Session, Thursday, 16 October 1919, Interpellation, Reinhard Mumm, DNVP, pp. 3163–4. Sarah F. Hall, ‘Youth protection and the prevention of juvenile delinquency: Keeping cinema on the right side of the law’. Journal of European Studies, 39 (2009), 353–70. In general for readers and material see, Ute Schneider, ‘Buchkäufer und Leserschaft’, in Georg Jäger, Dieter Langewiesche, Ernst Fischer, Stephan Füssel, Wolfram Siemann (eds), Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Die Weimarer Republik 1918–1933. Band 2, Teil 1 (Munich, 2007), pp. 149–96. Hans-Peter Schwarz, Adenauer I: Der Aufstieg: 1876–1952, third rev. edn (Munich, 1991), p. 248. For the imperial period see, Andrew Lees, Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor, 2002); Gary D. Stark, Banned in Berlin: Literary Censorship in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford, New Providence, 2009). Orig. Koch, added Weser in 1927; deputy for Weser Ems and justice minister; leader of the DDP parliamentary group in the Reichstag 1924–28. Koch-Weser was born

288

60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70

71

72 73 74

75

Notes in 26 Feb. 1875, died 19 Oct. 1944 in Brazil, to where he had emigrated in 1933, becoming a coffee farmer. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 330 Wahlperiode 1919/20 (Nationalversammlung), 100th Session, Thursday 16 October 1919, 3167. Ibid., p. 3171. Springman, ‘Poisoned Hearts’, p. 411. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 330 (Nationalversammlung), 58th Session, 16 July 1919, 1592; ibid., 100th Session, Thursday 16 October 1919, 3164–5, 3171, 3174–5. Düringer (11.8.1855–2.9.1924) had originally been a member of the DNVP but by 1924 had transferred to the DVP. Wilhelm Külz (1875–1948), Reichstag deputy for the DDP, Martin Schumacher, M.d.R. Die Reichstagsabgeordneten derWeimarer Republik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Düsseldorf, 1994), p. 268. Alfred Lasson, Gefährdete und verwahrloste Jugend  Großstadt-Dokumente. Bd. 49 (Berlin, Leipzig, 1908); Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino: die KinoUnternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher (Leipzig, 1913); Lynn Abrams, Workers’ Culture in Imperial Germany Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (London,1992), pp. 173–6. Lees, Cities, Sin, and Social Reform, pp. 255–86. Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience 1900–1945: Modernity and Crisis (London, 2001), pp. 97–128 passim. Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutschen Universitäten und der heutige Staat, Referate, erstattet auf der Weimarer Tagung Deutscher Hochschulleshrer am 23. und 24 April 1926 (Weimar, 1926), p. 23. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 391, 245th Session, 3 Dec. 1926, 8355–96. Akten der Reichskanzlei: Weimarer Republik, Die Kabinette. Marx III und IV, 17. Mai 1926 bis 29. Januar 1927, 29. Januar bis 29. Juni 1928, Band 1, Mai 1926 bis Mai 1927, prepared by Günter Abramowski (Boppard am Rhein, 1988), pp. 418–19, fn. 13, and fn. 16. Wolfgang Hütt (ed.), Hintergrund. Mit den Unzüchtigkeits- und Gotteslästerungenparagraphen des Strafgesetzbuches gegen Kunst und Künstler 1900–1933 (East Berlin, 1990) for numerous examples of these. Klaus Petersen, Literatur und Justiz in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1988). On this aspect, see Speitkamp, Die Verwaltung der Geschichte, p. 144. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 391, 245th, Session, 3 Dec. 1926, 8378. Emphasis in original. In 1910, there had been only 480 cinemas in 33 cities, and over half of these were in Berlin (139), Hamburg (40), Leipzig (31), Munich (28) and Königsberg (18). By the mid-1920s, a quarter of all cinemas were in the 48 large cities of the Reich. Paul Monaco, Cinema and Society: France and Germany during the Twenties (New York, 1976), pp. 20–1; David Welch, ‘Cinema and Society in Imperial Germany 1905–1918’. German History, 8, 1 (1990), 28–32; Karl-Christian Führer, ‘Auf dem Weg zum Massenkultur: Kino in der Weimarer Republik’. Historische Zeitschrift 262 (1996), 742–7. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 426, 109th Session, 3 Dec. 1929, 3404–11 Deputy Schreck Bielefeld called for the proposal to be debated in committee where its fangs (Giftzähne) could be drawn.

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76 Ibid., 191 Session, 4 July 1930, 6147. The spokesman from the Reichstag’s Education Committee which had earlier debated the measure, the Social Democrat deputy Fleißner, reported that the committee supported a tariff, but sought a time limitation: until 1 January 1931, ibid., p. 6148. On the reception of ‘America’ during the republic as well as the essays in Lüdtke, Marßolek, von Saldern, (eds), Amerikanisierung, see Peter Becker and Elke Reinhardt-Becker (eds), Mythos USA: ‘Amerikanisierung‘in Deutschland seit 1900 (Frankfurt, 2006); Ursula Saekel Der US-Film in der Weimarer Republik – ein Medium der ‘Amerikanisierung’?: deutsche Filmwirtschaft, Kulturpolitik und mediale Globalisierung im Fokus transatlantischer Interessen/(Munich, 2011). 77 The law created three Censorship Boards, Berlin (July 1927), Munich (October 1927 and a Higher Censorship Board (Oberprüfstelle) in Leipzig (July 1927). The Boards were not proactive but reactive in that they could only respond to requests from regional agencies such as the Youth and Welfare boards or regional governments. 78 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 437, Drucksache Nr. 1307, 24 August 1929, ‘Bericht der Reichsregierung über die praktischen Erfahrungen bei Durchführung des Reichsgesetzes zur Bekämpfung von Schund- und Schmutzschriften auf Grund des Antrags Dr Stegerwald und Genossen vom 13. Juli 1928 (Drucksache Nr. 323)’, p. 2. The following is based on this source. 79 Ibid., p. 3, Anlage. 80 Staatsarchiv Munich (hereafter STAM), Pol.Dir. 7420, Pol. Präs., annual report for 1924. 81 Examples in GStAPrK I Rep. 77/lit. 2772; STAM Pol.Dir. 7420, Pol.Präs. Tgb.Nr. II Z.B.U. 600/31 10 May 1931. 82 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 426, 109th Session, 3 Dec. 1929, 3404. 83 James D. Steakley, ‘Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders als die Andern’. Film History, 11, 2 (1999), 181–203, here 188, 190 and passim. 84 STAM Pol.Dir. 7420, Report April 1930–March 1931. In general see: Ernst Fischer and Stephan Füssel (eds), Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Bd. 2: Die Weimarer Republik 1918–1933, Teil 1 (Munich, 2007). 85 Cited in Kaes, Jay, Dimendberg (eds), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, p. 423. Biographical details of Stapel in ibid., p. 760. 86 In 1927/28 there were 33 films and 100 Wochenschau; the following season (1928/29), the figures were 21 and 160, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 426, 109th Session, 3 Dec. 1929, 3405–06. 87 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 426, 109th Session, 3 Dec. 1929, 3410. 88 Ibid., p. 3405. BarchBL R32/94 Bd. 2, Reichskunstwart, ‘Kunst und Zensur’ manuscript of speech for the Kampfausschusses gegen die Zensur, March 1929. 89 Bertolt Brecht, Frühe Stücke. Baal, Trommeln in der Nacht, Im Dickicht der Städte (Frankfurt am Main, 1973, orig. 1967), p. 9. 90 Hütt (ed.), Hintergrund, pp. 56–67. Background, Eve Rosenhaft, ‘Brecht’s Germany: 1898–1933’, in Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge, 1994). 91 Bertolt Brecht, Kuhle Wampe Protokoll des Films und Materialien, edited by Wolfgang Gersch und Werner Hecht (Frankfurt am Main, 1969). 92 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte 1: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (Munich, 1923); Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte 2: Welthistorische Perspektiven (Munich, 1924).

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93 Bürgin and Mayer (eds), Die Briefe Thomas Manns, 18/65, letter to OB Adalbert Öhler, Weimar; ibid., 19/108, letter to Franz Boll, 2 Nov. 1919. 94 Ibid., 20/25, letter to Alfred Bäumler, 7 Mar. 1920. Hoeres, Die Kultur von Weimar, pp. 32ff. 95 W. Heine, Der Kampf um den Reigen. Vollständiger Bericht über die sechstätige Verhandlung gegen Direktion und Darsteller des Kleinen Schauspielhauses Berlin (Berlin, 1922), 13–4, cited in Hütt, Hintergrund, p. 46. 96 Bürgin and Mayer (eds), Die Briefe Thomas Manns, 22/110, letter 5 Dec. 1922 to Ida Boy-Ed, p. 347. 97 The concept ‘middle brow’ as a cultural phenomenon is hardly ever applied to Germany in this period and yet it holds out the prospect for some fruitful research. See Konrad Dussel, ‘Kult oder Komödie? Heidelberger Theater im Nationalsozialismus’ (Vortrag am 24. April 2001 im Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma in Heidelberg), and Führer, ‘Weimar Culture’, p. 275. 98 M. Kay Flavell, George Grosz: A Biography (Yale, 1988). 99 Christian Schär, Der Schlager und seine Tänze im Deutschland der 20er Jahre: Sozialmusikalische Aspekte zum Wandel in der Musik- und Tanzkultur während der Weimarer Republik (Zurich, 1991), pp. 58–68. Horst Claus, ‘Varieté – Operrette – Film. Berührungspunkte und Konkurrenzkampf aus der sicht des Fachblattes “Der Artist”’, in Katje Uhlenbrok (ed.), MusikSpektakelFilm. Musiktheater und Tanzkultur im deutschen Film 1922–1937 (Munich, 1998), p. 70. Walter Rösler, Das Chanson im deutschen Kabarett 1901–1933 (Berlin, 1980), pp. 153–200 passim; Partsch, Schräge Töne, pp. 69, 132, 215. See comments by Adolf Halfeld in 1928 and Stefan Zweig, in Kaes, Jay, Dimendberg (eds), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, p. 271. 100 Schneider, ‘Buchkäufer und Leserschaft’, pp. 169–73; Luke Springman, ‘Exotic Attractions and Imperialist Fantasies in Weimar Youth Culture’, in John Williams (ed.), Weimar Culture Revisited (New York, 2011), pp. 99–116. 101 See above all: Curt Moreck, Führer durch Lasterhafte Berlin (Berlin, 1931). Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA, 1993); Abrams, Workers’ Culture, pp. 99–108. 102 Victor Klemperer, Leben sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum. Tagebücher Vol. 1: 1918–1924, edited Walter Nowojski with Christian Löser (Berlin, 1996), p. 892. 103 Ibid., p. 891; Victor Klemperer, Leben sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum. Tagebücher Vol. 2: 1925–1932, edited Walter Nowojski and Christian Löser, Vol. 2 (Berlin, 1996), pp. 726–7, 754–5. 104 Ibid., pp. 524, 656. See the comments by a contemporary of Klemperer, Arnold Berney, on high and low cultures in letters to Gerhard Ritter, Michael Matthiesen, Verlorene Identität. Der Historiker Arnold Berney und seine Freiburger Kollegen 1923–1938 (Göttingen,1998), pp. 27, 66. Berney, the historian from the province, whenever he found himself in Berlin, made a conscious effort to be part of ‘high’ culture, by visiting performances of such works as Mozart’s ‘Zauberflotte’ at the Staatsoper and Gogol’s ‘Revisor’ at the Schauspielhaus with his mentor, Ritter. On cultural hierarchies in Weimar’s modern media, see Karl Christian Führer, ‘Auf dem Weg zur “Massenkultur?” Kino und Rundfunk, in der Weimarer Republik’, Historische Zeitschrift, Bd. 262, H. 3 (June 1996), 739–81, and Corey Ross, ‘Mass Culture and Divided Audiences: Cinema and Social Change in Inter-War Germany’. Past & Present, 193 (November 2006), 157–95.

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105 Modris Ecksteins, ‘War, Memory and Politics: the Fate of the Film, “All Quiet on the Western Front”’. Central European History, 13 (1980), 60–82. See also, Schumann, ‘“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”’, p. 38, who argues that Mann’s Der Zauberberg is also an anti-war novel. 106 Klaus Petersen, Zensur in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, Weimar, 1995), pp. 263–5. 107 Partsch, Schräge Töne, pp. 191, 196–7. Klaus Mann, Der Wendepunkt. Ein Lebensbericht (Frankfurt, 1953). 108 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 426, 109th Session, 3 Dec. 1929, 3407. 109 Kurt Löwenstein, ‘Die Kulturpolitik und der Besitzbürgerblock’. Sozialistische Erziehung 3 Jg., Heft 2 (1927), 5. 110 Florian Odenwald, Der nazistische Kampf gegen das ‘Undeutsche’ in Theater und Film, 1920–1945 (Munich, 2006). Kevin Crichton, ‘“Preparing for Government?” Wilhelm Frick as Thuringia’s Nazi Minister of the Interior and of Education 23 January 1930–1 April 1931’ (Ph.D., University of St Andrews, 2001). 111 Runderlaß des Ministeriums der Justiz 18 Aug. 1932. 112 Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany. A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago and London, 2003), pp. 201–03; Chad Ross, Naked Germany. Health, Race and the Nation (Oxford and New York, 2005), pp. 105–18. Cf., Franz Walter, Viola Denecke, Cornelia Regin, Sozialistische Gesundheits- und Lebensreformverbände (Bonn, 1991), pp. 61–7. 113 Runderlaß des Ministeriums des Innerns 3 Mar. 1933. 114 Winfried Speitkamp, ‘“Erziehung zur Nation”. Reichskunstwart, Kulturpolitik und Identitätsstiftung im Staat von Weimar’, in Helmut Berding (ed.), Nationales Bewußtsein und kollektive Identität. Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtsein in der Neuzeit, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), pp. 541–80, here 575. 115 STAM Pol.Dir. 7420, Pol.Präs. IV Z.B.U. 7501/6, 11 April 1934, p. 10. 116 Detlev J. K. Peukert, ‘Der Schund- und Schmutzkampf als “Sozialpolitik der Seele”. Eine vorgeschichte der Bücherverbrennung?’, in Hermann Haarmann, Walter Huder, Klaus Siebenhaar (eds), ‘Das war ein Vorspiel nur . . . ’: Bücherverbrennung Deutschland 1933: Vorausstellungen und Folgen, (Berlin, 1983), pp. 51–3. 117 Bürgin and Mayer (eds), Die Briefe Thomas Manns, 22/110, letter to Boyd-Ed; see also ibid., 22/106 letter to Witkop, 29 Nov. 1922. Ibid., 18/100, letter 21 December 1918, p. 256 for his rejection to take part in the series of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Staatsbürgerliche Erziehung. 118 See for instance, Friedrich Meinecke, ‘Republik, Bürgertum, Jugend. Vortrag gehalten im Demo­kratischen Studentenbund zu Berlin am 16. Januar 1925’. Die Paulskirche 16 (Frankfurt a.M., 1925). 119 Friedrich Ebert letter to his former schoolteacher Heinrich Zauner, February 1919 printed in Walter Mühlhausen, Bernd Braun (eds), Friedrich Ebert und seine Familie: private Briefe 1909–1924 (Munich etc., 1992), Doc. 22, pp. 113–14, here 113. 120 In 1928, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer placed the Weimar Constitution firmly within the European Enlightenment and the ideas of 1789 and 1848, Ernst Cassirer, Die Idee der republikanische Verfassung. Rede zur Verfassungsfeier am 11. August 1928 (Hamburg, 1928). Two years later the Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst could claim that it was the ‘organic development of the Bismarckian Constitution of 1871’, Deutscher Lebenswille, p. 10. 121 Kurt Gerhard Fischer, ‘Einleitung: Das Problem der politischen Bildung in der Weimarer Republik’, in idem (ed.), Politische Bildung in der Weimarer Republik.

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123 124

125

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127 128 129 130

Notes Grundsatzreferate der ‘Staatsbürgerlichen Woche’ 1923 (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), pp. 8–41. Adolf Grimme, Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volk: Ansprachen und Aufsätze (Berlin, 1932), p. 21: ‘Es wäre eine Tat von gar nicht abzuschätzender nationalpädagogischer Bedeutung, wenn die parteipolitischen Gruppen aller Lager aufklären wollten, politische Erziehung mit parteipolitischer Festlegung zu verwechseln’. Heinrich Mann, Vossische Zeitung Nr. 88, 12 April 1925, Erste Beilage: ‘Die Inszenierung der Republik’ repr. in Welzbacher (ed.), Der Reichskunstwart, pp. 78–9. Akten der Reichskanzlei Kabinett Fehrenbach, p. 18, note 3 for the quote. See also the relevant documentation in Barch R43 I/831, and R32/1–3, 258; Verhandlungen, des Deutschen Reichstags 392, Session 289, 18 March 1927, 9664, ibid., Session 307, 6 April 1927, 10570; Giesbert Laube, Der Reichskunstwart. Geschichte einer Kulturbehörde 1919–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), pp. 14–25; Jost Hermand and Frank Trommler, Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1978), p. 13. Edwin Redslob, Von Weimar nach Europa. Erlebtes und Durchdachtes (Berlin, 1972), pp. 157–64, 165–180, 289, 294. Christian Welzbacher, Edwin Redslob: Biographie eines unverbesserlichen Idealisten (Berlin, 2009), pp. 148–67, 229. Redslob had been assigned two assistants and two clerical staff at the beginning of the 1920s but during the depression the office was reduced to himself and his secretary, Laube, Der Reichskunstwart, pp. 37–59, 201–24; Heffen, Der Reichskunstwart, p. 269. Barch R32/222, Bl. 210; Barch R32/526, ‘Grundgedanken für die Arbeit des Reichskunstwarts (Sonderdruck aus der Kunstchronik, Nr. 5, 28 Oct. 1921); Barch R32/480, ‘Denkschrift über die Tätigkeit des Reichskunstwarts. Entwurf und Materialsammlung’ (1923); Redslob, Von Weimar nach Europa, pp. 172–3; Barch R32/4 for further material on the purpose and role of the Reichskunstwart; documentation also ino Welzbacher (ed.), Der Reichskunstwart. Speitkamp, ‘“Erziehung zur Nation”’, p. 542; Speitkamp notes that while the Reichskunstwart had a broad field of activity and could advise, he did not have any power of decision, idem, Die Verwaltung der Geschichte, p. 176. Joan Campbell: Deutsche Werkbund, 1907-1934 (Stuttgart, 1981), p. 147; Kolb, Weimarer Republik, p. 103. Oberregierungsrat Richard I. W. Wicke, ‘Staatswille – Kulturwille’. Deutsche Tonkünstler Zeitung, 29 Jg., Nr. 532, Heft 19 (5 October 1930), 264, col. 2. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 354, Session 204, 6 April 1922, 6950 (Dr Luther); Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, 392 Sessions 290/291, 19 March 1927, 9722 (objection from deputy Dr Spuler DNVP). Annegret Heffen, Der Reichskunstwart: Kunstpolitik in den Jahren 1920–1933; zu den Bemühungen um eine offizielle Reichskunstpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Essen, 1986). Veit Valentin and Ottfried Neubecker, Die deutschen Farben. Mit einem Geleitwort von Reichskunstwart Dr Edwin Redslob (Leipzig, 1928), pp. 128. A second decree 5 May 1926 made two minor amendments, ibid., p. 137. Michael Seeger, ‘Der Flaggenstreit der Weimarer Republik’, in Arnold Rabbow (ed.), dtv-Lexikon politischer Symbole (Munich, 1970). Reichsministerium des Innern in Verbindung mit dem Reichskunstwart, Die Hoheitszeichen des Deutschen Reichs: Wappen, Flaggen und Kokarden (Berlin, 1930); Walter Stahlberg, Zur Flaggen- und Schuldfrage (Berlin, 1921), pp. 11, 27; Paul Wentzcke, Die deutschen Farben: ihre Entwicklung und Deutung sowie ihre Stellung in der deutschen Geschichte (Heidelberg, 1927), pp. 1–12, 229; Karl Schultz, Die deutsche Flagge (Berlin, 1928). In general: Hans Hattenhauer, Deutsche Nationalsymbole: Geschichte und Bedeutung (Munich, 1984).

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131 Barch R1501/125653, Bl. 126, 130. See also Nadine Rossol, ‘Flaggenkrieg am Badestrand. Lokale Möglichkeiten repräsentativer Mitgestaltung in der Weimarer Republik’. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 7/8, (2008), 617–37. 132 Herbert Michaelis, Ernst Schraepler (eds), Ursachen und Folgen. Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart 26 Volumes (Berlin, 1958–1979), vol. 9, Docs. 2089b-c. Valentin, Die deutschen Farben, pp. 58–68, 63–7 especially. A further decree in April 1937 this time issued by the Education Ministry forbade civil servants defined as Jews by the Nuremberg Race Laws from swearing an oath on the national symbol. 133 Hermann Oncken, Rede bei der Verfassungsfeier der Berliner Hochschulen am 27. Juli 1929 (Berlin, 1929); Felix E. Hirsch, ‘Hermann Oncken and the End of an Era’. The Journal of Modern History, 18, 2 (June 1946), 148–59. 134 Lehnert and Megerle argue that there were three commemoration dates reflecting the ‘fragmented’ political cultures of the republic: the foundation of the Reich, 27 January; the Revolution on 9 November; Constitution Day, 11 August, Lehnert and Megerle (eds), Politische Identität und Nationale Gedenktage, p. 13. Meanwhile, the consensus among historians seems to be that the republic lacked a ‘foundational moment’ for a politics of positive emotion, Peukert, The Weimar Republic, pp. 5–6, 35; Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 2005), p. 64. Both Weitz, Weimar Germany and Hoeres, Die Kultur von Weimar, ignore the Verfassungstag as evidence of an attempt to create a republican-state culture entirely. But see Manuela Achilles, ‘With a Passion for Reason: Celebrating the Constitution Day in Weimar Germany’. Central European History 43 (2010), 666–89, whose argument aligns broadly with mine. 135 Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik Die Kabinette Wirth I und II, Band 1 Mai 1921 bis März 1922, prepared by Ingrid Schulze-Bidlingsmaier (Boppard am Rhein, 1973), pp. 194–95, notes 1 and 2. 136 Barch R32/527; R43 I/570; Joseph Wirth, Reden während der Kanzlerschaft (Berlin, 1925), pp. 157–66, here 162. 137 Barch R1501/116871, Bl. 299. Kolb, Die Weimarer Republik, p. 98f. 138 Rossol, Performing the Nation, p. 79. 139 Barch R32/222, Bl. 211–12. Pollock, Germany. 140 Akten der Reichskanzlei Die Kabinette Wirth I und II, Vol. 2, Docs. 327, 331, 332, 335, 336, 337, 338 340, pp. 966–71, 981–7, 991–1010, 1012–13. 141 Ursula Mader, ‘Wie das “Deutschlandlied” 1922 Nationalhymne wurde. Aus der Ministerialakte “Nationallied”’. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (1990), 1088–100, here 1092–93, 1099. Friedrich Ebert, Schriften, Aufzeichnungen, Reden. Mit unveröffentlichten Erinnerungen aus dem Nachlaß, Zweiter Band (Dresden, 1926), pp. 248–50. 142 Details in Barch R32/219, R32/527. 143 Schumann, ‘“Deutschland Deutschland über alles”’, pp. 33–6, 44. 144 See the perceptive essay on anthems and emotions by Robert Michels, ‘Elemente zu einer Soziologie des Nationalliedes’. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 55/2 (1926), 317–61, especially the comments specific to the German national anthem, pp. 350–2. On the uses of culture in the Rhineland/Ruhr conflict, see Franziska Wein, Deutschlands Strom – Frankreichs Grenze: Geschichte und Propaganda am Rhein 1919–1930 (Essen, 1992), p. 114. 145 Barch R32/527, Fiche 2, Bl. 25. On the revived democratic tradition of the Paulskirche under the Weimar Republic, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Der Paulskirche’,

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147 148 149 150 151

152 153 154 155

156 157 158

Notes in Etienne François and Hagen Schulze (eds), Deutscher Erinnerungsorte Vol. II (Munich, 2001), pp. 47–66, here 63. Barch R32/222, Bl. 20, 32, 33, 121–126 (Opfer & Heldentod) esp. On commemorating the war dead, see Sean A. Forner, ‘War Commemoration and the Republic in Crisis: Weimar Germany and the Neue Wache’. Central European History, 35, 4 (2002), 513–49. Barch R32/527, Bl. 22. On the contested memory of the revolution during this period: Gavriel Rosenfeld, ‘Monuments and Politics of Memory in Munich Revolution 1918/19’. Central European History, 30, 2 (1997), 221–51, here 229–33. Bürgin and Mayer (eds), Die Briefe Thomas Manns, 22/110, letter to Boyd-Ed, 5 Dec. 1922, p. 347. Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914. Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, 2000). Cassirer, Die Idee der republikanische Verfassung, p. 31. Oncken as in n. 129; Fritz Rörig, Vom Werden Deutscher Staatlichkeit. Rede zur zehnjährigen Verfassungsfeier gehalten an der Christian-Albrechts-Universität am 24. Juli 1929 (Kiel, 1929); Fritz Hartung, Preußen und das Deutsche Reich seit 1871. Rede gehalten bei der Reichsgründungsfeier der Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität Berlin am 18. Januar 1932 (Berlin, 1932); Konrad Beyerle, Zehn Jahre Reichsverfassung. Festrede zur Münchner Verfassungsfeier der Reichsbehörden am 11. August 1929 (Munich, 1929); August Manigk, Revolution und Aufbau des Staates. Rede zur Verfassungsfeier der Universität Marburg am 27. Juli 1930 (Marburg, 1930). Barch R32/527 Fiche 2, Bl. 72. Welzbacher (ed.), Der Reichskunstwart, p. 13. Rossol gives a more pessimistic account of the 1928 celebration, ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 54; Dieter Nies, ‘Von der Schwierigkeit Republikaner zu Sein. Die gestörte Verfassungsfeier 1927 in Gießen’. Mitteilungen des Oberhessischen Geschichtsvereins, 76 (1991), 57–65. Barch R32/527, Fiche 2, Bl. 78–80. Radbruch concluded by honouring both Walter Rathenau and Friedrich Ebert, who had ‘fallen’ for the Fatherland in order that ‘the republic could remain standing’. Walther Hubatsch, Hindenburg und der Staat: Aus den Papieren des Generalfeldmarschalls und der Reichspräsidenten von 1878 bis 1934 (Göttingen, Berlin, Frankfurt/M., Zurich, 1966), p. 49. For similar assessments of Hindenburg by General Groener and by the editors of the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung (albeit the latter also critical of the Hindenburg myth), Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford, 2009), pp. 63–4. The other great myth revived under the republic was that of Bismarck, Robert Gerwarth, The Bismarck Myth. Weimar Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor (Oxford, 2005). Peter Fritzsche, ‘Presidential Victory and Popular Festivity in Weimar Germany: Hindenburg’s 1925 Election’. Central European History, 23, 2/3 (June–September 1990), 205–24. von der Goltz, Hindenburg, p. 122. Most studies on state and youth refer to social policy and welfare as disciplining mechanisms rather than examining the relationship from the perspective of state concerns with youth as political agents. Classic studies include: Detlev Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung. Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Jugendfürsorge 1878 bis 1932 (Berlin, 1986); Derek Linton, ‘Who has the Youth, has the Nation’. The Campaign to Save Youth Workers in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 1991). Elizabeth

Notes

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164 165 166 167 168 169

170

171

172 173 174 175

295

Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford University Press, 1993); Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Harvard University Press, 1996). Speitkamp, Die Verwaltung der Geschichte, pp. 171–2. Barch R32/427, Bl. 26–33; R32/527, Bl.140–144. Rossol, Performing the Nation, p. 74. Ibid., Chapter 4 passim. Barch R32/426, Bl. 48, 51. Barch R32/430, Bl. 29. See Gerhard Hellwig, Die Verfassungsfeier in der Schule. 4 ausführliche Feiern (Berlin, 1926), and Ernst Runschke, Deutschland über alles. Drei Reden zur Verfassungsfeier am 11. August (Berlin, 1928). These are part of a series of guides for teachers on how to enact the Verfassungsfeier in a school setting. Barch R32/430, Bl. 100, 105–10. See Chapter 8 for a fuller discussion of youth and its relations to Weimar’s political culture and the question of authority. Verfassungsrede gehalten von Reichsminister des Innern Dr Wirth bei der Feier der Reichsregierung am 2. August 1930 (Berlin, 1930), pp. 12–4, 16. Karl Christian Führer, ‘German Cultural Life and the Crisis of National Identity during the Depression, 1929–1933’. German Studies Review, 24, 3 (October 2001), 461–86. Harm Klueting, ‘“Vernunftrepublikaner” und “Vertrauensdiktatur”: Friedrich Meinecke in der Weimarer Republik’. Historische Zeitschrift, 242 (1986), 69–98, here 75, 80. So Heinz Goldhammer, the editor of the Neckar-Zeitung, to Theodor Heuss in correspondence, 12 December 1930, in Theodor Heuss, Bürger der Weimarer Republik. Briefe 1918–1933, edited and prepared by Michael Dorrmann (Munich, 2008), Nr. 174, pp. 404–06, here 406, n. 9. Harry Mayne, Goethe und Bismarck. Ein Wort an die akademische Jugend. Festrede gehalten am 18. Januar 1932 bei der Reichsgründungsfeier und der mit ihr verbundene Goethe-Hundertjahrfeier in der Aula der Marburger Philipps-Universität (Marburg, 1932); Hartung, Preußen und das Deutsche Reich seit 1871. See Lothar Machtan, ‘Bismarck’, in François and Schulze (eds), Deutscher Erinnerungsorte, Vol. II, pp. 86–104, here 91–96, who omits entirely republican appropriations of Bismarck concentrating instead on his commandeering by the radical right and the National Socialists. Friedrich Meinecke, ‘Freiherr vom Stein. Gedächtnisrede’, Bonner Akademische Reden 11 (Bonn, 1931). See also Meinecke’s earlier lectures cited in note 94. It is worth noting that this development coincided with the political process in which the executive was strengthened at the expense of an increasingly indecisive legislative. Stanley Suval, ‘Overcoming Kleindeutschland: The Politics of Historical Mythmaking in the Weimar Republic’. Central European History, 2, 4 (December 1969), 312–30. Franz Schnabel, ‘Der Freiherr vom Stein und der deutsche Staat. Festrede gehalten vor der Gesamtheit der Studentenschaft in der Aula der Technischen Hochschule Karsruhe am 18. Januar 1931’, Karlsruher akademischen Reden 9 (Karsruhe, 1931). Klemperer, Leben Sammeln, Vol. 1, entry 11 August 1922, pp. 606–09, here 608. Grimme, Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volk, pp. 46–54. Martin Henry Sommerfeldt, Ich war dabei: die Verschwörung der Dämonen, 1933–1939. Ein Augenzeugenbericht (Darmstadt, 1949), pp. 5–6, cited in Klaus H. Revermann, Die Stufenweise Durchbrechung des Verfassungssystems der Weimarer

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178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187

188 189

190 191 192

Notes Republik (Münster, 1959), p. 148. For similarly bleak assessments made immediately after the war, see Ferdinand Friedensburg, Die Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1946), p. 220; Willibalt Apelt, Geschichte der Weimarer Verfassung (Munich, 1946), p. 431; Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden, 1947), p. 71. Lamb and Phelan, ‘Weimar Culture’, p. 79. Lehnert and Megerle (eds), Politische Identität und Nationale Gedenktage, editors ‘introduction, passim. Rossol, Performing the Nation, pp. 42–9, 81, 102–20. We should note that Redslob’s ideas resonated with those of Siegfried Kracauer in his analysis of the ‘coordinated formation’ of the Tiller Girls, Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995), pp. 75–86. Welzbacher, Edwin Redslob, pp. 225, 243. On the ‘hunger for totality’, Gay, Weimar Culture, pp. 84, 101. Rossol, Performing the Nation, p. 71 and Chapter 4 passim. See also previously cited, Führer, ‘German Cultural Life and the Crisis of National Identity during the Depression, 1929–1933’. Walter Benjamin on fascism and the aesthetization of politics in Illuminations, cited in Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (Columbia University Press, New York, 1982), p. 184. Labanyi, ‘Images of Fascism’, pp. 169, 172. Gay, Weimar Culture, pp. 84, 101; Brunn, ‘Berlin – Zwischen Metropole und kleinstädtischen Milieus’, p. 94. Welzbacher, Edwin Redslob, p. 207. Also, Rainer Nägele, ‘Die Goethefeiern von 1932 und 1949’, in Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (eds), Deutsche Feiern (Wiesbaden, 1977), pp. 97–122. Barch R32/283, Bl. 61–141. Bürgin and Mayer (eds), Die Briefe Thomas Manns, 32/44, 7 March 1932, pp. 652–3. Berliner Tageblatt 375, 11 August 1930. Achilles, ‘With a Passion for Reason’ ignores this event in her otherwise excellent discussion of the Constitution Day celebrations. Barch R43II/291, Microfiche F.1–3 Reichskanzlei (Akten betr. Einberufung, Eröffnung u. Schluß des Reichstags Bd. 1 v. 30.1.33); Barch R32/282, Bl. 169, 171. Welzbacher, Edwin Redslob, pp. 238, 243; Klaus Scheel, 1933, Der Tag von Potsdam (Berlin, 1996), pp. 33–4 does not mention Biebrach at all, but focuses instead on the Nazi leaders, especially Goebbels, whose account of his role in the event Scheel seems to accept at face value. Martin Sabrow, ‘Der Doppelte Mythos’ in Potsdamer Neuesten Nachrichten 21.03.2013, pp. 12–13, accessed at http://www.pnn.de/potsdam/735386/. Hermann, Weiss and Paul Hoser (eds), Die Deutschnationalen und die Zerstörung der Weimarer Republik: aus dem Tagebuch von Reinhold Quaatz, 1928–1933 (Munich, 1989), p. 244, 22 March 1933. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher: sämtliche Fragmente, edited Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1987), Teil 1: Aufzeichnungen 1924–1941: 1.1.31 to 31.12.36, p. 396, 22 March 1933. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, 457, ‘Der Staatsakt in Potsdam. Blätter der Erinnerung an die feierliche Eröffnung des Reichstags am 21. März 1933’, p. 5 (Hindenburg), p. 13 (Hitler). Scheel, 1933, Der Tag von Potsdam, p. 33. Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1933–1934, edited Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), pp. 496–97, 5 August 1934.

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193 Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, ‘Dialogue, Culture, Critique: The Sociology of Culture and the New Sociological Imagination’. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 18, 3/4 (Spring–Summer, 2005), 281–92, here 285. 194 Bürgin and Mayer (eds), Die Briefe Thomas Manns, 29/106, 10 August 1929, 558. 195 In this direction, see the pioneering work of Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984). 196 Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst, Deutscher Lebenswille, p. 11. 197 Verfassungsrede Freiherr von Gayl (Berlin, 1932), p. 1. Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalender 1932 Band. 73, 48 Jg. (Munich, 1933), pp. 138–40, here 139. 198 Walther Lambach, Die Herrschaft der 500. Ein Bild des parlamentarischen Lebens im neuen Deutschland (Berlin, 1926). 199 Barch NS25/1231. 200 The concept of ‘commodity aesthetics’ is borrowed from, Peter Labanyi, ‘Images of Fascism’. See also, Anthony McElligott, Contested City. Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917–1937 (Ann Arbor, Mi., 1998), pp. 229–35.

