A Perfidious Distortion of History

by Jurgen Tampke

  From the start, British leaders had sought to undo anti-German aspects of the treaty. Lloyd George, to whom Versailles was merely ‘a temporary measure of a nature to satisfy public opinion’, 42 was the first to undermine such critical aspects of the treaty as French security and reparation demands. They did this not necessarily through guilt or shame, but because Britain wanted to restore the international trade and payment system that had run the world’s pre-war economy. This needed Germany to be reintegrated again into the global system, which in turn meant dismantling the framework of European security created in Paris. Lloyd George’s unfortunate comment that ‘we all slid into the war’ was aimed at wooing German economic co-operation.

  British governments over the next ten years worked towards reducing German reparation payments, ended military inspections, accelerated the withdrawal of troops from the Rhineland, and hastened the return of the Saar to the Reich. At the same time, they pressured France to disarm and to abandon its alliances with eastern European countries, and expressed sympathies for German revisionist ambitions in this region. 43 The French, understandably, were increasingly concerned about their security. They pointed out that those who sought to restore authoritarianism, militarism, and aggression still held key positions in the civil service, the judiciary, the military, and the boards of heavy industry. Were Germany to gain control of central and east-central Europe, it would be too powerful for the Western powers to restrain. Marshal Foch warned repeatedly:

  [Germany] would burst asunder all the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, one after the other. First the Polish Corridor would disappear, and then Czechoslovakia and Austria would rapidly follow, and instead of an already sufficiently powerful Germany of some 65 million inhabitants, we should be faced with a Germany of well over 100 millions, and then it would be too late for us to endeavour to check their ever-growing land hunger of power. 44

  J.H. Morgan, a member of the Inter-Allied Control Commission, drew attention to Germany’s extensive flouting of the disarmament clauses in 1925 and 1926. He reiterated that the High Command had not been suppressed, but reconstituted in a new guise; there had been a large intake and training of short-term recruits; few munitions factories had been converted to civilian production; and vast stock of arms had been found. Morgan warned that Germany, ‘the least idealistic nation in the world and the most realist, watches, waits, plans and despite her dynastic catastrophes, remains after the war more identical with what she was before than any other nation in Europe’. 45

  It was in vain. British leaders — convinced, or pretending to be convinced, that Germany was in the safe hands of democracy and fair government — would not listen. On 30 January 1933, the reactionary German political establishment brought Hitler into power. This was not the fault of the Versailles Peace Treaty.

  The Nazi takeover of power

  The Reichstag election on 19 January 1919 seemed a victory for forces working towards democracy in post-war Germany. The three parties that gained a majority, having between them secured three-quarters of all votes cast — the Social Democrats, the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), and the Centre Party — had sponsored the Reichstag’s ‘Peace Resolution’ of July 1917. This resolution blamed the Allies for having caused the war and for wanting to destroy Germany; and its mover, Matthias Erzberger, proclaimed that Germany was entitled to keep the conquered territories in east and west. Because of their support for the ‘move to peace’, these three parties were seen as providing evidence that the German empire was starting to embrace parliamentary democracy. This interpretation is wrong. The political uncertainty and disorder that followed the collapse of the Kaiser’s Germany, and above all the fear that the nation would be submerged in Bolshevism, encouraged people to vote for parties they hoped would prevent the worst. How far did these parties, referred to as the ‘Weimar Coalition’, stand behind the Republic?

  The SPD leaders had embarked upon reformist policies and continued to stick with them. The party program, however, was still Marxist, expecting capitalism to end, with the workers replacing the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. Formal disassociation from Marxism in the form of a new party program, as happened after World War II, would have alienated a large part of the rank and file. Nevertheless, the SPD was a pillar of the Weimar Republic.

  With qualifications, this was also true of the Centrists, who participated in most coalition governments. The Centre Party was above all Catholic, looking after the interests of a large Catholic minority in a Prussian-dominated Protestant Germany. In particular, the Zentrum defended Catholic interests in the education system, and fought against such evils of modern society as pornography and contraception. Catholic political conduct, however, was determined in Rome, and throughout the 1920s the Papacy was concerned about the spread of leftism that accompanied the process of democratisation.

  The DDP was the only committed member of the Weimar Republic to participate in all governments. The democratic liberals, however, were victims of a huge swing in the 1920 Reichstag elections towards the conservative former national liberals. They lost thirty-six of their 75 seats, whereas the National Liberals increased theirs from nineteen to 65. The DDP continued to lose voters — only fourteen seats were won in the 1930 election, and by then they had ceased to play a significant part in the Republic’s political life.

  Following the June 1920 election, as stated above, the Weimar Coalition parties never gained a majority, which meant that from thence government had to be formed with parties opposed to the Republic. The 1920 election also showed that if there was support for Weimar democracy among the middle classes, it was neither deep-seated nor long-lasting. Their disillusionment reached a peak with the hyper-inflation of 1923.

