Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic (contemporarily also German Republic) refers to the period of German history from 1918 to 1933 in which a parliamentary democracy existed in Germany for the first time. This era replaced the constitutional monarchy of the imperial era and began with the proclamation of the republic on 9 November 1918. It ended with the seizure of power by the NSDAP and the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933.

The Weimar Republic came into being in the course of the November Revolution. This designation of the first German republic realized on a nation-state level is due to the first meeting place of the Constituent National Assembly, the city of Weimar. However, the state name German Empire was retained.

After the Council of People's Deputies had initially exercised governmental power, the election for the German National Assembly was held on 19 January 1919 by decision of the Reichsrätekongress. On 11 February, the National Assembly elected Friedrich Ebert as Reich President, who appointed the Scheidemann cabinet on 13 February. The Weimar Imperial Constitution came into force on August 14, 1919. It constituted the German Empire as a federal republic. The head of state was the Reich President, elected directly by the people for a term of seven years, who had wide-ranging powers as part of the executive. The government was led by the Reich Chancellor, who was appointed and dismissed by the Reich President and was responsible to the German Reichstag. As the representative body of the people with comprehensive legislative, budgetary and control rights, the Reichstag was elected for a legislative period of four years on the basis of proportional representation. The Länder were represented by the Reichsrat. The parliaments at the state level were called Landtage (state parliaments); the first was formed in the Free State of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in January 1919.

The history of the Weimar Republic can be divided into three periods after the founding phase. In the crisis years from 1919 to 1923, the Republic had to contend with the immediate consequences of war, hyperinflation, and numerous attempted coups and political assassinations. In the years from 1924 to 1929, it experienced a period of relative stability, economic recovery, and foreign recognition and esteem. The Great Depression beginning in late 1929, the presidential cabinets following the breakup of the Grand Coalition on March 27, 1930, and the rise of the National Socialists eventually led to its downfall.

Culturally, the Weimar Republic was marked by the first breakthrough of mass culture in Germany (radio, cinema, light music, etc.) and by avant-garde currents in the arts, some of which had already been established in the pre-war period.

Basic Features

The Republic had inherited several structural problems from the imperial period, such as the economic and social order and the confessional school policy. In addition, there were phenomena that directly influenced the failure of Weimar democracy:

• The First World War left behind heavy economic and social burdens. In particular, the de facto expropriation of many citizens through hyperinflation and the reparations demanded under the Treaty of Versailles proved to be a burden - not least psychologically - and were used by the Republic's opponents for their agitation against the "fulfillment policy".
• Since democratic politicians had been excluded from running the affairs of state in the empire, they continued to rely on the existing personnel in the military, administration and judiciary, who, however, largely rejected the republican form of government and democracy. With the exception of Prussia, no fundamental democratization of the civil service took place. Symptomatic of this were the judiciary's often politically motivated sentences: right-wing criminals were often given much more lenient sentences than left-wing criminals.
• Large sections of the population also rejected bourgeois democracy and the republic: conservatives and right-wing extremists spread the stab-in-the-back legend, according to which not the imperial but the new democratic government had been responsible for the defeat in the war and the peace treaty of Versailles, which was perceived as humiliating. On the left, the struggles during the November Revolution had led to an irreconcilable attitude of the Communists toward the Social Democrats, which prevented them from taking joint action against the enemies of the Republic.

The Weimar Constitution was considered one of the most progressive in its time. After the March Revolution of 1848, it was the second - and first successful - attempt to establish a liberal democracy in Germany. The thesis, already widespread among contemporaries, that the state of Weimar was a "democracy without democrats" is only partially correct, but it does point to an essential problem: there was no viable constitutional consensus that would have integrated all parts of the political spectrum from right to left. After the death of the first Reich President, the SPD politician Friedrich Ebert, a conservative successor was elected in 1925 in the person of Paul von Hindenburg, who was emphatically critical of the republican form of government.

Most political parties at the time of the Weimar Republic had adopted their ideological orientation from their immediate predecessors in the Empire and largely represented the interests of their respective clientele. The division according to interest groups and social milieus such as the workers' movement or Catholics was scolded as particularism. In the Reichstag, the parliament, there were at times as many as 17 and rarely fewer than 11 different parties represented. There were 20 cabinet changes in 14 years. Eleven minority cabinets depended on toleration by parties that were not part of the governing coalition.

The relative stabilization of the Weimar Republic after the end of the Great Inflation ended with the economic and social upheavals that followed the Black Thursday of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, especially in Germany. The withdrawal of short-term loans by American investors, which had fed an interim upswing, contributed significantly to the economic depression that set in: faltering sales of goods, declining production, mass layoffs and unemployment, along with dwindling purchasing power, caused a downward spiral of unprecedented proportions, which the social security systems that were being built up were unable to cope with.

Since there had been no government supported by the majority of the Reichstag since March 1930, Reich President Hindenburg and the Reich Chancellors appointed by him ruled from then on mainly with the help of emergency decrees. The Reichstag elections of 1930 saw the rise of the radical right-wing NSDAP as a major force in the Weimar party spectrum. Since the summer of 1932, the parties hostile to republicanism and democracy - in addition to the NSDAP, the right-wing conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) and the left-wing radical Communist Party of Germany (KPD) - together held a negative majority in the Reichstag. With the DNVP and other right-wing conservative forces, a new constellation of forces pushing for power formed around Adolf Hitler as party leader of the National Socialists in early 1933. Appointed Reich Chancellor on 30 January, Hitler succeeded in a short time in destroying the democratic, constitutional and federal structures of the Republic and imposing his dictatorship.

Designation

Contemporary supporters and opponents of the Republic spoke primarily of the German Republic. In the National Assembly of 1919, the two Social Democratic parties also wanted to use this name as the name of the state, because they wanted to emphasize the new beginning of the state. The word Reich was to be avoided because of the imperial claim it implied. The liberal parties, including the constitutional lawyer Hugo Preuß, wanted to retain the tradition of the state name German Reich. The representatives of the Centre and the German Nationalists agreed. Later, however, parts of the Right took the view that the Republic did not deserve the old name. The first constitutional article, Das Deutsche Reich ist eine Republik (The German Reich is a Republic), was thus a compromise.

The association with the city name Weimar was initially used only in connection with the constitution; it was not until 1929, on its tenth anniversary, that backward-looking conservatives, the National Socialist Hitler, and even the organ of the Communists spoke of the Weimar Republic. In 1932, however, this expression also appeared in the republic-loyal Vossische Zeitung.

Early reviews of the republic also rarely used the term. Arthur Rosenberg's 1935 work was called History of the German Republic. Later reissues of this and other books used the term "Weimar Republic" in the title or subtitle. It was not until after World War II that it became generally accepted in journalism and historical research. In 1946, the first work with the title Weimar Republic was published. After the founding of the Federal Republic, it was often referred to as the Bonn Republic, sometimes also as the "Second Republic", in analogy to the "First Republic" of Weimar. Today, the terms Weimar Republic, Bonn Republic and Berlin Republic serve to distinguish between Germany's three democratic historical eras.

Commemorative plaque to the Weimar National Assembly at the Great House of the German National Theatre in Weimar