Chapter 7 1 Heinrich Mann, Vossische Zeitung Nr. 88, 12 April 1925, Erste Beilage: ‘Die Inszenierung der Republik’, reprinted in Christian Welzbacher (ed.), Der Reichskunstwart. Kulturpolitik und Staatsinszenierung in der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Weimar, 2010), pp. 78–9. 2 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), p. 1393. 3 Rudolf Morsey, ‘Beamtenschaft und Verwaltung zwischen Republik und “neuen Staat”’, in Karl Dietrich Erdmann and Hagen Schulze (eds), Weimar: Selbstpreisgabe einer Demokratie (Düsseldorf, 1980), pp. 151–68. 4 Arnold Brecht, ‘Bureaucratic Sabotage’. Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, 189 (1937), 48–57. For Simons’ interview see Lysbeth Muncy, ‘The Junkers and the Prussian Administration from 1918 to 1937’. Review of Politics 9 (1947), 488–9. 5 Oscar Meyer, Vom Bismarck zu Hitler: Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen (New York, 1944), p. 117, argues that there was a ‘joining of hands’ of Junker anti-republicans and Nazis. Hans Fenske, ‘Monarchisches Beamtentum und demokratischer Rechtsstaat: Zum Problem der Bürokratie in der Weimarer Republik’, in Demokratie und Verwaltung: 25 Jahre Hochschule für Verwaltung Speyer (Berlin, 1972), pp. 117–36; Hans Mommsen, ‘Die Stellung der Beamtenschaft in Reich, Ländern und Gemeinden in der Ära Brüning’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 21 (1973), 151–65. 6 Herbert Jacob, German Administration since Bismarck: Central Authority versus Local Autonomy (New Haven and London, 1963), pp. 96–8. 7 Christian Graf von Krockow, Warnung vor Preußen (Berlin, 1989, third edition, 1999), p. 129. 8 Jane Caplan, Government without Administration. State and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1988), p. 16ff. 9 E. Könnemann, G. Schulze (eds), Der Kapp-Lüttwitz-Ludendorff Putsch. Dokumente (Munich, 2002), Docs. 120, 204, pp. 173, 273.

298

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10 Caplan, Government without Administration, p. 44, n. 50. Idem, ‘Civil Service Support for National Socialism’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (eds), The ‘Führer State’: Myth and Reality. Studies on the Structure and Politics of the Third Reich (Stutgart, 1981), pp. 167–93; idem, ‘Speaking the Right Language: The Nazi Party and the Civil Service Vote in the Weimar Republic’, in Thomas Childers (ed.), The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1918–1933 (London, 1986), pp. 182–201. 11 Rudolf Morsey, ‘Zur Beamtenpolitik von Bismarck bis Brüning’, in Demokratie und Verwaltung: 25 Jahre Hochschule für Verwaltung Speyer (Berlin, 1972); Anthony J. Nicholls, ‘Die höhere Beamtenschaft in der Weimarer Zeit: Betrachtungen zu Problem ihrer Haltung und ihrer Fortbildung’, in Lothar Albertin and Werner Link (eds), Politische Parteien auf dem Wege zur parlamentarischen Demokratie in Deutschland:Entwicklungslinien bis zur Gegenwart (Düsseldorf, 1981), pp. 195–207; Horst Möller, ‘Die preussischen Oberpräsidenten der Weimarer Republik als Verwaltungselite’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 30 (1982), 1–26. Wolfgang Runge, Politik und Beamtentum im Parteienstaat: die Demokratisierung der politischen Beamten in Preußen zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Klett, 1965); The exceptions are Jacob, German Administration since Bismarck; Hans-Karl Behrend, ‘Zur personalpolitik des preussischen Ministeriums des Innern: Die Besetzung der Landratstellen inden östlichen Provinzen 1919–1933’. Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands, 6 (1957), 173–214. Eberhard Pickart, ‘Preussische Beamtenpolitik 1918–33’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 6 (1958), 119–37. 12 Otto Constantin and Erwin Stein (eds), Die Deutschen Landkreise (Berlin: Deutsche Kommunal-Verlag, n.d. [1926]). Frank Riedel, ‘Der Landrat – “König von Preußen in der Provinz” als Paradebeispiel effizienten Regierens’. Deutschland Journal Sonderausgabe (2006), at http://www.deutschlandjournal.de/Deutschland_Journal_ Sonderausg/Frank_Riedel_Der_Landrat_Konig_von_Preussen_in_der_Provinz.pdf. 13 The others were Oberpräsident, police president, Regierungspräsident. Caplan points out that the political Beamte is not a universal concept; most common in Prussia where of 1600 senior grade, it comprised about a third; it was less common in Saxony where there were 300 of them, or Baden with barely a third of that number, but virtually unknown in Wurttemberg. James Kerr Pollock, The Government of Greater Germany (New York, 1938), p. 137. 14 Behrend, ‘Zur personalpolitik des preussischen Ministeriums des Innern’, p. 175; Margun Schmitz, Der Landrat, Mittler zwischen Staatsverwaltung und kommunaler Selbstverwaltung: der Wandel der funktionellen Stellung des Landrats vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden, 1991). 15 Hans-Karl Behrend, ‘Die Besetzung der Landratstellen in Ostpreußen, Brandenburg, Pommern und der Grenzmark’ (Freie Universität Berlin, D.Phil. 1956). Cf., Lysbeth Muncy, ‘The Prussian Landräte in the Last Years of the Monarchy: A Case Study of Pomerania and the Rhineland in 1890–1918’. Central European History, 6, 4 (December 1973), 299–338. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, ‘Voter, Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the New Franchise in Imperial Germany’. The American Historical Review, 98/5 (1993), 1448–74. 16 The same was true for his urban counterparts, the mayor and lord mayor, who unlike the Landrat were elected officials. See Anthony McElligott, ‘Servants of the State, Agents of the Party, Representatives of the People: The German Mayoralty in the Twentieth Century’, in John Garrard (ed.), Heads of the Local State. Mayors, Provosts and Burgomasters since 1800 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 131–56. 17 Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich 49 (Berlin, 1930), pp. 510–11.

Notes

299

18 Deutsche Richterzeitung 17 Jg., 1925, cols. 291–2, ‘Beamtenbezüge ab 1 Dezember 1924’. 19 Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 6: Die Weimarer Reichsverfassung (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1981), p. 771. Dietmar Petzina, Werner Abelshauser, Anselm Faust (eds), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III. Materialien zur Statistik des Deutschen Reiches 1914–1945 (Munich, 1978), p. 172. 20 Pollock, The Government of Greater Germany, pp. 136–8, 513, 533f., 536–8, 595, 614. 21 Jacob, German Administration since Bismarck, p. 48. 22 Ibid., p. 64. But their loyalty to the crown did not prevent a number of Landräte falling foul of the Kaiser when they used their votes in the Prussian Landtag to oppose two proposals to build a Rhein-Dortmund Canal (1894) and the so-called Mittelland-Kanal (1899). The Kaiser responded with dismissals against the ‘canal rebels’. See Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deustche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 4: Struktur und Krisen des Kaiserreichs (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1969), pp. 1087–105, particularly, pp. 1098–103. 23 Fenske, ‘Monarchisches Beamtentum’, pp. 121–2. 24 Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Band 3: Bismarck und das Reich (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1963), pp. 127, 967. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, pp. 773–4. 25 Muncy, ‘Junkers and the Prussian Administration’, p. 493; Jacob, German Administration since Bismarck, pp. 50, 58, 63–4. 26 Jacob, German Administration since Bismarck, pp. 57, 103. Constantin and Stein (eds), Die deutschen Landkreise, Vol. 1 in particular. 27 Günther Gereke, Ich war königlich-preußischer Landrat (Berlin-East, 1970), pp. 42–97; further examples in Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 3, pp. 818, n. 3;. 832f, n. 1–10; idem, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, p. 488; Jacob, German Administration since Bismarck, pp. 49, fn. 43, 51, fn. 46. 28 Ibid., p. 71. 29 Wolfgang Hofmann, Zwischen Rathaus und Reichskanzlei. Die Oberbürgermeister in der Kommunal- und Staatspolitik des Deutschen Reiches von 1890–1933 (Stuttgart, 1974), pp. 56–68; McElligott, Contested City, p. 20. 30 Franz Cornelsen, ‘Die Landratsfamilie Cornelsen in Stade’, in Rudolf Pförtner (ed.), Alltag in der Weimarer Republik. Erinnerungen an eine unruhige Zeit (Düsseldorf, Vienna, New York, 1990), p. 187. Dietrich Wegmann, Die leitenden staatlichen Verwaltungsbeamten der Provinz Westfalen 1815–1918 (Münster, 1969), p. 258. 31 Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußische Kulturbesitz Berlin-Dahlem (GStAPrK), Rep. 77/4768; for the Kreistag elections see ibid., Rep. 77/5695, Bl. 52. 32 GStAPrK Rep. 77/4530, Bl. 58f. Groß-Wartenberg Volkszeitung Nr. 40 17 August 1927. Landkreis Gr. Wartenberg was within the administrative region of Breslau; its population in 1925 was 2209 and grew to 2969 by 1933. http://www. verwaltungsgeschichte.de/wartenberg.html 33 Lysbeth W. Muncy, ‘The Junkers and the Prussian Administration’, p. 487; Caplan, Government without Administration, p. 48. 34 From December 1918 to March 1919 justice minister, March 1919 to 20 March 1920, interior minister; toppled by his own party after the Kapp Putsch, Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 4, p. 111, fn. 85. Martin Schumacher, M.d.R. Die Reichstagsabgeordneten der Weimarer Republik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Politische Verfolgung, Emigration und Ausbürgerung 1933–1945. Eine biographische Dokumention, third revised and expanded edition (Düsseldorf, 1994), pp. 180–2.

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35 GStAPrK, Rep. 77/4084, Bl. 108–112, letter, 23 May 1919; Bl. 114, letter Der Vorstand der Vereinigung der deutschen Bauernvereine to Pr. M.d.I Abg. Heine, 27 July 1919. 36 Eberhard Pikart, ‘Preußische Beamtenpolitik 1918–1933’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 6 (1958), 119–37. 37 Preußische Gesetzsammlung (1919), Nr. 13, col. 11743: ‘Verordnung betreffend die einstweilige Versetzung der unmittelbaren Staatsbeamten in den Ruhestand, v. 26 February 1919’. Fenske, ‘Monarchisches Beamtentum’, p. 125. 38 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, p. 518. Runge, Beamtentum und Politik, p. 100ff. 39 Huber, op cit. For a contemporary account of the putsch and the reasons for its failure see Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Der Putsch der Prätorianer und Junker (23. März 1920)’, in Spektator-Briefe. Aufsätze über die deutsche Revolution und die Weltpolitik 1918/22, edited H. Baron (Tübingen, 1924), pp. 117–25, and p. 122 where he notes the support for Kapp in the East Prussian provinces. 40 Caplan, Government without Administration, p. 44. 41 Severing, Mein Lebensweg, Vol. 1, pp. 281, 286. Behrend, ‘Die Besetzung der Landratstellen’, pp. 9–10, 131; Jacob, German Administration since Bismarck, p. 97. 42 Behrend, ‘Zur Personalpolitik des preußischen Ministeriums des Innern’, pp. 202–3. 43 Behrend, ‘Die Besetzung der Landratstellen’, pp. 128–9. 44 Caplan, Goverment without Administration, p. 46, Table 1. Muncy, ‘The Junkers and the Prussian Administration’, pp. 492–3, 495; 48 Junker were dismissed from the Prussian administration between 1918 and 1934; of these 13 were Landräte, that is ¼ of the 48. Jacob, German Administration since Bismarck, p. 89 gives slightly higher figures. 45 Muncy, ‘Junkers and the Prussian Administration’, p. 493. 46 Ibid., p. 488. 47 Barch R36/46, (Preußische Landkreise). The consistency of the handwriting in all six surveys suggests that the material was collated in the Prussian interior ministry retrospectively in early 1933 upon demand by the Reich interior ministry. 48 Ernst Hamburger, ‘Verwaltung’. Der Beamte Jg. 1 (1929), 335–8. Albert Falkenberg, ‘Beamtenauslese als Gesellschaftsproblem’. Der Beamte 3 (1931), 203–5. 49 Hans-Peter Ehni, ‘Zum Parteiverhältnis in Preußen 1918–1932. Ein Beitrag zu Funktion und Arbeitsweise der Weimarer Koalitionsparteien’. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte XI (1971), pp. 241–88. Ehni gives a figure of 416 Landräte which is too high for Prussia after 1920. The political affiliations of his cohort are as follows: 183 belonged to the ‘Weimar Coalition’ (81 Centre Party, 55 SPD, 47 DDP); 74 to the DVP; 6 to the DNVP; 153 as ‘unknown’. Cf., Behrend, ‘Zur Personalpolitik des preußischen Ministeriums des Innern’, p. 203. 50 Barch R36/46, ‘Preußische Landkreise’: Bl. 11, 13–15, 27–31, 59–63, 75–9, 94–5. 51 Behrend’s study of the county managers in the four provinces of Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia, shows that ‘outsider’ appointments under the republic accounted for just under a fifth of the 296 Landräte by the mid-1920s. It should be noted that the ‘outsider’ was not a phenomenon of the Weimar Republic: in 1905 they accounted for 11 per cent, declined to 6 per cent during the war; before recovering the earlier level after 1918. Behrend, ‘Zur personalpolitik des preussischen Ministeriums des Innern’, pp. 176, 202–3. 52 Fenske, ‘Monarchisches Beamtentum’, p. 128 and note 29. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, pp. 764–7. Prussia’s interior ministers were Paul Hirsch,

Notes

53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

61

62 63 64

65

66 67

301

1918–19; Wolfgang Heine 1919–20; Carl Severing March 1920–April 1921, and November 1921–October 1926; Albert Grzesinski October 1926–February 1930; Heinrich Waentig February–October 1930; Severing October 1930–July 1932. Ibid., 762 n.1. See the assessment of Grzesinski’s crackdown in 1926 and in 1930 by Prussia’s former minister president, Otto Braun, From Weimar to Hitler (New York, 1940), pp. 238–9. See footnote 34. Caplan, Government without Administration, p. 44. See in particular Runge, Beamtentum und Politik, pp. 100–23 for changes to the composition of the political appointed official. Runge, Politik und Beamtentum, p. 191ff; Caplan, Government without Administration, p. 45. So Fenske, ‘Monarchische Beamtentum’, pp. 125–26. Ibid., p. 129. On the social background of political civil servants, Caplan, Government without Administration, p. 46, Table 1. In general see Frank B. Tipton, Jr, ‘Farm Labor and Power Politics: Germany, 1850–1914’. The Journal of Economic History, 34, 4 (December 1974), 951–79, and Richard Bessel, ‘Eastern Germany as a Structural Problem in the Weimar Republic’. Social History, 3, 2 (May 1978), 199–218. Muncy, ‘The Junkers and the Prussian Administration’, pp. 485, 487. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich (Leipzig/Berlin, 1938), p. 19; Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience, Modernity and Crisis 1900–1945 (London, 2000), pp. 13–15. Hermann Strauß-Olsen, ‘Kleinstadt und Großstadt’. Die Zukunft XXXIII Jg., No. 2 (10 October 1914), 42; Willy Latten, ‘Die niederrheinische Kleinstadt’. Kölner Vierteljahreshefte für Soziologie: Zeitschrift des Forschungsinstitut für Sozialwissenschaften in Köln, 8 Jg., Heft 1 (Leipzig, 1929), 312–24. Mack Walker, German Home Towns. Community State and General Estate (London, 1971); Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials. The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990). The classic literary depiction of small town life is Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan (Leipzig, 1918). Valentin Lupescu, ‘Sociology of the German Small Town’. Die Gesellschaft VIII (1931), 464, 471. David Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913. Consensus Politics in Imperial Germany (London, 1982); Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale. Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York, 2002). Robert G. Moeller, ‘Dimensions of Social Conflict in the Great War: The View from the German Countryside’. Central European History, 14, 2 (June 1981), 142–68. Bernd Kölling, Familienwirtschaft und Klassenbildung: Landarbeiter im Arbeitskonflikt; das ostelbische Pommern und die norditalienische Lomellina 1901–1921 (Vierow bei Greifswald, 1996). Eric D. Kohler, ‘Revolutionary Pomerania, 1919–20: A Study in Majority Socialist Agricultural Policy and Civil-Military Relations’. Central European History, 9, 3 (September 1976), 250–93. Jens Flemming, ‘Die Bewaffnung des “Landvolkes”: Ländliche Schutzwehren und agrarischer Konservatismus in der Anfangsphase der Weimarer Republik’. Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 2 (1979), 7–36. Emil Gumbel, Vier Jahre politische Mord (Berlin-Friedenau, 1922). Lawrence D. Stokes, Kleinstadt und Nationalsozialismus. Ausgewählte Dokumente zur Geschichte Eutin 1918–1945 (Neumünster, 1984), p. 9. It should be noted that the SPD also had a strong foothold in Eutin. See also, Dirk Stegmann,

302

68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80 81 82 83

84 85

Notes ‘Kleinstadtgesellschaft und Nationalsozialismus’, in Luneburger Arbeitskreis ‘Machtergreifung’ (ed.), Heimat, Heide, Hakenkreuz. Luneburgs Weg ins Dritten Reich (Hamburg, 1984), pp. 16–27. GStAPrK Rep. 77, Nr. 5695 (1919), MdI Betrifft Parteipolitische Zusammensetzung der Kreistage (1919). Reinhard Wulfmeyer, Lippe 1933. Die faschistische Machtergreifung in einem deutschen Kleinstaat (Bielefeld, 1987). GStAPrK Rep. 77/5697 (1925), Bl.4. Cf GStAPrK Rep. 77/5695 (1919), MdI Betrifft Parteipolitische Zusammensetzung der Kreistage (1919), Bl. 4–9, esp. Bl. 7–8 for Kreis Pr. Eylau. 57 per cent of its population lived in rural settlements (under 2,000), and only 14 per cent in towns, see also Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich (Leipzig/Berlin, 1934), p. 5. Dietmar Petzina, Werner Abelshauser, Anselm Faust (eds), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch II. Materialien zur Statistik des Deutschen Reiches 1870–1914 (Munich, 1978), pp. 42–3. J. Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1986), pp. 104–6. Gumbinnen, population 539,778, was one of East Prussia’s four Regierungsbezirke: Königsberg 911,879; Allenstein, 540287; Westpreußen, 264,405 were the other three. GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5565. Ernst Troeltsch, Spektator Briefe, p. 122. Könneman, Schulze (eds), Der Kapp-Lüttwitz-Ludendorff Putsch, Doc. 500, p. 780. GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5188. See footnote 63, Kohler, ‘Revolutionary Pomerania’ and Flemming, ‘Die Bewaffnung des “Landvolkes” ’. Johannes Erger, Der Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 206–10. Behrend, ‘Die Besetzung der Landratsstellen’, p. 123. See: Hamburger, ‘Verwaltung’, pp. 356–7; idem, ‘Die personelle und organistorische Verwaltungspolitik der neuen Machthaber’. Der Beamte 4 (1932), 216–23, here 217.Caplan, Government without Administration, pp. 43–4. See for instance the list of lectures in Berliner Verwaltungsakademie, ‘Vorlesungsverzeichnis’, WS 1919/20 – WS 1934/35 (microfiche copies in Humboldt University Library), and Berliner Verwaltungsakademie, Schriftenreihe der Verwaltungsakademie Berlin 4: Ludwig Bergsträsser, Geschichte der politischen Parteien in Deutschland, 4th rev. edn (Mannheim etc., [1921] 1926). Fenske, ‘Monarchisches Beamtentum’, p. 135. Originally in Lübecker Volksbote, 14 May 1926 and reprinted in Julius Leber, Ein Man geht seinen Weg (Berlin, 1952), p. 137. Behrend, ‘Zur Peronsalpolitik’, p. 179. For a selection of these, see: GStAPrK Rep. 77/3555. Andreas Kossert, Ostpreussen. Geschichte und Mythos (Munich, 2005), pp. 140–273. James Kerr Pollock and Homer Thomas, Germany in Power and Eclipse, The Background of German Development (Toronto, New York, London, 1952), pp. 271–84; Shelley Baranowski, The Sanctity of Rural Life, Nobility, Protestantism and Nazism in Weimar Prussia (New York, Oxford, 1995), pp. 27–38. Eberhard Kolb, ‘Im Schatten des übermächtigen Vaters. Herbert und Otto von Bismarck’, in Thomas Karlauf and Katharina Raabe (eds), Väter und Söhne. Zwölf Portaits (Reinbek, 1998), pp. 169–201. A further 14.8 per cent were in commerce and transport, 5 per cent in administration, 1.3 per cent in health sector, 3.6 per cent in domestic service, and 10.5 per cent without a profession/job. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 62, 3 (1929), 603.

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86 The province was divided into three Regierungsbezirke shown on the map: Köslin and Stettin each with 12 counties and 1 municipal borough; Stralsund with 4 counties (including the island of Rügen) and 1 municipal borough. 87 Ibid., p. 605. 88 See county results in GstAPrK Rep. 77/5695; Rep. 77/5696; Rep. 77/4087 and Rep. 77/5698. Falter et al., Wahlen und Abstimmungen, p. 132. The DNVP was the strongest party in the province until the July election of 1932, when it was overtaken by the NSDAP. It is also worth noting that Hindenburg had achieved 71 per cent of votes in the Reich presidential elections of 1925, but saw this halved by 1932; Hitler, on the other hand achieved his strongest performance here, with nearly 53 per cent of the vote, ibid., pp. 67–79. 89 Barch R36/46, Bl. 18, 35, 84. 90 http://www.gonschior.de/weimar/php/ausgabe_gebiet.php?gebiet1152 (Wahlen in der Weimarer Republik – Gebietseinheit: Kreis Regenwalde. 91 On the impact upon the administration of the influenza epidemic see GstAPrK Rep. 77/5448, Bl. 54. Details of Bismarck’s appointment can be found in GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5597, Bl. 194–222. 92 He took two oaths, first to the Reich constitution on 10 March 1920 and the second to the Prussian constitution on 6 May 1921, Barch R1501PA/4995, Bl. 27, 34. 93 GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5598, Bl. 1599; Carl von Halfern (1873–1937), the former Landrat in Ottweiler (1909), and in Saarbrücken (1916–19), then a ministerial adviser in the Prussian finance ministry, and Regierungspräsident in Hildesheim, Stettin, and finally OP from June 1930–October 1933, described by Huber as an OP of the ‘old school’, Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 7: Ausbau, Schutz und Untergang der Weimarer Repulblik (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1984), p. 1032. Halfern succeeded Julius Lippmann (DDP, 1864–1934), a lawyer, who had been Oberpräsident from April 1919 until April 1930. Details in Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, pp. 766–7. 94 Wolfgang R. Krabbe, ‘Die Bismarckjugend der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei’. German Studies Review, 17, 1 (February 1994), 9–32, here 26. 95 Apparently, the Lauenburg branch of the Pomeranian Bauernbund lobbied vigorously against Bismarck when it was rumoured that he might be appointed as Regierungspräsident in Köslin. They claimed that Bismarck, together with other landed magnates von Braunschweig-Lübzow and von Kleist-Schmenzin, had been an intractable enemy of the National Socialists; Bismarck had been highly critical of the LB’s leader Martin Schiele. Schumacher, M.d.R. Die Reichstagsabgeordneten, pp. 40–1. 96 Bismarck died in Wiesbaden in 1955. Barch R1501 PA/4994, Bl. 30; R1501 PA/4995, Bl. 46, 48, 76, 127. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, p. 168, fn. 77. 97 The couple had seven children (1914 daughter, 1916 son, 1919 son, 1922 daughter, 1925 daughter (?), 1927 son (Herbert, died 1929), 1930 son). Biographical details in Barch R1501PA/4993. See also: Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels, Adelige Häuser A Band XVI, Band 76 der Gesamtreihe, (Limburg, Lahn, 1981), p. 38; Baranowski, The Sanctity of Rural Life, p. 31f. 98 Barch R1501PA/4994, Bl. 46, 50–53, 58. R1501PA/4997, Bl. 1–3. 99 Barch R1501PA/4993, Bl. 106–106; R1501PA/4998, Bl. 15. 100 Interesting to note that the USPD was decisively against Bismarck whereas the MSPD supported his appointment. GStAPrK Rep. 77/5597, Bl. 225–9. 101 Barch R1501PA/4995, Bl. 75, Reg.präs. Dr Höhnen, 7 March 1925; Bl. 116–117, Reg. präs. 18 March 1929.

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102 GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5598, Bl. 50. 103 Ibid., Bl. 53–4. 104 On the issue of republican symbols and resulting conflicts over flags see: Nadine Rossol, ‘Flaggenkrieg am Badestrand. Lokale Möglichkeiten repräsentativer Mitgestaltung in der Weimarer Republik’. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 7/8 (2008), 617–37; Bernd Buchner, Um nationale und republikanische Identität. Die Sozialdemokratie und der Kampf um die politische Symbole in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2001). 105 Herbert Michaelis and Ernst Schraepler (eds), Ursachen und Folgen. Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart 26 Volumes (Berlin, 1958–1979), vol. 7, Doc. 1519. 106 RGBl. I Nr. 52, 1922, pp. 590–5, here 591. 107 Höhnen was later moved to Hildesheim in 1927–33, Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, p. 771. On the communal challenge to the Prussian government’s guidelines on flags, see Achim Bonte, Werbung für Weimar? Öffentlichkeitsarbeit von Großstadtverwaltungen in der Weimarer Republik (Mannheim, 1997), pp. 129–33. 108 GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5598, Bl. 34–6, OPräs. O.P.S. Nr. 184 to M.d.I., Stettin 21 December 1926, ‘Persönlich und eigenhändig’. 109 Muncy, ‘Junkers and the Prussian Administration’, p. 489. One cannot exclude the possibility of deference towards Bismarck, or at least towards his family name. 110 GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5598, Bl. 46–7, M.d.I., C. 7176/26, letter to Bismarck, 13 May 1927. 111 Ibid., Bl. 38, letter 17 December 1926. 112 GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5597, Bl. 82, Bl. 225–9. Volksbote Nr. 112, 15 May 1925 for reference to the Free Corps. 113 Case file: GStAPr.K Rep. 77/3335. 114 Case file: ibid. 115 GStAPrK Rep. 77/4530. 116 A further good example of this can be found in the case of Landrat Schönberg of Lauenburg, GStAPrK, Rep. 77/3335. 117 Muncy, ‘Junkers and the Prussian Administration’, p. 496, note 38. 118 Background in Hagen Schulze, Otto Braun oder Preußens demokratische Sendung (Frankfurt/Main, 1977), pp. 659–70. 119 GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5597, Bl. 122. 120 Barch R1501PA/4496, Bl. 70; GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5598, Bl. 55, Abschrift, M.d.I., Pd. 74, 10 February 1930 to Bismarck; ibid., Bl. 56 for reference to the other Landräte. 121 Dietrich Orlow, Weimar Prussia, 1925–1933. The Illusion of Strength (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1991). 122 GStAPrK, Rep. 77/5598, Bl. 60–61, Preuss. M.d.I., P.7051, 25 March 1931 to Min. Präs.; Bl. 74, notice of suspension to Bismarck from P.M.d.I., P.7052, 30 March 1931. For Severing’s re-appointment as interior minister, see Schulze, Otto Braun, pp. 619ff, 641ff. 123 See in particular his speeches at nationalist rallies in Pyritz, 29 August 1930 and at Swinemunde 27 March 1931, Barch R1501PA/4995. 124 GStAPrK Rep. 77/5598, Bl. 142–43, 190. Barch R1501PA/4495, Bl. 138; R1501PA/4996, Bl. 77. 125 Greifenberger Kreisblatt Nr. 74, 28 March 1931; Kreuz-Zeitung Nr. 86, 27 March 1931; Pommersche Tagespost Nr. 74, 28 March 1931.

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126 Wilhelm Abegg, in 8Uhr Abendblatt Nr. 11, 13 January 1933, in Barch R1501PA/4997, Bl. 112. 127 Barch R1501PA/4995, Bl. 164, Greifenberger Kreisblatt Nr. 128, 3 June 1931, ‘Unser Kampf um Preußen’. 128 On Junker complaints of moral and national decline, Baranowski, The Sanctity of Rural Life, p. 39. 129 Barch R1501PA/4996, Bl. 77; GStAPrK Rep. 77/5598, Bl. 59. 130 Barch R1501PA/4995, Bl. 179–87, Polizeipräsident Stettin to Oberpräsident der Provinz Pommern, marked ‘personal and to be handed directly’, 2 September 1930, here Bl. 180–5. 131 Deutsche Zeitung Nr. 86, 10 March 1931, cited in Schulze, Otto Braun, p. 659. 132 Ibid., p. 661. 133 Der Tag Nr. 185, 5 August 1930; cf., SPD’s Volksbote Nr. 181, 6 August 1930, ‘Hugenberg hat sein Ziel erreicht’. 134 Akten der Reichskanzlei: Kabinett von Papen I und II, vol. 2, Doc. 196, pp. 885–8, here 888. Jacob, German Administration since Bismarck, p. 124, gives a higher figure of 61 Landräte. 135 The purges continued after 1933, so that by 1937 (new Beamtengesetz), 75 per cent of Prussian Landräte, and 51 per cent of their equivalent in the other Länder had been removed from their posts. By this date, only 5 per cent were not members of the NSDAP. The so-called Märzgefallene constituted 47 per cent and the alte Kämpfer 48 per cent of Landräte in Prussia. The situation in the other Länder was very different with 42 per cent of posts not falling to Nazis but 49 per cent going to the Märzgefallene; thus the purge under the Nazis was much more thoroughgoing than under the republic, securing the Third Reich (similar to Second Reich) a reliable field administration, but one which came to suffer like most of the bureaucracy from chaos, Jacob, German Administration since Bismarck, pp. 130–4. Cf Behrend, ‘Die Besetzung der Landratstellen’, p. 140. 136 Arnold Brecht, Prelude to Silence. The End of the German Republic (New York, 1944), pp. 110–11. 137 Geoffrey Pridham and Jeremy Noakes, Nazism a Documentary Reader 2: State, Economy and Society 1933–1939 (Exeter, 1984), Doc. 174, pp. 256–7. 138 Muncy, ‘Junkers and the Prussian Administration’, pp. 497–8. 139 Caplan, Government without Administration, pp. 145, 165–74. See the example of the police in Akten der Reichskanzlei, Regierung Hitler 1933–1933: Teil I 1933/34, Band 2: 30 Januar bis 31 August 1933 prepared by Karl-Heinz Minuth (Boppard am Rhein, 1983), Doc. 295.

Chapter 8 1 Leopold Schwarzschild, ‘10 Jahre Verfassung, 10 August 1929’, in Die Letzten Jahre vor Hitler. Aus dem ‘Tagebuch’ 1929–1933, edited by Valerie Schwarzschild with a foreword by Golo Mann (Hamburg, 1966), p. 26. 2 Hermann Martin, Demokratie oder Diktatur? (Berlin, 1926), p. 103. 3 Howard Becker, ‘Monuments: German Personality Types Foreshadowing the Collapse of the Weimar Republic’. American Sociological Review, 8, 5 (October 1943), 525–30, here 529.

306

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4 See the useful discussion of the antipodes of ‘leader’ and political party as ‘machine’, in Thomas Mergel, Führer, ‘Volksgemeinschaft und Maschine. Politische Erwartungsstrukturen in der Weimarer Republik und dem Nationalsozialismus 1918–1936’, in Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1918–1939 (Göttingen, 2005), pp. 91–127, here 105–111, 121ff. Also useful as a point of departure for any discussion on charismatic leadership is, M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘The Model of Charismatic Leadership and its Applicability to the Rule of Adolf Hitler’. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7, 2 (June 2006), 175–90. 5 Parts of this chapter have appeared in amended form in Anthony McElligott, ‘Rethinking the Weimar Paradigm: Carl Schmitt and Politics without Authority’, in Jochen Hung, Godela Weiss-Sussex, Geoff Wilkes (eds), Beyond Glitter and Doom: New Perspectives of the Weimar Republic, Vol. 98 (Munich: Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies, 2012), pp. 80–94; idem, ‘Political Culture’, in idem (ed.), Weimar Germany (Oxford, 2009), pp. 26–49. 6 Friedrich Meinecke, Straßburg-Freiburg-Berlin 1901–1919, in Werke 8: Autobiographische Schriften, edited and introduced by Eberhard Kessel (Munich, 1969), pp. 315–18. Max Weber, ‘Der Präsident’, in Gesammelte politische Schriften, edited by Johannes Winckelmann 5th edn (Tübingen, 1988), p. 301. Harm Klueting, ‘“Vernunftrepulikanismus” und “­Vertauensdiktatur”: Friedrich Meinecke in der ­Weimarer Republik’. Historische Zeitschrift, Bd. 242, H. 1 (February 1986), 69–89, here 86; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920 (Chicago and London, 1984); Detlef Lehnert, ‘Einleitung’, in idem, (ed.), Hugo Preuss. Gesammelte Schriften IV: Politik und Verfassung in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen, 2008), pp. 8–9. 7 These articles were revised and published as ‘Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland. Zur politischen Kritik des Beamtentums und Parteiwesens’, reprinted in Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, pp. 306–443 [orig. 1921]. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, pp. 332–46. 8 Richard Schmidt, ‘Das Führerproblem in der modernen Demokratie’, in Politische Wissenschaft; ­Schriftenreihe der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik in Berlin und der Instituts für Auswärtige Politik in H ­ amburg Heft 10: Probleme der Demokratie Zweite Reihe (Berlin, 1931), pp. 3, 5–6, 11–16. See also ­Stefan Korioth, ‘The Shattering of Methods in Late Wilhelmine Germany’, in Arthur J. Jacobsen and Bernhard Schlink (eds), Weimar A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2000), p. 44. 9 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Frankfurt, 2010), pp. 157–88. Weber in ‘Parlament und Regierung’, pp. 355–6, 365, defined leadership as having the unlimited power to make decisions; in the modern state, however, this was more an ideal than reality, even under the so-called silent dictatorship of Ludendorff-Hindenburg, as we saw in Chapter 2. See the correspondence from Walther Rathenau to Franz von Wandel, 1.5.1917, in Alexander Jaser, Clemens Picht, Ernst Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe Teilband 2: 1914–1922 (Düsseldorf, 2006), pp. 1666–7. L. A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought (New York, 1971), p. 227. 10 Albrecht Graf zu Stolberg-Wernigerode, Diktatur oder Parlamentarismus? Flugschriften der Deutsche Volkspartei (Berlin, 1929). 11 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 424, 54th Session, 1 March 1929, 1359–66, (Graef), especially, 1362. 12 Nationalversammlung 327, 44th Session, 2 July 1919, 1225–6 (David); ibid., 328, 69th Session, 9 July 1919, 2071–4 (Preuß).