  A steady decline in the mark had commenced during the war, when the German government resorted to the printing press to meet the ever-rising costs of war without having the economic resources to back it up. After the war, successive governments continued to print money rather than tackle the problem with more responsible economic policies, such as raising taxes (as most other national participants in the war had done). The mark declined from eight to the dollar in December 1918 to 7,000 to the dollar in December 1922. The subsequent occupation of the Ruhr was disastrous: by November 1923, the mark had fallen to 4,200 trillion to the dollar.

  This was good luck for those who owed money, but for most other citizens the hyper-inflation was a frightful experience. Savings were wiped out. Employees had to carry home the mass of banknotes that made up their pay packets in baskets and wheel-barrows. People rushed to buy basic essentials before their salaries became worthless. Food was worst affected. It is reported, for example, that the cost of a cup of coffee, listed at 5,000 marks at the time of ordering, had risen to 8,000 by the time the customer asked for the bill. The price of a loaf of bread, 163 marks at the beginning of 1923, had risen to 229 billion by November. Families had to sell possessions to meet rising costs. Crowds rioted, shops were looted, and there were gunfights between miners invading rural areas to strip the fields bare and farmers who did not want to see their goods stolen or sold for worthless money. 46

  The nightmare was ended by DVP leader Gustav Stresemann, who was appointed chancellor and foreign minister in August 1923. He remained foreign minister until his death in October 1929. His chancellorship lasted only months, but that was enough time for him to succeed in negotiating the withdrawal of French troops from the Ruhr in return for a guarantee to meet reparations. By the end of the year, economic stability was restored.

  The years of relative social peace that followed the turmoil of hyper-inflation saw a flourishing of cultural life. A large number of the twentieth century’s most outstanding artists were part of Weimar culture. They included painters Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Max Beckmann, and novelists Alfred Döblin, Erich Maria Remarque, and the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann. The novel of the last mentioned, The Blue Angel, a biting satire on bourgeois society, was made into a film starring Emi
l Jennings and Marlene Dietrich. Fritz Lang’s expressionist films Metropolis and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari became world famous. The Three-Penny Opera, an all-out attack on the decadence of capitalist society, ran for months in Berlin to capacity audiences every night. The text was written by Bertolt Brecht, and Kurt Weill composed the music. To Brecht, however, the box-office success of the play was a disappointment. Most of the crowd came to enjoy the catchy tunes and the witty lyrics, but were not interested in Brecht’s social message.

  The Bauhaus was created by architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in March 1919 in Weimar. Designed primarily as an educational centre, it accommodated artist from all fields. Gropius saw no difference between a craftsperson and an artist. ‘Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn back to craft’. Art and architecture should be functional, contributing to a new future. Teachers at the Bauhaus included painters Wassily Kandinsky, Oscar Schlemmer, Paul Klee, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The modernity of the paintings and architectural designs was not appreciated by Weimar’s general population, nor the liberal lifestyle of the school’s male and female students. Funding was withdrawn in 1924. The Bauhaus then moved to Dessau in the small central German state of Anhalt, where it continued a troubled existence for a few more years before being closed down by the newly elected Nazi town council in 1931. The Bauhaus movement, nevertheless, continued to influence international modern architecture.

  Because of the left-leaning tendencies of writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Döblin, the journalists Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky, and Bauhaus director Hannes Mayer and other intellectuals, the broader public coined the term ‘Cultural Bolshevism’.

  Most people did not like the new forms of entertainment from across the Atlantic either. American-style variety shows and new dances such as the Charleston and the foxtrot offended social conservatism. Jazz, in particular, angered traditional music lovers. Alfred Einstein, Germany’s leading music critic, wrote that jazz ‘was the most disgusting treason against all occidental civilised music’. 47 That most jazz musicians performing in German nightclubs were black made things worse.

  Promiscuity encouraged by the comparatively mild censorship laws in many German states also caused outrage. Berlin was seen a Sündenbabel. Stefan Zweig, the Austrian poet and novelist, was dumbfounded:

  Even the Rome of Suetonius had not known orgies like the Berlin transvestite balls, where hundreds of men in women’s clothes and women in men’s clothes danced under the benevolent eyes of the police … made-up boys with artificial waistlines promenaded along the Kurfürstendamm — and not professionals alone: every high school student wanted to make some money, and in the darkened bars one could see high public officials and high financiers courting drunken sailors without shame … Young ladies proudly boasted that they were perverted, and to be suspected of virginity at sixteen would have been a disgrace in every school in Berlin. 48

  All this was perhaps exaggerated, but the staging of transvestite and other erotic shows in city nightclubs made people believe that the Republic was decadent and outside the norm of what they regarded as civilised social behaviour.

  Belief that proud, traditional German values such as decency and honour were being eroded was also fostered by the changing role of women in society. Their share of the overall workforce did not differ significantly from pre-war levels, but by 1930 the share of female university students had risen to 16 per cent, opening the university and the legal and medical professions to women. They had been given the vote in 1918, and could stand for elections to local councils, state parliaments, or the Reichstag. This allowed them to play a more prominent part in public life. The conservatives felt that this trend should be remedied. The Nazi Party became more successful in elections in the late 1920s because of its demand that Germany’s future depended on the return of women to their proper place in the home as wives and mothers. This was an election trump card, particularly in rural and semi-rural areas.

