and international affairs apparently brought onto a firmer footing by the mid-1920s. The question thus arises: was Weimar democracy, as some pessimistic accounts tend to suggest, really ‘doomed from the start’, or, rather, was its collapse contingent on the immediate effects of the world economic depression after 1929? Were the causes of its collapse essentially structural and long term or circumstantial and short term in nature? And, insofar as they were short-term, what roles were played by different groups and individuals, and what, if any, alternative outcomes might have been possible? What options and courses of action might have been available to those key historical actors, who, if they had taken different decisions, might have been in a position to alter the fatal course of Weimar history? Could the economic distress which provided much of the rapidly increasing strength of the Nazi Party after 1928 have been in some way ameliorated? Did Hitler actually ‘seize power’, or was it rather handed to him? And if so, by whom? Clearly there are no simple answers to these questions. Any adequate explanation must involve a combination of factors – both long-term and short-term, to do with both wider circumstances and individual choices.
In February 1925 Friedrich Ebert died, prematurely, from appendicitis. In the ensuing election, the seventy-seven-year-old right-wing monarchist Junker Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was elected, on a second ballot, President of the Weimar Republic. Unlike the Social Democrat Ebert, Hindenburg was not in principle committed to upholding and strengthening the democratic system: on the contrary, he made little secret of his intention to replace it with a more authoritarian political system as soon as was practicable. The election of Hindenburg was of twofold significance: it illustrated the prevailing political orientations of a little over half of the German electorate in the mid-1920s; and it put into a position of considerable power an individual who would use this power to undermine the democracy which he was empowered to uphold.
Hindenburg’s election was symptomatic of wider trends. As far as the actual functioning of parliamentary democracy was concerned, all was far from well even before the onset of the recession. Under an electoral system of proportional representation, in which the relatively numerous parties held radically different opinions on a range of domestic and foreign affairs, it was extremely difficult to form any sort of stable coalition government with majority support in Parliament, even in the ‘good years’. While some combinations of parties were able to agree on domestic issues, they could not agree on foreign affairs; and other combinations could agree on foreign affairs but not on domestic matters. With no party able to dominate a fragmented political landscape, any coalition was intrinsically unstable, and in the event short-lived. The instability of parliamentary government only helped to discredit a system that was in any event rather lacking in legitimacy among large sectors of the population.
It was hardly surprising that many Germans thought the system of parliamentary democracy did not work, when looking at the sequence of short-lived governments within the space of just four years. In 1924 there were two governments made up of bourgeois coalitions without a parliamentary majority: the first, headed by Wilhelm Marx, failed to gain support in the May General Election, as did the second Marx cabinet in the General Election of December 1924. In the period up to the next General Election of May 1928, there were four different cabinets. The first, headed by Hans Luther, lasted less than a year, from 15 January to 5 December 1925. A coalition of the Right, it collapsed as a result of the opposition of the right-wing German National People’s Party (DNVP) to the Locarno Pact. The second, surviving less than five months, from 20 January to 12 May 1926, and again headed by Luther, was a bourgeois coalition lacking a parliamentary majority; it was brought down by a combination of forces in the Reichstag. The third lasted only from 16 May to 17 December 1926, headed once more by Marx, and was a renewed bourgeois coalition lacking parliamentary support; it was ultimately brought down by a vote of no confidence in the Reichstag proposed by the SPD and supported by both Communists and Nationalists, as well as by other smaller parties. A new right-wing coalition, headed again by Marx, lasted from 29 January 1927 until after the General Election of 1928.
All of these brief cabinets had lacked the input of Social Democrats, who had been so central to the foundation of the Republic. After the short-lived grand coalition of the Stresemann government of 13 August–23 November 1923, the SPD had chosen to remain on the sidelines of parliamentary politics. In 1928 the SPD returned again to government in a grand coalition under Chancellor Hermann Müller: this was to be the last truly democratic regime of the Weimar Republic. But it faced almost insuperable historical challenges. From 1929 onwards Germany experienced mounting economic, social and political problems that finally tore apart the delicate fabric of Weimar democracy. And from 1930, fear of renewed elections ushered in a period of de facto presidential rule, as we shall see. But it is clear that even in the period from 1924 to 1928 the functioning of Weimar parliamentary politics was less than smooth, and the instability of governments only helped to bring the whole ‘system’ into disrepute.
The problems of Weimar parliamentary democracy cannot be attributed simply to specific constitutional features, such as the electoral system of proportional representation, or the ease by which chancellors could be voted out of office. Party politics reflected the deeper socioeconomic and cultural divisions in Weimar Germany. This in turn contributed to the fragmentation and increasing extremism of party politics in the later Weimar years, as economic and social conditions rapidly deteriorated, leaving a growing political vacuum in the centre. So democracy was on shaky foundations even before it was hit by the impact of the economic downturn and rising unemployment.
For one thing, because of the new and prominent role of the state in economic and social affairs, socioeconomic conflicts were inevitably politicized. Particular issues became generalized; criticism of specific policies widened to become critiques of the ‘system’ as a whole. Again, these tendencies predated the onset of economic recession, and weakened the internal structure of Weimar democracy even before it was subjected to the sustained battering of the depression years.
As early as 1923 employers had mounted an effective attack on the 8-hour day agreed in the Stinnes–Legien agreement of 1918; and the failure of the Zentral-Arbeits-Gemeinschaft (ZAG) to resolve industrial disputes led to the official resignation of the trade union organization, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB), in January 1924. After 1923 trade unions began losing members, funds and credibility. They had increasingly to rely on the state as the effective guarantor of their position. Yet employers, despite their relatively strong position, remained on the defensive. Although it is difficult to generalize about employers’ attitudes, the Ruhr lock-out of 1928 is a significant illustration of one important strand. Unwilling to concede even a modest wage increase (of 2–4%), certain Ruhr industrialists locked out around a quarter of a million workers in protest against the very system of state arbitration. Gradually, significant sectors of industry came to feel that it was the democratic parliamentary system itself, which guaranteed the position of workers and unions, that needed to be revised. As they lost faith in a system for which they had never, in any event, had much love, so also they began to withdraw support – and funds – from the liberal parties of the bourgeois middle. More broadly, the Weimar Republic was identified with the institutionalized power of workers and their political and union organizations – which employers, who had formed their attitudes in what were now seen as the golden days of Imperial Germany, tended to regard as essentially illegitimate, by definition little more than ‘enemies of the empire’ (Reichsfeinde), in Bismarck’s phrase.
Labour relations constituted but one element in undermining support for the Republic among elites. Far more widespread was the rejection of the Versailles Treaty and all it implied for Germany’s geographical boundaries, and for her political and military status. This resentment was extensive – and was to play an important role in the eventual mass popularity of the Nazi Party – but it took on a particular significance in connection with one particular elite: the army. While there are varying analyses of the role of the army in Weimar politics (ranging from older interpretations of the army as comprising a ‘state within a state’ to more recent explorations of the interconnections between army, industry and government), it is clear that in a number of ways the army played a key role in undermining Weimar democracy. The Reichswehr was to a