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13 Hugo Preuß, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik (Berlin, 1915); idem, ‘Weltkrieg, Demokratie und Deutschlands Erneuerung’, in Lothat Albertin (ed.), Hugo Preuß. Gesammelte Schriften I: Politik und Gesellschaft im Kaiserreich (Tübingen, 2007). Christoph Schoenberger, ‘Hugo Preuss’, in Jacobsen and Schlink (eds), Weimar A Jurisprudence of Crisis, p. 112; Detlef Lehnert, Verfassungsdemokratie als Bürergenossenschaft. Politisches Denken, Öffentliches Recht und Geschichtsdeutungen bei Hugo Preuß (Baden-Baden, 1998). Heiko Bollmeyer, ‘Das “Volk” in den Verfassungsberatungen der Weimarer Nationalversammlung 1919 – ein demokratietheoretischer Schlüsselbegriff zwischen Kaiserreich und Republi’, in Alexander Gallus (ed.), Die vergessene Revolution von 1918/19 (Göttingen, 2010), pp. 57–83. 14 Carl Schmitt, ‘Diktatur und Belagerungszustand. Eine staatsrechtliche Studie’. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 38 (1916), 138–62. This essay was expanded and published in book form in 1921 and again in 1924. 15 Stefan Breuer, Carl Schmitt im Kontext. Intellectuellenpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 2012), pp. 101–09. See the perceptive comments in Eva Horn, ‘Work on Charisma: Writing Hitler’s Biography’. New German Critique, No. 114, Narrating Charisma (Fall 2011), 95–114. 16 Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt Aufstieg und Fall. Eine Biographie (Munich, 2009), pp. 76–81, esp. 78; Breuer, Carl Schmitt, p. 78. Ernst Hüsmert (ed.), Carl Schmitt. Tagebücher vom Oktober 1912 bis Februar 1915, second edition (Berlin, 2005), pp. 318–20; idem and Curt Giesler (eds), Carl Schmitt – Die Militärzeit 1915 bis 1919. Tagebuch Februar bis Dezember 1915. Aufsätze und Materialien (Berlin, 2005), pp. 1–18, 181–7. 17 In Prussia the dictatorial powers of commanders were further facilitated by Article 9 of the Prussian State of Siege Law of 1852. 18 Carl Schmitt, Die Diktatur: von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf; mit einem Anhang: Die Diktatur des Reichspräsidenten nach Art. 48 der Weimarer Verfassung, 2 edn (München, 1928), pp. 254–5 [orig. 1921], Frank Hertweck and Dimitrios Kisoudis (eds), ‘Solange das Imperium da ist’. Carl Schmitt im Gespräch 1971 (Berlin, 2010), p. 99. 19 Stefan Breuer, Carl Schmitt im Kontext: Intellektuellenpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 2012); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984); Nicolaus Sombart, Die deutschen Männer und ihre Feinde: Carl Schmitt, ein deutsches Schicksal zwischen Männerbund und Matriarchatsmythos (Munich, 1991). 20 Leopold Ziegler, Volk, Staat und Persönlichkeit (Berlin, 1917); Walther Rathenau, Der Kaiser: eine Betrachtung (Berlin, 1919), p. 45; Wilhelm Abegg, Für den neuen Staat (Berlin, [1926] 1928), p. 86. See also the essays by Schmitt, Heller and Michels in Politische Wissenschaft Schriftenreihe der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik in Berlin und des Instituts für Auswärtige Politik in Hamburg Heft 5: Probleme der Demokratie, Erste Reihe (Berlin-Grunewald, 1928). Achim Kurz, Demokratische Diktatur? Auslegung und Handhabung des Artikels 48 der Weimarer Reichsverfassung 1919–1925 (Berlin, 1992), pp. 185–6. Steffen Bruendel, Volksgemeinschaft oder Volksstaat: Die ‘Ideen von 1914’ und die Neuordnung Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 2003). 21 G. L. Ulmen, ‘The Sociology of the State: Carl Schmitt and Max Weber’. State Culture and Society, 1, 2 (Winter 1985), 3–57, esp. 6. Mateusz Stachura, ‘Rationale Demokratie: Demokratietheoretische Überlegungen in Anschluss an Max Weber’. Zeitschrift für Politik, 53 Jg., (4/2006), 393–410.

308

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22 Walter Jellinek, ‘Entstehung und Aufbau der Weimarer Verfassung’, in Gerhard Anschütz, and Richard Thoma (eds), Handbuch des Deutschen Staatsrechts I (Tübingen, 1930), pp. 127–38. Elmar M. Hucko (ed.), The Democratic Tradition. Four German Constitutions (Oxford, 1987), pp. 147–90. The relationship between president and Reichstag was defined by Articles 20–59, Konrad Beyerle, Zehn Jahre Reichsverfassung. Festrede zur Münchner Verfassungsfeier der Reichsbehörden am 11. August 1929 (Munich, 1929), p. 10. 23 Richard Grau, Die Diktaturgewalt des Reichspräsidenten und der Landesregierungen auf Grund des Artikels 48 der Reichsverfassung (Berlin, 1922); Ludwig Richter, ‘Reichspräsident und Ausnahmegewalt. Die Genese des Artikels 48 in den Beratungen der Weimarer Nationalversammlung’. Der Staat 37 (1998), 221–47; Hans Boldt, ‘Die Weimarer Verfassung’, in Bracher/Funke/Jacobsen (eds), Die Weimarer Republik, pp. 44–62. For Art. 54 see Wolfram Pyta, ‘Konstitutionelle Demokratie statt monarchischer Restauration. Die verfassungspolitische Konzeption Schleichers in der Weimarer Staatskrise’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 47 (July 1999), 417–41. 24 Christoph Gusy, Die Weimarer Reichsverfassung (Tübingen, 1997), pp. 3–5. Heiko Bollmeyer, Der steinige Weg zur Demokratie. Die Weimarer Nationalversammlung zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik (Frankfurt, 2007), pp. 48–184, 368–73; especially 74–91; idem, Bollmeyer, ‘Das “Volk”’, pp. 69–77. 25 Robert Redslob, Die parlamentarische Regierung in ihrer wahren und in ihrer unechten Form: eine vergleichende Studie über die Verfassungen von England, Belgien, Ungarn, Schweden und Frankreich (Tübingen, 1918). Manfred Friedrich, ‘Robert Redslob’. Neue Deutsche Biographie, 21 (Berlin, 2003), p. 251 (http://daten. digitale-sammlungen.de/0001/bsb00016339/images/index.html?seite267). Peter Haungs, Reichspräsident und parlamentarische Kabinettsregierung: eine Studie zum Regierungssystem der Weimarer Republik in den Jahren 1924 bis 1929 (Cologne, 1968), pp. 29–34, 113. 26 Hugo Preuß, ‘Der demokratische Gedanke in der deutschen Republik’, Vossische Zeitung Nr. 573 (10 November 1919) Morgen-Ausgabe, reprinted in Lehnert, Hugo Preuß. Gesammelte Schriften IV, pp. 590–1. Ernst Rudolf Huber, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte Vol. 3: Dokumente der Novemberrevolution und der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz,1966), Doc. 43, pp. 33–5. 27 The committee included political luminaries such as Count Posadowsky-Wehner and Clemens von Delbrück, both DNVP, Wilhelm Kahl and Rudolf Heinze from the DVP, Karl Trimborn, Peter Spahn and Adolf Gröber of the Zentrum, the Democrats Max Weber, Friedrich Naumann, Conrad Haußmann and Erich Koch(-Weser); the four members drawn from the SPD, included the Reichstag deputy Karl Hildenbrand and the lawyer Max Quarck; another lawyer Oskar Cohn represented the USPD, Beyerle, Zehn Jahre Reichsverfassung, pp. 11–15. Gerhard Schulz, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur: Verfassungspolitik und Reichsreform in der Weimarer Republik. Band 1, Die Periode der Konsolidierung und der Revision des Bismarckschen Reichsaufbaus 1919–1930 second edn (Berlin and New York, 1987), pp. 129–30; Mommsen, Max Weber, pp. 335–71; Bollmeyer, Der steinige Weg, pp. 219–22; Christian F. Trippe, Konservative Verfassungspolitik 1918–1923. Die DNVP als Opposition in Reich und Länder (Düsseldorf, 1995), pp. 40–9, 56–8, 70. 28 Haungs, Reichspräsident und parlamentarische Kabinettsregierung, pp. 22–34; Trippe, Konservative Verfassungspolitik, pp. 84–90.

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29 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Zum Begriff der “Plebiszitären Führerdemokratie” bei Max Weber’. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 15, 2 (1963), 295–322, repr. in idem, Max Weber Gesellschaft, Politik und Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), pp. 44–71. 30 Hugo Preuß, Um die Verfassung von Weimar (Berlin, 1924), p. 73. Lehnert, ‘Einleitung’, p. 13, note 45. 31 Lehnert, ‘Einleitung’, pp. 13–14; Bollmeyer, Der steinige Weg zur Demokratie, pp. 235–7. 32 Hugo Preuß, ‘Denkschrift zum Entwurf des allgemeinen Teils der Reichsverfassung vom 3. Januar 1919’ in idem, Staat, Recht und Freiheit: aus 40 Jahren dt. Politik u. Geschichte (Tübingen, 1926), pp. 368–94, here 387. 33 Hugo Preuß, ‘Volksstaat oder verkehrter Obrigkeitsstaat?’. Berliner Tageblatt, 47 Jg., Nr. 583 (14 November 1918), Morgen-Ausgabe, reprinted in Preuß, Staat Recht und Freiheit, pp. 365–8; Preuß, Um die Reichsverfassung, p. 63. See also Lehnert, Hugo Preuss. Gesammelte Schriften IV, pp. 73–5. Bollmeyer, Der steinige Weg, pp. 222–34, 336–44. 34 Preuß, Staat Recht und Freiheit, pp. 144–72. Walther Rathenau to Peter Hammes, 23.6.19, in Jaser, Picht, Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe, pp. 2211–12. 35 Max Weber, Gesamtausgabe, edited Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Vol. 16 (Tübingen, 1988), p. 53. Max Weber, ‘Deutschlands künftige Staatsform’, in Gesammelte Politische Schriften, p. 469; idem, ‘Der Reichspräsident’, in ibid., pp. 498–501 [orig. Berliner Börsenzeitung, 25 February 1919]. There was also the issue that proportional representation might lead to deadlocked Reichstag unable to pass laws, Theodor Heuss, Führer aus deutscher Not. 5 politische Porträts (Berlin, 1928), p. 92. 36 Klueting, ‘Friedrich Meinecke in der Weimarer Republik’, p. 90. 37 So Schoenberger, ‘Hugo Preuss’, p. 114. 38 Verhandlungen des Verfassungsgebenden Deutschen National Versammlung 336, 3rd Session, February 1919, pp. 12–15. In making this argument Preuß revealed the influence of the constitutional expert Robert Redslob, Mommsen, ‘Zum Begriff der “Plebiszitären Führerdemokratie”, 295–322, here 302; Bollmeyer, Der steinige Weg, pp. 259–60. 39 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, 385, ‘Bereidung des Reichspräsidenten v. Hindenburg vor dem Reichstag am 12. Mai 1925’, p. 1721, accessed at http://www. reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_w3_bsb00000069_00616.html 40 Kurz, Demokratische Diktatur?, pp. 152–56. Lehnert, ‘Einleitung’, pp. 13. 41 Beyerle, Zehn Jahre Reichsverfassung, p. 10. Willy Hellpach, Politische Prognose für Deutschland (Berlin, 1928), pp. 136–9. 42 Controversally, Ernst Nolte, The Three Faces of Fascism (London, 1965). 43 See the essays in Otto Forst de Battaglia (ed.), Prozeß der Diktatur (Zurich, Leipzig, Vienna, 1932). 44 Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (New York, 1963, orig. Princeton, 1948). 45 Waldemar Besson, ‘Dokumentation: Zur Frage der Staatsführung in der Weimarer Republik: “Diktatur innerhalb der Demokratie”’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 7/1 (January 1959), 85–111, here 87; Richard Grau, ‘Die Diktaturgewalt des Reichspräsidenten’, in Gerhard Anschütz, Richard Thoma (eds), Handbuch des Deutschen Staatsrechts II (Tübingen, 1932), pp. 274–94. 46 For the earlier period and the consensus for dictatorial powers, Kurz, Demokratische Diktatur?, pp. 160–2; Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789.

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53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64

Notes Vol. 7: Ausbau, Schutz und Untergang der Weimarer Repulblik (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1984), p. 451. Kurz, Demokratische Diktatur?, pp. 152–6. Haungs, Reichspräsident und parlamentarische Kabinettsregierung, p. 174. Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalender 1923 (Munich, 1927), p. 152. Heinz Hürten (ed.), Das Krisenjahr 1923. Militär und Innenpolitik 1922–1924 (Düsseldorf, 1980), Docs. 25, 27, 29. RGBl. (1919) I, p. 1383. Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalendar 1923, pp. 192–3 for Zeigner’s programme for government. Hürten (ed.), Das Krisenjahr 1923, Docs. 61, 67, 207, pp. 107–10, 115–18, 334–62; Akten der Reichskanzlei Die Kabinette Stresemann I und II, prepared by Karl Dietrich Erdmann and Martin Vogt (­Boppard am Rhein, 1978), Docs. 147, 194, 222. Schuthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalender 1923, pp. 210–11; Vossische Zeitung Nr. 512 Abend-Ausgabe, 29 Oktober 1923: ‘Dr Heinze Reichskommissar für Sachsen. Der Zusammentritt des Landtags verboten’; Vossische Zeitung Nr. 525 ­MorgenAusgabe, 6 November 1923: ‘Gegen die Reichszestörer! Aufruf zum Schutz der Verfassung’. Background in Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, pp. 376–86; Kurz, Demokratische Diktatur?, pp. 103–10. Hugo Preuß, ‘Reichsverfassungsmäßige Diktatur (1923)’, in Hugo Preuss. Gesammelte Schriften IV, pp. 523–35; see also his letter to Dr Hegewisch 20 December 1924 in ibid., pp. 566–7. RGBl. (1932) I, p. 377; RGBl. (1933) I, pp. 153, 173; RGBl. (1934) I, p. 75. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 361, 386th Session, 8 October 1923, 11947–12031; Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Kabinette Stresemann I und II, Docs. 192. Ibid., Docs. 102–06, 115, 215 and 216. For the SPD’s conditions for remaining in the government, see Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalendar 1923, pp. 208–09. Vossische Zeitung Nr. 525 Morgen-Ausgabe, 6 November 1923: ‘Der Schrei nach Diktatur’. Martin, Demokratie oder Diktatur? p. 244. Hürten (ed.), Das Krisenjahr 1923, pp. XXII–XXIX, and especially Docs. 152, 158 and 160 (private correspondence between Lt-Colonel Erfurth, Lt-Colonel von Falkenhausen and Lt-Colonel Joachim von Stülpnagel). Akten der Reichskanzlei Die Kabinette Stresemann I und II, Anhang 1, pp. 1176– 1203. Friedrich von Rabenau, Hans von Seeckt. Aus seinem Leben (Leipzig, 1940), pp. 339–90, here 366–7, 376. Heinz Brauweiler, Generäle in der Deutschen Republik: Groener, Schleicher, Seeckt (Berlin, 1932), p. 46; Claus Guske, Das politische Denken des Generals von Seeckt: ein Beitrag zur Diskussion des Verhältnisses Seeckt Reichswehr – Republik  Historische Heft 422 (Lübeck, 1971), pp. 230, 245–6. See Hürten (ed.), Das Krisenjahr 1923, Doc. 26, pp. 58–60, Doc. 75, p. 127, Doc. 198, p. 302, Doc. 207, pp. 334–62. Background in Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschchte 7, pp. 391–9. Guske, Das politische Denken, p. 245. Rabenau, Hans von Seeckt, p. 369. Hürten (ed.), Das Krisenjahr 1923, ‘Intoduction’, pp. XV. Seeckt was elected in 1930 to the Reichstag as a deputy of the DVP. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 361, 386th Session, 8 October 1923, 1169 (Westarp); Martin, Demokratie oder Diktatur?, pp. 227–44. Kurz, Demokratische

Notes

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66

67

68

69 70 71 72 73

74 75

311

Diktatur?, pp. 115–16. Background: Guske, Das politische Denken, pp. 227–8, 230–2, 237–8, 243. Haungs, Reichspräsident und parlamentarische Kabinettsregierung, pp. 185–93. Ulrich von Hehl, Wilhelm Marx: 1863–1946; eine politische Biographie (Mainz, 1987), pp. 249–55. The choice of Marx threw up an interesting spat between the DNVP and Ebert, with the former complaining that the president was appointing the same cabinet under a different chancellor, to which Ebert responded that it was the president’s prerogative to appoint ministers, not the Reichstag’s, Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschchtskalendar 1923, p. 224. It passed on the final reading with 313 votes in favour, 18 against and one abstention, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 361, 397th Session, 8 December 1923, 12337–2; cf., ibid., 396th Session, 6 December 1923, 12335–61; RGBl. (1923), I p. 1179. Heinrich Triepel, ‘Die Ermächtigungsgesetz’. Deutsche Juristen Zeitung 29 (1924), col. 2. Hürten (ed.), Das Krisenjahr 1923, Doc. 133, here pp. 196–7. Sylvia Eilers, ‘Ermächtigungsgesetz und militärischer Ausnahmezustand zur Zeit des ersten Kabinetts von Reichskanzler Wilhelm Marx 1923/24’ (D.Phil., University of Colgne, 1988). Schmitt, ‘Reichstagsauflösungen’, p. 24. The DNVP abstained from voting, Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalendar 1923, p. 228. Even liberals could take this view: Willy Hellpach and Graf zu Dohna, Die Krise des deutschen Parlamentarismus. Vorträge auf der Tagung deutscher Hochschullehrer in Weimar (Karlsruhe, 1927), pp. 3–4. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, pp. 452–4. Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalendar, 1923, pp. 227–8. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags vol, 403rd Session, 28 February 1924, 12535. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, pp. 541–4. Joseph Wirth, Der Aufbruch: republikanische Flugschriften (Berlin, 1926), pp. 26–7; idem, Reden während der Kanzlerschaft (Berlin, 1925). Haungs, Reichspräsident und parlamentarische Kabinettsregierung, pp. 174–5. Winkler wrongly asserts that Ebert did not involve himself with day-to-day matters of government, Heinrich August Winkler, Der Schein der Normalität: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1924–1930, second rev. edn (Berlin, 1988), pp. 232–4. Walter Mühlhausen, Friedrich Ebert: 1871–1925. Reichspräsident der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2006). Friedrich Karl Fromme, Von der Weimarer Verfassung zum Bonner Grundgesetz, third expanded edn (Berlin, [1960] 1999), p. 65; Kurz, Demokratische Diktatur?, p. 183. See also Gusy, Die Weimarer Reichsverfassung, pp. 107–13. Carl Schmitt, ‘Die Diktatur des Reichspräsidenten nach Art. 48 der Reichsverfassung’, appendix to Die Diktatur: von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf, second edn (Munich, Leipzig, 1928), pp. 213–59, here pp. 237–8, 240–1, 253. This addendum was orginally published in Veröffentlichungen der Vereinigung der Deutschen Staatsrechtslehrer 1 (1924). See also Ellen Kennedy for Schmitt’s thinking on authority in this context: Ellen Kennedy, ‘Emergency government within the bounds of the constitution: an introduction to Carl Schmitt, “The Dictatorship of the Reich president according to Article 48 R.V”’. Constellations, 18/3 (November 2011), 284–97 (introduction), and ibid., 299–323 with a translation into English of Carl Schmitt, ‘The Dictatorship of the Reich president according to Art 48 of the Reich constitution’.

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76 Hugo Preuß. Gesammelte Schriften IV, pp. 264–6; Vossische Zeitung Nr. 123, 23 May 1925: Postausgabe. 77 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstag 391, 253rd Session, 17 December 1926, 48650–57. See, Michael Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition in der Weimarer Republik 1924–1928 (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 162–81; Haungs, Reichspräsident und parlamentarische Kabinettsregierung, pp. 117–23; Hehl, Wilhelm Marx, pp. 389–93. For the SPD’s relationship to Marx’s government, Winkler, Der Schein der Normalität, pp. 290–307. 78 Fromme, Von der Weimarer Verfassung, p. 78. Rudolf Wertheimer, ‘Der Einfluß des Reichspräsidenten auf die Gestaltung der Reichsregierung’ (unpublished jur. Diss., Heidelberg, 1930). 79 Stolberg-Wernigerode, Diktatur oder Parlamentarismus?, p. 11. 80 Kurt von Reibnitz, Im Dreieck Schleicher, Hitler, Hindenburg. Männer des deutschen Schicksals (Dresden, 1933), p. 114. Baron von Reibnitz was a career civil servant and formerly Landrat in County Falkenberg in Upper Silesia 1913–18; he joined the SPD in 1918, serving as chief minister of Mecklenburg-Strelitz from 13 October 191–July 1923 and again from 13 March 1928 to 4 December 1931; biographical details in Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 6: Die Weimarer Verfassung (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1981), p. 827, note 25. 81 Martin Schiele, ‘Innere Politik’, in Walther Lambach (ed.), Politische Praxis 1926 (Hamburg, 1926), pp. 48–57, here p. 53. 82 Fromme, Von der Weimarer Verfassung, p. 76; Fritz Poetzsch-Heffter, ‘Vom Staatsleben unter der Weimarer Verfassung’ Part II. Jahrbuch des öffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart 17 (1929), 103. 83 Carl Schmitt, Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (Berlin, 1923), pp. 31, 33–4; Schmitt, ‘Der Begriff der modernen Demokratie in seinem Verhältnis zum Staatsbegriff ’. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 51 (Tübingen, 1924), p. 821. Ernst Wolgast, Die Kampfregierung. Ein Beitrag zur Lehre von der Kabinettsbildung nach der Weimarer Verfassung (Königsberg, 1929). 84 Karl Rothenbücher, ‘Der Kampf um Artikel 54 der deutschen Reichsverfassung’. Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht 7 (1928), 339; Wolgast, Zum deutschen Parlamentarismus. For discussion of the various positions, see Fromme, Von der Weimarer Verfassung, pp. 65–8, 71. 85 Georg Schreiber, Brüning, Hitler, Schleicher. Das Zentrum in der Opposition (Cologne, 1932), pp. 15, 57. 86 Hans Mommsen and Sabine Gillmann (eds), Politische Schriften und Briefe Carl Friedrich Goerdelers, Vol. 1 (Munich, 2003), pp. 240–59. 87 Hermann Pünder, Der Reichspräsident in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main, Bonn, 1961), p. 18. 88 Schreiber, Brüning, Hitler, Schleicher, p. 58. 89 Klueting, ‘Friedrich Meinecke in der Weimarer Republik’, pp. 94–5. For a less positive assessment of Meinecke’s politics, see Waldemar Besson, ‘Friedrich Meinecke und die Weimarer Republik. Zum Verhältnis von Geschichtsschreibung und Politik’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 7 (1959), 113–29, here 126. 90 Gregor Bienstock, Kampf um die Macht (Berlin, 1932), p. 6. 91 For example, Dr Max Weiß (ed.), Der nationale Wille. Werden und Wirken der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918–1928 (Leipzig, 1928). Fromme, Von der Weimarer Verfassung, p. 78.

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92 Carl Schmitt, ‘Machtpositionen des modernen Staates (1933)’, in Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954. Materialien zu einer Verfassungslehre (Berlin, [1958] 2003), pp. 367–71, here 367. Mehring, Carl Schmitt, p. 249. Karl Lowenstein, Verfassungslehre, second edn (Tübingen, 1969[1957]), Chapter 4 in particular. 93 ‘Der Hüter der Verfassung’, Archiv des öffentlichen Rechts NF. 16 (1929), pp. 161–237, here 218. 94 Carl Schmitt, ‘Legalität und Legitimät (1932)’, in Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze, pp. 263–350. 95 Carl Goerdeler, ‘Denkschrift Anfang 1931’, in Mommsen and Gillmann (eds), Politische Schriften, vol. 1, p. 312. The editors point out that the memorandum was probably written as early as September 1929, ibid., p. 271 fn. 1 and p. 200. 96 Carl Goerdeler, ‘Mehr Macht dem Präsidenten!’, in ibid., p. 212. 97 Ibid., p. 204. 98 Carl Goerdeler, untitled manuscript written between 1931 and 1935 in Mommsen and Gillmann (eds), Politische Schriften, p. 254. Theodor Eschenburg, ‘Das Problem der deutschen Einheit nach den beiden Weltkriege’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 5. Jahrg., 2. H. (April 1957), 107–33. 99 Mommsen and Gillmann (eds), Politische Schriften, p. 210. 100 Kurt Sontheimer, ‘Der Tatkreis’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 7 (1959), 229–60. Martin Spahn, Für den Reichsgedanken: Historisch-politische Aufsätze 1915–1934 (Berlin, Bonn, 1934); Leopold Ziegler, ‘Auslese der Minderwertigkeit’ cited by Otto Landsberg, Die politische Krise der Gegenwart. Nach einem Vortrag (Berlin, 1931), p. 17; for Zehrer see Walter Struve, ‘Hans Zehrer as a Neoconservative Elite Theorist’. The American Historical Review, 70, 4 (July 1965), 1035–57; Werner E. Braatz, ‘Two Neo-Conservative Myths in Germany 1919–1932: The “Third Reich” and “New State”’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 32, 4 (October–December 1971), 569–84, here 577; Besson, ‘Friedrich Meinecke’, p. 126. 101 Pyta, ‘Konstitutionelle Demokratie’, pp. 431–32. 102 Hertweck/Kisoudis (eds), ‘Solange das Imperium da ist’, p. 93; Carl Schmitt Tagebücher 1930–1934, p. 201, 20 July1932. Breuer, Carl Schmitt, p. 175. Gabriel Seiberth, Anwalt des Reiches: Carl Schmitt und der Prozeß ‘Preußen contra Reich’ vor dem Staatsgerichtshof (Berlin, 2001), pp. 97–110. Peter Caldwell argues Schmitt was heavily oriented to the radical right as early as 1924, Peter Caldwell, ‘The Citizen and the Republic in Germany, 1918–1935’, in Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (eds), Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany (Stanford, Calif., 2008), p. 51, while Volker Neumann, establishes beyond doubt, Schmitt’s rampant anti-Semitism, ‘Carl Schmitt’, in Jacobsen and Schlink (eds), Weimar A Jurisprudence of Crisis, pp. 281–82. 103 Legalität und Legitimät (Munich, 1932), trans. and ed. by Jeffrey Seitzer, Legality and Legitimacy (Durham, Conn., 2004); Der Begriff des Politischen (Hamburg, 1932), trans. and intro. by George Schwab, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, 1996). See Heinrich Muth, ‘Carl Schmitt in der deutschen Innenpolitik des Sommers 1932’. Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte, New Series, Vol. 1, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Weimarer Republik’ (1971), pp. 75–147, here pp. 138–47. 104 Lutz Berthold, Carl Schmitt und der Staatsnotstandsplan am Ende der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1999), pp. 78–88. There are countless references in his diaries to his meetings with Eugen Ott and Erich Marcks, both of whom were closely associated with Schleicher.

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105 Hermann Heller, ‘Genie und Funktionär in der Politik’, in Probleme der Demokratie  Politische Wissenschaft Schriftenreihe der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik in Berlin und des Instituts für Auswärtige Politik in Hamburg, Heft 10 (BerlinGrunewald, 1931), p. 68. For Heller’s thought see: Marcus Llanque (ed.), Souveräne Demokratie und soziale Homogenität: das politische Denken Hermann Hellers (Baden-Baden, 2010), and David Dyzenhaus, ‘Hermann Heller’, in Jacobsen and Schlink (eds), Weimar A Jurisprudence of Crisis, pp. 249–55. 106 Hermann Heller, Rechtsstaat oder Diktatur? (Tübingen, 1930), pp. 14–15, 17, 18. See also Hans Kelsen, ‘Wer soll der Hüter der Verfassung sein?’. Die Justiz, 6 (1931), 576–628. 107 Heinrich Herrfahrdt, Der Aufbau des neuen Staates (Berlin, 1932); Walther Schotte, Der Neue Staat (Berlin, 1932); Gerhard Leibholz, Die Auflösung der liberalen Demokratie in Deutschland und das autoritäre Staatsbild (Munich, 1933), this publication originated in a lecture from March 1932 by Leibholz, who was professor of law at Göttingen University. Fromme, Von der Weimarer Verfassung, p. 78. For earlier attacks, see Erich Kaufmann, Grundfragen der künftigen Reichsverfassung (Berlin, 1919) and Johannes Viktor Bredt, Das Werk des Herrn Preuss (Berlin, 1919). 108 Braatz, ‘Two Neo-Conservative Myths’, p. 584. 109 See the reference to the president ‘als Bestandteil einer republikanischen Verfassung’, by the DNVP deputy Reinhold Quaatz, in Die Deutschnationalen und die Zerstörung der Weimarer Republik: aus dem Tagebuch von Reinhold Quaatz, 1928–1933 (Munich, 1989), edited by Hermann Weiss and Paul Hoser, p. 106, 22 March 1930. 110 Quaatz, Die Deutschnationalen, p. 158, 20 October 1931. Reibnitz concludes that Hindenburg took counsel, but made his own decisions, finally recognizing that Brüning was no longer able to assert his authority as chancellor, Im Dreieck, pp. 107–08. 111 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, pp. 971–6; Daniel Binchy, ‘Heinrich Brüning’. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 21, 83 (September 1932), 385–403, here 398–9. Erich Matthias, ‘Hindenburg Zwischen den Fronten 1932’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 8 (1960), 75–84. 112 Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher 1918–1937. Politik, Kunst und Gesellschaft der zwanziger Jahre (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 4th edn, 1979), p. 669, 30 May 1932. Binchy, ‘Heinrich Brüning’, p. 402. William L. Patch, Heinrich Brüning and the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 256–71. 113 Franz von Papen, Die Wahrheit eine Gasse (Munich, 1952), pp. 32–5, and 32–69 passim. 114 Fromme, Von der Weimarer Verfassung, p. 74. Jürgen Bach, Franz von Papen in der Weimarer Republik. Aktivitäten in Politik und Presse 1918–1932 (Düsseldorf, 1977). 115 Hermann Pünder, Politik in der Reichskanzlei. Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1929–1932, edited by Thilo Vogelsand (Stuttgart, 1961), p. 137. 116 Kessler, Tagebücher, 3 June 1932, p. 670. 117 Ibid., 4 June 1932. 118 Pünder, Politik, p. 136. See Quaatz, Die Deutschnationalen, p. 106, 22 March 1930. 119 Dr F. Friedensburg, ‘Fünfzehn Notverordnungen in zwei Jahren’. Die Justiz Band VIII, Heft 7 (1933), 314–22; Boldt, ‘Der Artikel 48’, 293–94, 301; Funke, ‘Republik im Untergang’, 530; Heiber, Weimar Republic, 180, has slightly differing figures. 120 Barch R3001/6670 (22087), Bl. 6, 79, 85; Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Das Kabinett von Papen, prepared by Karl-Heinz Minuth, 2 vols (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1989) vol. 2, Doc. 239b, here 1037f., note 10.

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121 Reibnitz, Dreieck, p. 116. 122 Das Kabinett von Papen, vol. 1, Doc. 7. On the relationship between constitutionality and the usage of Art. 48 before Papen, see Carl Schmitt, ‘Die Staatsrechtliche Bedeutung der Notverordnung, insbesondere ihre Rechtgültigkeit’. Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze, pp. 235–62. This article was originally in Notverordnung und öffentliche Verwaltung (Berlin, 1931), pp. 10–35. 123 Papen, Die Wahrheit, pp. 32–3. 124 Das Kabinett von Papen, Doc. 97: ‘Der Reichskommissar für Preisüberwachung Goerdeler an den Reichskanzler. 8. August 1932 (Vorschläge zur Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsreform)’. McElligott, ‘Political Culture’, pp. 40–41. 125 Barch N2035/2 (Nachlass Bracht) Bl. 509–12. Franz von Papen, Vom Scheitern einer Demokratie 1930–1933 (Mainz, 1968), pp. 144–5, 182–4; Theodor Eschenburg, ‘Franz von Papen’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1 Jahrgang, 2 Heft (April 1953), 153–69, here 161, 163. Manfred Funke, ‘Republik im Untergang. Die Zerstörung des Parlamentarismus als Vorbereitung der Diktatur’, in Bracher, Funke, Jacobsen (eds), Die Weimarer Republik, p. 512. Heinrich August Winkler, Der Weg in die Katastrophe: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1930 bis 1933 (Berlin, 1987), pp. 734–40. 126 Barch N2035/2 (Nachlass Bracht) Bl. 509–12: Reinhold Wulle (Reichsführer Deutschvölkischen Freiheitsbewegung): Informationsbrief 231, 1 October 1932. 127 Frhr. v. Gayl, ‘Gesichtspunkte für den Staatsneuaufbau’, 22. Aug. 1932’, in Gerd Schwerin, ‘Wilhelm Frhr. v. Gayl, der Innenminister im Kabinett Papen 1932’ (Erlangen-Nürnberg, Univ., Diss.,1972), 225–31. 128 R. G. Quaatz, P. Bang (eds), Das deutschnationale Freiheits-Programm mit einem Vorwort von Dr Alfred Hugenberg (Berlin, 1932), pp. 7, 10. 129 Quoted from Carl Schmitt ‘Gesunde Wirtschaft im Starken Staat’, unidentified newspaper cutting (1932), Barch N2035/2 Nachlaß Bracht, Bl.132. This is a report of his lecture also published as ‘Starken Staat und gesunde Wirtschaft’, in Mitteilungen des Vereins zur Wahrung gemeinsamen wirtschaftlichen Interessen in Rheinland und Westfalen, no. 1 (Düsseldorf, 1932), pp. 13–32, here p. 17. Angela Reinthal, Reinhard Mußgnug, Dorothee Mußgnug (eds), Briefwechsel Ernst Forsthoff  – Carl Schmitt (1926–1974) (Berlin, 2007). 130 He had gone some way towards this already with the illegal coup against Prussia on 20 July, Dietrich Orlow, Weimar Prussia 1925–1933: Illusion of Strength 1925–1933 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1991), pp. 225, 50. 131 Fromme, Von der Weimarer Verfassung, p. 64. The decree had been already signed by Hindenburg on 30 August without being dated and without the grounds for dissolution being given. Das Kabinett von Papen, vol. 2, Doc. 134, here p. 544, note 3; Doc. 158, here pp. 651–2. See Schmitt’s comments Carl Schmitt Tagebücher 1930 bis 1934, edited Wolfgang Schuller and Gerd Giesler (Berlin, 2010), p. 215, and in ‘Solange das Imperium da ist’, ed. by Hertweck/Kisoudis, pp. 70, 151, n. 8. 132 Pünder, Politik, 18 September 1932, p. 146. 133 Das Kabinett von Papen, vol. 2, Doc. 135, here pp. 556–7. 134 Quaatz, Die Deutschnationalen, p. 203, 12 September 1932. 135 Kessler, Tagebücher, p. 670, 30 May 1932. See also Leopold Schwarzschild, who agreed, ‘Die nächsten Stationen’ 4 June 1932, in Die Letzten Jahre vor Hitler, pp. 190–4. Mommsen and Gillmann (eds), Politische Schriften, pp. 249–51, a point originally made by A. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, ‘The Political Dilemma in Germany’. Foreign Affairs, 8, 4 (July 1930), 628. See also Michael Dreyer, Militant Democracy,

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137 138 139 140

141 142 143

144

Notes in Hung, Weiss-Sussex, Wilkes (eds), Beyond Glitter and Doom, p. 77. The classic statement on the break in 1930, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik ([Villingen 1955] Düsseldorf, 1984), pp. 305, 367ff. reiterated in Kolb, Die Weimarer Republik, p. 127. By the summer of 1932 political violence had become an everyday occurrence, so much so that talk of ‘civil war’ conditions on Germany’s streets and in the countryside was commonplace, Winkler, Der Weg in die Katastrophe, pp. 761–5; Dirk Blasius, Weimars Ende: Bürgerkrieg und Politik 1930–1933 (Frankfurt a/ Main, 2008). Papen’s Reichsexekution against the Prussian administration, in effect transferring powers from Prussia to the Reich, caused alarm among regional governments, not least in Bavaria. The Prussian administration supported by other Land governments took the Reich to court – and won its case, but to little effect. Von Papen’s attack upon Prussia was in effect the first step towards a much vaunted constitutional and administrative reform of the Reich, which had been under discussion for several years and which only found its completion after 1933. Das Kabinett von Papen, vol. 1, Doc. 96, p. 353; Further documentation in Herbert Michaelis, Ernst Schraepler (eds), Ursachen und Folgen. Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart 26 Volumes, Vol. 8 (Berlin, 1958–1979), pp. 557–601 passim. On the issue of Reich-Land relations, see the pamphlet by Bavaria’s Social Democrat prime minister, Dr Heinrich Held, Das preußische-deutsche Problem (Berlin, Leipzig, 1929). For the case heard by the Reichsgericht, see the documentation in Arnold Brecht (ed.), Preußen contra Reich vor dem Staatsgerichtshof (Berlin: Dietz, 1933); Dr Schwalb, ‘Die Einwendungen gegen das Staatsgerichts-Urteil vom 25. Oktober 1932 in der Preußensache’. Die Justiz, 8, 5/6 (1933), 217–39. Das Kabinett von Papen, vol. 2, Doc. 177, here p. 808, note 2. Edmund Schultz (ed.), with an Introduction by Friedrich Georg Jünger, Ein Bilderwerk zur Geschichte der deutschen Nachkriegszeit: Das Gesicht der Demokratie (Leipzig, 1931), p. 7. Das Kabinet von Papen, vol. 2, Doc. 135, here, 556–7. Stolberg-Wernigerode Diktatur oder Parlamentarismus?, p. 13. Winkler, Der Weg in die Katastrophe, pp. 810–56, esp. 845–8. Carl Schmitt, ‘Der Begriff der modernen Demokratie in seinem Verhältnis zum Staatsbegriff ’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 51 (Tübingen, 1924), p. 822; Braatz, ‘Two Neo-Conservative Myths’, p. 576. Wilhelm Hennig, ‘Zum Problem der deutschen Staatsauffassung’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 7 (1959), 1–23. Cited in Petra Weber, ‘Goethe und “der Geist von Weimar”. Die Rede Werner Thormanns bei der Verfassungsfeier in der Paulskirche am 11. August 1932’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 46 (1998), 109–35, here 110. Martin, Demokratie oder Diktatur?, p. 103. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1895–1936 Hubris (London, 1998), p. 295; Lepsius, ‘The Model of Charismatic Leadership’, p. 178. David Welch, ‘Working Towards the Führer: Charismatic Leadership and the Image of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Propaganda’, in A. McElligott and T. Kirk (eds), Working Towards the Führer. Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw (Manchester, 2004), pp. 93–117. See Bracher, Die Auflösung, pp. 626–7 note 137 for the description of Hitler as the ‘Austrian corporal’, and pp. 632–8 for the emphasis on the role of an internecine political intrigue in bringing Hitler to power.

