Death of a Nation
Page 46
Nevertheless, during his one hundred days as Chancellor and his five years as Foreign Minister, Stresemann achieved a remarkable turn-around. Within three days of becoming Chancellor he established a new currency to replace the now worthless Mark. A new Rentenbank was to issue the new Rentenmark, which, as Germany did not possess any gold reserves, was backed by mortgages put on all her industrial and agricultural land. Two hundred thousand, four hundred million (RM 200,400,000,000) Rentenmarks were initially issued, with half going to the government and half going to the Rentenbank, to help break the credit crunch and restart lending to industry. This was accompanied by stringent financial discipline, which included a drastic cut in the number of government employees, cuts in salaries and government expenditure, and an increase in taxation. Confidence returned remarkably quickly and inflation was brought under control. The first step in an incredible economic transformation had just taken place, but the thorny issue of reparations remained.(14)
In 1924, amid much protest and criticism, Stresemann — now in the post of Foreign Minister in a new coalition government — had the German government sign up to the Dawes Plan. The plan rescheduled Germany’s reparations payments according to an index of her prosperity. It also allowed her to receive substantial American loans for the expansion of her industrial capacity with the intention that she would be able to export more and pay off her debt to the Allies more easily. The money from the loans was also channelled into long-term public works schemes, helping to reduce unemployment. The loans had a tremendous impact on the German economy. German factories were refitted with the most advanced machinery and adopted American mass-production techniques, doubling overall production between 1923–29. The government worked hard on the issue of brittle industrial relations, getting workers and employers to cooperate in industrial disputes, making arbitration compulsory and dramatically reducing the number of strikes, thereby helping to raise productivity further. Real wages began to rise again, as did the average standard of living. By 1929, out of the ruinous situation just six years earlier, Germany had re-emerged as the world’s second largest industrial economy; the position she had been in before the war.(15) These were the golden years of the Weimar Republic, and the economic recovery had the welcome knock-on effect of significantly reducing the appeal of extremist parties. The Nazis’ share of the vote, which had been 6.6 per cent with thirty-two seats in 1924, fell to just 2.6 per cent and twelve seats in the 1928 elections. The communists also lost votes and seats with 12.6 per cent and sixty-two seats in 1924, falling to 10.6 per cent and fifty-two seats in 1928, the KPD’s (German Communist Party) vote holding up better than that of the extreme right, the party remaining the largest communist movement outside of the Soviet Union.(16)
The gloom and despondency of the post-war period was briefly replaced by the mini boom of the ‘Roaring Twenties’. No city in Europe epitomised the era more than Berlin. The German capital became the epicentre of an explosion of contemporary culture and personal liberty, which took a startling variety of forms. The capital of global hedonism was characterised by cabaret and revue bars full of troops of naked dancing girls, transvestite shows, a thriving gay and lesbian scene, an exuberant diversity of all-night bars, and widespread prostitution. Berlin became the centre of modernity, from the functional architecture of the Bauhaus movement to Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg’s development of ‘tonal’ music — an acquired taste, if ever there was one! More popular and enduring by far was the political musical theatre based on the writing of Bertolt Brecht and set to the music of Kurt Weill. Their most popular offering, The Threepenny Opera, was a sinister socialist critique of the capitalist world. Beyond that Max Beckmann’s surrealist art and Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front depicted the horrors of war and mirrored a societal break in the belief in the unbroken progress of man. Fritz Lang’s cinematic classic Metropolis depicts life in the cities of the future amid towering gothic skyscrapers in which the masses have become slaves to industrial capital. It was the most expensive film of its day, made at the world-renowned Babelsberg film studios near Berlin, which at the time were second only to Hollywood. Alfred Doeblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz lifted the veil on the seedy underworld of a capital seething with crime, murder and prostitution; a world in which the fundamental structures that once bound society were breaking down. Oswald Spengler’s classic, The Decline of the West, and Ernst Jünger’s The Working Man, were further examples of the fin de siècle mood; the end of God, history, philosophy and human enlightenment. Besides these seedy and gloom-ridden stories there were also the great adventure stories of Karl May and the more cerebral literature and poetry of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Erich Kästner and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Berlin had also become the centre of all that was avant-garde in the art world, from Dadaism (conventionalising the absurd) to surrealism. Die neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity or dispassion), cubism and geometric art, expressionism and futurism all flourished in Weimar Berlin, as did the haunting caricatures and sculptures of Käthe Kollwitz and the dark, but often lewd and humorous, cartoons of Berlin’s underclass by Heinrich Zille.