  The rise of the cheap ‘boulevard press’ in the 1920s also proved detrimental to Weimar democracy. Attacks on politicians, often plucked out of the air, alleging sexual or financial misconduct, harmed the Republic. The publicity given to murder trials and police investigations also helped create the impression that society was being submerged in a wave of violence. 49 This impression was reinforced by the increasing street battles between the paramilitary arms of political parties, none more vicious than the clashes between the Nazis’ SA (Sturmabteilung) and the Communists’ Red Front. In short, the average citizen could see few positive achievements in the Weimar Republic.

  Gustav Stresemann’s foreign policies were successful. He brokered an agreement, signed at Locarno in December 1925, with the foreign minister of France, Aristride Briand, the British foreign minister, Austen Chamberlain, and the U.S. banker Charles Dawes. The agreement recognised Germany’s western borders, but not its eastern boundaries. Locarno put Germany on the same footing as France, which, on British insistence, was asked to weaken its alliance system with eastern Europe. It opened the way for Germany to enter the League of Nations in September 1926, where it was immediately given a permanent seat on the league’s Council. Germany had gained Great Power status again — no mean achievement on Stresemann’s part. Nevertheless, the Locarno Pact was fiercely attacked by the political right for having abandoned German claims in the west. The DNVP left the coalition government, and Stresemann received a great deal of criticism from his own party. But Stresemann was not selling out. Only a few days after the ceremony at Locarno, he offered to repurchase Eupen-Malmedy from Belgium, 50 and not much later he assured the Germans that Locarno did not rule out regaining Alsace-Lorraine. 51

  The Treaty of Locarno, Germany’s entry into the league, and the result of the 1928 election, which saw a sharp rise in the vote cast for the Social Democrats, has often been interpreted as evidence that Weimar democracy was stabilising. This was not the case. The DVP had participated in coalition governments, albeit reluctantly, but had begun to shift to the right even before Stresemann fell ill in the late 1920s (he died in October 1929). The DNVP, which had been opposed to Weimar from the beginning, shifted further to the right when Alfred Hugenberg, press baron and, in the Kaiser’s day, one of the most outspoken Pan-Germans, became chairman of the party in 1928. Finally, the Catholic Centre, one of the three ‘Weimar Coalition’ parties, also shifted to the political right under pressure from the Concordat, and had ceased to be a bulwark of Weimar democracy before 1930. 52

  The final act in the life of the trouble-ridden Republic began in October 1929. Aided by the Dawes Plan, the economic performance of Germany’s industries had begun to improve by the mid-1920s. Manufacturing, in particular, managed to regain most of its export markets, and by 1928 Germany’s industrial output had surpassed pre-World War I levels. The Dawes Plan, however, soon proved a double-edged sword. As stated above, part of the Dawes Plan involved injecting huge sums of American capital into the German economy. This greatly stimulated the nation’s economic recovery, but it had inherent dangers. Governments at all levels embarked on a vast spending spree, balancing their budgets with money from U.S. loans. In real terms, a huge deficit was building. Short-term loans were often invested in projects that were designed to return profits in the long term: if the market panicked, and the loans were recalled, grave problems could arise. This is what happened in the last fortnight of October 1929 when the New York sharemarket collapsed. In its wake, American banks and investors stopped lending money and/or started to withdraw their funds from Germany. Within weeks, the German economy was in chaos. Enterprises went bankrupt, banks started to collapse, and unemployment rose. Political consequences soon followed. A ‘Grand Coalition’, comprising Social Democrats and all the middle-class parties to the left of the DNVP, had formed after the May 1928 election. They united chiefly to secure the passing of the Young Plan in the face of hostile opposition from the far right. Having achieved this, the coalition fell apart. When the middle-cla
ss parties demanded an increase in the unemployment-insurance contribution — to meet the rapidly rising costs of unemployment insurance — the SPD-led government resigned in March 1930.

  With no majority in the Reichstag, President Hindenburg, who had been elected to the office after Friedrich Ebert’s death in February 1925, was repeatedly called upon to rule by emergency decree, in particular by invoking Article 48. The chancellorship went into the hands of the Centre Party leader Heinrich Brüning, who for the next two years governed with a minority.

  Brüning was a monarchist at heart, and saw in the monarchy the best system to free government from the interference of political parties. He attempted to solve the economic and political crisis by undertaking drastic cuts in government spending. The budget had to be balanced. Deficits were to be avoided, as was inflation. Because international loans were no longer available in 1930, a balanced budget could be achieved only by raising taxes and cutting expenditure. The government increased taxes on income, turnover, sugar, and beer, and introduced a series of new taxes — for example, a special tax on department-store sales and on mineral water. Even bachelors were taxed. Public servants had their salaries reduced on three occasions during 1931, by a total of 23 per cent. Overall wages were reduced to the level of 1927, a cut of approximately 10 per cent. Unemployment benefits, which had not been particularly generous previously, were cut by about 60 per cent. As a result of these measurers, business declined, and there was a wave of bankruptcies. The collapse of a major banking chain added to the chaos.