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145 Correspondence in Jaser, Picht, Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe, pp. 1985, 1987, 1992, 1998, 2017–18, 2103–6, 2108–9, 2114. 146 Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914. Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, 2000), p. 136. Jesko von Hoegen, Der Held von Tannenberg. Genese und Funktion des Hindenburg-Mythos (Cololgne, 2007), pp. 203–15. 147 Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921 (Frankfurt am Main, 2003 [1979]), p. 448, 22 June 1920. Kuzmin’s novel was originally published in 1910. 148 Katherine Roper, ‘Fridericus films in Weimar Society: Potsdamismus in a Democracy’. German Studies Review, 26, 3 (October 2003), 493–514; Robert Gerwarth, The Bismarck myth: Weimar Germany and the legacy of the Iron Chancellor (Oxford, 2005). Richard E. Frankel, Bismarck’s Shadow. The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898–1945 (Oxford and New York, 2005). Thomas Mergel, ‘Dictatorship and Democracy, 1918–1939’, in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), pp. 423–53, here 430. 149 Beyerle, Zehn Jahre Reichsverfassung, pp. 7, 40; Reibnitz, Im Dreieck, pp. 102–04; Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1922, p. 199; Heuss, Führer, pp. 103–04. 150 Mühlhausen, Friedrich Ebert, pp. 142–50, 572–93; Winkler, Der Schein der Normalität, p. 232; Haungs, Reichspräsident und parlamentarische Kabinettsregierung, pp. 178–81. Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919, pp. 681–5, 6 and 8 February 1919. 151 Peter Fritzsche, ‘Presidential Victory and Popular Festivity in Weimar Germany: Hindenburg’s 1925 Election’. Central European History, 23, 2/3 (June-September 1990), 205–24. 152 Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg: Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich, 2007), especially pp. 466, 471–2; Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg; Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford, 2009), pp. 12, 75–6. Background in Heinrich August Winkler, Der Schein der Normalität: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1924 bis 1930 (Berlin etc, 1985), pp. 229–45. 153 Andreas Kossert, Ostpreussen. Geschichte und Mythos (Munich, 2005), p. 210; Pyta, Hindenburg, pp. 456–57. 154 Meinhold Lurz, Kriegerdenkmäler in Deutschland Band 4: Weimarer Republik (Heidelberg, 1985), pp. 47–100. 155 G. Schultze-Pfaelzer, Wie Hindenburg Reichspräsident wurde (Berlin, 1925), pp. 34–6, 46–8, 58–9. 156 von Hoegen, Der Held von Tannenberg, Illustration 13. 157 Anon (Von Regierungsrat ***), Ein Tag aus dem Leben des Reichspräsidenten (Berlin, 1925), p. 37. 158 Beatrice and Helmut Heiber (eds), Die Rückseite des Hakenkreuzes. Absonderliches aus den Akten des ‘Dritten Reiches’ (Wiesbaden, 2005), pp. 123–83. Henrik Eberle (ed.), Briefe an Hitler, Ein Volk schreibt seinem Führer. Unbekannte Dokumente aus Moskauer Archiven – zum ersten Mal veröffentlicht (BergischGladbach, 2007), translated as Letters to Hitler (Cambridge, 2012). 159 Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Between Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1989 [1987]), for many references to this gap between everyday life and the image. 160 Karl Tschuppik, ‘Hindenburg’. Foreign Affairs, 10 (October 1931), 54–69, here 60–1. 161 This is discussed by von Hoegen, Der Held von Tannenberg, pp. 260–356. 162 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 385‚ Vereidigung des Reichspräsidenten v. Hindenburg vor dem Reichstag am 12. Mai 1925’, p. 1721. Pyta, Hindenburg, p. 485.

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163 Heuss, Führer, p. 104. 164 Haungs, Reichspräsident und parlamentarische Kabinettsregierung, pp. 181–5; Winkler, Der Schein der Normalität, p. 245. Arnold Brecht, Aus nächster Nähe, Lebenserinnerungen 1884–1927 (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 455–6. For a contrary view: Pyta, Hindenburg, pp. 461, 481–3, 486. In general see, Andreas Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic (Princeton, 1964). 165 Albert Grzesinski, Im Kampf um die deutschen Republik. Erinnerungen eines Sozialdemokraten, edited and introduced by Eberhard Kolb (Munich, 2009), pp. 245–6; Theodor Lessing, Hindenburg (Berlin, 1925), pp. 20–23, originally published as ‘Hindenburg’, in Prager Tagblatt, 25 February 1925, p. 3. See also Rudolf Olden, Hindenburg oder der Geist der preussischen Armee (Paris, 1935, reprint Hikdesheim, 1982), pp. 210–46, 324–54; anon. Von Hindenburg zu Hindenburg (1914–1925) (Berlin, 1925), 22 page pamphlet written from a left-wing (Communist) stance that also criticizes the SPD (e.g. p. 13). 166 Ernst Troeltsch, Spektator-Briefe. Aufsätze über die deutsche Revolution und die Weltpolitik 1918/22, edited H. Baron (Tübingen, 1924), p. 47. 167 Kessler, Tagebücher, 2 October 1930, p. 643. 168 Cited in Walther Lambach, Die Herrschaft der Fünfhundert. Ein Bild des parlamentarischen Lebens im neuen Deutschland (Hamburg and Berlin, 1926), p. 19. Lambach, a DNVP deputy, vigorously refuted this. 169 Willy Hellpach, Politische Prognose für Deutschland (Berlin, 1928), p. 140; Leopold Schwarzschild, ‘Ende eines Systems’. Das Tagebuch Jg. 11 (5 April 1930), 527–9, here 528. In general, Andreas Wesemann (ed.), Chronik eines Untergangs: Deutschland 1924–39; die Beiträge Leopold Schwarzschilds in den Zeitschriften ‘Das Tage-Buch’ und ‘Das Neue Tage-Buch’ (Vienna, 2005). Bernd Sösemann, Das Ende der Weimarer Republik in der Kritik demokratischer Publizisten: Theodor Wolff, Ernst Feder, Julius Elbau, Leopold Schwarzschild (Berlin, 1976). For the political background, see, James K. Pollock, ‘The German Party System’. The American Political Science Review, 24, 4 (November 1929), 859–91. 170 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, ‘The Political Dilemma in Germany’, p. 620. 171 Heinz Flügel, ‘Wir träumten von verborgenen Reich . . .’, in Rudolf Pförtner (ed.), Alltag in der Weimarer Republik. Erinnerungen an eine unruhige Zeit (Düsseldorf, Vienna, New York, 1990), pp. 170–83, here 174–5. See the two biographies in Theodore Abel, The Nazi Movement. Why Hitler Came to Power (New York, [1938] 1966), pp. 262–89. The later edition (1985) with a foreword by Thomas Childers has the slightly amended title: Why Hitler Came into Power. I have used the earlier edition. 172 Flügel, ‘Wir träumten’, p. 176. 173 Reibnitz, Im Dreieck, pp. 216–17; Arthur Dix, Die deutschen Reichstagswahlen 1871–1930 und die Wandlungen der Volksgliederung (Tübingen, 1930), pp. 32–4; Wolfram Pyta, Gegen Hitler und für die Republik. Die Auseinandersetzung der deutschen Sozialdemokratie mit der NSDAP in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1989), pp. 133–36. See also the essays in Jürgen Reulecke (ed.), Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2003). 174 Bracht, who was close to the Centre Party, was appointed Reichskommissar of Prussia after 20 July 1932 and then Reich interior minister in von Papen’s second cabinet (3 December 1932–30 January 1933). 175 Barch N2035/2, Bl. 210 (Nachlass Franz Bracht). No date but probably written sometime October 1931.

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176 See Max Weber, ‘Politik als Beruf ’, in Gesammelte Politische Schriften, pp. 505–60. 177 Wilhelm Schramm, Radikale Politikdie Welt diesseits und jenseits des Bolschewismus (Munich, 1932), p. 55. Biographical details in Horst G. Kliemann und Stephen S. Taylor (eds), Who is Who in Germany (Montreal, 1964). Gerhard Schulz, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur: Verfassungspolitik und Reichsreform in der Weimarer Republik. Band 2, Deutschland am Vorabend der grossen Krise (Berlin, 1987), pp. 33–9. Idem, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur: Verfassungspolitik und Reichsreform in der Weimarer Republik. Band 3, Von Brüning zu Hitler: der Wandel des politischen Systems in Deutschland 1930–1933 (Berlin, 1992). 178 August Winnig, Das Reich als Republik 1918–1928 (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1928), p. 165. 179 Kessler, Tagebücher, pp. 640–1, 15 Sept. 1930. R. H. S. Crossman, ‘Germany – The Inner Conflict’, The Listener, 13 June 1934, p. 983. 180 Willy Hellpach and Graf zu Dohna, Die Krise des deutschen Parlamentarismus. Vorträge auf der Tagung deutscher Hochschullehrer in Weimar 1927 (Karlsruhe, 1927). 181 Winnig, Das Reich als Republik, p. 54. 182 Richard Bessel, ‘The Front Generation and the Politics of the Weimar Republic’, in Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 121–36; Hans Mommsen, ‘Generationskonflikt und Jugendrevolte in der Weimarer Republik’, in Thomas Koebner, Rolf-Peter Janz, Frank Trommler (eds), ‘Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit’. Der Mythos Jugend (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), pp. 50–67. The classic statement on generational alienation from a cultural perspective is to be found in Peter Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider (London, 1969). 183 Dix, Die deutschen Reichstagswahlen, p. 32. For a quantitative/statistical analysis of electoral cohorts, Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Wählergenerationen in Preussen zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik. Versuch zu einem Kontinuitätsproblem des protestantischen Preussen in seien Kernprovinzen. Mit eine Einführung von Otto Büsch (Berlin, 1987), p. 409. In general, Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republic. Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Munich, 1968). 184 Max Knight, The German Executive (Stanford, 1952), pp. 25–6. Martin Schumacher, M.d.R. Die Reichstagsabgeordneten derWeimarer Republik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Düsseldorf, 1994), ‘Forschungsbericht’, p. 46. 185 Victor Engelhardt, ‘Die Zusammensetzung des deutschen Reichstag’, in Die Arbeit 1931, p. 32. Heinrich Best, ‘Elite Structure and regime (dis)continuity in Germany 1867–1933: the case of the parliamentary leadership groups’. German History 7 (1990), 1–27. 186 Heinrich Geiger, ‘Der Reichstag der alten Herren’. Die Tat XXII (1930), 285. On the election itself see: James K. Pollock, ‘The German Reichstag Elections of 1930’. The American Political Science Review, 24, 4 (November 1930), 989–95. 187 Victor Engelhardt, ‘Die Zusammensetzung des deutschen Reichstag’, in Die Arbeit 1931, Tabelle 3, p. 32. 188 Michael Kater, The Nazi Party. A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919–1945 (Oxford, 1983); Dietrich Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party, Vol. 1, 1919–33 (Pittsburgh, 1969); Detlef Mühlberger, Hitler’s Followers, Studies in the Sociology of the Nazi Movement (London, 1990); Jeremy Noakes, The Nazi

320

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190 191

192 193

194

195

196 197

Notes Party in Lower Saxony, 1921–1933 (Oxford, 1971); Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill and London, 1986). See Theodor Geiger, ‘Panik im Mittelstand’, in Die Arbeit. Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde 7 (1930), 637–54, here 649, for their occupations. Barch, Sammlung Schumacher 208 I, Bd.2 Gau Schleswig-Holstein, Bl.145; Barch, NS 26/232 (Innenstadt München). Ernest M. Doblin and Claire Pohly, ‘The Social Composition of the Nazi Leadership’. The American Journal of Sociology, 51, 1 (July 1945), 43, Table 1. Theodor Heuss, Hitlers Weg. Eine historisch-politische Studie über den Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig, 1932), pp. 119, 159. Of course, as many supported the republic and were to be found in the youth wing of pro-republican organizations such as the Reichsbanner. See, Franz Walter, ‘Republik, das ist nicht zu viel’. Partei und Jugend in der Krise des Weimarer Sozialismus (Bielefeld, 2011); Peter Zimmermann, Theodor Haubach (1896–1945). Eine Politische Biographie (Munich, Hamburg, 2004), pp. 123–46. My concern here, however, is mainly with anti-republican youth. Dix, Die deutschen Reichstagswahlen, p. 43. Artur Mahraun, Das Jungdeutsche Manifest. Volk gegen Kaste und Geld; Sicherung des Friedens durch Neubau der Staaten (Berlin, 1927), pp. 71–9. Thomas Kühne, Kamaradschaft. Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 27–110 passim. Also Breundal, Volksgemeinschaft oder Volksstaat, pp. 301–13. The classic statement of this ‘Front Generation’ is Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewitter (Storm of Steel) first published in 1920, Rolf Peter Sieferle, Die Konservative Revolution. Fünf biographische Skizze (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), pp. 132–63. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 6, p. 220; Klaus Hornung, Der Jungdeutsche Orden (Düsseldorf, 1958), pp. 23–41, 87–96; Wolfgang R. Krabbe, Die gescheiterte Zukunft der Ersten Republik. Jugendorganisation bürgerlicher Parteien im Weimarer Staat (1918–1933) (Opladen, 1995). See also the contributions to idem (ed.), Politische Jugend in der Weimarer Republik (Bochum, 1993). The phrase is borrowed from my colleague Professor John Horne, Trinity College Dublin. Mahraun, Das Jungdeutsche Manifest, pp. 7–10. In general see: Yuji Ishida, Jungkonservative in der Weimarer Republik. Der Ring-Kreis 1928–1933 (Frankfurt, Bern, New York, Paris, 1988); Berthold Petzinna, Erziehung zum Deutschen Lebenstil. Vorsprung und Entwicklung des junkonservativen ‘Ring’-Kreises 1918–1933 (Berlin, 2000); Annelies Thimme, Flucht in den Mythos. Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die Niederlage von 1918 (Göttingen, 1969). Wolfgang R. Krabbe, ‘Die Bismarckjugend der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei’. German Studies Review, 17, 1 (February 1994), 9–32, esp. 15–18, 20–21. Gerwarth, The Bismarck Myth, pp. 106–7. Conan Fischer, The German Communists and the Rise of Nazism, pp. 117, 137, 139–40, 145; idem, ‘Class Enemies or Class Brothers? Communist-Nazi Relations in Germany, 1929–1933’. European History Quarterly, 15, 3 (1985), 259–79; idem and Detlef Mühlberger, ‘The Pattern of the SA’s Social Appeal’, in Conan Fischer (ed.), The Rise of the National Socialism and the Working Class in Weimar Germany (Providence and Oxford, 1996), pp. 99–113. Abel, The Nazi Movement, chap. vii passim. See also Wilfried Böhnke, Die NSDAP im Ruhrgebiet:1920–1933 (Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 1974).

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198 Harrison Brown, ‘Germany: Youth Without Hope’, The Listener, 2 November 1932 and Sir Evelyn Wrench, ‘What Germany was Thinking Last Week’, ibid., 19 April 1933, pp. 614, 632. Pyta, Gegen Hitler und für die Republik, pp. 125–27, 134; Detlev J. K. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der Klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), p. 94. 199 Walther Rathenau, An Deutschlands Jugend (Berlin, 1918), pp. 105, 121. See his letter to Walther Kröner, 28.9.1917, in Jaser, Picht, Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe, pp. 1773–74. 200 Ernst Jünger, ‘Revolution und Idee’, in Völkischer Beobachter 23/24 September 1923, cited in Helmuth Kiesel, Ernst Jünger. Die Biographie (Munich 2007, 2009 pbk edition), p. 267. Mahraun, Das Jungdeutsche Manifest, pp. 43, 46, 53, 57–60. 201 Flügel, ‘Wir träumten’, p. 177. 202 Franz Meyer, ‘Zu Fuß von Köln nach München-Gladbach’, in Pförtner (ed.), Alltag in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 200–09, here 204. 203 Pyta, Gegen Hitler und für die Republik, p. 82. 204 Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt Briefe 1930–1983, edited with commentary and a postscript by Helmuth Kiesel (Stuttgart, 1999). For background, Günter Reuter and Henrique Ricardo Otten (eds), Der Aufstand gegen den Bürger. Antibürgerlichen Denken im 20. Jahrhundert (Würzburg, 1999). Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932: ein Handbuch, third expanded edition (Darmstadt, 1089 [orig.1949]). 205 Rüdiger von der Goltz, Tribut-Justiz. Ein Buch um die deutsche Freiheit (Berlin, 1932), pp. 104–05. Von der Goltz was a well-known right-wing lawyer who had also been a member of the Freikorps. He sat in the Reichstag after 1933. 206 Jürgen Falter, ‘The Young Membership of the NSDAP between 1925 and 1933. A Demographic and Social Profile’, in Conan Fischer (ed.), The Rise of the National Socialism and the Working Class in Weimar Germany (Providence and Oxford, 1996), pp. 79–98. 207 http://www.ns-dokuzentrum-rlp.de/index.php?id590. 208 Ibid. As a supporter of Gregor Strasser, Kayser later found himself in opposition to the NSDAP; arrested in 1935 for his role in the Black Front (Schwarzen Front) resistance group, he remained in custody until the end of the war. 209 Hans Gerth, ‘The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition’. The American Journal of Sociology, xlv, 4 (January 1940), 530, Table 2. See also, Der Abend Nr. 436, 17 September 1930 for a discussion of Reichstag deputies. 210 Dix, Die deutschen Reichstagswahlen, p. 30. Larry Eugene Jones, ‘“The Dying Middle”: Weimar Germany and the Fragmentation of Bourgeois Politics’. Central European History, 5, 1 (March 1972), 23–54. 211 Junius Alter (pseud. for Franz Sontag), Nationalisten, Deutschlands nationales Führertum der Nachkriegszeit (Leipzig, 1930), p. 139. There was a paradox here, given Hitler’s emphasis upon legality precisely at this moment. 212 Heuss, Hitlers Weg, pp. 156–7, and 160 for the quote. A new edition with an introduction by Eberhard Jäckel has the amended title: Hitlers Weg. Eine Schrift aus dem Jahre 1932 (Tübingen, 1968). I have used the original version. von der Goltz, Tribut-Justiz, p. 119; Abel, The Nazi Movement, p. 179. 213 Dix, Die deutschen Reichstagswahlen, pp. 33, 34–5. Students had played an impotant part in the counter-revolutionary Free Corps at the beginning of the republic, such as the Studentenwehr, the Yorcksche Jägerkorps made up of in BerlinLichterfelde and Ortelsberg in East Prussia, Günter Paulus, ‘Die soziale Struktur

322

214 215 216 217 218

219 220 221 222

223 224 225 226

227 228 229

230

Notes der Freikorps in den ersten Monaten nach der Novemberrevolution’. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, Heft 5 (1955), pp. 685–704, here 696–9. Abel, The Nazi Movement, pp. 131–2. Geiger, ‘Panik im Mittelstand’, op cit. Jürgen Falter, Hitlers Wähler (Munich, 1991), pp. 146–54, esp. 147. Dix, Die deutschen Reichstagswahlen, p. 32. Luke Springman, ‘Exotic Attractions and Imperialist Fantasies in Weimar Youth Culture’, in John Williams (ed.), Weimar Culture Revisited (New York, 2011), pp. 99–116. Huber, Dokumente 3, Doc. 423, pp. 468–70. Alter, Nationalisten, p. 125; Heuss, Hitlers Weg, pp. 125. Larry E. Jones, ‘German Liberalism and the Alienation of the Younger Generation in the Weimar Republic’, in Konrad H. Jarausch and Larry E. Jones (eds), In Search of a Liberal Germany. Studies in the History of German Liberalism from 1789 to the Present (New York, 1990), pp. 287–321. On myth and the ‘stranger king’ see: Marshall Sahlins, ‘The Alterity of Power and Vice Versa, with Reflections on Stranger-Kings and the Real-Politics of the Marvellous’, in Anthony McElligott, Liam Chambers, Ciara Breathnach, Catherine Lawless (eds), Power in History. From Medieval Ireland to the Post-Modern World (Dublin, Portland OR, 2011), pp. 283–308. Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 8, Doc. 1804. Wolfgang Stammler, Germanisches Führerideal. Rede gehalten zum 60 Gründungsfeier des Reichs (Greifswald, 1931), pp. 3–6 and passim. Felix Genzmer, Staat und Nation: Rede, gehalten bei der Übernahme des Rektorats der Philipps-Universität zu Marburg (Marburg, 1929), p. 26. Staat und NSDAP: 1930–1932: Quellen zur Ära Brüning, prepared by Ilse Maurer (Düsseldorf, 1977), Doc. 6, pp. 25–8, here 25. For lower estimates, Wolfgang Zorn, ‘Student Politics in the Weimar Republic’. Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 1 (1970), pp. 128–43, here 130. See also, Peter D. Stachura, ‘The Ideology of the Hitler Youth in the Kampfzeit’. ibid., 8, 3 (July 1973), 155–67. Staat und NSDAP, Docs. 6, 44, pp. 28–30, 232. Verfassungsrede gehalten von Reichsminister des Innern Dr. Wirth bei der Feier der Reichsregierung am 2. August 1930 (Berlin, 1930), p. 12. Ibid., p. 16. This was a phenomenon that extended beyond Germany to much of Europe at this time, Luciano Cavalli, ‘Charismatic Domination, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Plebiscitary Democracy in the Twentieth Century’, in Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici (eds), Changing Conceptions of Leadership (New York, 1986), pp. 67–81. Mahraun, Das Jungdeutsche Manifest, p. 135. Michael Wildt, Generation der Unbedingten: das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002). Breuer, Carl Schmitt, pp. 173–76, 233–56; Ralf Walkenhaus, Konservatives Staatsdenken: eine wissenssoziologische Studie zu Ernst Rudolf Huber (Berlin, 1997); Martin Jürgens, Staat und Reich bei Ernst Rudolf Huber: sein Leben und Werk bis 1945 aus rechtsgeschichtlicher Sicht (Frankfurt am Main etc, 2005). For Mitscherlich, Carl Schmitt Tagebücher 1930–1934, p. 216, 15 September 1932. Cf., Florian Meinel, Der Jurist in der industriellen Gesellschaft. Ernst Forsthoff und seine Zeit (Berlin, 2011) for a similar prognosis of a contemporary of Huber’s. Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932: Ein Handbuch, sixth revised edition (Graz, 2005); Sebastien Maass, Kämpfer um ein Drittes Reich. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und sein Kreis (Kiel, 2010).

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231 Papen’s cabinet resigned on 17 November but continued in an administrative capacity until the next government could be formed. Das Kabinett von Papen, vol. 2, Docs. 213–15. 232 Quaatz, Die Deutschnationalen, p. 207, 3 November 1932; Carl Schmitt Tagebücher 1930–1934, 17, 18, 25 October 1932, pp. 225, 227. The court’s verdict is reprinted in Preussen contra Reich vor dem Staatsgerichtshof: Stenogrammbericht der Verhandlungen vor dem Staatsgerichtshof in Leipzig vom 10. bis 14. und vom 17. Okt. 1932, mit einem Vorwort von Ministerialdirektor Arnold Brecht (Berlin, 1933), pp. 492–517. 233 Das Kabinett von Papen 2, Docs. 215, 240. 234 Othmar Spann, Hauptpunkte der universalistischen Staatsauffassung (Berlin: Erneuerungs-Verlag, 1931). Gerhard Schulz, ‘Sand gegen den Wind. Letzter Versuch zur Beratung einer Reform der Weimarer Richsverfassung im Frühjahr 1933’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 44 (1996), 295–319, here 308. Winkler, Der Weg in die Katastrophe, pp. 802–09; Pyta, ‘Konstitutionelle Demokratie’, pp. 429–30. 235 Thilo Vogelsang, Reichswehr, Staat und NSDAP: Beiträge zur deutschen Geschichte 1930–1932 (Stuttgart, 1962), Doc. 27. Schwarzschild, ‘Auch nur einer Partei, 6 August 1932’, in Die Letzten Jahre vor Hitler, pp. 198–204, here 202. Irene Strenge, Kurt von Scheicher: Politik im Reichswehrministerium am Ende der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 2006), pp. 168–70, 189–95, 204–09. Wolfram Pyta, ‘Vorbereitungen für den militärischen Ausnahmezustand unter Papen/Schleicher’. Militärgechichtliche Mitteilungen 51 (1992), 385–428. Eberhard Kolb and Wolfram Pyta, ‘Die Staatsnotstandsplanung unter den Regierungen Papen und Schleicher’, in Heinrich August Winkler (ed.), Handlungsspielräume und Alternativen in der deutshen Staatskrise 1930–1933 (Munich, 1992), 153–79. 236 H. L., ‘The National Revolution in Germany’, Bulletin of International News, 16 March 1933, p. 6; Bracher, Die Auflösung, p. 624. Hertweck/Kisoudis (eds), ‘Solange das Imperium da ist’, p. 155, n. 15. See Pyta, ‘Konstitutionelle Demokratie’, pp. 425–8. See von Papen, Die Wahrheit einer Gasse, pp. 253–81 passim, where he downplays his own role in bringing about Schleicher’s downfall. 237 Kessler, Tagebücher, p. 702, 28 January 1933. Bracher, Die Auflösung, pp. 632–3. 238 Ibid., pp. 624–38; Henry Ashby Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: 30 January 1933 (London, 1996). 239 Akten der Reichskanzlei, Weimarer Republik. Das Kabinett von Schleicher 3 Dezember 1932 bis 30 Januar 1933, prepared by Anton Golecki (hereafter Das Kabinett von Schleicher) (Boppard am Rhein, 1986), LXV–LXX; Funke, ‘Republik im Untergang’, 516–17. 240 Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1933–1934 (Frankfurt am Main 2003 [1977]), p. 448. 241 http://www.wahlen-in-deutschland.de/wrtw.htm. 242 Das Kabinett von Schleicher, Docs. 71, 77 and 79 passim. 243 Barch N2035/2, Nachlaß Bracht, Bl. 169. Spahn, who had been a member of the Centre Party, had joined the DNVP in 1921, and in 1933 moved to the NSDAP. Gabriele Clemens: Martin Spahn und der Rechtskatholizismus in der Weimarer Republik (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte. Reihe B: Forschungen. Bd. 37) (Mainz, 1983). 244 Harold James, ‘The Weimar Economy’, in McElligott (ed.), Weimar Germany, 122–4. 245 Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalendar 1932 (Munich, 1933), pp. 139, 176, 274. Braatz, ‘Two Neo-Conservative Myths’, pp. 573–75.; Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 1006.

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246 Akten der Reichskanzlei, Regierung Hitler 1933–1933: Teil I 1933/34, Band 1: 30 Januar bis 31 August 1933, prepared by Karl-Heinz Minuth (Boppard am Rhein, 1983), Doc. 1, p. 3. Winkler, Der Weg in die Katastrophe, pp. 857–64. Bracher, Die Auflösung, pp. 636–7, argues to the contrary, stating that the political initiative lay with Hitler who made the running from the outset. 247 Papen, Die Wahrheit einer Gasse, p. 272. See also, Quaatz, Die Deutschnationalen, p. 229, 1 February 1933.

Chapter 9 1 Otto Forst de Battaglia, ‘Das Antlitz der Diktatur’, in idem, (ed.), Prozeß der Diktatur (Zurich, Leipzig, Vienna, 1932), p. 385. 2 Vossische Zeitung Nr. 50, 30 January 1933, Abend-Ausgabe: ‘Kabinett Hitler-PapenHugenberg’. 3 Ernst Rudolf Huber, Verfassungsrecht des Großdeutschen Reiches (Hamburg, 1939), p. 142, cited in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds), Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, Vol. 2 (Exeter, 1984), pp. 198–9. 4 Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 7: Ausbau, Schutz und Untergang der Weimarer Repulblik (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1984), pp. 1084–6, 1090–1, 1145–6, 1205–11. 5 George Gerhard, ‘Herr Hitler Comes to Bat’. The North American Review, 234, 2 (August 1932), 104–9. But see Bukower Lokal-Anzeiger Nr. 14, 38 Jg., 31 January 1933, which mentions surprise in political circles at Hitler’s appointment. 6 Daniel Binchy, ‘Adolf Hitler’ in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 22, No. 85 (Mar., 1933), 29–47, here 47. 7 Carl Schmitt Tagebücher 1930–1934, p. 257, 31 January 1933. 8 Goebbels Tagebücher, vol. 2, entry 30 June 1930; see also 26 June 1930, 29 June 1930. Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), Chapter 2 on the development of the ‘charismatic myth’; idem, ‘The Führer Image and Political Integration: The Popular Conception of Hitler in Bavaria during the Third Reich’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (eds), Der ‘Führerstaat’: Mythos und Realität. Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reichs/The ‘Führer State’: Myth and Reality. Studies on the Structure and Policies of the Third Reich (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 133–63. Ludolf Herbst, Hitlers Charisma. Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias (Frankfurt am Main, 2010). 9 Sebastian Haffner, Germany Jekyll and Hyde. A Contemporary Account of Nazi Germany (London, 2008, orig. 1940), pp. 21–2. Lothar Kettenacker, ‘Sozialpsychologische Aspekte der Führer-Herrschaft’, in Hirschfeld and Kettenacker (eds), Der ‘Führerstaat’, pp. 98–132; idem, ‘Hitler’s Impact on the Lower Middle Class’, in David Welch (ed.), Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations (London, 1983), p. 11. 10 See the quote of Prince Max von Baden in Theodore Abel, The Nazi Movement. Why Hitler Came to Power (New York, [1938] 1966), p. 18. And letter from Rathenau to Felix Schottlaender, describing the Germans as ‘deeply authoritarian’, in Alexander Jaser, Clemens Picht, Ernst Schulin (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe Teilband 2: 1914–1922 (Düsseldorf, 2006), p. 757. 11 Norbert Frei, Der Führerstaat. Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft 1933 bis 1945 (Munich, 1987) translated as National Socialist Rule in Germany: the Führer

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25

325

State 1933–1945, translated by Simon B. Steyne (Oxford, 1993). Frei’s third phase of unbounded radicalisation from 1938 until 1945 is not dealt with here. For a chronology that corresponds roughly to the one adopted in this book, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Stufen der Machtergreifung  Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gerhard Shulz, Wolfgang Sauer, Die nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung. Sudien zur Errichtung des totalitären Herrschaftssystems in Deutschland 1933/34: I (Frankfurt, 1962), p. 498. For an interesting attempt to periodize the Weimar Republic in terms of its leadership, John Wheeler Bennett, ‘The End of the Weimar Republic’. Foreign Affairs, 50, 2 (January 1972), 351–71, here 353–8, 364. Akten der Reichskanzlei. Regierung Hitler 1933–1933: Teil I 1933/34, Band 1: 30 Januar bis 31 August 1933 prepared by Karl-Heinz Minuth (Boppard am Rhein, 1983), Doc. 2. Doc. 16, and note 2. Rudolf Morsey, Die Protokolle der Reichstagsfraktion und des Fraktionsvorstands der Deutschen Zentrumspartei 1926–1933 (Mainz, 1969), Doc. 737; idem, ‘Hitlers Verhandlungen mit der Zentrumsführung am 31 January 1933’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 9 (1961), 182–94. See Hitler’s comments at the ministerial meeting on 1 February, Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 3. Vossische Zeitung Nr. 50, 30 January 1933, Abend-Ausgabe: ‘Der Sprung’. Spandauer Zeitung Nr 25, 40 Jg., 30 January 1933, ‘Dunkle Weg’. Ralf Walkenaus, Konservatives Staatsdenken: eine wissenssoziologische Studie zu Ernst Rudolf Huber (Berlin, 1997), p. 171. Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 60. Figures reported in Bukower Zeitung Nr. 14, 38 Jg., 31 January 1933, ‘Ovationen für Hindenburg und Hitler’. Harrison Brown, ‘Hitler and his Cabinet’, Broadcast 4 February, The Listener, 8 February 1933, p. 196. Cited in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds), Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, Vol. 1 (Exeter, 1983), p. 129. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1895–1936 Hubris (London, 1998); idem, The ‘Hitler Myth’. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987). Karl Loewenstein, ‘The Balance between Legislative and Executive Power: A Study in Comparative Constitutional Law’. The University of Chicago Law Review, 5, 4 (June 1938), 566–608. Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 17, Pt. 3, Doc. 18, Doc. 19. Ibid., Doc. 351, here p. 1293. Dan P. Silverman, Hitler’s Economy. Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933–1998 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 63–4; Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2006), pp. 38–49. See, V. Bodker, BBC Broadcast 19 April 1934, ‘Hitler’s Germany’, The Listener, 25 April 1934, pp. 694–5, and the sample of reports from 1935/1936 in Herbert Michaelis, Ernst Schraepler (eds), Ursachen und Folgen. Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart 26 Volumes (Berlin, 1958–79), vol. 11, Doc. 2492a-d. Kershaw, The Hitler Myth, pp. 71, 74–7. Frank Bajohr, Fremde Blicke auf das ‘Dritte Reich’. Berichte ausländischer Diplomaten über Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945 (Göttingen, 2011), p. 422 (report of U.S. ambassador Dodd). Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934–1940, 7 Vols (Salzhausen, Frankfurt am Main, 1980), Vol. 3 (1936), March, pp. 281–3, and Vol. 8 (1938), March, pp. 259–60, for two examples of popular responses to Hitler’s policy in the Rhineland and the Anschluss with Austria

326

26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44

Notes (but also see the comments on responses two weeks after the Anschluss, in ibid., pp. 263–4). On material benefits arising from the expropriation of Jews, see Gotz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York, 2008). Bracher, Stufen, p. 484. Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 9 (details of the draft in note 7). See ibid., Doc. 11. Ibid., Doc. 93 P.2, Doc. 122. Ibid., Doc. 294. Hans Mommsen and Sabine Gillmann (eds), Politische Schriften und Briefe Carl Friedrich Goerdelers, Vol. 1 (Munich, 2003), p. 265. See the comment by Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1933–1934, edited Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer, 2003), p. 492 (entry for 2 August 1934). Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 891, n. 76. Reinhard Mehring, ‘Decline of Theory’, in Arthur J. Jacobsen and Bernhard Schlink (eds), Weimar. A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2000), pp. 313–33. Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt Aufstieg und Fall. Eine Biographie (Munich, 2009), pp. 319–21. Frank Hertweck and Dimitrios Kisoudis (eds), ‘Solange das Imperium da ist’. Carl Schmitt im Gespräch 1971 (Berlin, 2010), pp. 101–03, 107. Schmitt, Tagebücher, p. 276, 31 March 1933. See Dirk Blasius, Carl Schmitt: Preußischer Staatsrat in Hitlers Reich (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 157–69. Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 93 here p. 312, notes 3–5. ‘Weiterentwicklung des totalen Staats in Deutschland (January 1933)’ in Carl Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar – Genf – Versailles 1923–1939 (Berlin, 1994 [1940]), pp. 211–16. ‘Das Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich vom 24. März 1933’, in Deutsche Juristen Zeitung 38, 1933, cols. 455–8. Carl Schmitt Tagebücher 1930–1934, p. 274, 27 March 1933. Stefan Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer. Deutscher Adel und Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), p. 585; Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 10, Doc. 2375. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 7, p. 891, n. 76. Carl Schmitt, ‘1 Jahr deutsche Politik. Rückblick vom 20. Juli 1932. Von Papen über Schleicher zum ersten deutschen Volkskanzler Adolf Hitler’, in Westdeutscher Beobachter 9 (1933), Nr. 176, 23 July 1933, 1. Mehring, Carl Schmitt, p. 321. Ibid., pp. 321, 326, 328. For a much tougher, if one-sided view of Schmitt’s opportunism, see Blasius, Carl Schmitt: Preußischer Staatsrat in Hitlers Reich. On Schmitt’s anti-Semitism, Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden: eine deutsche Rechtslehre (Frankfurt am Main, 2000); and balanced but critical, Gabriel Seiberth, Anwalt des Reiches: Carl Schmitt und der Prozeß ‘Preußen contra Reich’ vor dem Staatsgerichtshof (Berlin, 2001). Mehring, Carl Schmitt, pp. 334, 380. Ibid., pp. 322, 355. Schmitt had competition in this respect, from his former student, Ernst Rudolf Huber, Ralf Walkenhaus, Konservatives Staatsdenken: eine wissenssoziologische Studie zu Ernst Rudolf Huber (Berlin, 1997). See also, Mehring, ‘Decline of Theory’, pp. 318–19. Above all Franz von Papen, Die Wahrheit eine Gasse (Munich, 1952) and idem, Von Scheitern einer Demokratie 1930–1933 (Mainz, 1968); see also Fritz Günther von Tschirschky, Erinnerungen eines Hochverräters (Stuttgart, 1972), pp. 164–72; Otto

Notes

45 46

47 48

49 50

51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

327

Meißner, Staatssekretär unter Ebert, Hindenburg, Hitler (Hamburg, 1950); Hjalmar Schacht, 76 Jahre meines Lebens (Bad Wörishofen, 1953). Thus the concluding remarks of Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik ([Villingen 1955] Düsseldorf, 1984), p. 638. An example of this can be found in a letter to Hitler from the leader of the ChristianSocial People’s Service (Christlich-Sozialen Volksdienst) Simpfendörfer dated 22 February, Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 28. See also Goerdeler’s account written in London in 1937, in Mommsen and Gillmann (eds), Politische Schriften vol. 1, pp. 240–59, and his later account on the eve of his execution, ibid., vol. 2, pp. 1202– 35. Larry Eugene Jones, ‘The Limits of Collaboration. Edgar Jung, Herbert von Bose and the Origins of the Conservative Resistance to Hitler 1933–1934’, in idem and James Retallack (eds), Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance (Providence and Oxford, 1993), pp. 465–501. While the opening of the Reichstag in the Garnisonkirche on 21 March was agreed on, Hitler appeared still uncertain at the same cabinet meeting on 7 March as to where the Reichstag would convene, Regierung Hitler 1, Docs, 41 Part 4; 44. According to Schmitt’s account of a telephone conversation of 19 March with Johannes Popitz, Hindenburg had expressed reservation about the proposal for an Enabling Law (but obviously conceded within a few days) Carl Schmitt Tagebücher 1930–1934, p. 271, 19 March 1933. This entry also has antisemitic comments. The remaining 26 deputies were either in custody or had taken leave of absence, either from poor health or because of intimidation. See also Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc., 60, p. 214. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 457, 2 Session, 23 March 1933, 27, 28; Goebbels’ diary gives an unreliable account, stating Hitler spoke for two hours, Tagebücher, p. 397, 24 March. The session lasted barely an hour and fifty minutes, Cf., Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalendar 1933 (Munich, 1934), pp. 66–77; Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 72, p. 250. Ibid., p. 32. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 457, 2 Session, 23 March 1933, page. John Wheeler Bennett describes Wels’ speech as ‘magnificently courageous’, ‘The End of the Weimar Republic’. Foreign Affairs, 50, 2 (January 1972), 351–71, here 367. See Hugenberg’s praise of Hitler’s speech at the ministerial meeting the following day, Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 72, p. 248. According to Schmitt, the leader of the Free Trade Unions Theodor Leipart was prepared to find an accommodation with the new regime, Carl Schmitt Tagebücher 1930–1934, pp. 270–1, 18 March 1933. Vernon Bartlett, Radio Broadcast 30 March, ‘What I have seen in Nazi Germany, The Listener, 5 April 1933, pp. 521–2, here 522. The Enabling Law was renewed in 1937, again in 1941, and finally in 1944. Vossische Zeitung Nr. 139, 23 March 1933, Morgen-Ausgabe: ‘Das deutsche Schicksalgesetz’ and ‘Aussichten und Belastungen’. Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 2, note 6 especially; ibid., Doc. 68. Morsey, ‘Hitlers Verhandlungen mit der Zentrumsfraktion’, op cit. Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 10. Wheeler Bennett, ‘The End of the Weimar Republic’, 367. Vossische Zeitung Nr. 52 31 January 1933, Abend-Ausgabe: ‘Das Zentrum verhandelt’ and ‘Das Zentrum als Schlüssel’. Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 2. Vossische Zeitung Nr. 139, Morgen-Ausgabe: ‘Neue Aussprache Hitler-Kaas’.