While a heady mix of cultural pessimism and hedonism characterised the social milieu in Weimar Germany, a technological revolution put Berlin at the centre of a modern transport revolution. The development of modern aircraft and civilian air travel was epitomised by the Lufthansa Junkers G38, a four-engined passenger plane (the largest in the world at the time), which flew regularly between London and Berlin and would take you from the German capital to Rome in a revolutionary eight hours. The Zeppelins could transport you from Berlin to Hamburg in just two hours. The first superhighway (Autobahn) in Europe was built between Cologne and Bonn, and Fritz von Opel pioneered rocket-propelled automobiles along Berlin’s newly opened Avus racetrack. In addition to the advancements in modern transportation, in August 1931 in Berlin, Manfred von Ardenne gave the world’s first demonstration of a television, using a cathode ray tube for both transmission and reception. Test runs for a public television service began in 1933, and by 1935 Berlin hosted the world’s first television service. By the time of the Berlin Summer Olympics of 1936, the German television service was able to broadcast images of the events throughout Germany.
During the Weimar Republic, German scientists, writers and even politicians won an unprecedented number of Nobel prizes; seventeen in all. These included Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg for physics, Carl Bosch for chemistry, Thomas Mann for literature, and the Nobel Peace prize for Gustav Stresemann.(17) In the realm of foreign policy, Stresemann also transformed Germany from the leper of Europe to a partner for peace, signing the Locarno Treaty in 1925, a treaty of mutual security guaranteeing Germany’s borders with France and Belgium and initiating a new system of ‘collective security’ in the West, whilst leaving Germany free to seek changes and revisions in the East. And in 1926, Stresemann signed the Berlin Treaty with the Soviet Union, which agreed each nation would remain neutral if attacked by a third power, and contained a secret agreement between the Reichswehr and the Red Army for mutual assistance if either were attacked by Poland, either in East Prussia or the Ukraine.clxx The Stresemann era catapulted Germany out of her economic meltdown and through the ‘politics of the possible’, and in true Bismarckian style, Stresemann was able to create pragmatic diplomatic political and economic solutions to steer Germany through six years of if not ‘sunlit uplands’, then at least stability and progress. In 1925, Stresemann said, ‘A nation must not adopt the attitude of a child that writes a list of its wants on Christmas Eve, which contains everything that the child will need for the next fifteen years. The parents would not be in a position to give it all this. In foreign politics I often have the feeling that I am being confronted with such a list, and it is forgotten that history advances merely step by step.’(18) In 1926, Stresemann took Germany into the League of Nations, and in 1928 signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact along with sixty other nations renouncing the use of force in inte
rnational disputes with one another. It was a tragedy for Germany and the world when Stresemann died prematurely of a stroke in 1929 aged just fifty-one, just as the Great Depression unfolded and a tidal wave of despair hit Germany.
Phase Three: 1930–1933, Depression and Despair
The Stock Market Crash of October 1929 led to foreign investors pulling their capital out of Germany. The loans on which Germany had come to depend on so heavily were called in, and there were no new ones forthcoming. The Dawes and Young Plans, both in terms of the annual payments Germany had to make, and because of the way the loans were indexed to her ability to pay, were based entirely on Germany’s ability to sustain a high level of export revenues. With loans and export markets drying up the German economy plummeted again.
