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The Weimar Republic

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The Weimar Republic Chapter 4 The Weimar The Scope and Sequence Republic: Individual Choosing to & Society Participate The Fragility of We & They Judgment, Memory & Legacy The Holocaust Democracy akg-images HaHB_chapter4_v1_PPS.indd 156 2/28/17 7:51 PM Overview The Weimar Republic, the post– World War I German government named for the German city where it was formed, lasted more than 14 years, but democracy never found firm footing. This chapter explores Germany in the years preceding the Nazis’ ascension to power by highlighting efforts to turn a fledgling republic into a strong democracy and examining the misunderstandings, myths, and fears that often undercut those efforts. HaHB_chapter4_v1_PPS.indd 157 2/28/17 7:51 PM Chapter 4 Introduction After World War I ended in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm fled to the Netherlands, Essential and Germany became a republic. The Weimar Republic was characterized Questions by contrasts and conflicts. The Weimar government granted significant new rights and freedoms to individuals and groups, beginning an era in • How do fears, both real and which creativity and experimentation flourished. At the same time, the imagined, shape the way we as individuals and as republic struggled to convince many Germans, accustomed to monarchy, citizens define our nation’s to accept and trust its authority. The people’s trust in the republic was universe of obligation? especially damaged as it faced economic crises as well as challenges from political parties that were hostile to democracy. • How can we as citizens build and maintain a Two very different moods characterized Weimar politics and society. The democracy that protects the first mood was one of excitement and creativity. Newly permitted freedom nation as a whole without of expression in art, music, dance, and architecture burst forth in Weimar undermining individual culture and left a lasting legacy for our modern world. Women took on rights? new roles in Weimar society, as they constituted roughly a third of the • How could a society that German workforce after World War I, exercised their new right to vote, is politically and culturally and held political office for the first time. liberal and progressive fall The second mood was one of anxiety and fear. The pace of change, victim to a government especially in expanding political rights and social freedoms, made many that espouses intolerance, Germans uneasy and sparked backlash against the changes. Many also discrimination, and hatred? feared the impact of communism, which had taken over Russia and threat- ened to spread its abolition of private wealth and property to Germany, by violence if necessary. This fear was heightened by two economic crises that tested the leadership of the Weimar government: the hyperinflation Watch Facing History that beset the republic in its early years and the Great Depression in its final VIDEO Scholar Reflections: The Weimar Republic years. Parties from across the political spectrum clashed violently in the hstry.is/more streets throughout the Weimar era, leaving citizens on edge. Meanwhile, interest in and enthusiasm for the message of ultra-conservative forces, in particular the growing National Socialist Party with its message of racial Explore The hatred and its demand for a return to an autocratic government, continued Weimar Republic: to grow. The Fragility of LESSON Democracy In his autobiography, artist George Grosz recalls how these moods shaped hstry.is/more life in Germany during the 1920s: Even the capital of our new German Republic was like a bubbling cauldron. You could not see who was heating the cauldron; you could merely see it merrily bub- bling, and you could feel that heat increasing. There were speakers on every street corner and songs of hatred everywhere. Everybody was hated: the Jews, the cap- italists, the gentry, the communists, the military, the landlords, the workers, the unemployed . the politicians, the department stores, and again the Jews.1 1 George Grosz, An Autobiography, trans. Nora Hodges (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 149–50. 158 HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR HaHB_chapter4_v1_PPS.indd 158 2/28/17 7:51 PM An investigation of the Weimar Republic not only provides a crucial foundation for understanding the Nazi era that followed it but can also serve as a warning and a guide for democracies today. Historian Paul Bookbinder explains: The history of the Weimar Republic illuminates one of the most creative and crucial periods in the twentieth century and serves as a significant case study of our own time. Many of the questions asked about the Weimar Republic are relevant to prob- lems that individuals and societies face in the twenty-first century.2 Historian Detlev Peukert has observed that the hallmark of the Weimar period was uncertainty.3 In many ways, the crises and dilemmas Germans faced in the 1920s were similar to those that people in other nations have faced and continue to face today in times of transition and change. 