328

Notes

61 Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc., 72, here p. 248. 62 Examples from Klaus Scheel, 1933, Der Tag von Potsdam (Berlin, 1996), pp. 23–4. 63 Anthony McElligott, ‘Street Politics in Hamburg 1932/33’. History Workshop Journal 16 (Autumn 1983), 83–90; Eike Hennig, ‘Politische Gealt und Verfassungsschutz in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik’, in Rainer Eisfeld and Ingo Müller (eds), Gegen Barbarei. Essays Robert M.W. Kempner zu Ehren (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), pp. 106–30. Dirk Schumann, Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933. Kampf um die Straße und Furcht vor dem Bürgerkrieg (Essen, 2001). Dirk Blasius, Weimar’s Ende Bürgerkrieg und Politik 1930–1933 (Göttingen, 2005). 64 Schumacher, M.d.R. Die Reichstagsabgeordneten derWeimarer Republik, pp. 106–9. See the comments of Vernon Bartlett in his broadcast of 30 March, ‘What I have seen in Nazi Germany’, The Listener, 5 April 1933, pp. 521–2, in which he states: ‘But, so far, the persecution, I am firmly convinced, is not nearly so bad as many people in other countries believe’. And a response from ‘An Englishman in Vienna’, ‘Another View on Nazi Germany’, The Listener, 26 April 1933, p. 678. 65 See for examples: Regierung Hitler 1933/34 Docs. 28, 55, 112, 168. 66 See entries in Martin Schumacher, M.d.R. Die Reichstagsabgeordneten derWeimarer Republik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Düsseldorf, 1994), pp. 61–5, 175–8, 207–8. 67 The rest were to be found in: Württemberg: 971, Hamburg: 682, Baden: 539, Bremen: 229, Oldenburg: 170, Hesse: 145, Anhalt: 112, Mecklenburg-Schwerin: 35, Lübeck: 27, Schaumburg-Lippe: 24, Lippe-Detmold: 17, Thüringen: 16, Mecklenburg-Strelitz: 16, Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 193, note 17. See Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers. Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung (Munich 1969), pp. 407–9; also Scheel, 1933, Tag von Potsdam, pp. 25–6. An amnesty of 7 August 1934 resulted in the release of 12,500 political prisoners considered to be no longer a threat to the regime, among these persons were those arrested in the wake of the Röhm Affair, Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 383, note 10. 68 Barch R3001/alt/R22/1284 Bl. 312 (for Reich Justice Minister Gürtner on nulla poena sine lege at the International Law Congress in Berlin, 1935). This was the so-called lex van der Lubbe and retrospectively applied the Decree of the 28 February to acts committed between 1 January and 28 February. If found guilty, a defendant could be hanged rather than executed by the swift and therefore considered more humane guillotine. During a cabinet discussion on the Reichstag fire, Frick called for the public hanging of van der Lubbe in front of the burnt remains of the Reichstag on the Königsplatz, Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 44, pp. 163–4. Both laws in RGBl. 1933 I, pp. 83, 151. Martin Broszat, ‘Zum Streit um den Reichstagsbrand’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (1960). Lothar Gruchmann, Justiz im Dritten Reich 1933–1940: Anpassung und Unterwerfung in der Ära Gürtner third revised edition (Munich, 2001), p. 826f. Cf., Kenneth W. Reynolds ‘“Der Richter ist konservativ.” The German Reichsgericht und der Reichstag Fire Trial 1933’ (unpublished M.A. Thesis, McGill University, Montreal, 1992). 69 Under existing law (Straf. GB para. 81–86) before the passing of the Decree of 28 February the severest penalty for the fire was life imprisonment. Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 60, note 20. 70 Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 44, p. 164. 71 Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (New York, 1941), p. 3. 72 Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 375. The purge also affirmed Hitler’s relations with the army, see Sopade 1. Jahrgang Nr. 3, 1934, 189–211, here 205.

Notes

329

73 Thomas Klein, ‘Marburg-Stadt und Marburg-Land in der amtlichen Berichterstattung 1933–1936’ in Klaus Malettke (ed.), Der Nationalsozialismus an der Macht (Göttingen, 1984), p. 134. 74 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 10, Doc. 2381a-c, Doc. 2390. Franz von Papen, Die Wahrheit einer Gasse (Munich, 1952), pp. 353ff. von Tschirschky, Erinnerungen eines Hochverräters, pp. 176–9. 75 Numbers vary: Ian Kershaw, Hitler (Profiles in Power) (Harlow, 1991), p. 73 gives 87, which is close to the official figure of 83, while Alois Prinz, Der Brandstifter. Die Lebensgeschichte des Joseph Goebbels (Weinheim, Basel, 2011), p. 206 cites 200 plus, probably basing his figure on the estimate of 150–200 given in Charles Bloch, Die SA und die Krise des NS-Regimes 1934 (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), p. 104; cf Heinrich Bennecke, Die Reichswehr und der ‘Röhm-Putsch’ (Munich and Vienna, 1964). In his speech to the Reichstag on 13 July, Hitler gave the number of 77 victims. Jürgen Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine Strukturgeschichtliche Analyse (Munich, 2007), pp. 71–81 for background on relations between army, SA and SS at this point. 76 Mann, Tagebücher 1933–1934, p. 463, 8 July 1934. Gruchmann, Justiz, pp. 443ff. 77 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 458, 3rd Session, 13 July, 21–32, esp. 31. 78 Mehring, Carl Schmitt, pp. 345, 351. Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer, p. 586. General Ferdinand von Bredow, considered by Göring to be hostile to the regime was also murdered on 30 June. See Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 68, pp. 241–2 esp. 79 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Munich and Leipzig, 1922), cited in Neumann, ‘Carl Schmitt’, p. 283. 80 Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 377. 81 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 10, Doc. 2379b. 82 Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 375, here p. 1358. 83 Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 10, Doc. 2384. 84 Ibid., Doc. 2380, cf., Doc. 2383 for similar comments from General Werner von Blomberg, the army minister. Reichenau was promoted to Field Marshall and saw action in both western and eastern theatres of war; he was killed in an air crash in 1942. 85 RGBl.1934 I, p. 529; Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 375. 86 Carl Schmitt, ‘Der Führer schützt das Recht. Zur Reichstagsrede Adolf Hitlers vom 13. Juli 1934’, in Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, Heft 15, (1 August 1934), cols, 945–50. See Ursachen und Folgen, vol. 10, Doc. 2380c; Doc. 2411a. Schmitt had taken over the editorship of the DJZ that spring. Mehring, Carl Schmitt, pp. 350–5. Gruchmann, Justiz, p. 453. 87 Schmitt tellingly uses inverted commas around Rechtsstaat in the original, thus challenging the validity of the concept. 88 Schmitt, ‘Der Führer schützt das Recht’, col. 946. 89 Ibid., col. 947. 90 Ibid., col. 948. Huber’s article followed that of Schmitt, ‘Die Einheit der Staatsgewalt’, in ibid., col. 950ff., in which Huber argues that the three-way division between lawmaking, justice and administration common to bourgeois civil society do not apply under the principle of political totality, which is the ‘fundamental characteristic of the National Socialist state’. 91 Fraenkel, note 71 above. Mehring, ‘Decline of Theory’, p. 315. 92 Mehring, Carl Schmitt, p. 347. 93 Ibid., pp. 126, 333–4.

330

Notes

94 Bracher, Stufen, pp. 472–6. On the complexity of the Volksgemeinschaft, see Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto (eds), A Nazi Volksgemeinschaft? German Society in the Third Reich (Oxford, 2013). 95 Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 377, here p. 1377. 96 Most notably its racial violence. See Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge, 1991). 97 Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Doc. 60, p. 216 and note 14. Meissner nonetheless advised that it might be convenient to invoke Hindenburg’s authority in passing some laws under the Enabling Law. 98 RGBl. 1934 I, p. 751 (‘Gesetz über das Staatsoberhaupt’). Regierung Hitler 1933/34, Docs. 382, 383. 99 Bajohr, Fremde Blicke, Doc. 81, p. 417. 100 Ibid., Doc. 84, p. 419, report by Polish Consul in Leipzig Taduesz Brzezinski to the Polish ambassador in Berlin, Jósef Lipski on the results of the plebiscite in the five electoral districts of Saxony. 101 Sopade 1936, pp. 398–404, 407. Bracher, Stufen, p. 498. Bajohr, Fremde Blicke, Docs. 114a-c, 116, 117, 118, 120, pp. 452–9. 102 For example, Klein, ‘Marburg-Stadt und Marburg-Land, pp. 118, 128. 103 On domestic conditions and public mood, see the perceptive reports in Sopade 1935 and 1936 passim. Klein, ‘Marburg-Stadt und Marburg-Land’, p. 129. On ‘charisma from below’ see Stein Ugelvik Larsen ‘Charisma from below? The Quisling Case in Norway’. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7, 2 (June 2006), 235–44. 104 Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’, Chapter 3 in particular. See the numerous letters to Hitler in Beatrice and Helmut Heiber (eds), Die Rückseite des Hakenkreuzes. Absonderliches aus den Akten des ‘Dritten Reiches’ (Munich, 1993/2001), pp. 123–83. 105 This relationship was foregrounded by Huber in his numerous writings and more fully elaborated by another of Schmitt’s students, Ernst Forsthoff in his book, Der Totale Staat (1933), Mehring, ‘Decline of Theory’, pp. 316, 318. See also Bajohr, Fremde Blicke, p. 372. 106 Regierung Hitler 1933/34, ‘Introduction’ by Karl-Heinz Minuth, p. XVII Bracher, Stufen, p. 474. 107 Their ‘citizenship’ would of course be racially defined by the Nuremberg Laws, 1935. Peter Caldwell, ‘The Citizen and the Republic in Germany, 1918–1935’, in Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (eds), Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany (Stanford, Calif., 2008), p. 54. 108 Mehring, ‘Decline of Theory’, p. 324. 109 Mann, Tagebücher 1933–1934, pp. 496–7, 5 August 1934. 110 Richard Wolin, ‘Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism, and the Total State’. Theory and Society, 19, 4 (August 1990), 389–416, here 407–11. Further discussion of the complex interlocking of ideas relating to state theory can be found in the contributions to Jacobsen and Schlink (eds), Weimar A Jurisprudence of Crisis. 111 Bracher, Stufen, p. 484. Richard J. Evans, Coercion and Consent in Nazi Germany’, Raleigh Lecture on History 24 May 2006, in Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007), 53–81.

Selected Bibliography The following archives and reference works were consulted; for economy of space, individual files are cited in the footnotes.

Archives Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfeld (Barch) R7/1041 (Reichswirtschaftsministerium) R36/46 (Preußische Landkreise) R43 I (Akten der Reichskanzlei) R3001 (Reichsjustizministerium) R1501 (Reichsministerium des Innern) R1501 PA/4493-4998 (Personalakten Herbert von Bismarck) R32 (Reichskunstwart) NS22/522 (Reichsorganisationsleiter der NSDAP) NS25/1231 (Hauptamt für Kommunalpolitik) NS 26/232 (Hauptarchiv der NSDAP) Sammlung Schumacher 208 I, Bd.2 Gau Schleswig-Holstein N2035/2 Nachlaß Bracht

Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin-Dahlem (GstAPrK) Rep. 77 (Preußisches Innenminsterium) I Rep. 84a (Preußisches Justizministerium) Rep. 353/179

Landesarchiv Berlin (LAB) Rep. 142/1 StB (Deutscher und Preussischer Städtetag) Rep. 142/2 StK (Kriegswirtschaftsakten)

Staatsarchiv Bremen (StABr) StABr 4,65 II E.1.a.3 (Polizei)

Landesarchiv Schleswig (LAS) LAB 301/4691 (Akten Oberpräsident)

332

Selected Bibliography

Staatsarchiv Hamburg Zeitungsausschnitt-Sammlung 55a: Prozeß gegen d. Bombenattentäter 1930.

Staatsarchiv Munich (STAM) 7420 (Polizei Direktion)

Printed sources Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945 (ADAP), Serie A: 1918–1925, 14 vols (Göttingen, 1982–1995). Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945 (ADAP), Serie B: 1925–1933, 21 vols (Göttingen, 1966–1983). Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945 (ADAP), Serie C: 1933–1937, 6 vols (Göttingen, 1971–1981). Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945 (ADAP), Serie D: 1937–1941, 13 vols (Göttingen, 1950–1970). Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945: From the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, Series C (1933–1936), vols 4 (1935–1936) and 6 (1936–1937) (London, 1949–1964). Akten der Reichskanzlei. Weimarer Republik. Das Kabinett Scheidemann. 13. Februar bis 20. Juni 1919, prepared by Hagen Schulze (Boppard am Rhein, 1971). Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Die Kabinette Wirth I und II: 10. Mai 1921 bis 26. Oktober 1921/26. Oktober 1921 bis 22. November 1922, prepared by Ingrid SchulzeBidlingsmaier, 2 vols (Boppard am Rhein, 1973). Akten der Reichskanzlei. Weimarer Republik.Die Kabinette Stresemann I und II: 13. August bis 6. Oktober 1923; 6. Oktober bis 30. November 1923, prepared by Karl Dietrich Erdmann and Martin Vogt (Boppard am Rhein, 1978). Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik Die Kabinette Wirth I und II, Band 1 Mai 1921 bis März 1922, prepared by Ingrid Schulze-Bidlingsmaier (Boppard am Rhein, 1973). Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Die Kabinette Marx I und II: 30 November bis 3 Juni 1924/3. Juni 1924 bis 15. Januar 1925, prepared by Günter Abramowaski, 2 vols (Boppard am Rhein, 1973). Akten der Reichskanzlei: Weimarer Republik. Die Kabinette Luther I und II: 15 Januar 1925 bis 20. Januar 1926; 20. Januar 1926 bis 17. Mai 1926; 1. Januar 1925 bis Oktober 1925, prepared by: Karl-Heinz Minuth (Boppard am Rhein, 1977). Akten der Reichskanzlei: Weimarer Republik, Die Kabinette. Marx III und IV. 17. Mai 1926 bis 29. Januar 1927, 29. Januar bis 29. Juni 1928, Band 1, Mai 1926 bis Mai 1927, prepared by Günter Abramowski (Boppard am Rhein, 1988). Akten der Reichskanzlei: Weimarer Republik. Das Kabinett Müller II. 28. Juni 1928 bis 27. März 1930. Part 1: Juni 1928 bis Juli 1929, prepared by Martin Voigt (Boppard am Rhein, 1970). Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik. Die Kabinette Brüning I und II: 30. März 1930 bis 10. Oktober 1931/10. Oktober 1931 bis 1. Juni 1932, 3 vols, prepared by Tilman Koops (Boppard am Rhein, 1982). Akten der Reichskanzlei Weimarer Republik.DasKabinett von Papen 1. Juni bis 3. Dezember 1932, prepared by Karl-Heinz Minuth, 2 vols (Boppard am Rhein, 1989).

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333

Akten der Reichskanzlei, Weimarer Republik. Das Kabinett von Schleicher 3 Dezember 1932 bis 30 Januar 1933, prepared by Anton Golecki (Boppard am Rhein, 1986). Akten der Reichskanzlei Die Regierung Hitler Erster Teil: 1933/34, vol. 1: 30 Januar bis 31 August 1933, prepared by Karl-Heinz Minuth (Boppard am Rhein, 1983). Bauer, Franz J., Die Regierung Eisner 1918/19, Ministerprotokolle und Dokumente (Düsseldorf, 1987). Berlin, Jörg (ed.), Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19. Quellen und Dokumente (Cologne, 1978). Deist, Wilhelm, Militär und Innenpolitik im Weltkrieg 1914–1918, Erster Teil (Düsseldorf, 1970). Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) 1934–1940, 7 Vols (Salzhausen, Frankfurt am Main, 1980). Elz, Wolfgang (ed.), Quellen zur Aussenpolitik der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Darmstadt, 2007). Fröhlich, Elke (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Sämtliche Fragmente. Teil 1, Aufzeichnungen 1924–1941 (Munich, 1998–2005). Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels, Adelige Häuser A Band XVI, Band 76 der Gesamtreihe, (Limburg, Lahn, 1981). Hitler Reden Schriften Anordnungen Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, Band III Zwischen den Reichstagswahlen Juli 1928-Septembeer 1930, Teil 3: Januar 1930-September 1930, edited and with a commentary by Christian Hartmann (Munich, New Providence, London, Paris, 1995). Huber, Ernst Rudolf, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte Vol. 3: Dokumente der Novemberrevolution und der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933 (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1966). Hucko, Elmar M. (ed.), The Democratic Tradition. Four German Constitutions (Oxford, 1987). Hürten, Heinz (ed.), Das Krisenjahr 1923. Militär und Innenpolitik 1922–1924 (Düsseldorf, 1980). Könnemann, E. and Schulze, G. (eds), Der Kapp-Lüttwitz-Ludendorff Putsch. Dokumente (Munich, 2002). Link, Arthur S. et al. (ed.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 51, 14 September–8 November 1918 (Princeton, 1985). Longerich, Peter (ed.), Die Erste Republik. Dokumente zur Geschichte des Weimarer Staates (Munich, 1992). Lönne, Karl-Egon (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik 1918–1933  Quellen zum politische Denken der Deutschen im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert, Freiherr vom SteinGedächtnisausgabe, Vol. 8 (Darmstadt, 2002). Michaelis, Herbert and Schraepler, Ernst (eds), Ursachen und Folgen. Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart 26 Volumes (Berlin, 1958–1979). Michalka, Wolfgang and Niedhart, Gottfried (eds), Deutsche Geschichte 1918–1933: Dokumente zur Innen- und Außenpolitik (Frankfurt am Main, 2002). Miller, Susanne and Potthoff, Heinrich, Die Regierung der Volksbeauftragten 1918/19 Erster Teil (Düsseldorf, 1969). Morsey, Rudolf, Die Protokolle der Reichstagsfraktion und des Fraktionsvorstands der Deutschen Zentrumspartei 1926–1933 (Mainz, 1969). Petzina, Dietmar, Abelshauser, Werner and Faust, Anselm (eds), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch II. Materialien zur Statistik des Deutschen Reiches 1870–1914 (Munich 1978).

334

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—, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III. Materialien zur Statistik des Deutschen Reiches 1914–1945 (Munich, 1978). Preußische Gesetzsammlung. Reichsgesetzblatt. Ruge, Wolfgang and Schumann, W. (eds), Dokumente zur deutschen Geschichte 1917–1919 (Berlin, 1975). Schulthess’ europäischer Geschichtskalender, N. F. vols 30–50 (1914–1934) (Berlin, Munich, 1914–1935). Schwabe, Klaus (ed.), Quellen zum Friedensschluss vom Versailles  Ausgewählte Quellen zur Deutschen Geschichte der Neuzeit, Vol. 30 (Darmstadt, 1997). Staat und NSDAP: 1930–1932: Quellen zur Ära Brüning, prepared by Ilse Maurer (Düsseldorf, 1977). Statistischen Reichsamt, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, Neue Folge, various volumes. —, Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, vols 49–57 (Berlin/Leipzig, 1930–1938). Statistisches Bundesamt, Bevölkerung und Wirtschaft 1872–1972: herausgegeben anläßlich des 100jährigen Bestehens der zentralen amtlichen Statistik (Stuttgart, Mainz, 1972). U.S. Government Printing Office, The Treaty of Versailles and After. Annotations of the Text of the Treaty (New York, 1944, repr. 1968). Verhandlungen des Verfassungsgebenden Deutschen National VersammlungVerhandlungen des Deutschen ReichstagsStenographische Berichte accessed at http://www. reichstagsprotokolle.de/index.html. Weber, Hermann (ed.), Die Grundungsparteitag der KPD. Protokoll und Materialien (Frankfurt, 1969). Der Zentralrat der Deutschen Sozialistischen Republik 19.12.1918–8.4.1919Quellen zur Geschichte der Rätebewegung in Deutschland 1918/19 Bd.I, Der Zentralrat 18.12.1918– 8.4.1919, edited Eberhard Kolb and Reinhard Rürup (Leiden, 1968).

Online http://www.gonschior.de/weimar/php/ausgabe_gebiet.php?gebiet1152 http://www.wahlen-in-deutschland.de/wrtw.htm http://www.zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/

Films Dudow, Slatan, Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehöhrt der Welt? (1932). Jutzi, Phil, Um’s tägliche Brot (Hunger in Waldenburg) (1929). Ulmer, Edgar and Siodmak, Robert, Menschen am Sonntag Germany (1930).

Secondary literature The literature on the period covered by this study and specifically on the Weimar Republic is vast. The footnotes provide the full range of works consulted. The following secondary literature has been restricted to general works which offer a good starting point to this book. Abegg, Wilhelm, Für den neuen Staat (Berlin, [1926] 1928). Abelshauser, Werner, Die Weimarer Republik als WohlfahrtsstaatZum Verhältnis von Wirtschaft- und Sozialpolitik in der Industriegesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1987).

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335

Abraham, David, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic. Political Economy and Crisis, second rev. edition (New York, 1986 [1981]). Albertin, Lothar (ed.), Hugo Preuß. Gesammelte Schriften I: Politik und Gesellschaft im Kaiserreich (Tübingen, 2007). Anderson, Margaret Lavinia, ‘Voter, Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the New Franchise in Imperial Germany’. The American Historical Review, 98/5 (1993), 1448–74. Angermund, Ralph, Deutsche Richterschaft, 1919–1945: Krisenerfahrung, Illusion, politische Rechtsprechung (Frankfurt am Main, 1990). Apelt, Willibalt, Geschichte der Weimarer Verfassung (Munich, 1946). Applegate, Celia, A Nation of Provincials. The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990). Alter, Junius (pseud. for Franz Sontag), Nationalisten, Deutschlands nationales Führertum der Nachkriegszeit (Leipzig, 1930). Bach, Jürgen, Franz von Papen in der Weimarer Republik. Aktivitäten in Politik und Presse 1918–1932 (Düsseldorf, 1977). Bailey, Stephen, ‘The Berlin Strike of January 1918’. Central European History, 13/2 (June 1980), 158–70. Bajohr, Frank, Johe, Werner, Lohalm, Uwe (eds), Zivilisation und Barbarei. Die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne (Hamburg, 1991). —, Fremde Blicke auf das ‘Dritte Reich’. Berichte ausländischer Diplomaten über Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945 (Göttingen, 2011). Balderston, Theo, The Origins and Course of the German Economic Crisis. November 1923 to May 1932 (Berlin, 1993). —, Economics and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Cambridge, 2002). Baranowski, Shelley, The Sanctity of Rural Life, Nobility, Protestantism and Nazism in Weimar Prussia (New York, Oxford, 1995). Bariéty, Jacques, Les relations franco-allemandes après la première guerre mondiale (Paris, 1977). —, ‘Die franzöische Politik in der Ruhrkrise’, in Klaus Schwabe (ed.), Die Ruhrkrise 1923 (Munich, 1986), pp. 11–27. Bartholdy, A. Mendelssohn, ‘The Political Dilemma in Germany’. Foreign Affairs, 8, 4 (July 1930), 620–31. Bästlein, Klaus, ‘Als Recht zu Unrecht wurde: Zur Entwicklung der Strafjustiz im Nationalsozialismus’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament B13–14/89 (24 March 1989). Battaglia, Otto Forst de (ed.), Prozeß der Diktatur (Zurich, Leipzig, Vienna, 1932). Baum, Vicki, Menschen im Hotel (Berlin, 1929). Baumgarten, Otto, ‘Der sittliche Zustand des deutschen Volkes unter dem Einflüß des Krieges’, in Otto Baumgarten, Erich Förster, Arnold Rademacher, Wilhelm Flittner (eds), Geistige und Sittliche Wirkungen des Krieges in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1927), pp. 1–88. Bechtel, Heinrich, Wirtschaftsgechichte Deutschlands, Band 3: Im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich 1956). Becker, Josef and Hildebrand, Klaus (eds), Internationale Beziehungen in der Weltwirtschaftskrise 1929–1933. Referate und Diskussionsbeiträge eines Augsburger Symposions, 29. März bis 1. April 1979 (München, 1980). Behrend, Hans-Karl, ‘Die Besetzung der Landratstellen in Ostpreußen, Brandenburg, Pommern und der Grenzmark’ (Freie Universität Berlin, D.Phil. 1956).

336

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—, ‘Zur personalpolitik des preussischen Ministeriums des Innern: Die Besetzung der Landratstellen inden östlichen Provinzen 1919–1933’. Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands, 6 (1957), 173–214. Becker, Peter and Reinhardt-Becker, Elke (eds), Mythos USA: ‘Amerikanisierung ‘in Deutschland seit 1900 (Frankfurt, 2006). Bennecke, Heinrich, Die Reichswehr und der ‘Röhm-Putsch’ (Munich and Vienna, 1964). —, Wirtschaftliche Depression und politischer Radikalismus, 1918–1938 (Munich and Vienna, 1970). Bennett, John Wheeler, Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan (London, 1936). —, ‘The End of the Weimar Republic’, Foreign Affairs. 50, 2 (January 1972), 351–71. Berg, Manfred, Gustav Stresemann. Eine politische Karriere zwischen Reich und Republik (Göttingen, 1992). Bergstrasser, Ludwig, Geschichte der politischen Parteien Deutschlands (Munich and Vienna, 1965), orig. 1921, 4th revised edn. 1926. Bermbach, Udo, Vorformen parlamentarischer Kabinettsbildung in Deutschland. Der Interfraktionelle Ausschuß 1917/18 und die Parlamentarisierung der Reichsregierung (Cologne and Opladen, 1967). Bernhard, Henry, Reventlow, Hugenberg und die anderen (Berlin, 1926). Berthold, Lutz, Carl Schmitt und der Staatsnotstandsplan am Ende der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1999). Bessel, Richard, ‘Eastern Germany as a Structural Problem in the Weimar Republic’. Social History, 3, 2 (May 1978), 199–218. Bessel, Richard and Feuchtwanger, E. J. (eds), Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany (London, 1981). —, ‘Die Krise der Weimarer Republik als Erblast des verlorenen Krieges’, in Frank Bajohr, Werner Johe, Uwe Lohalm (eds), Zivilisation und Barberei. Die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne (Hamburg, 1991). —, Germany after the First World War (Oxford, 1993). —, ‘The Front Generation and the Politics of the Weimar Republic’, in Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968 (Cambridge, 1995). Besson, Waldemar, ‘Dokumentation: Zur Frage der Staatsführung in der Weimarer Republik: “Diktatur innerhalb der Demokratie”’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 7 (1959a), 85–111. —, ‘Friedrich Meinecke und die Weimarer Republik. Zum Verhältnis von Geschichtsschreibung und Politik’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 7 (1959b), 113–29. Best, Heinrich, ‘Elite Structure and regime (dis)continuity in Germany 1867–1933: the case of the parliamentary leadership groups’. German History, 7 (1990), 1–27. Beyerle, Konrad, Zehn Jahre Reichsverfassung. Festrede zur Münchner Verfassungsfeier der Reichsbehörden am 11. August 1929 (Munich, 1929). Bienstock, Gregor, Kampf um die Macht (Berlin, 1932). Binchy, Daniel, ‘Heinrich Brüning’. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 21, 83 (September 1932), 385–403. —, ‘Adolf Hitler’. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 22, 85 (March 1933), 29–47. Blackburn, David, ‘Politics as Theatre: Metaphors of the Stage in German History, 1848–1933’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 37 (1987), 149–67. Blasius, Dirk, Carl Schmitt: Preußischer Staatsrat in Hitlers Reich (Göttingen, 2001). —, Weimars Ende: Bürgerkrieg und Politik 1930–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 2008).

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337

Borchardt, Knut, ‘Wachstum und Wechsellagen 1914–1970’, in Hermann Aubin and Wolfgang Zorn (eds), Handbuchder deutschen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Vol. 2: Das 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 685–740. —, ‘Wirtschaftliche Ursachen des Scheiterns der Weimarer Republik’, in Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Hagen Schulze (eds), Weimar: Selbstpreisgabe einer Demokratie; eine Bilanz heute (Düsseldorf, 1980), pp. 211–49. —, Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy, trans. Peter Lambert (New York and Cambridge, 1991). Bollenbeck, Georg, ‘German Kultur, the Bildungsbürgertum, and its Susceptibility to National Socialism’. The German Quarterly, 73, 1, Millenial Issue (Winter 2000), 67–83. Bollmeyer, Heiko, Der steinige Weg zur Demokratie. Die Weimarer Nationalversammlung zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik (Frankfurt, 2007). Bookbinder, Paul, The Weimar Republic (Manchester, 1996). Boor, Wolfgang de and Meurer, Dieter (eds), Über den Zeitgeist. Deutschland in den Jahren 1918–1995, Vol. 2 (Marburg, 1995). Braatz, Werner E., ‘Two Neo-Conservative Myths in Germany 1919–1932: The “Third Reich” and “New State”’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 32, 4 (October – December 1971), 569–84. Bracher, Karl Dietrich, Stufen der Machtergreifung  Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gerhard Shulz, Wolfgang Sauer, Die nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung. Sudien zur Errichtung des totalitären Herrschaftssystems in Deutschland 1933/34: I (Frankfurt, 1962). —, Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik ([Villingen 1955] Düsseldorf, 1984). Bracher, Karl Dietrich, Funke, Manfred and Jacobsen, Hans-Adolf (eds), Nationalsozialistische Diktatur 1933–1945. Eine Bilanz (Bonn, 1983). —(eds), Die Weimarer Republik 1918–1933. Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft (Düsseldorf, 1987). Bramke, Werner and Heß, Ulrich, ‘Die Novemberrevolution in Deutschland und ihrer Wirkung auf die deutsche Klassengesellschaft’. Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 36 (1988), 1059–73. Braun, Otto, Von Weimar zu Hitler (New York, 1940). Braunthal, Alfred, ‘Die Legende von den überhöhten Löhnen’. Die Arbeit. Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde 9, H. 6 (1932), 329–39. —, ‘Die Ökonomischen Würzeln des Nationalsozialistischen Wirtschaftsprogramms’. Die Gesellschaft IX, 1 (1932), 487–91. Brauweiler, Heinz, Generäle in der Deutschen Republik: Groener, Schleicher, Seeckt (Berlin, 1932). Brecht, Arnold, ‘Bureaucratic Sabotage’. Annals of the American Academy of PoliticalScience, 189 (1937), 48–57. —, Prelude to Silence. The End of the German Republic (New York, 1944). —, Vorspiel zum Schweigen. Das Ende der deutschen Republik (Vienna, 1948). Brecht, Bertolt, Frühe Stücke. Baal, Trommeln in der Nacht, Im Dickicht der Städte (Frankfurt am Main, 1973, orig. 1967). —, Kuhle Wampe Protokoll des Films und Materialien, edited by Wolfgang Gersch und Werner Hecht (Frankfurt am Main, 1969). Brechtfeld, Jörg, Mitteleuropa and German Politics 1848 to the Present (Basingstoke, 1996). Brenner, Wolfgang, Walther Rathenau. Deutscher und Jude (Munich and Zurich, 2007). Bresciani-Turroni, C. , The Economics of Inflation: A Study of Currency Depreciation in Post-War Germany, 1914–1923, translated (London, 1937)

338

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Brentano, Bernard von, Der Beginn der Barbarei in Deutschland (Berlin, 1932). Breuer, Stefan, Carl Schmitt im Kontext. Intellectuellenpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 2012). Briefs, Goetz A., ‘The Dualism of Weimar Culture’. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 3, 3, Essays in Memory of Franz Oppenheimer, 1864–1943 (April 1944), 321–34. Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich von, Dokumente und Gedanken um Versailles (Berlin, 1925). Broszat, Martin, ‘Zum Streit um den Reichstagsbrand’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 8 (1960), 275–79. Brown, Tim, Der Staat Hitlers. Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung (Munich, 1969). —, Weimar Radicals Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (New York and Oxford, 2009). Bruendel, Steffen, Volksgemeinschaft oder Volksstaat: Die ‘Ideen von 1914’ und die Neuordnung Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 2003). Buchner, Bernd, Um nationale und republikanische Identität. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und der Kampf um die politischen Symbole in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2001). Bullock, Alan, ‘Hitler and the Origins of the Second World War’, in Esmonde M. Robertson (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1971), pp. 189–224. Bundesminister der Justiz [Gerhard Fieberg], ‘Im Namen des deutschen Volkes!’ Justiz und Nationalsozialismus. Katalog zur Ausstellung des Bundesministers der Justiz (Cologne, 1989). Bürgin, Hans and Mayer, Hans-Otto (eds), Die Briefe Thomas Manns. Regesten und Register (Frankfurt, 1977). Büsch, Otto, Wölk, Monika and Wölk, Wolfgang (eds), Wählerbewegung in der Deutschen Geschichte. Analyse und Berichte zu den Reichstagswahlen 1871–1933 (Berlin, 1978). Buse, D. K., ‘Ebert and the German Crisis, 1917–1920’. Central European History, 5 (1972), 234–55. Büttner, Ursula, Hamburg in der Staats- und Wirtschaftskrise 1928–1931 (Hamburg, 1982). —, ‘Politische Alternativen zum Brüningschen Deflationskurs. Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion über “ökonomische Zwangslagen” in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 37 (1989), 209–51. —, Weimar die überforderte Republik 1918–1933; Leistung und Versagen in Staat, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft und Kultur (Stuttgart, 2008). Caldwell, Peter, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law. The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham USA., London, 1997). —, ‘The Citizen and the Republic in Germany, 1918–1935’, in Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (eds), Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany (Stanford, Calif., 2008). Campbell, Joan, The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts (Princeton, NJ., 1978), Trs. Deutsche Werkbund, 1907–1934 (Stuttgart, 1981). Caplan, Jane, ‘Civil Service Support for National Socialism’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (eds), The ‘Führer State’: Myth and Reality. Studies on the Structure and Politics of the Third Reich (Stutgart, 1981), pp. 167–93. —, ‘Speaking the Right Language: The Nazi Party and the Civil Service Vote in the Weimar Republic’, in Thomas Childers (ed.), The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1918–1933 (London, 1986), pp. 182–201. —, Government without Administration. State and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1988).

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339

Carr, William, Arms, Autarky and Aggression. A Study in German Foreign Policy, 1933–1939, 2nd edn (London, 1979). Cavalli, Luciano, ‘Charismatic Domination, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Plebiscitary Democracy in the Twentieth Century’, in Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici (eds), Changing Conceptions of Leadership (New York, 1986), pp. 67–81. Chickering, Roger, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1998). —, The Great War and Urban Life in German: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2007). Childers, Thomas, The Nazi Voter. The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill and London, 1983). Clark, Christopher M., Wilhelm II, the Last Kaiser (Harlow, 2000). Clemens, Gabriele, Martin Spahn und der Rechtskatholizismus in der Weimarer Republik (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte. Reihe B: Forschungen. Bd. 37) (Mainz, 1983). Conze, Werner and Raupach, Hans (eds), Die Staats- und Wirtschaftskrise des deutschen Reichs 1929/33 (Stuttgart, 1967). Coyner, Sandra, ‘Class Patterns of Family income and expenditure during the Weimar Republic: German White Collar Employees as Harbingers of Modern Society’ (PhD. Rutgers University, New Brunswick New Jersey, 1975). —, ‘Class Consciousness and Consumption: The New Middle Class During the Weimar Republic’. Journal of Social History 3 (1977), 310–31. Craig, Gordon, Craig’s Germany 1866–1945 (Oxford, 1981). Crew, David, Germans on Welfare. From Weimar to Hitler (Oxford and New York, 1998). Curtius, Julius, Sechs Jahre Minister (Heidelberg, 1948). —, Der Young-Plan (Stuttgart, 1948). Dahm, Georg and Schaffstein, Friedrich, Liberales oder autoritäres Strafrecht?’ (Hamburg, 1933). Daniel, Ute, ‘Der Krieg der Frauen 1914–1918: Zur Innenansicht des Ersten Weltkriegs in Deutschland’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Irina Renz (eds), Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch . . . Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkriegs (Essen, 1993), pp. 131–49. —, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft. Beruf, Familie und Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 1989) translated as The War from Within, German Working-Class Women in the First World War (Oxford, New York, 1997). —, Frauen (Frankfurt, 1997). Daniel, Ute, Marszolek, Inge, Pyta, Wolfram and Welskopp, Thomas (eds), Politische Kultur und Medienwirklichkeiten in den 1920er Jahren (Munich, 2010). Davis, Belinda, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (New York, 2000). Deppe, Wilfried, Drei Generationen Arbeiterleben. Eine sozio-biographische Darstellung (Frankfurt/Main, 1982). Dickinson, Edward Ross, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA, 1996). Diesel, Eugen, Germany and the Germans (London, 1931), transl. of Die deutsche Wandlung das Bild eines Volks (Potsdam 1929, 2nd edn Stuttgart, 1931). Dix, Arthur, Die deutschen Reichstagswahlen 1871–1930 und die Wandlungen der Volksgliederung (Tübingen, 1930). Doblin, Ernest M. and Pohly, Claire, ‘The Social Composition of the Nazi Leadership’. The American Journal of Sociology, 51, 1 (July 1945), 42–9. Dorpalen, Andreas, Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic (Princeton, 1964).

340

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—, ‘Weimar Republic and Nazi Era in East German Perspective’. Central European History, 11, 3 (September 1978), 211–30. Dreyer, Michael, ‘Weimar als “wehrhafte Demokratie” – ein unterschätztes Besipiel’, in Michael Schlutheiß (ed.), Die Weimarer Verfassung – Wert und Wirking für die Demokratie (Erfurt, 2009), pp. 161–89. —, ‘Weimar as a “Militant Democracy”’, in Jochen Hung, Godela Weiss-Sussex, Geoff Wilkes (eds.), Beyond Glitter and Doom: New Perspectives of the Weimar Republic (Munich, 2012), pp. 69–86. Dülffer, Jost, Martin, Bernd and Wollstein, Günter (eds), Deutschland in Europa. Kontinuität und Bruch. Gedenkschrift für Andreas Hillgruber (Frankfurt/Main, Berlin, 1990). Ebert, Friedrich, Schriften, Aufzeichnungen, Reden. Mit unveröffentlichten Erinnerungen aus dem Nachlaß, Zweiter Band (Dresden, 1926). Ecksteins, Modris, ‘War, Memory and Politics: the Fate of the Film, “All Quiet on the Western Front”’. Central European History, 13 (1980), 60–82. Edwards, Marvin L., Stresemann and the Greater Germany 1914–1918 (New York, 1963). Eghigian, Greg, ‘The Politics of Victimization: Social Pensioners and the German Social State in the Inflation of 1914–1924’. Central European History, 26 (1993), 375–403. —, ‘Pain, Entitlement, and Social Citizenship in Modern Germany’, in Greg Eghigian and Paul Betts (eds), Pain and Prosperity. Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German History (Stanford, Cal., 2003), pp. 16–34. Ehni, Hans-Peter, ‘Zum Parteiverhältnis in Preußen 1918–1932. Ein Beitrag zu Funktion und Arbeitsweise der Weimarer Koalitionsparteien’. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, XI (1971), 241–88. Ehrlich, Lothar and John, Jürgen (eds), Weimar1930. Politik und Kultur im Vorfeld der NS-Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 1998). Eilers, Sylvia, ‘Ermächtigungsgesetz und militärischer Ausnahmezustand zur Zeit des ersten Kabinetts von Reichskanzler Wilhelm Marx 1923/24’ (D.Phil., University of Cologne, 1988). Elz, Wolfgang, ‘Versailles und Weimar’. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 50–51/2008, (8 December 2008), 31–8. Engeli, Christian, Gustav Böß: Oberbürgermeister von Berlin 1920–1930 (Stuttgart, 1971). Enssle, Manfred J., ‘Stresemann’s Diplomacy Fifty Years After Locarno: Some Recent Perspectives’. The Historical Journal, 20, 4 (December 1977), 937–48. Erdmann, Karl Dietrich, ‘Die Geschichte der Weimarer Republik als Problem der Wissenschaft’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 3 Jg., 1 Heft (January 1955), 1–19. —, ‘Rätestaat oder Demokratie. Neuere Forschungen zur Novemberrevolution 1918 in Deutschland (Copenhagen, 1979). Erger, Johannes, Der Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch (Düsseldorf, 1967). Eschenburg, Theodor, ‘Franz von Papen’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1 Jahrgang, 2 Heft (April 1953), pp. 153–69. —, ‘Das Problem der deutschen Einheit nach den beiden Weltkriege’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 5. Jahrg., 2. H. (April 1957), 107–33. —, Die improvisierte Demokratie: gesammelte Aufsätze zur Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1963). Evans, Richard J. (ed.), The German Working Class: 1888–1933. The Politics of Everyday Life (London, 1982). —, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600–1987 (Oxford, 1996). —, Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century (London and New Haven, CT., 1998).

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Flora, Peter, Kraus, Franz and Pfennig, Winfried, State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe 1815–1975. A Data Handbook in Two Volumes: Vol. II: The Growth of Industrial Societies and Capitalist Economies (Frankfurt, London, Chicago, 1987). Föllmer, Moritz and Graf, Rüdiger (eds), Der ‘Krise ‘der Weimarer Republik. Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt, New York, 2005). —, ‘Suicide and Crisis in Weimar Berlin’. Central European History 42 (2009), 195–221. —, Individuality and Modernity in Berlin. Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge, 2013). Forner, Sean A., ‘War Commemoration and the Republic in Crisis: Weimar Germany and the Neue Wache’. Central European History, 35, 4 (2002), 513–49. Förster, Jürgen, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine Strukturgeschichtliche Analyse (Munich, 2007). Fraenkel, Ernst, The Dual State (New York, 1941). —, Soziologie der Klassenjustiz und Aufsätze zur Verfassungskrise 1931–32 (orig. 1927–1932, reprint Darmstadt 1968). François, Etienne and Schulze, Hagen (eds), Deutscher Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols (Munich, 2001). Frankel, Richard E., Bismarck’s Shadow. The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898–1945 (Oxford and New York, 2005). Frei, Norbert, Der Führerstaat. Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft 1933 bis 1945 (Munich, 1987) translated as National Socialist Rule in Germany: the Führer State 1933–1945, translated by Simon B. Steyne (Oxford, 1993). Friedensburg, Ferdinand, Die Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1946). Frisby, David and Featherstone, Mike (eds), Simmel on Culture (London, 1997). Fritzsche, Peter, ‘Presidential Victory and Popular Festivity in Weimar Germany: Hindenburg’s 1925 Election’. Central European History, 23, 2/3 (June–September 1990), 205–24. —, ‘Did Weimar Fail?’. Journal of Modern History, 68 (September 1996), 629–56. —, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA, 1998). —, The Turbulent World of Franz Göll. An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, 2011). Fromme, Friedrich Karl, Von der Weimarer Verfassung zum Bonner Grundgesetz third expanded edition (Berlin, [1960] 1999). Frommelt, Reinhard, Paneuropa oder Mitteleuropa. Einigungsbestrebungen im Kalkül deutscher Wirtschaft und Politik 1925–1933 (Stuttgart, 1977). Führer, Karl-Christian, ‘Auf dem Weg zum Massenkultur: Kino in der Weimarer Republik’. Historische Zeitschrift, Band. 262, Heft 3 (1996), 739–81. —, ‘Anspruch und Realität. Das Scheitern der nationalsozialistischen Wohnungsbaupolitik 1933–1945’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 45 (1997), 225–56. —, ‘German Cultural Life and the Crisis of National Identity during the Depression, 1929–1933’. German Studies Review, 24, 3 (October 2001), 461–86. Fulda, Bernhard, Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford, 2009). Funke, Manfred (ed.), Hitler, Deutschland und die Mächte. Materialien zur Außenpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Düsseldorf, 1976). Gall, Lothar, Walther Rathenau. Portrait einer Epoche (Munich, 2010). Gallus, Alexander (ed.), Deutsche Zäsuren. Systemwechsel seit 1806 (Cologne, 2006). —, Die vergessene Revolution von 1918/19 (Göttingen, 2010). Ganßer, Walter, Abwehrbereit. Demokratie und Verfassungsschutz (Munich, 1985). Gay, Peter, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider (Harmondsworth, 1974, orig. 1969).

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Geiger, Theodor, ‘Panik im Mittelstand’. Die Arbeit. Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde 7 (1930), 637–54. —, Die soziale Schichtung des deutschen Volkes. Soziographischer Versuch auf statistischer Grundlage, (Stuttgart, 1932). Gereke, Günther, Ich war königlich-preußischer Landrat (Berlin-East, 1970). Gerwarth, Robert, The Bismarck Myth. Weimar Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor (Oxford, 2005). Geyer, Martin, Verkehrte Welt. Revolution, Inflation und Moderne: München 1914–1924 (Göttingen, 1998). Gietinger, Klaus, Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal. Die Ermordung der Rosa L. (Berlin, 1995). —, Hitler vor Gericht: der Prozess nach dem Putsch von 1923. Fakten, Hintergründe, Analysen (Munich, 2009). Goldfarb, Jeffrey C., ‘Dialogue, Culture, Critique: The Sociology of Culture and the New Sociological Imagination’. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 18, 3/4, (Spring – Summer, 2005), 281–92. Goltz, Anna von der, Hindenburg Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford, 2009). Gordon Jr, Harold J., Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch (Princeton, 1972). Gotter, Detlef, ‘Oldenburg-Januschau, ein Repräsentant des preußischen Junkertums’ (University Halle-Wittenberg, Diss., 1978). Graml, Herrmann, Zwischen Stresemann und Hitler. Die Außenpolitik der Präsidialkabinette Brüning, Papen und Schleicher (Munich, 2001). Grau, Richard, Die Diktaturgewalt des Reichspräsidenten und der Landesregierungen auf Grund des Artikels 48 der Reichsverfassung (Berlin, 1922). —, ‘Die Diktaturgewalt des Reichspräsidenten’, in Gerhard Anschütz and Richard Thoma (eds), Handbuch des Deutschen Staatsrechts II (Tübingen, 1932). Grill, Johnpeter Horst, Nazi Movement in Baden 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill, 1983). Grimme, Adolf, Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volk: Ansprachen und Aufsätze (Berlin, 1932). Gritschneder, Otto, Bewährungsfrist für den Terroristen Adolf H. Der Hitlerputsch und die bayerische Justiz (Munich, 1990). —, Der Hitler-Prozeß und sein Richter Georg Neithardt. Skandalurteil von 1924 ebnet Hitler den Weg (Munich, 2001). Gross, Raphael, Carl Schmitt und die Juden: eine deutsche Rechtslehre (Frankfurt am Main, 2000). Gruchmann, Lothar (ed.), Der Hitler-Prozess 1924: Wortlaut der Hauptverhandlung vor dem Volksgericht München I. Teil 1, 1–4 Verhandlungstag (München, 1997). —, Justiz im Dritten Reich 1933–1940: Anpassung und Unterwerfung in der Ära Gürtner third revised edition (Munich, 2001). Grunwald, Henning, From Courtroom to ‘Revolutionary Stage’: Party Lawyers and Political Justice in the Weimar Republic (New York and Oxford, 2012). Grzesinski, Albert, Im Kampf um die deutschen Republik. Erinnerungen eines Sozialdemokraten, edited and introduced by Eberhard Kolb (Munich, 2009). Gumbel, E. J., Vier Jahre politische Mord (Berlin-Friendenau, 1922). Guske, Claus, Das politische Denken des Generals von Seeckt: ein Beitrag zur Diskussion des Verhältnisses Seeckt – Reichswehr – Republik  Historische Heft 422 (Lübeck, 1971). Gusy, Christoph, Die Weimarer Reichsverfassung (Tübingen, 1997). —(ed.), Weimars lange Schatten. ‘Weimar’ als Argument nach 1945 (Baden-Baden, 2003). Haffner, Sebastian, Germany Jekyll and Hyde. A Contemporary Account of Nazi Germany (London, 2008, orig. 1940).

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Hagemann, Karen, Frauenalltag und Männerpolitik: Alltagsleben und gesellschaftliches Handeln von Arbeiterfrauen in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 1990). Hahn, Erich, ‘The German Foreign Ministry and the Question of War Guilt in 1918–1919’, in Carole Fink, Isabell Hull, MacGregor Knox (eds), German Nationalism and the European Response, 1890–1945 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1985). Haken, Bruno Nelissen, Der Fall Bundhund: ein Arbeitslosenroman (Jena, 1930). —, Stempelchronik: 261 Arbeitslosenschicksale (Hamburg, 1932). Hall, Sarah F., ‘Youth protection and the prevention of juvenile delinquency: Keeping cinema on the right side of the law’. Journal of European Studies, 39 (2009), 353–70. Hamilton, Richard, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton, N.J., 1982). —, ‘The Rise of Nazism: A Case Study and Review of Interpretations – Kiel, 1928–1933’. German Studies Review, 26/1 (2003), 43–62. Hannover-Druck, Elizabeth and Hannover, Heinrich, Politische Justiz 1918–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1966). Hansen, V. and Heine, G. (eds), Fragen und Antworten. Interviews mit Thomas Mann 1909–1955 (Hamburg, 1983). Hardach, Gerd, The First World War 1914–1918 (Berkeley, 1977). Hardach, Karl, Wirtschaftsgeschichte Deutschlands im 20.Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1976). Hardtwig, Wolfgang (ed.), Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit 1918–1939 (Göttingen, 2005). Harsch, Donna, ‘Der Sklarek-Skandal 1929 und die sozialdemokratische Reaktion’, in Ludger Heid and Arnold Paucker (eds), Juden und deutsche Arbeiterbewegung bis 1933. Soziale Utopien und religiös-kulturelle Traditionen (Tübingen 1992), pp. 193–213. Harvey, Elizabeth, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford, 1993). —, ‘Culture and Society in Weimar Germany: The Impact of Modernism and Mass Culture’, in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), German History since 1800 (London, 1997). Hassis, Hellmut G., Spuren der Besiegten 3: Freiheitsbewegungen vom demokratischen Untergrund nach 1848 bis zu den Atomkraftgegenern (Reinbeck, 1984). Hattenhauer, Hans, ‘Zur Lage der Justiz in der Weimarer Republik’, in Karl-Dietrich Erdmann and Hagen Schulze (eds), Weimar: Selbstpreisgabe einer Demokratie: e ine Bilanz heute (Düsseldorf, 1980), pp. 169–76. —, Deutsche Nationalsymbole: Geschichte und Bedeutung (Munich, 1984). Hau, Michael, TheCult of Health and Beauty in Germany. A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago and London, 2003). Haungs, Peter, Reichspräsident und parlamentarische Kabinettsregierung: eine Studie zum Regierungssystem der Weimarer Republik in den Jahren 1924 bis 1929 (Cologne, 1968). Haß, Hermann, Herrschaft in Mitteleuropa Bismarcks Bündnispolitik (Hamburg, 1933). Heberle, Rudolf, From Democracy to Nazism (Baton Rouge, 1945). Heffen, Annegret, Der Reichskunstwart: Kunstpolitik in den Jahren 1920–1933; zu den Bemühungen um eine offizielle Reichskunstpolitik in der WeimarerRepublik (Essen, 1986). Hehl, Ulrich von, Wilhelm Marx: 1863–1946; eine politische Biographie (Mainz, 1987). Heiber, Beatrice and Heiber, Helmut (eds), Die Rückseite des Hakenkreuzes. Absonderliches aus den Akten des ‘Dritten Reiches’ (Wiesbaden, 2005). Heiber, Helmut, The Weimar Republic, translated by W. E. Yuill (Oxford, 1993). Heinemann, Ulrich, Die verdrängte Niederlage: politische Öffentlichkeit und Kriegsschuldfrage in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 1983). Heller, Hermann, Rechtsstaat oder Diktatur? (Tübingen, 1930).

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—, ‘Genie und Funktionär in der Politik’, in Probleme der Demokratie  Politische Wissenschaft Schriftenreihe der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik in Berlin und des Instituts für Auswärtige Politik in Hamburg, Heft 10 (Berlin-Grunewald, 1931). Hellpach, Willy, Politische Prognose für Deutschland (Berlin, 1928). Hellpach, Willy and Dohna, Graf zu, Die Krise des deutschen Parlamentarismus. Vorträge auf der Tagung deutscher Hochschullehrer in Weimar 1927 (Karlsruhe, 1927). Hennig, Eike, ‘Politische Gewalt und Verfassungsschutz in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik’, in Rainer Eisfeld and Ingo Müller (eds), Gegen Barbarei. Essays Robert M.W. Kempner zu Ehren (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), pp. 106–30. Hennig, Wilhelm, ‘Zum Problem der deutschen Staatsauffassung’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 7 (1959), 1–23. Hepp, Carola, Avantgarde: Moderne Kunst, Kulturkritik und Reformbewegungen nach der Jahrhundertwende (Munich, 1987). Herbst, Ludolf, Hitlers Charisma. Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias (Frankfurt am Main, 2010). Herf, Jeffrey, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984). Hermand, Jost and Trommler, Frank, Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1978). Herrfahrdt, Heinrich, Der Aufbau des neuen Staates (Berlin, 1932). Heuss, Theodor, Hitlers Weg. Eine historisch-politische Studie über den Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig, 1932). —, Friedrich Naumann: der Mann, das Werk, die Zeit (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1949). —, Bürger der Weimarer Republik. Briefe 1918–1933, edited and prepared by Michael Dorrmann (Munich, 2008). Hildebrand, Klaus, Deutsche Außenpolitik 1933–1945, 4th expanded edition (Stuttgart, 1980). Hillgruber, Andreas, Großmachtpolitik und Militärismus im 20. Jahrhundert. 3 Beiträge zur Konituitätsproblem (Düsseldorf, 1974a). —, Großmachtpolitik und Militarismus im 20. Jahrhundert. 3 Beiträge zum Kontinuitätsproblem (Düsseldorf, 1974b). —, ‘“Revisionismus” – Kontinuität und Wandel in der Außenpolitik der Weimarer Republik’. Historische Zeitschrift, 237 (1983), 597–621. Hindenburg, Paul von, Aus meinem Leben (Leipzig, 1920). Hirsch, Felix E., ‘Hermann Oncken and the End of an Era’. The Journal of Modern History, 18, 2 (June 1946), 148–59. Hirschfeld, Gerhard and Kettenacker, Lothar (eds), Der ‘Führerstaat’: Mythos und Realität. Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reichs/The ‘Führer State’: Myth and Reality. Studies on the Structure and Policies of the Third Reich (Stuttgart, 1981). Hoegen, Jesko von, Der Held von Tannenberg. Genese und Funktion des HindenburgMythos (Cololgne, 2007). Hoegner, Wilhelm, Die verratene Republik. Deutsche Geschichte 1918–1933 (Munich, 1958). Hoeres, Peter, Die Kultur von Weimar. Durchbruch der Moderne (Berlin, 2008). Holtfrerich, Carl-Ludwig, ‘Political Factors of the German Inflation, 1914–1923’, in Nathan Schmukler and Edward Marcus (eds), Inflation through the Ages. Economic, Social, Psychological and Historical Aspects (New York, 1983). —, The German Inflation 1914–1923: Causes and Effects in International Perspective (Berlin, 1986). Holtje, Christian, Die Weimarer Republik und das Ostlocarno-Problem 1919 bis 1934. Revision oder Garantie der deutschen Ostgrenze von 1919 (Wurzburg, 1958).

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Holtz, Bärbel, ‘Preußens Kunstpolitik in der Demokratie (1918 bis 1933)’, in Acta Borussica Neue Folge: 2 Reihe, Preußen als Kulturstaat: Das preußische Kultusministerium als Staatsbehörde und gesellschaftliche Agentur (1817–1934) (Berlin, 2010), pp. 399–634. Hong, Young-Sun, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933 (Princeton, 1998). Höpfner, Hans Paul, Deutsche Südosteuropapolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main, 1983). Horn, Eva, ‘Work on Charisma: Writing Hitler’s Biography’. New German Critique New German Critique, 114, Narrating Charisma (Fall 2011), 95–114. Horne, John and Kramer, Alan, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT, 2001). Hornung, Klaus, Der Jungdeutsche Orden (Düsseldorf, 1958). Hubatsch, Walther, Hindenburg und der Staat: Aus den Papieren des Generalfeldmarschalls und der Reichspräsidenten von 1878 bis 1934 (Göttingen, Berlin, Frankfurt/M., Zurich, 1966). Hubbard, William H., Familiengeschichte. Materialien zur deutschen Familie seit dem Ende des 18.Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1983). Huber, Ernst Rudolf, Verfassungsrecht des Großdeutschen Reiches (Hamburg, 1939). —, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 3: Bismarck und das Reich (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1963). —, Deustche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 4: Struktur und Krisen des Kaiserreichs (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1969). —, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 5: Weltkrieg, Revolution und Reichserneuerung 1914–1919 (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1978). —, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 6: Die Weimarer Verfassung (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1981). —, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Vol. 7: Ausbau, Schutz und Untergang der Weimarer Repulblik (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1984). Hueck, Ingo J., Der Staatsgerichtshof zum Schutze der Republik (Tübingen, 1996). Hughes, David, Shock of the New Art and the Century of Change revised and enlarged (London, 1991). Hull, Isabel V., The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918 (Cambridge, 1982). Hung, Jochen, Weiss-Sussex, Godela and Wilkes, Geoff (eds), Beyond Glitter and Doom: New Perspectives of the Weimar Republic (Munich, 2012). Hunt, Richard N., German Social Democracy 1918–1933, (Yale, 1964). Hüsmert, Ernst (ed.), Carl Schmitt. Tagebücher vom Oktober 1912 bis Februar 1915, second edition (Berlin, 2005). Hüsmert, Ernst and Giesler, Curt (eds), Carl Schmitt – Die Militärzeit 1915 bis 1919. Tagebuch Februar bis Dezember 1915. Aufsätze und Materialien (Berlin, 2005). Hütt, Wolfgang (ed.), Hintergrund. Mit den Unzüchtigkeits- und Gotteslästerungenparagraphen des Strafgesetzbuches gegen Kunst und Künstler 1900–1933 (East Berlin, 1990). Hüttenberger, Peter, ‘Heimtückefälle vor dem Sondergericht München’, in Martin Broszat, Elke Fröhlich, Anton Grossmann (eds), Bayern in der NS-Zeit IV (Munich, Vienna, 1981), pp. 435–526. International Industrial Relations Institute (ed.), International Unemployment. (Proceedings of the World Social Economic Congress, Amsterdam, August 1931). Is Germany Guilty? German White-book concerning the Responsibility of the Authors of the War (Berlin, 1919).

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Isherwood, Christopher, Berlin Stories, The Last of Mr Norris and Goodbye to Berlin (New York, 1963, orig. 1935). Ishida, Yuji, Jungkonservative in der Weimarer Republik. Der Ring-Kreis 1928–1933 (Frankfurt, Bern, New York, Paris, 1988). Jacob, Herbert, German Administration since Bismarck: Central Authority versus Local Autonomy (New Haven and London, 1963). Jacobsen, Arthur J. and Schlink, Bernhard (eds), Weimar A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley, 2000). Jäckel, Eberhard, Theodor Heuss, Hitlers Weg. Eine Schrift aus dem Jahre 1932 (Tübingen, 1968). Jahoda, Marie, Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Zeisel, Hans, Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal. Ein soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen langandauernder Arbeitslosigkeit (1933, reprint Frankfurt am Main 1975). Jarausch, Konrad H., ‘From Second to Third Reich: The Problem of Continuity in German Foreign Policy’. Central European History, 12, 1 (March 1979), 68–82. Jarausch, Konrad H. and Jones, Larry E. (eds), In Search of a Liberal Germany. Studies in the History of German Liberalism from 1789 to the Present (New York, 1990). Jaser, Alexander, Picht, Clemens and Schulin, Ernst (eds), Walther Rathenau Briefe Teilband 2: 1914–1922 (Düsseldorf, 2006). Jasper, Gotthard, Der Schutz der Republik. Studien zur staatlichen Sicherung der Demokratie in der Weimar Republik 1922–1930 (Tübingen 1963). —(ed.), Von Weimar zu Hitler 1930–1933 (Cologne and Berlin, 1968). —, ‘Justiz und Politik in der Weimarer Republik’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 30 (1982), 167–215. —, ‘Beamtentum und Richterschaft’, in Everhard Holtmann (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik Vol. 2: Der brüchige Frieden 1924–28   Bayerische Landeszentrale für Politische Bildungsarbeit (Munich, 1994). Jatzlauk, Manfred, ‘Landarbeiter, Bauern und Großgrundbesitzer in der Weimarer Republik’. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 39 (1991), 888–905. Jefferies, Matthew, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918 (Basingstoke, 2003). Jelavich, Peter, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA, 1993). Jellinek, Walter, ‘Entstehung und Aufbau der Weimarer Verfassung’, in Gerhard Anschütz, Richard Thoma (eds), Handbuch des Deutschen Staatsrechts I (Tübingen, 1930). Jerram, Leif, Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of Metropolis, 1895– 1930 (Manchester, 2007). Jesse, Eckehard and Köhler, Henning, ‘Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19 im Wandel der historischen Forschung. Forschungsüberblick und Kritik der “herrschenden Lehre”. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B45 (1978), 3–24. Jones, Larry Eugene, ‘“The Dying Middle”: Weimar Germany and the Fragmentation of Bourgeois Politics’, Central European History, 5, 1 (March 1972), 23–54. —, ‘Gustav Stresemann and the Crisis of German Liberalism’. European Studies Review, 4, 2 (1975), 141–63. Jones, Larry Eugene and Retallack, James (eds), Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance (Providence and Oxford, 1993), pp. 465–501. Jones, Larry Eugene and Pyta, Wolfram (eds), ‘Ich bin der letzte Preuße’. Der politische Lebensweg des konservativen Politikers Kuno Graf von Westarp (1864–1945) (Cologne, 2006). Jung, Otmar, ‘“Da gelten Paragraphen nichts, sondern da gilt lediglich der Erfolg . . .” Noskes Erschießungsbefehl während des Märzaufstandes in Berlin 1919 – rechthistorisch betrachtet’. Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 45 (1988), 51–79.

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Jünger, Ernst, In Stahlgewittern: aus dem Tagebuch eines Stoßtruppführers (Berlin, 1924 [orig. 1920]). Jürgens, Martin, Staat und Reich bei Ernst Rudolf Huber: sein Leben und Werk bis 1945 aus rechtsgeschichtlicher Sicht (Frankfurt am Main, 2005). Kaschuba, Wolfgang and Maase, Kasper (eds), Schund und Schönheit. Populäre Kultur um 1900 (Cologne, 2001). Kaser, Michael and Radice, E. A. (eds), The Economic History of Eastern Europe 1919– 1975. Volume 1 Economic Structure and Performance between the Wars (Oxford, 1985). Kater, Michael, The Nazi Party. A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919–1945 (Oxford, 1983). Kennedy, Ellen, ‘Emergency government within the bounds of the constitution: an introduction to Carl Schmitt, “The Dictatorship of the Reich president according to Article 48 R.V”’. Constellations, 18/3 (November 2011), 284–323. Kershaw, Ian, The ‘Hitler Myth’. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987). —, ‘The Nazi State: An Exceptional State?’. New Left Review, 176 (1989), 47–67. —(ed.), Weimar: Why did German Democracy Fail? (London, 1990). —, Hitler, 1895–1936 Hubris (London, 1998). —, Hitler, 1936–45: Nemesis (New York, London, 2000a). —, The Nazi Dictatorship, Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th edition (London, 2000b). Kessler, Harry Graf, Tagebücher 1918–1937. Politik, Kunst und Gesellschaft der zwanziger Jahre, 4th edn (Frankfurt/Main, 1979). —, Künstler und Nationen. Aufsätze und Reden, 1899–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1988). —, The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan: Count Harry Kessler, 1918–1937, translated and edited by Charles Kessler (London, 1991). —, Das Tagebuch 1880–1937: Sechster Band 1916–18, edited Günter Riederer, Roland S. Kamzelak und Ulrich Ott (Stuttgart, 2006). Keynes, John Maynard, The Economic Consequences of Peace (London, 1919). Kiesel, Helmuth (ed.), Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt Briefe 1930–1983 (Stuttgart, 1999). —, Ernst Jünger. Die Biographie pbk edition (Munich 2009). Kindleberger, Charles P., The World in Depression 1929–1939 (London, 1973). —, Financial History of Western Europe (London, Boston, Sydney, 1984). Kirk, Tim and McElligott, Anthony (eds), Opposing Fascism. Community, Authority and Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, 1999). Kitchen, Martin, The Silent Dictatorship. The Politics of the German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1916–1918 (London, 1976). Kißener, Michael, Zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie. Badische Richter 1919–1952 (Konstanz, 2003). Klemperer, Victor, Leben sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum. Tagebücher 1918–1924, edited Walter Nowojski (Berlin, 1996). —, Leben Sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum. Tagebücher 1925–1932, edited Walter Nowojski (Berlin, 1996). Klueting, Harm, ‘“Vernunftrepulikanismus” und “Vertauensdiktatur”: Friedrich Meinecke in der Weimarer Republik’. Historische Zeitschrift, Bd. 242, H. 1 (February 1986), 69–89. Kluge, Ulrich, Die deutsche Revolution 1918/1919 (Frankfurt/Main, 1985). Klümpen, Heinrich, Deutsche Außenpolitik zwischen Versailles und Rapallo: Revisionismus oder Neueorientierung? (Münster, 1992). Knickerbocker, H. R., Deutschland so oder so? (Berlin, 1932).