2 Paul Bookbinder, “Why Study Weimar Germany?,” The Weimar Republic: The Fragility of Democracy, Facing History and Ourselves, accessed March 30, 2016, https://www.facinghistory.org/weimar-republic-fragility-democracy/readings/why-study-weimar-germany. 3 Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 275. CHAPTER 4: THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC: THE FRAGILITY OF DEMOCRACY 159 HaHB_chapter4_v1_PPS.indd 159 2/28/17 7:51 PM Reading 1 The November Revolution By fall 1918, the military leaders of Germany knew that they could not win World War I. In hopes of gaining more favorable terms when they sur- rendered to the Allies, German generals urged the liberal Prince Max von Baden to form a new German government that was more democratic than the monarchy under the kaiser. But Baden was unable to control the navy, whose leaders wanted to go down fighting rather than surrender. In Octo- ber 1918, when navy ships sailed to fight the British fleet, German sailors, refusing to begin a battle they were likely to lose, mutinied against their admirals. The news of the mutiny touched off uprisings in support of the sailors throughout Germany.1 Ernst Toller, a German poet and playwright, described the demonstrations: First Kiel, then Munich, then Hanover, Hamburg, the Rhineland, Berlin. On Novem- ber 9th, 1918, the Berlin workers left the factories and marched in their thousands from north, south, and east to the center of the city—old gray men and women who had stood for years at the munitions benches, men invalided out of the army, boys who had taken over their fathers’ work. The processions were joined by men on leave, war-widows, wounded soldiers, students and solid citizens. No leader had arranged this uprising. The procession marched on in silence; there was no singing, no rejoicing. It came to a standstill before the gates of the Maikäfer Barracks. The gates were barred; rifles and machine-guns threatened from every window and loop-hole. Would the soldiers shoot? But the men in field-gray were the brothers of these ragged, starving crowds. They flung down their weapons, the gates were opened and the people streamed into the barracks and joined forces with the Kaiser’s army. The ruling powers gave in without a struggle, the officers surrendered. .2 As a result of the unrest, Kaiser Wilhelm, Baden, and other German leaders in the monarchy abdicated, or gave up their power, and left the coun- try. On November 10, the Berliner Tageblatt, a conservative newspaper, summed up the events of the previous day: “Yesterday morning, everything was still there [the kaiser, the chancellor, the chief of police]; yesterday afternoon nothing of all that existed any longer.”3 The Social 1 Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2003), 61–62. 2 Ernst Toller, I Was a German: The Autobiography of Ernst Toller, trans. Edward Crankshaw (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1990), 139–40. 3 Quoted in Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 89. 160 HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR HaHB_chapter4_v1_PPS.indd 160 2/28/17 7:51 PM Democrats, the political party that had the largest number of delegates in the Reichstag (the German parliament), were now in charge of the country. But the Social Democrats, under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert, struggled to keep order. Radical groups and other political parties also tried to seize power in the confusion that followed the end of the war and of the mon- archy. They took control of many city halls and state governments across the country. The war was over, the German empire had fallen, and now the question was whether Germany could create a new future and what kind of society it would become. Connection Questions 1. What kinds of challenges face a society in the immediate aftermath of a war? 2. What was “revolutionary” about the events of November 9–10, 1918? 3. What motivated the protesters? Why did members of the military refuse to stop the protests? CHAPTER 4: THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC: THE FRAGILITY OF DEMOCRACY 161 HaHB_chapter4_v1_PPS.indd 161 2/28/17 7:51 PM Reading 2 Rumors of Betrayal Writing in 1939, German journalist Sebastian Haffner remembered his feelings as an 11-year-old upon hearing that the war had ended: On the eleventh there was no army bulletin on the notice board at my local po- lice station when I appeared there at the usual time. Empty and black, the board yawned at me. Horror overcame me to think that the board, which had sustained my spirit and nourished my dreams every day for years, would remain empty and black forevermore. I walked on. There must be some news from the front some- where. If the war was over (and one had to reckon with that possibility) there must at least have been some sort of end worth reporting, something like the final whis- tle at a soccer match.
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