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Kniesche, Thomas W. and Brockman, Stephen (eds), Dancing on the Volcano. Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (Columbia, SC, 1994). Knipping, Franz, Deutschland, Frankreich und das Ende der Locarno-Ära 1928–1931. Studien zur internationalen Politik in der Anfangsphase der Weltwirtschaftskrise (Munich, 1987). Kocka, Jürgen, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg, 2nd edn (Göttingen, 1978) translated as Facing Total War: German Society 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1984). Koebner, Thomas, Janz, Rolf-Peter and Trommler, Frank (eds), ‘Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit’. Der Mythos Jugend (Frankfurt am Main, 1985). Kohler, Eric D., ‘Revolutionary Pomerania, 1919–20: A Study in Majority Socialist Agricultural Policy and Civil-Military Relations’. Central European History, 9, 3 (September 1976), 250–93. Kolb, Eberhard, Die Weimarer Republik, third edn (Munich, 1993). —, ‘Im Schatten des übermächtigen Vaters. Herbert und Otto von Bismarck’, in Thomas Karlauf and Katharina Raabe (eds), Väter und Söhne. Zwölf Portaits (Reinbek, 1998), pp. 169–201. Kölling, Bernd, Familienwirtschaft und Klassenbildung: Landarbeiter im Arbeitskonflikt; das ostelbische Pommern und die norditalienische Lomellina 1901–1921 (Vierow bei Greifswald, 1996). Kollwitz, Käthe, Die Tagebücher 1908–1943, edited with a postscript by Jutta BohnkeKollwitz (Berlin 1989, new edn. 2007). Koshar, Rudy, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism. Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986). —(ed.), Splintered Classes. Politics and the Lower Middle Classes in Interwar Europe (New York, 1990). Kossert, Andreas, Ostpreussen. Geschichte und Mythos (Munich, 2005). Krabbe, Wolfgang R. (ed.), Politische Jugend in der Weimarer Republik (Bochum, 1993). —, ‘Die Bismarckjugend der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei’. German Studies Review, 17, 1 (February 1994), 9–32. —, Die gescheiterte Zukunft der Ersten Republik. Jugendorganisation bürgerlicher Parteien im Weimarer Staat (1918–1933) (Opladen, 1995). Kracauer, Siegfried, The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995). Kramer, Gerhard, ‘The Courts of the Third Reich’, in Maurice Baumont, John M. E. Fried, Edmond Vermeil (eds), The Third Reich (New York, 1955). Kratz-Kessemeier, Kristina, Kunst für die Republik. Die Kunstpolitik des preußischen Kultusministeriums1918 bis 1932 (Berlin, 2008). Krause, Hartfried, USPD. Zur Geschichte der Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Frankfurt/Main, 1975). Kreiler, Kurt (ed.), Traditionen deutsche Justiz: Große politische Prozeße der Weimarer Zeit. Ein Lesebuch zur Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1978). Krockow, Christian Graf von, Warnung vor Preußen, 3rd edn (Berlin, 1999). Kruedener, Jürgen von, ‘Die Überförderung der Weimarer Republik als Sozialstaat’. Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 11 (1985), 358–76. —(ed.), Economic Crisis and Political Collapse: The Weimar Republic, 1924–1933 (New York, 1990). Krüger, Peter, Deutschland und die Reparationen 1918/19 (Stuttgart, 1973). —, Die Aussenpolitik der Republik von Weimar (Darmstadt, 1985). Kuczynski, Jürgen, Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter in Deutschland Band I (Berlin, 1947).

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Kuhn, Robert, Die Vertrauenskrise in der Justiz (1926–1928). Der Kampf um die Republikanisierung der Rechtspflege in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 1983). Kühne, Thomas, Kamaradschaft. Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006). Kunz, Andreas, Civil Servants and the Politics of Inflation, 1914–1924 (Berlin, 1986). Kurz, Achim, Demokratische Diktatur? Auslegung und Handhabung des Artikels 48 der Weimarer Reichsverfassung 1919–1925 (Berlin, 1992). Laffan, Michael (ed.), The Burden of German History 1919–1945: Essays for the Goethe Institute (London, 1988). Lamb, Stephan and Phelan, Anthony, ‘Weimar Culture: The Birth of Modernism’, in Rob Burns (ed.), German Cultural Studies (Oxford, 1996). Lambach, Walther, Diktator Rathenau (Hamburg, Leipzig, 1918). —, Die Herrschaft der Fünfhundert. Ein Bild des parlamentarischen Lebens im neuen Deutschland (Hamburg and Berlin, 1926a). —(ed.), Politische Praxis 1926 (Hamburg, 1926b). Landsberg, Otto, Die politische Krise der Gegenwart. Nach einem Vortrag (Berlin, 1931). Larsen, Stein Ugelvik, ‘Charisma from below? The Quisling Case in Norway’. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7, 2 (June 2006), 235–44. Laschnitza, Amalies, Im Lebensrausch, trotz alledem. Rosa Luxemburg Eine Biographie (Berlin, 2002 [1996]). Lasswell, Harold, The Analysis of Political Behaviour: An Empirical Approach (London, 1948). Laube, Giesbert, Der Reichskunstwart. Geschichte einer Kulturbehörde 1919–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1997). Lebzelter, Gisela, ‘Die “Schwarze Schmach” in Vorurteile-Propaganda-Mythos’. Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 11 (1985), 37–58. Lee, Marshall and Michalka, Wolfgang, German Foreign Policy 1917–1933: Continuity or Break? (Leamington Spa, Hamburg, New York, 1987). Lehnert, Detlef, ‘Forschungsprojeckt “Politische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik, Identitäts- und Konsensprobleme in einer fragmentierten Gesellschaft”’ (Berlin Free University, 1985). Lehnert, Detlef and Megerle, Klaus (eds), Politische Identität und Nationale Gedenktage. Zur politischen Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Opladen, 1989). —, Verfassungsdemokratie als Bürgergenossenschaft. Politisches Denken, Öffentliches Recht und Geschichtsdeutungen bei Hugo Preuß (Baden-Baden, 1998). —, (ed.), Hugo Preuss. Gesammelte Schriften IV: Politik und Verfassung in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen, 2008). Leibholz, Gerhard, Die Auflösung der liberalen Demokratie in Deutschland und das autoritäre Staatsbild (Munich, 1933). Lepsius, M. Rainer, ‘The Model of Charismatic Leadership and its Applicability to the Rule of Adolf Hitler’. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7, 2 (June 2006), 175–90. Lessing, Theodor, Hindenburg (Berlin, 1925). Lethen, Helmuth, Verhaltenslehren der Kälte. Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt am Main, 1994). Lewek, Peter, Arbeitslosigkeit und Arbeitslosenversicherung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1927 (Stuttgart, 1992). Linton, Derek, ‘Who has the Youth, has the Nation’. The Campaign to Save Youth Workers in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 1991). Llanque, Marcus (ed.), Souveräne Demokratie und soziale Homogenität: das politische Denken Hermann Hellers (Baden-Baden, 2010).

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Lösche, Peter, Der Bolschevismus im Urteil der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Berlin 1967). Lowenstein, Karl, Verfassungslehre, second edition (Tübingen, 1969 [orig. 1957]). Löwenstein, Kurt, ‘The Balance between Legislative and Executive Power: A Study in Comparative Constitutional Law’. The University of Chicago Law Review, 5.4 (June 1938), 566–608. Lorenz, Thomas, ‘Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht’. Der Versailler Vertrag in Diskurs und Zeitgeist der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt, New York, 2008). Luckau, Alma Molin, The German Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference (New York, 1941). Ludendorff, Erich, Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914–1918 (Berlin, 1919). —, Kriegsführung und Politik (Berlin, 1923). —, Mein militärischer Werdegang. Blätter der Erinnerung an unser stolzes Heer (Munich, 1933). Lüdtke, Alf, ‘Hunger in der Großen Depression. Hungererfahrungen und Hungerpolitik am Ende der Weimarer Republik’. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 27 (1987), 145–76. Lüdtke, Alf, Marßolek, Inge and Saldern, Adelheid von (eds), Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1996). Lyth, Peter J., Inflation and the Merchant Economy. The Hamburg Mittelstand, 1914–1924 (New York, Oxford, Munich, 1990). Maass, Sebastien, Kämpfer um ein Drittes Reich. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und sein Kreis (Kiel, 2010). Machtan, Lothar, Die Abdankung. Wie Deutschlands gekrönte Häupter aus der Geschichte fielen (Berlin, 2008). Mader, Ursula, ‘Wie das “Deutschlandlied” 1922 Nationalhymne wurde. Aus der Ministerialakte “Nationallied”’. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (1990), 1088–100. Maehl, William, ‘The German Socialists and the Foreign Policy of the Reich from the London Conference to Rapallo’. Journal of Modern History, 19, 1 (March 1947), 35–54. Mahraun, Artur, Das Jungdeutsche Manifest. Volk gegen Kaste und Geld; Sicherung des Friedens durch Neubau der Staaten (Berlin, 1927). Maier, Charles S., In Search of Stability. Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge, 1987). Malinowski, Stefan, Vom König zum Führer. Deutscher Adel und Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2004). Mallmann, Klaus, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik: Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionären Bewegung (Darmstadt, 1996). Mann, Golo, Reminiscences and Reflections: Growing up in Germany (London, 1990). Mann, Heinrich, Der Untertan (Leipzig, 1918). Mann, Klaus, Der Wendepunkt. Ein Lebensbericht (Frankfurt, 1953). Mann, Thomas, Tagebücher 1918–1921, edited Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main, 2003a). —, Tagebücher 1933–1934, edited Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main, 2003b). Marks, Sally, ‘The Myth of Reparations’. Central European History, 11/3 (September 1978), 231–55. —, ‘Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and Prurience’, European Studies Review, 13, 3 (1983), 297–333. Martel, Gordon (ed.), Modern German Reconsidered 1870–1945 (London, New York, 1992). Martin, Hermann, Demokratie oder Diktatur? (Berlin, 1926). Martynkewicz, Wolfgang, Salon Deutschland. Geist und Macht 1900–1945 (Berlin, 2009).

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Mason, Tim, ‘The Legacy of 1918 for National Socialism’, in Anthony Nicholls and Erich Matthias (eds), German Democracy and the Triumph of Hitler (London, 1971). —, Social Policy in the Third Reich. The Working Class and the ‘National Community’, 1918–1939 (New York, Oxford, Munich, 1993). —, Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Classes: Essays by Tim Mason, edited Jane Caplan (Cambridge, 1995). Matthias, Erich, ‘Hindenburg Zwischen den Fronten 1932’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 8 (1960), 75–84. Matthias, Erich and Morsey, Rudolf (eds) DasEndederParteien1933 (Düsseldorf, 1960). McElligott, Anthony, Contested City. Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona (Ann Arbor, 1997). —(ed.), The Short Oxford History of Germany: Weimar Germany (Oxford, New York, 2009), pp. 26–49. McElligott, Anthony and Kirk, Tim (eds), Working towards the Führer. Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw (Manchester, 2003). Meerwarth, Rudolf, Günther, Adolf and Zimmermann, Waldemar, Die Einwirkung des Krieges auf Bevölkerungsbewegung, Einkommen und Lebenshaltung in Deutschland (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig, 1932). Megerle, Klaus, Deutsche Außenpolitik 1935: Ansatz zu aktiven Revisionismus (Frankfurt, 1973). Mehring, Reinhard, Carl Schmitt Aufstieg und Fall. Eine Biographie (Munich, 2009). Mein Arbeitstag – mein Wochenende. 150 Berichte vonj Textilarbeiterinnen, Collected and edited by Deutschen Textilarbeiterverband (Berlin, 1930). Meinecke, Friedrich, ‘Republik, Bürgertum, Jugend. Vortrag gehalten im Demokratischen Studentenbund zu Berlin am 16. Januar 1925’, in Die Paulskirche 16 (Frankfurt a.M., 1925). —, ‘Die Revolution. Ursachen und Tatsachen’, in Gerhard Anschütz, Richard Thoma (eds), Handbuch des Deutschen Staatsrechts I (Tübingen, 1930). —, Die Deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden, 1947). —, Straßburg-Freiburg-Berlin 1901–1919 in Werke 8: Autobiographische Schriften edited and introduced by Eberhard Kessel, (Munich, 1969). Meinel, Florian, Der Jurist in der industriellen Gesellschaft. Ernst Forsthoff und seine Zeit (Berlin, 2011). Meißner, Otto, Staatssekretär unter Ebert, Hindenburg, Hitler (Hamburg, 1950). Mergel, Thomas, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 2002). —, ‘Dictatorship and Democracy, 1918–1939’, in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), pp. 423–53. Meyer, Henry Cord, Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815–1945 (The Hague, 1955). Meyer, Oscar, Vom Bismarck zu Hitler: Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen (New York, 1944). Michalka, Wolfgang and Lee, Marshall (eds), Gustav Stresemann (Darmstadt, 1982). Miller, Susanne, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf, 1974). —, Die Bürde der Macht: die deutsche Sozialdemokratie 1918–1920 (Düsseldorf, 1978). Mittenzwei, Werner, Der Untergang einer Akademie oder die Mentalität des ewigen Deutschen. Der Einfluß der nationalkonservativen Dichter an der Preußischen Akademie der Künste 1918–1947 (Berlin, 1992). Moeller, Robert G., ‘Dimensions of Social Conflict in the Great War: The View from the German Countryside’, Central European History, 14, 2 (June 1981), 142–68.

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—, German Peasants and Agrarian Politics, 1914–1924. The Rhineland and Westphalia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986). Mohler, Armin, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932: Ein Handbuch, sixth revised edition (Graz, 2005 [orig.1949]). Möller, Horst, ‘Die preussischen Oberpräsidenten der Weimarer Republik als Verwaltungselite’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 30 (1982), 1–26. Mombauer, Annika and Deist, Wilhelm (eds), The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2003). Mommsen, Hans, ‘Die Stellung der Beamtenschaft in Reich, Ländern und Gemeinden in der Ära Brüning’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 21 (1973), 151–65. Mommsen, Hans, Petzina, Dietmar and Weisbrod, Bernd (eds), Industrielles System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik 2 vols (Düsseldorf, 1977). —, From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History, translated by Philip O’Connor (Oxford, 1990). —, Die verspielte Freiheit. Der Weg der Republik von Weimar in den Untergang 1918–1933 (Berlin, 1989), in English as The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy translated Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones (Chapel Hill, 1996). Mommsen, Hans and Gillmann, Sabine (eds), Politische Schriften und Briefe Carl Friedrich Goerdelers, 2 Vols (Munich, 2003). Mommsen, Wolfgang J., ‘Zum Begriff der “Plebiszitären Führerdemokratie” bei Max Weber’. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 15, Nr. 2 (1963), 295–322. —, Max Weber Gesellschaft, Politik und Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1974). —, Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920 (Chicago and London, 1984). —, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II and German Politics’. Journal of Contemporary History, 25 (1990), 289–316. —, Großmachtstellung und Weltpolitik. Die Außenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1870–1914 (Berlin, 1993). —, Imperial Germany 1867–1918. Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State (London, 1995). —, Bürgerlich Kultur und politische Ordnung. Künstler, Schriftsteller und Intellektuelle in der deutschen Geschichte 1830–1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 2000). —, Die Urkatastrophe Deutschlands. Der Erste Weltkrieg 1914–1918  Gebhardt Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, Vol. 17, tenth edition (Stuttgart, 2001). —, Der Erste Weltkrieg. Anfang vom Ende des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (Frankfurt am Main, 2003). Morris, Douglas G., Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor, 2005). Morsey, Rudolf, ‘Hitlers Verhandlungen mit der Zentrumsführung am 31. Januar 1933’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 9 (1961), 182–94. —, ‘Zur Beamtenpolitik von Bismarck bis Brüning’. in Demokratie und Verwaltung: 25 Jahre Hochschule für Verwaltung Speyer (Berlin, 1972). Mühlberger, Detlef, Hitler’s Followers, Studies in the Sociology of the Nazi Movement (London, 1990). —, The Social Bases of Nazism, 1919–1933 (Cambridge, 2003). Mühlhausen, Walter, Friedrich Ebert: 1871–1925. Reichspräsident der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 2006). Mühlhausen, Walter and Braun, Bernd (eds), Friedrich Ebert und seine Familie: Private Briefe 1909–1924 (Munich etc., 1992). Müller, Hermann, Die November Revolution. Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1931).

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Müller, Ingo, Hitler’s Justice. The Courts of the Third Reich (London, 1991). Muncy, Lysbeth, ‘The Junkers and the Prussian Administration from 1918 to 1937’. Review of Politics 9 (1947), 482–501. —, ‘The Prussian Landräte in the Last Years of the Monarchy: A Case Study of Pomerania and the Rhineland in 1890–1918’. Central European History, 6, 4 (December 1973), 299–338. Muth, Heinrich, ‘Carl Schmitt in der deutschen Innenpolitik des Sommers 1932’. Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte, New Series, 1, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Weimarer Republik’ (1971), 75–147. Naumann, Friedrich, Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1915). Nebelin, Manfred, Ludendorff. Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 2011). Neugebauer-Wölk, Monika, Wählergenerationen in Preussen zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik. Versuch zu einem Kontinuitätsproblem des protestantischen Preussen in seien Kernprovinzen.Mit eine Einführung von Otto Büsch (Berlin, 1987). Neuhaus, Helmut, ‘Das Ende der Monarchien in Deutschland 1918’. Historisches Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft 111 (1991), 102–36. Neumann, Adolf, ‘Rathenaus Reparationspolitik’ (Phil. Diss Leipzig University, 1930). Neumann, Franz, Behemoth. The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944, (1942, 1944, reprint 1963, edn. New York 1983). Nicholls, Anthony J., ‘Die höhere Beamtenschaft in der Weimarer Zeit: Betrachtungen zu Problem ihrer Haltung und ihrer Fortbildung’, in Lothar Albertin and Werner Link (eds), Politische Parteien auf dem Wege zur parlamentarischen Demokratie in Deutschland: Entwicklungslinien bis zur Gegenwart (Düsseldorf, 1981). Niedhart, Gottfried, Internationale Beziehungen 1917–1947 (Paderborn, 1989). —, Die Außenpolitik der Weimarer Republik (Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte, 53; Munich, 1999). Nitschke, August, Ritter, Gerhard A., Peukert, Detlev J. K. and Bruch, Rüdiger vom (eds), Jahrhundertwende: Der Aufbruch in der Moderne 1880–1930, 2 Vols (Reinbek, 1990). Noakes, Jeremy, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, 1921–1933 (Oxford, 1971). Noakes, Jeremy and Pridham, Geoffrey (eds), Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, Vol. 1 (Exeter, 1983). —, Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, Vol. 2 (Exeter, 1984). Nolan, Mary, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford, 1994). Nolte, Ernst, The Three Faces of Fascism (London, 1965). —, Die Weimarer Republik: Demokratie zwischen Lenin und Hitler (Munich, 2006). Odenwald, Florian, Der nazistische Kampf gegen das ‘Undeutsche’ in Theater und Film, 1920–1945 (Munich, 2006). Olden, Rudolf, Stresemann (Berlin, 1929). —, Hindenburg oder der Geist der preussischen Armee (Paris, 1935, reprint Hildesheim, 1982). Orde, Anne, British Policy and European Reconstruction after the First World War (Cambridge, 1990). O’Riordan, Elspeth Y., Britain and the Ruhr Crisis (Basingstoke, 2001). Orlow, Dietrich, The History of the Nazi Party, Vol. 1, 1919–1933 (Pittsburgh, 1969). —, ‘1918/19: A German Revolution’. German Studies Review, 5, 2 (May 1982), 187–203. —, Weimar Prussia 1925–1933: Illusion of Strength 1925–1933 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1991). Osmond, Jonathan, Rural Protest in the Weimar Republic: The Free Peasantry in the Rhineland and Bavaria (New York, 1993). Ottwalt, Ernst, Denn sie wissen was sie tun. Ein deutscher Justiz-Roman (Berlin, 1931).

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Overy, Richard, The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932–1938, second edn (Cambridge, 1996 [London, 1982]). Pachter, Henry, Weimar Etudes (New York, 1982). Papen, Franz von, Die Wahrheit eine Gasse (Munich, 1952). —, Von Scheitern einer Demokratie 1930–1933 (Mainz, 1968). Partsch, Cornelius, Schräge Töne: Jazz und Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart etc., 2000). Patch, William L., Heinrich Brüning and the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge, 1998). Pauley, Margaret, The Watch on the Rhine. The Military Occupation of the Rhineland, 1918–1930 (London, New York, 2007). Paulus, Günter, ‘Die soziale Struktur der Freikorps in den ersten Monaten nach der Novemberrevolution’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, Heft 5 (1955), 685–704. Peschel, Andreas, Friedrich Naumanns und Max Webers ‘Mitteleuropa’: eine Betrachtung ihrer Konzeptionen im Kontext mit den ‘Ideen von 1914’ und dem Alldeutschen Verband (Dresden, 2005). Petersen, Klaus, Literatur und Justiz in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1988). —, ‘The Harmful Publications (Young Persons) Act of 1926. Literary Censorship and the Politics of Morality in the Weimar Republic’. German Studies Review, 15, 3 (1992), 505–23. —, Zensur in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, Weimar, 1995). Petzinna, Berthold, Erziehung zum Deutschen Lebenstil. Vorsprung und Entwicklung des junkonservativen ‘Ring’-Kreises 1918–1933 (Berlin, 2000). Petzold, Joachim/Authors’ Collective, Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg 3 Vols: Vol 3 November 1917 bis November 1918 (East Berlin, 1970/71). Peukert, Detlev J. K., Die KPD im Widerstand (Wuppertal, 1980). —, Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung. Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Jugendfürsorge 1878 bis 1932 (Essen, 1986). —, The Weimar Republic. The Crisis of Classical Modernity, translated Richard Deveson (London, 1991). Pförtner, Rudolf (ed.), Alltag in der Weimarer Republik. Erinnerungen an eine unruhige Zeit (Düsseldorf, Vienna, New York, 1990). Pikart, Eberhard, ‘Preußische Beamtenpolitik 1918–1933’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 6 (1958), 119–37. Pinsdorf, Kate, ‘The Nature and Aims of the National Socialist Labor Party’. American Political Science Review, XXV (1931), 377–88. Pohl, Karl Heinrich, Weimars Wirtschaft und die Außenpolitik der Republik, 1924–1926. Vom Dawes Plan zum Internationalen Eisenpakt (Düsseldorf, 1979). —(ed.), Politiker und Bürger. Gustav Stresemann und seine Zeit (Göttingen, 2002). Pollock, James Kerr, Germany in Power and Eclipse, The Background of German Development (Toronto, New York, London, 1952). Preller, Ludwig, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik, (1949, repr. Düsseldorf, 1978). Preuß, Hugo, Staat Recht und Freiheit. Aus 40 Jahren Deutscher Politik und Geschichte (Tübingen, 1926). Pünder, Hermann, Politik in der Reichskanzlei. Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1929–1932, edited by Thilo Vogelsand (Stuttgart, 1961). —, Der Reichspräsident in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main, Bonn, 1961). Pyta, Wolfram, Gegen Hitler und für die Republik. Die Auseinandersetzung der deutschen Sozialdemokratie mit der NSDAP in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1989).

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—, ‘Vorbereitungen für den militärischen Ausnahmezustand unter Papen/Schleicher’. Militärgechichtliche Mitteilungen 51 (1992), 385–428. —, ‘Konstitutionelle Demokratie statt monarchischer Restauration. Die verfassungspolitische Konzeption Schleichers in der Weimarer Staatskrise’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 47 (1999), 417–41. —, Hindenburg. Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich, 2007). Rabenau, Friedrich von, Hans von Seeckt. Aus seinem Leben (Leipzig, 1940). Rasehorn, Theo, Justizkritik in der Weimarer Republik: das Beispiel der Zeitschrift ‘Die Justiz’ (Frankfurt/Main, 1985). Rathenau, Walther, Von kommenden Dingen (Berlin, 1917). —, An Deutschlands Jugend (Berlin, 1918a). —, Gesammelte Schriften in fünf Bänden: fünfter Band (Berlin, 1918b). —, Nach der Flut (Berlin, 1919a). —, Der Kaiser: eine Betrachtung (Berlin, 1919b). —, Nachgelassene Schriften, 2 vols (Berlin, 1928). —, Briefe Teilband 2: 1914–1922, edited Alexander Jaser, Clemens Picht, Ernst Schulin (Düsseldorf, 2006). Raulff, Ulrich, Kreis ohne Meister: Stefan Georges Nachleben (München, 2009). Recker, Marie-Luise, Die Außenpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Munich, 1990). Redslob, Edwin, Von Weimar nach Europa. Erlebtes und Durchdachtes (Berlin, 1972). Reibnitz, Kurt von, Im Dreieck Schleicher, Hitler, Hindenburg. Männer des deutschen Schicksals (Dresden, 1933). Reinthal, Angela, Mußgnug, Reinhard and Mußgnug, Dorothee (eds), Briefwechsel Ernst Forsthoff – Carl Schmitt (1926–1974, Berlin, 2007). Reulecke, Jürgen (ed.), Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2003). Reuter, Günter and Otten, Henrique Ricardo (eds), Der Aufstand gegen den Bürger. Antibürgerlichen Denken im 20. Jahrhundert (Würzburg, 1999). Revermann, Klaus H., Die Stufenweise Durchbrechung des Verfassungssystems der Weimarer Republik (Münster, 1959). Reynolds, Kenneth W., ‘ “Der Richter ist konservativ.” The German Reichsgericht und der Reichstag Fire Trial 1933’ (M.A. Thesis, McGill University, Montreal, 1992). Rheinbaben, Rocchus Freiherr von (ed.), Stresemann. Reden und Scriften, 2 vols (Dresden, 1926). Richter, Johannes Karl, Die Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst: Geschichte der ersten politischen Bildungsstelle in Deutschland und Untersuchung ihrer Rolle in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1963). Richter, Ludwig, ‘Reichspräsident und Ausnahmegewalt. Die Genese des Artikels 48 in den Beratungen der Weimarer Nationalversammlung’. Der Staat, 37 (1998), 221–47. Ritter, Gerhard A., The Sword and the Scepter. The Problem of Militarism Germany. Vol. III: The Tragedy of Statemanship – Bethmann Hollweg as War Chancellor (1914–1917) (Florida, 1972). Rödder, Andreas, Stresemanns Erbe: Julius Curtius und die deutsche Außenpolitik 1929–1931 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, 1996). Roerkohl, Anne, Hungerblockade und Heimatfront. Die kommunale Lebensmittelversorgung in Westfalen während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Stuttgart, 1991). Röhl, John C. G., Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy 1888–1900 (Cambridge, 2004).

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Roos, Juliana, ‘Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’. German History, 30, 1 (March 2012), 45–74. Rosenbaum, Eduard, Der Wirtschaftskrieg nach dem Versailler Vertrag (Leipzig, 1932). Rosenberg, Arthur, Die Enstehung der deutschen Republik 1871–1918 (Berlin, 1928) reprinted as Entstehung und Geschichte der Weimarer Republik edited and introduced by Kurt Kersten (Frankfurt, 1961). Rosenblum, Warren, Beyond the Prison Gates. Punishment and Welfare in Germany, 1850–1933 (Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, 2008). Rosenfeld, Gavriel, ‘Monuments and the Politics of Memory: Commemorating Kurt Eisner and the Bavarian Revolutions of 1918–1919 in Postwar Munich’. Central European History, 30, 2 (1997), 221–51. Rosenhaft, Eve, ‘Brecht’s Germany: 1898–1933’, in Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge, 1994). Ross, Corey, ‘Mass Culture and Divided Audiences: Cinema and Social Change in InterWar Germany’. Past & Present, 193 (November 2006), 157–95. Rossiter, Clinton, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (New York, 1963, orig. Princeton, 1948). Rossol, Nadine, ‘Chancen der Weimarer Republik’. Neue Politische Literatur, 55, 3 (2010), 393–419. —, Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany: Sport, Spectacle and Political Symbolism, 1926–36 (London and New York, 2010). Rothfels, Hans, ‘Germany: After the Catastrophe’. Journal of Contemporary History, 2, 1 (January 1967), 79–91. Rühle, Otto, Vom Untertan zum Staatsbürger (East Berlin, 1958). Runge, Wolfgang, Politik und Beamtentum im Parteienstaat: die Demokratisierung der politischen Beamten in Preußen zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Klett, 1965). Rupieper, Hermann J., The Cuno Government and Reparations 1922–1923. Politics and Economics (The Hague, Boston, London, 1979). Rürup, Reinhard, Probleme der Revolution in Deutschland 1918/19 (Wiesbaden, 1968). —, ‘Problems of the German Revolution’. Journal of Contemporary History, 3, 4 (October 1968), 109–35. —, ‘Demokratische Revolution und “dritter Weg”. Die deutsche Revolution von 1918/19 in der neueren wissenschaftlichen Diskussion’. Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 9 (1983), 278–301. Sabrow, Martin, ‘Der Doppelte Mythos’, in Potsdamer Neuesten Nachrichten, 21.03.2013, pp. 12–13, accessed at http://www.pnn.de/potsdam/735386/. Sachse, Carola (ed.), ‘Mitteleuropa’ und ‘Südosteuropa’ als Planungsraum. Wirtschafts- und kulturpolitische Expertisen im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Göttingen, 2010). Saldern, Adelheid von, ‘Massenfreizeitkultur im Visier. Ein Beitrag zu den Deutungs- und Einwirkungsversuchen während der Weimarer Republik’. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 33 (1993), 21–58. Salin, Edgar, Die Deutschen Tribute. Zwölf Reden (Berlin, 1930). Schacht, Hjalmar, 76 Jahre meines Lebens (Bad Wörishofen, 1953). Schäfer, Heinrich, Reichsverfassung und Rätesystem. Diktatur oder Demokratie? (Cologne, 1920). Scheel, Klaus, 1933, Der Tag von Potsdam (Berlin, 1996). Scheidemann, Philipp, Das historische Versagen der SPD. Schriften aus dem Exil (Lüneburg, 2002).

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Schenk, Dieter, Hans Frank. Hitlers Kronjurist und Generalgouverneur (Frankfurt am Main, 2006). Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, Culture of Defeat. On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (London, 2003, orig. Die Kultur der Niederlage, Berlin, 2001). Schmidt, Anne, ‘Eine Staatsführung in der Vertrauenskrise. Deutschland 1918’, in Ute Frevert (ed.), Vertrauen. Historische Annäherungen (Göttingen, 2003), pp. 279–305. Schmitt, Carl, ‘Diktatur und Belagerungszustand. Eine staatsrechtliche Studie’. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 38 (1916), 138–62. —, Politische Theologie (Munich and Leipzig, 1922). —, Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (Berlin, 1923). —, ‘Der Begriff der modernen Demokratie in seinem Verhältnis zum Staatsbegriff ’. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 51 (Tübingen, 1924), 817–23. —, Die Diktatur: von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf; mit einem Anhang: Die Diktatur des Reichspräsidenten nach Art. 48 der Weimarer Verfassung, 2nd edn (München, 1928). —, ‘Der Hüter der Verfassung’. Archiv des öffentlichen Rechts NF, 16 (1929), 161–237. —, ‘Starken Staat und gesunde Wirtschaft’, in Mitteilungen des Vereins zur Wahrung gemeinsamen wirtschaftlichen Interessen in Rheinland und Westfalen, no. 1 (Düsseldorf, 1932), pp. 13–32. —, ‘Das Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich vom 24. März 1933’. Deutsche Juristen Zeitung 38 (1933a), cols. 455–8. —, ‘1 Jahr deutsche Politik. Rückblick vom 20. Juli 1932. Von Papen über Schleicher zum ersten deutschen Volkskanzler Adolf Hitler’. Westdeutscher Beobachter 9 (1933b), Nr. 176, (23 July 1933). —, ‘Der Führer schützt das Recht. Zur Reichstagsrede Adolf Hitlers vom 13. Juli 1934’. Deutsche Juristen Zeitung, Heft 15 (1 August 1934), cols., 945–50. —, Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar – Genf – Versailles 1923–1939, third edn (Berlin, 1994 [1940]). —, Der Begriff des Politischen (Hamburg, 1932), translated with an introduction by George Schwab, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, 1996). —, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954. Materialien zu einer Verfassungslehre (Berlin, [1958] 2003). —, Legalität und Legitimät (Munich, 1932), trans. and ed. by Jeffrey Seitzer, Legality and Legitimacy (Durham, Conn., 2004). —, ‘Solange das Imperium da ist’. Carl Schmitt im Gespräch 1971, edited by Frank Hertweck/and Dimitrios isoudis (Berlin, 2010). Schmitz, Margun, Der Landrat, Mittler zwischen Staatsverwaltung und kommunaler Selbstverwaltung: der Wandel der funktionellen Stellung des Landrats vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden, 1991). Schnee, Heinrich and Draeger, Hans (eds), Zehn Jahre Versailles, 3 vols (Berlin, 1929). Schneider, Michael, Streit um Arbeitszeit. Geschichte des Kampfes um Arbeitszeitverkürzung in Deutschland (Cologne, 1984). Schoenbaum, David, Hitler’s Social Revolution. Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933– 1939 (1966, reprint 1980). Schöllgen, Gregor, Jenseits von Hitler. Die Deutschen in der Weltpolitik von Bismarck bis heute (Berlin, 2005). Schorske, Carl E., German Social Democracy, 1905–1917. The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, MA, London, 1955, 1983).

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Schott, Sabine, ‘Curt Rothenberger – eine politische Biographie’ (D.Phil jur., MartinLuther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 2001). Schotte, Walther, Der Neue Staat (Berlin, 1932). Schottlaender, Felix, Zwang und Freiheit. Ein Versuch über die Entstehung des Terrors in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1946). Schräder, Bärbel and Schebera, Jürgen, Kunstmetropole Berlin 1918–1933: Die Kunststadt in der Novemberrevolution, Die ‘Goldenen’ Zwanziger, Die Kunststadt in der Krise (Berlin, Weimar, 1987). Schreiber, Georg, Brüning, Hitler, Schleicher. Das Zentrum in der Opposition (Cologne, 1932). Schuller, Wolfgang and Giesler, Gerd (eds), Carl Schmitt Tagebücher 1930 bis 1934 (Berlin, 2010). Schultz, Hans-Dietrich, ‘Deutschlands ‘natürliche’ Grenzen’, in Alexander Demandt (ed.), Deutschlands Grenzen in der Geschichte (Munich, 1990). Schulz, Birger, Der Republikanische Richterbund (1921–1933) (Frankfurt am Main, Bern, 1982). Schulz, Gerhard, ‘Aufbau und Fehlschlag einer Demokratie’, in Weimar als Erfahrung und Argument. Aussprachen und Referate anläßlich der Feier des 25jährigen Bestehens der Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien (BonnBad Godesberg, 1977), pp. 5–24. —, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur:Verfassungspolitik und Reichsreform in der Weimarer Republik. Band 1, Die Periode der Konsolidierung und der Revision des Bismarckschen Reichsaufbaus 1919–1930, 2nd edn (Berlin and New York, 1987a). —, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur: Verfassungspolitik und Reichsreform in der Weimarer Republik. Band 2, Deutschland am Vorabend der grossen Krise (Berlin, 1987b). —, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur: Verfassungspolitik und Reichsreform in der Weimarer Republik. Band 3, Von Brüning zu Hitler: der Wandel des politischen Systems in Deutschland 1930–1933 (Berlin, 1992). —, ‘Sand gegen den Wind. Letzter Versuch zur Beratung einer Reform der Weimarer Richsverfassung im Frühjahr 1933’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 44 (1996), 295–319. Schulze, Hagen, Otto Braun oder Preußens demokratische Sendung (Frankfurt/Main, 1977). —, Weimar. Deutschland 1917–1933 (Berlin, 1982). Schumacher, Martin (ed.), M.d.R. Die Reichstagsabgeordneten der Weimarer Republik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Politische Verfolgung, Emigration und Ausbürgerung 1933–1945. Eine biographische Dokumention (3rd rev. edn. Düsseldorf, 1994). Schumann, Dirk, Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933. Kampf um die Straße und Furcht vor dem Bürgerkrieg (Essen, 2001). Schumann, Wolfgang (ed.), Griff nach Südosteuropa. Neue Dokumente über die Politik des deutschen Imperialismus im Zweiten Weltkrieg (East Berlin, 1973). Schwarz, Hans-Peter, Adenauer I: Der Aufstieg: 1876–1952, 3rd revised edn (Munich, 1991). Schwarzschild, Leopold, ‘Die Letzten Jahre vor Hitler. Aus dem ‘Tagebuch’ 1929–1933, edited by Valerie Schwarzschild with a foreword by Golo Mann (Hamburg, 1966). Schwerin, Gerd, ‘Wilhelm Frhr. v. Gayl, der Innenminister im Kabinett Papen 1932’ (Erlangen-Nürnberg, Univ., Diss., 1972). Seiberth, Gabriel, Anwalt des Reiches: Carl Schmitt und der Prozeß ‘Preußen contra Reich’ vor dem Staatsgerichtshof (Berlin, 2001). Severing, Carl, Mein Lebensweg (Cologne, 1950).

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Sieferle, Rolf Peter, Die Konservative Revolution. Fünf biographische Skizze (Frankfurt am Main, 1995). Silverman, Dan, ‘A Pledge Unredeemed: The Housing Crisis in Weimar Germany’. Central European History 3 (1970), 112–39. —, Hitler’s Economy. Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933–1936 (Cambridge, 1998). Smith, Helmut Walser, The Butcher’s Tale. Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York, 2002). —, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2008). Sombart, Nicolaus, Die deutschen Männer und ihre Feinde: Carl Schmitt, ein deutsches Schicksal zwischen Männerbund und Matriarchatsmythos (Munich, 1991). Sommerfeldt, Martin Henry, Ich war dabei: die Verschwörung der Dämonen, 1933–1939. Ein Augenzeugenbericht (Darmstadt, 1949). Sontheimer, Kurt, ‘Der Tatkreis’. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 7 (1959), 229–60. —, Antidemokratisches Denken ind er Weimarer Republik. Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933, 4th edn (Munich, 1983). Sösemann, Bernd, Das Ende der Weimarer Republik in der Kritik demokratischer Publizisten: Theodor Wolff, Ernst Feder, Julius Elbau, Leopold Schwarzschild (Berlin, 1976). Spahn, Martin, Für den Reichsgedanken: Historisch-politische Aufsätze 1915–1934 (Berlin, Bonn, 1934). Spann, Othmar, Hauptpunkte der universalistischen Staatsauffassung (Berlin: ErneuerungsVerlag, 1931). Speier, Hans, Die Angestellten vor dem Nationalsozialismus. Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis der deutschen Sozialstruktur 1918–1933, 2nd edn (Frankfurt/Main, 1989). Speitkamp, Winfried, ‘ “Erziehung zur Nation”. Reichskunstwart, Kulturpolitik und Identitätsstiftung im Staat von Weimar’, in Helmut Berding (ed.), Nationales Bewußtsein und kollektive Identität. Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtsein in der Neuzeit, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1994). —, Die Verwaltung der Geschichte. Denkmalpflege und Staat in Deutschland 1871–1933 (Göttingen, 1996). Spengler, Oswald, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte 1: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (Munich, 1923). —, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte 2: Welthistorische Perspektiven (Munich, 1924). —, ‘Neubau des deutschen Reiches’ (1924), in Winfried Speitkamp (ed.), Politische Schriften 1919–1926 (Waltrop and Leipzig, 2009), pp. 179–83. Springman, Luke, ‘Poisoned Hearts, Diseased Minds, and American Pimps: The Language of Censorship in the Schund und Schmutz Debates’. The German Quarterly, 68, 4 (1995), 408–29. —, ‘Exotic Attractions and Imperialist Fantasies in Weimar Youth Culture’, in John Williams (ed.), Weimar Culture Revisited (New York, 2011). Stachura, Mateusz, ‘Rationale Demokratie: Demokratietheoretische Überlegungen in Anschluss an Max Weber’. Zeitschrift für Politik, 53 (2006), 393–410. Stachura, Peter D., ‘The Ideology of the Hitler Youth in the Kampfzeit’. Journal of Contemporary History, 8, 3 (July 1973), 155–67. —(ed.), Unemployment and the Great Depression in Weimar Germany (London, 1986). Staewen-Ordemann, Gertrud, Menschen der Unordnung. Die proletarische Wirklichkeit im Arbeiterschicksal der ungelernten Großstadtjugend (Berlin, 1933). Stammen, Theo (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik, Vol. 1. Das schwere Erbe 1918–1923, 2nd edn, (Munich, 1992 [1987]).

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Stark, Gary D., Banned in Berlin: Literary Censorship in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford, New Providence, 2009). Stationen der Moderne. Die bedeutendsten Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Exhibition Catalogue) (Berlin, 1988). Steakley, James D., ‘Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders als die Andern’. Film History, 11, 2 (1999), 181–203. Steber, Martina and Gotto, Bernhard (eds), A Nazi Volksgemeinschaft? German Society in the Third Reich (Oxford, 2013). Stenbock-Fermor, Alexander Graf, Deutschland von Unten. Reisen durch die proletarische Provinz 1930 (Stuttgart, 1931, reprint Lausanne and Frankfurt a.M., 1980). Stephenson, David, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (Cambridge, MA, 2011). Stern, Carola and Winkler, Heinrich A. (eds), Wendepunkte deutscher Geschichte 1848–1990 (Frankfurt/Main, 1994 (1979). Stern, Fritz, ‘Adenauer and a Crisis in Weimar Democracy’. Political Science Quarterly, LXXIII, 1 (March 1958), 1–27. Stern-Rubarth, Edgar, Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau, Wanderer zwischen Zwei Welten. Ein Lebensbild (Berlin, 1929). Stibbe, Matthew, Germany 1914–1933. Politics, Society and Culture (Harlow, 2010). Stieg, Margaret F., ‘The 1926 German Law to Protect Youth against Trash and Dirt: Moral Protectionism in a Democracy’. Central European History, 23, 1 (March 1990), 22–56. Stirk, Peter M. R. (ed.), Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects (Edinburgh, 1994). Stolberg-Wernigerode, Albrecht Graf zu, Diktatur oder Parlamentarismus? Flugschriften der Deutsche Volkspartei (Berlin, 1929). Stolper, Gustav, supplemented by Häuser, Karl and Borchardt, Knut, The German Economy 1870 to the Present (London, 1967, orig. 1940). Stoltenberg, Gerhard, Politische Strömungen im Schleswig-holsteinischen Landvolk 1918–1933. Ein Beitrag zur Politischen Meinungsbildung in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1962). Strenge, Irene, Kurt von Schleicher: Politik im Reichswehrministerium am Ende der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 2006). Stresemann, Gustav, Vermächtnis. Der Nachlass in drei Bänden, edited Henry Bernhard, 3 vols (1932–33). Struve, Walter, ‘Hans Zehrer as a Neoconservative Elite Theorist’. The American Historical Review, 70, 4 (July 1965), 1035–57. Stürmer, Michael, Koalition und Opposition in der Weimarer Republik 1924–1928 (Düsseldorf, 1967). —, Das kaiserliche Deutschland: Politik und Gesellschaft 1870–1918 (Frankfurt am Main, 1977). —(ed.), Die Weimarer Republik. Belagerte Civitas, (Königstein, 1980). Suval, Stanley, ‘Overcoming Kleindeutschland: The Politics of Historical Mythmaking in the Weimar Republic’. Central European History, 2, 4 (December 1969), 312–30. Swett, Pamela E., Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933 (Cambridge and New York, 2004). Teichova, Alice and Cottrell, P. L. (eds), International Business and Central Europe 1918–1939 (Leicester, New York, 1983). Terhalle, Fritz, Die Finanzwirtschaft des Staates und der Gemeinden (Berlin, 1948). Thimme, Annelies, Flucht in den Mythos. Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die Niederlage von 1918 (Göttingen, 1969). Thoß, Hendrik, Demokratie ohne Demokraten? Die Innenpolitik der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 2008).

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Timm, Helga, Die deutsche Sozialpolitik und der Bruch der grossen Koalition im März 1930 (Düsseldorf, 1952). Toepfer, Karl, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (University of California Press, 1997). Toller, Ernst, Justiz Erlebnisse (Berlin, 1927). Tooze, Adam, The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2006). Tormin, Walter (ed.), Die Weimarer Republik (Hannover, 1973). Trippe, Christian F., Konservative Verfassungspolitik 1918–1923. Die DNVP als Opposition in Reich und Länder (Düsseldorf, 1995). Troeltsch, Ernst, Spektator-Briefe. Aufsätze über die deutsche Revolution und die Weltpolitik 1918/22, edited H. Baron (Tübingen, 1924, reprint 1966). Tschirschky, Fritz Günther von, Erinnerungen eines Hochverräters (Stuttgart, 1972). Tucholsky, Kurt, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (Amherst, MA, 1972, orig. 1929). Turner, Henry Ashby, Stresemann and the politics of the Weimar Republic (Princeton, 1963). —, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York and Oxford, 1985, pbk. 1987). —, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: 30 January 1933 (London, 1996). Ulbricht, Justus H., ‘Im Herzen des “geheimen Deutschland”. Kulturelle Opposition gegen Avantgarde, Moderne und Republik in Weimar 1900 bis 1933’, in Lothar Ehrlich, Jürgen John (eds), Weimar 1930. Politik und Kultur im Vorfeld der NS-Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 1998). Ullrich, Sebastien, Der Weimar-Komplex. Das Scheitern der ersten deutschen Demokratie und die politische Kultur der frühen Bundesrepublik 1945–1959 (Göttingen, 2009). Ullrich, Volker, Die nervöse Großmacht 1871–1918 (Frankfurt am Main, 2007). Ulmen, G. L., ‘The Sociology of the State: Carl Schmitt and Max Weber’. State Culture and Society, 1.2 (Winter 1985), 3–57. Verhey, Jeffrey, The Spirit of 1914. Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, 2000). Vogelsang, Thilo, Reichswehr, Staat und NSDAP: Beiträge zur deutschen Geschichte 1930–1932 (Stuttgart, 1962). Wagner, Patrick, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher. Konzeptionen und Praxis der Kriminalpolizei in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik und des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg, 1996). Walkenhaus, Ralf, Konservatives Staatsdenken: eine wissenssoziologische Studie zu Ernst Rudolf Huber (Berlin, 1997). Walker, Mack, German Home Towns. Community State and General Estate (London, 1971). Walter, Franz, ‘Republik, das ist nicht zu viel’. Partei und Jugend in der Krise des Weimarer Sozialismus (Bielefeld, 2011). Walter, Franz, Denecke, Viola and Regin, Cornelia, Sozialistische Gesundheits- und Lebensreformverbände (Bonn, 1991). Ward, Janet, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2001). Watt, Richard M., The Kings Depart: The Tragedy of Germany – Versailles and the German Revolution (London, 1969). Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, Calif., 1978). —, Max Weber: Gesammelte Politische Schriften, ed. by Johannes Winckelmann, 5th edn (Tübingen, 1988a).

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—, ‘Die paradoxe Revolution 1918/19’. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 50–51 (8 December 2008), 6–12. Wirth, Joseph, Reden während der Kanzlerschaft (Berlin, 1925). —, Der Aufbruch: republikanische Flugschriften (Berlin, 1926). Witt, Peter Christian, ‘Tax Policies, Tax Assessments and Inflation’, in Peter Christian Witt (ed.), Wealth and Taxation in Central Europe. The History and Sociology of Public Finance (Leamington Spa, 1987). Wolff, Theodor, Tagebücher 1914–1919. Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der Weimarer Republik in Tagebüchern, Leitartikeln und Briefen des Chefredakteurs am ‘Berliner Tageblatt’ und Mitbegründers der ‘Deutsche Demokratische Partei’ introduced and edited by Bernd Sösemann (Boppard am Rhein, 1984). Wolgast, Ernst, Die Kampfregierung. Ein Beitrag zur Lehre von der Kabinettsbildung nach der Weimarer Verfassung (Königsberg, 1929a). —, Zum deutschen Parlamentarismus. Der Kampf um Art. 54 RV (Berlin, 1929b). Wolin, Richard, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (Columbia University Press, New York, 1982). —, ‘Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism, and the Total State’. Theory and Society, 19, 4 (August 1990), 389–416. Wright, Jonathan, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (Oxford, and New York, 2002; paperback 2004). Wrisberg, Ernst von, Der Weg zur Revolution 1914–1918 (Leipzig, 1921). Wunderlich, Frieda, Farm Labor in Germany 1810–1945. Its Historical Development within the Framework of Agricultural and Social Policy (Princeton, New Jersey, 1961). Xammar, Eugeni, Das Schlangenei. Berichte aus dem Deutschland der Inflationsjahre 1922–1924, translated Kirstin Brand (Berlin, 2007). Zarnow, Gottfried (pseud., Ewald Moritz), Gefesselte Justiz (n.p., 1931). Zorn, Wolfgang, ‘Student Politics in the Weimar Republic’. Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 1 (1970), 128–43.

Index abdication  22–5, 28 Abegg, Wilhelm  178–9 Abelshauser, Werner  72 Adenauer, Konrad  55, 136, 203 All-German Congress of Councils  32 Angermund, Ralph  99–100, 102 anti-Weimar bureaucracy  158 Artelt, Karl  25 Association of German Machine Factories  92 Ausserordentliche Gerichte  107 authoritarian democracy  190 intellectual impetus  191 authoritarian law  4, 100, 109–10, 118, 123–4, 126–7 Baden, Prince Max von  10, 16, 21–2, 25–6, 28–30 Balderston, Theo  81 Balkan federation (Donauföderation)  65 Ballin, Albert  10, 18–19 Barth, Emil  19, 22, 31 Bartholdy, Albrecht Mendelssohn  199 Battle of Tannenberg  197 Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein)  140 Bauer, Colonel Max  15, 21 Bauer, Gustav  41–3, 179 Bennett, John Wheeler  4 Bielefeld System of criminal supervision  118 Bienstock, Gregor  190 Binchy, Daniel  209–10 Bismarck, Herbert von  62–3, 81, 150, 152–3, 155, 159–60, 163, 165, 174–80, 182, 189, 196, 200, 202, 211, 219 Constitution Day celebrations  177 ‘Our Struggle for Prussia’  178 symbols of the republic  175–6 Bismarckjugend  202 black indignity (Schwarze Schmach)  48, 135

Borchardt, Knut  73, 80, 88 Bracher, Karl Dietrich  2, 99, 212 Bracht, Franz  144, 199, 207 Braun, Adolf  137 Brauns, Heinrich  81 Braunthal, Alfred  80 ‘bread and peace’  13–14 Brecht, Arnold  157–8, 180 Brecht, Bertolt  95–6, 141, 143 Breitscheid, Rudolf  44, 53, 217 Brentano, Lujo  73 Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich von  40–2, 66 Brost, Georg  199 Brüning, Heinrich  46, 54, 59, 66, 70, 81–2, 88–9, 92, 94, 96, 103, 116, 152, 186, 190, 193, 195, 216 Buchner, Bernd  131 Bullock, Alan  67 Bund Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Juristen (BNSDJ)  104, 219 bureaucratic sabotage  157 Burgfrieden  4, 11, 18–19, 42, 45, 49, 72, 149 Burschenschaft Gothia zu Königsberg  105 Burschenschaften  105, 205 Büttner, Ursula  2, 130 BVP (Bavarian People’s Party)  37, 52, 67, 140, 204, 210, 216 Caplan, Jane  158, 164 Caprivi, Leo von  63 The Case of Bundhund (Bruno Nelissen Haken)  93 central food distribution agency (Reichsernährungsamt)  12 Central Working Community Agreement see Stinnes-Legien Agreement Centre Party  16, 24, 43, 46, 51, 54, 67, 77–8, 81, 109, 133, 139, 154, 163–4, 190, 193, 204, 206, 211, 215–16 Childers, Thomas  77

366

Index

Christian Metalworkers Union  80 civic pedagogy  5, 58, 152, 154–5 civil servants  10–12, 83, 157–8, 162–4, 168, 179–80 anti-republican politics of  158 class justice  99, 110, 121–2 Constitution Day celebrations  55, 131, 146–50, 152–5, 177, 194–5, 198, 205 Council of People’s Deputies  10, 28, 30–2 cramped housing conditions  85–6 cultural authenticity  136 cultural authority cinemas  137–8, 140 conservatives and progressives  134 Dada  134–5, 142 democratic  130 heritage policy  131 leisure products  133 metropolitan based  130 moral corruption  136 and national unity  137 Prussian Academy  131 Reichskunstwart  133 republican authority  130–1 war  132 wartime censorship  138 cultural experimentalism  2 Cuno, Wilhelm  47–8, 73, 78, 186 currency revaluation  76 Curtius, Julius  39, 54, 58, 60, 62, 66, 80 custodial sentences  113, 120, 122 Dada exhibition  134–5, 142 Dahm, Georg  123, 206 Daniel, Ute  13, 17 David, Eduard  41, 138, 142, 182 Davis, Belinda  13 Dawes Plan  46, 49, 51–3, 73, 77–8 DDP (German Democratic Party)  42, 51, 63, 104, 109, 136–7, 146, 153, 163, 168, 176, 182, 186 death sentences and executions  125 Decree for the Protection of People and State (1933)  217 Deeds of the Great Alexander (Michail Kuzmin)  196 deflationary measures  89 democratic illiberalism  6

Denn sie wissen was sie tun (Ernst Ottwalt)  104 depression  21, 37–8, 43, 62, 64, 69–71, 80–2, 85, 87–8, 91–5, 103, 106, 118, 121, 124, 139, 141, 199, 212 Der Untertan (Heinrich Mann)  111, 132 Dessauer, Friedrich  106 Deutsche Richterzeitung  105, 111–13, 116 dictatorship of trust  185, 190 dictatorship within the bounds of the constitution  181, 185–6, 188, 218 Disarmament Conference, Geneva  66–7 disposable democracy  2 Dix, Arthur  204 Dix, Otto  142 DNVP (German Nationalist People’s Party)  44, 46, 49, 52, 59–60, 91, 104, 112–13, 115, 135–7, 140, 154, 163–4, 173–4, 177, 179, 182, 186–7, 189–90, 194, 211, 215 draconian policy of sentencing  108–10, 124, 127 Drews, Bill  22, 26, 28 Dubois, Louis  46 Dussel, Konrad  142 DVP (German People’s Party)  37, 43, 46, 48, 51, 60, 80, 104, 163–4, 173–4, 177, 182, 189 Ebert, Friedrich  197 economic stabilization private loans  78 strikes and lockouts  79 Ehrlich, Lothar  131 Eisner, Kurt  1, 19, 112 Elz, Wolfgang  37 Employers Association of the Northwest Group of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists  80 employment insecurity  86–7 Enabling Law  7, 78, 186, 188, 207, 213, 215–17, 220 Engelhardt, Victor  200 Entente Powers  46, 52, 55, 66, 71, 77 Erzberger, Matthias  24, 41–3, 47, 72, 147

Index Eschenburg, Theodor  1–2 Evans, Richard  130 Everling, Friedrich  115 Falck, Ernst  126 Fehrenbach, Constantin  42, 44, 47, 51 Fenske, Hans  169 Ferguson, Niall  71–2 field administration  159–65 Fischer, Fritz  38 Flag Law Decree  114 Flügel, Heinz  199 forced idleness  94–5 foreign economic policy  64–5 Fraenkel, Ernst  99, 102–3, 106, 112, 219 Francke, Helmut  187 Franco-German relations  48 Freymuth, Arnold  108 Frick, Wilhelm  7, 144, 154, 213, 217, 220 Funk, Walther  39 Gallas, Wilhelm  120, 124–5 Gay, Peter  154 Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider  129–30 Gayl, Wilhelm von  156, 194–5 Geiger, Theodor  77, 89–90, 204 Genzmer, Felix  205 German Aristocratic Association  104 The German Cities (Emil Stutzer)  39 German Congress of Cities  75 German League for Human Rights  108 German Metalworkers Union  80 German National Committee of the International Criminology Association  123 German-Völkisch Protection League  104 Germany’s River (Edwin Redslob)  57–9 Gerth, Hans  203–4 Geyer, Martin  70 Goebbels, Joseph  144–5, 155, 203–4, 210 Goerdeler, Carl  1, 90, 191, 213–14, 221 ‘Men versus the Herd’  191 Goltz, Anna von der  151 Goltz, Rüdiger von der  203 Göring, Hermann  174, 211, 213, 217, 219 Graef, Walther  182 Grau, Richard  185 Grebing, Helga  33

367

Groener, Wilhelm  16–17, 26, 28, 30, 132 Grossmann, Hermann  111–12 Grosz, George  134–5, 141–3 Grzesinski, Albert  115, 151, 164, 198 Gumbel, Emil  99, 109–10 Gürtner, Franz  112, 114, 126–7, 217 Haffner, Sebastian  210 Hague Conference on Reparations  53–5, 59 Halfern, Carl von  174, 177 Hamburg-Amerikanische PacketfahrtActien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG)  18, 47 Hardach, Karl  71 Hardtwig, Wolfgang  131 Harem Nights  135 Harvey, Elizabeth  136 Hauptmann, Gerhard  103, 134 Die Ratten  132 Die Weber  132 Haußmann, Conrad  25 Hausmann, Raoul  135 Heartfield, John  134 Heilmann, Ernst  108–9, 217 Heine, Wolfgang  109–10, 126, 162, 164 Heller, Hermann  192 Hermand, Jost  129 Heuss, Theodor  198, 200 Hindenburg, Paul von  10, 12, 15–17, 20–1, 24, 28, 54–5, 57–9, 70, 77, 82, 151–2, 154, 177, 185, 189, 193, 195, 197–8, 204–7, 211, 215, 217, 219–20 Hindenburg Programme  12, 16–17, 70 Hintze, Paul von  27 Hitler, Adolf  2–7, 10, 37–8, 43, 59, 61, 66–8, 70, 88, 94, 97, 103, 112, 124, 126–7, 154–6, 160–1, 166, 181, 183, 186, 190, 192, 196, 198, 200–1, 203–7, 209–21 appointment to chancellorship  207, 209 bohemian corporal  196, 214 charismatic authority  77, 115, 204, 210, 212 conservative idea of authority  214 dictatorship  6, 183, 196, 205–6, 214, 221

368

Index

Enabling Act  213, 216 Führer State  198, 210, 219–21 Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch  77 Hitler Youth  203 middle and working-class stake-holding  212 national defence decisionism  218–19 overnment of the majority  211 protective custody  217 pseudo plebiscitary character of  221 public works schemes  212 Reichsstatthaltergesetz  213 Röhm Affair  218 state of exception  182–3, 187 state-sponsored violence  216 Tag von Potsdam  215 terrorist activity  213 unbounded authority, sources to  212, 217–18, 221 unemployment, drop in  212 violent character of  214–15 Höch, Hannah  135 Hoegner, Wilhelm  99, 217 Hoetzsch, Otto  55 Hollweg, Bethmann  4, 15, 20–1, 71, 160 Holtfrerich, Carl-Ludwig  72–3 household budgets  77, 84 Huber, Ernst Rudolf  16, 28, 45, 92, 206, 219 Hugenberg, Alfred  60, 110, 140 Hughes, Michael  76 hunger  85, 93, 96, 199 hyperinflation  69, 71–5 imperialism, modern form of  35 impoverishment  12 industrial arbitration process  79 inflation  69–77 agriculture  75, 78 cost benefit  71 foreign investors  73 material consequences  76–7 post-war reconstruction  72 unions and industry, agreement between  74 white-collar incomes  74 winners of  73–5 interest politics  70 Isherwood, Christopher  85, 130

Jacob, Herbert  158, 161, 164 James, Harold  71–2, 207 ‘Jew republic’  113 Joël, Curt  116 John, Jürgen  131 Johst, Hanns  136 Jones, Larry Eugene  130, 136 judiciary system class justice  99, 110, 121–2 crisis of confidence  117 law and state  123 legal trainees  101, 105–6 older age profile  102 political pluralism  105 property crimes  119 pro-republican and law reform views  105 regained social and political confidence  106 Reich flag, colours of  113–15 relative stability  106 salary  103 sentencing policy  101–2, 107 shackled justice  117 social characteristics  101 social class and age  102 social justice  118 third force  100 upper age limit  106 violent death convictions  118–19 Jungdeutsche Orden  202 Jünger, Ernst  203, 206 Kaas, Ludwig  211, 216 Kahl, Wilhelm  43 Kahr, Gustav von  218 Kapp Putsch  1, 158, 162, 164, 168, 175 Kautsky, Karl  63–4 Kayser, Wilhelm  203 Keil, Wilhelm  40 Kelsen, Hans  123, 214 Kershaw, Ian  212 Kessler, Count Harry  3, 23–4, 32, 43, 84–5, 130, 193, 195, 198, 200 Keynes, John Maynard  72 Klemperer, Victor  43, 88–9, 132, 142–3, 153 Knickerbocker, Hubert  93 Kolb, Eberhard  29, 129–30, 215

Index königlicher Landrat  174 KPD (Communist Party of Germany)  44, 51, 96–7, 110, 136, 141, 152, 186, 189, 195, 201 Kramer, Gerhard  99 Kuhle Wampe, oder Wem gehört die Welt? (Slatan Dudow)  5, 95–6 Kunz, Andreas  74 Kunze, Richard  53 Küstermeier, Rudolf  75 Kuzmin, Michail  196 Lamb, Steve  130 Lambach, Walther  46 Landrat  4, 147, 158–65, 168–9, 174–80, 200 Kapp Putsch  158, 162, 164, 168, 175 Mittelstand supporters  161 non-party  163–4 political affiliation  163, 173 promotion  160, 175 Weimar coalition parties  163–4 Landsberg, Otto  23, 41–2 Lange, Karl  92 Lang, Fritz  79, 117–18 Langnamverein  194, 207 Laufenberg, Heinrich  32 Lautenschlager, Karl  10–11 Law for the Protection of the Republic (Republikschutzgesetz 1922)  100, 112–14, 148, 164, 177 Law for the Protection of Youth against Harmful Publications (1926)  136–7 Law on Measures for State Self Defence (1934)  127, 219 League of Republican Judges  111 Ledebour, Georg  19, 30, 63 Legien, Carl  72 Lehnert, Detlef  131, 153 Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul von  108 Liebermann, Max  132, 142 Liebknecht, Karl  9, 14, 19, 22, 31, 43 Lippmann, Julius  176 Little Man What Now? (Hans Fallada)  87 Locarno Treaties, 1925  37, 39, 52–3 long-term unemployment  93–4 Lorenz, Thomas  37, 43 Löwenthal, Fritz  121–3

369

Ludendorff, Erich  4, 10, 15–17, 21–3, 132, 168, 193 Ludendorff-Hindenburg dictatorship  4, 20–1, 28, 183 Lupescu, Valentin  166 Luther, Hans  51–2, 54, 81, 114, 146, 188–9 Luxemburg, Rosa  14, 19, 31 Magdeburg Citizens protesters  13–14 Maier, Charles  74 Majority Social Democrats  9, 24, 28, 46–8, 52, 80, 110, 114, 116, 127, 137–8, 150, 161, 164, 166, 173, 184, 201, 210 malnutrition  75 Mann, Heinrich  111, 142, 145, 169 Der Untertan  132 Mann, Thomas  31, 42–3, 111, 132–4, 136, 141–2, 144–5, 150, 153–5, 196, 207, 221 Markgraf Battleship  25 Martin, Hermann  196 Marx, Wilhelm  53–4, 78, 186, 188–9 Maslowski, Peter  141, 143, 200 material security  4, 69, 91 Megerle, Klaus  131, 153 Mehring, Reinhard  214 Meinecke, Friedrich  1–2, 23–4, 33, 105, 137, 144, 153, 182, 184–5, 190 emergency construction  1 Menschen im Hotel (Vicki Baum)  69, 87 Mergel, Thomas  37 Meyer, Franz  203 middling business  88 miners, Ruhr  74, 93 Mitteleuropa (Friedrich Naumann)  6, 39, 61–4, 68 Moeller, Robert  75 Mommsen, Hans  2 monarchist Imperial Yacht Club  104 Müller, Hermann  26, 42, 60, 138, 178 Mumm, Reinhard  135–6, 140, 144 national dictatorship  187, 194 National German Officers [Club]  104 national rising  210 nationalist veterans’ league (Stahlhelm)  104, 177

370

Index

Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (NSDStB)  205 Nazi Party  123, 224, 244–5, 275, 281–2, 295 Neuhaus, Helmut  28 Neurath, Konstantin von  66–7 Nicolson, Harold  130 Night of the long knives  127 Noske, Gustav  9, 18, 25–6, 41, 109–10, 202 NSDAP  51, 59–61, 67, 89–91, 97, 104, 115, 143, 152, 159, 180, 189, 201, 203, 206, 209, 211, 213 nullum crimen sine poena  217 Oberfrohren, Ernst  137 Oberpräsident  1, 159, 162, 168, 174–5, 178 Obrigkeitsstaat  4, 153, 182–3, 187 Oldenburg-Januschau, Elard von  82 Operation Kolibri  218 Oswald, Richard ‘Different to the Others’  140 Ottwalt, Ernst  104, 106, 109 Pachter, Henry  130 Pan German League  104 Papen, Franz von  67, 112, 118, 123, 126, 160, 164, 173, 179, 186, 192–6, 206–7, 211, 213–14, 216–18 ‘authority and true democracy’  195 Paris Reparations Commission  73 parliamentary democracy  29–31, 33, 70, 182, 184–5, 188–9, 191–2, 194, 200 party-dominated state form (Parteienstaat)  183, 194 Patriotic Auxiliary Law  16, 20, 81 Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law  16, 18 Paul, Gertrud  110 People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak)  5, 83 Petersen, Carl  149–51 Petersen, Klaus  136 Peukert, Detlev  2–3, 70, 102, 129 Phelan, Anthony  130 Piscator, Erwin  58, 153 Plum, Günter  97 Pohl, Karl Heinrich  61 political conjuncture cycle  72 Pomeranian province  169–70 distribution of seats  171 Preller, Ludwig  95

Preuß, Hugo  42, 63, 181–2, 184–5, 189, 191 The German People and Politics  182 ‘World War, Democracy and Germany’s Renewal’  182 Price Control Office, Munich  13 Procedure of Criminal Trial  108 professional bureaucracy  157 protective custody  110, 127, 217 provincial society  165 Prussian administration  106, 158, 168, 174, 179, 194–5 Pünder, Hermann  190, 193 putting out system  82 Puttkammer reforms, 1880  160 Quaatz, Reinhold  195 Quarck, Max  184 Radbruch, Gustav  105, 111, 117–18, 150–1 Rademacher, Walther  112 Rathenau, Walther  11, 16, 23, 32, 38, 42, 45–7, 72, 100, 107, 196, 202 Realpolitik  66 Redslob, Edwin  55, 57–9, 145–9, 151–4 Redslob, Robert  184 reformed currency  72 Regenwalde county  173–9 agriculture  171 political parties  173 regular unemployment benefits  87, 92–3 Reich Association of German Youth  85 Reich Criminal Court Procedural Regulation  121 Reichenau, Walter von  219 Reich Office for Labour Exchange and Unemployment Insurance  91 Reich Settlement Law  81 Reichsexekution  78, 186, 188, 214 Reichstag deputies, age profile of  200–1 ‘Reichstag Fire’ decree  124, 217 Reinhardt Programme  97 Rentenmark  72, 76–7 re-ordering Europe  68 reparations  37, 42, 44–7, 49, 51–5, 66, 70–3, 77–8 calculation  73 Dawes Plan  77–8 Reparations Commission  44, 46–7, 71–3

Index Republican Judges Association (Republikanische Richterbund)  105 Reusch, Paul  207 revolution  2–3, 5, 9, 11, 14, 17–23, 25–33, 70, 72, 74, 78, 81–2, 108, 112, 116, 134, 136, 142, 144, 146–8, 150, 157, 161–3, 165, 177, 184, 199, 201–3, 207, 214–16, 218–19 revolutionary Greater Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council  27–9, 166 Rhenish Peasant Association of Rhineland Westphalia  75 Rhineland, occupied zones of  56 Ridley, Hugh  130 Riezler, Kurt  23 Rosenblum, Warren  118 Rosenfeld, Kurt  116 Rossiter, Clinton ‘constitutional dictatorship’  185 Ruhr lockout, 1928  79–80 Ruhr occupation  47–9, 52–3, 55, 73–5, 78, 80, 135, 149, 186, 194 Rüstow, Alexander  185 Saile, Hans  216 Schäffer, Fritz  211 Schaffstein, Friedrich  123, 206 Schairer, Erich  135 Schaller, Richard  203 Scheidemann, Philip  9, 18, 26, 28, 30, 35, 42–3, 55, 116, 184 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang  10, 43 Schleicher, Kurt von  97, 174, 187, 192–3, 195–6, 206–7, 214, 218–19 Schmitt, Carl  1, 28, 35, 123, 127, 132, 153, 181–3, 185, 187–92, 194, 203, 206, 210, 213–14, 218–21 Concept of the Political  192 Der Hüter der Verfassung  191 ‘Dictatorship and State of Siege’  183 ‘exceptional dictator’  182, 185, 187, 189, 220 ‘friend/foe’  221 ‘Law of Sovereignty and the Enabling Law’  213 Schoenberg, Arnold  132, 142 Schoffengericht  113 Schramm, Wilhelm  199

371

Schreiber, Georg  133, 140, 190 Schulenburg, Rudolf von der  162 Schwister, Wilhelm  105 Schwitters, Kurt  135 Seeckt, Hans von  187–8, 206 Seldte, Franz  179 sentencing and support for the republic  112–13 Severing, Carl  110, 139–40, 162, 164–5, 176, 178, 187 ‘shackled justice’  117 Simmel, George  132–3 Simons, Walter  41, 44 social justice  118 social-democratic policy  33 Sondergerichte  121, 124, 126, 217 soup kitchens catering  12, 76–7 Southern, David  103 Spahn, Martin  192, 207 Spahn, Paul  39 SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany)  4, 11, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 29–31, 40, 51, 53, 64, 80, 89, 97, 109–10, 116–17, 137–8, 140, 151, 154, 161, 163, 166, 168 176–8, 184, 186–9, 193, 201, 204, 215–16 movement  99, 131 newspaper editors  48 negative toleration of Brüning  186 participation in Reich government after 1922  78 Ruhr dispute  80 ‘social democratic professors’  179 Speitkamp, Winfried  131 Spender, Stephen  130 Spengler, Oswald  1 Decline of the West  141–2 The Spider’s Web (Joseph Roth)  202 Springman, Luke  204 stabilization package see Dawes Plan Stammen, Theo  129 Stammler, Wolfgang  205 Stapel, Wilhelm  140 State Court for the Protection of the Republic  115 state of emergency  186 State of Siege law of 1851  108 Stern, Fritz  1

372

Index

Stieg, Margaret  136–8 Stinnes, Hugo  72 Stinnes-Legien Agreement  72, 78 Strasser, Gregor  206, 218 Stresemann, Gustav  2, 20, 37–9, 46, 48–9, 51–4, 59–64, 66, 75, 78, 118, 179, 186–8, 196 strike activity, munitions workers  17–18 Tag von Potsdam  215 taxpayers  76 ‘Third Reich’  4, 7, 39, 64, 67, 99–100, 105, 126–7, 142, 154–6, 180, 192, 206, 210, 212–15, 220 foreign policy  67 Thyssen, Fritz  207 Trade Union Association of German Metalworkers  80 Treaty of Versailles  5 see also Versailles Treaty Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl)  5, 154 Troeltsch, Ernst  29, 31, 33, 42–3, 198 Trommler, Frank  129 Tucholsky, Kurt  85, 106, 116, 141, 143 Ulbricht, Walther  96–7 The Unemployed of Marienthal  95 unemployment anger  95 mental health  95 mobilization of  96 protests of  96 unemployment insurance system  81, 91–2 USPD (Independent Socialist Party of Germany)  18–19, 22, 24, 30, 32, 44, 136, 166, 168, 184 Valentini, Rudolf von  18, 160 Versailles Treaty, Article 231  35, 37, 39, 51–2, 55, 58–9, 64, 66–8, 71–2, 147, 186 inflation  72 interrelated areas of  37 national opposition  42 Volksstaat  182–4, 187 Vollzugsrat  29–32

wage dictatorship  80 Wall Street’s ‘Black Friday’  70 Ward, Janet  130 wartime hardship, alleviation of  19 Weber, Max  22, 24, 63, 132, 148, 157–9, 181–5, 197 Wedekind, Franz Büchse der Pandora  132 Frühling’s Erwachen  132 Wehler, Hans Ulrich  16 Weimar Constitution Article 48  2, 74, 108, 185–6, 188–90, 193, 195, 206, 217 Article 54  185, 189–91, 194–5 Article 104  106 six key articles of  183 Weimar’s foreign policy  37–8 Weitz, Eric  6, 130 Wels, Otto  31, 215 Westarp, Kuno Graf von  46, 53, 182, 187, 189 white-collar employees  74, 87 Wiedfeldt, Otto  187 Wiesbaden Agreement  46–7 Wilhelm II  9–10, 28 Wilhelmshaven mutiny of 1917  25 Willett, John  129 Wilson’s Fourteen Points  20–1, 26, 40, 43 Winnig, August  1, 200 Wirth, Joseph  45–7, 61, 146–7, 152, 188, 205 policy of capitulation  46 Wissell, Rudolf  80–1 Wolff, Julius  63 Wolff, Theodor  63 women, working conditions of  82–3 working children  86–7 workplace authority  72 Xammar, Eugeni  73 Young Plan  52–4, 58–9, 96 Zehnhoff, Hugo Am  110 Zellner, Heinrich  196 Zetkin, Clara  14, 31–2