The broad democratic coalition that sustained the Weimar Republic in its earlier years — which included the Social Democrats (SPD), the Catholic Centre Party, the Liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), and the conservative nationalist People Party (DVP — Streseman’s party) — was swept away, as the tidal wave of the Great Depression hit. The Centre Party and the SPD were split on how to deal with this tsunami, specifically over the issue of unemployment benefits and the cost of the welfare system. The Centre Party shifted to the right and increasingly aligned itself with nationalist and big business interests who sought to reduce the size of the welfare system in order to help reinvigorate the German economy. The SPD moved further left and even closer to the unions who were trying to protect the interests of the workers. And the DNVP, the right-wing nationalist party, which up to that point had not been part of Weimar coalitions, was taken even further right by the election of Alfred Hugenberg, the millionaire publisher and newspaper baron. Hugenberg increasingly aligned his party with Hitler’s NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) putting his propaganda apparatus at the Nazis’ disposal and helping them rise to ‘respectability’.
After the crash, the political parties showed themselves incapable of demonstrating the necessary unity of purpose to deal with Germany’s mounting problems, which increasingly affected the everyday lives of their fellow citizens. They preferred instead to fight over highly divisive, but essentially trivial, issues such as the disposal of the property of the old ruling houses, state support for Church schools, and which flags to fly outside German embassies. This made the public doubt their politicians could deal with the problems that faced the nation. One Centre Party member of the Reichstag commented, ‘Never has the German soul asked more vehemently and impatiently for leadership in the grand style than in these days.’(19)
Parliamentary democracy in Germany ended on March 27th 1930 when the five-party coalition, and the fifteenth government in eleven years, effectively collapsed under the weight of the mounting problems: 3 million unemployed, a lack of public funds, and a failure to unify around a policy of how they could dig Germany out of the deep hole she found herself in. President Hindenburg, together with a succession of increasingly right-wing Chancellors, ruled more by decree than by the rule of parliament. President Hindenburg in fact dissolved parliament in 1930 for attempting to exercise its democratic prerogative. The parliamentary election that followed strengthened the parties of the right, but for over a year the Reichstag was unable to secure the majority it needed to stop the President from ruling by decree. Economic revival under Stresemann had taken the wind out of the sails of the extremist parties; these sails were filled again by the ill winds of the economic implosion that followed the Wall Street Crash and the apparent impotence of the politicians to do anything about it. In 1928, the Nazis gained 2.6 per cent of the vote with 810,000 votes and twelve seats, but in the 1930 election these figures grew to 18.3 per cent of the vote with 6.5 million votes and 107 seats in the Reichstag. The communists also gained a million votes, and their tally of seats rose to seventy-seven with 13.1 per cent of the vote.(20)
The leader of the Centre Party, Chancellor Brüning, now headed a minority government, which was tolerated by the Social Democrats because it aimed to stop the rise of the Nazis — who overnight had become the second largest party in the Reichstag. Brüning nevertheless had to rely ever more on rule by decree with the backing of the President. Brüning hoped to gain a working majority in the Reichstag by rallying conservative and nationalist forces in support of an attempted customs union between the two economically bankrupt states of Germany and Austria. During the negotiations, Austria asked the League of Nations for a loan. The French government seized its chance to block the customs union by making the loan conditional on the permanent abandonment of any economic union between Germany and Austria. Brüning then reluctantly referred the issue to the League of Nations. This humiliating climb down ended his attempt to rally the forces of the right.
There were two more Reichstag elections and two more Chancellors appointed by Hindenburg in 1932; both failed to establish a working majority in the Reichstag. The economy continued its seemingly unstoppable fall and unemployment figures continued to spiral up, rising from 1.3 million in 1929, to over 6 million at the beginning of 1933 — representing one in three of the working population. If the number of people in irregular short time work was included, the actual number could have been as high as 50 per cent.(21)
Again the potential for civil war loomed large as Nazis and communists took their battle to the streets. Christabel Bielenberg, an Englishwoman married to an anti-Nazi German lawyer, interviewed as part of the seminal World at War television series, attempted to relay the backdrop to the rise, out of sheer chaos, of the Nazi movement and why many were prepared to tolerate it, at least initially. Bielenberg came to Germany during the midst of this chaos and described what she witnessed:
I came to Germany in 1932 and that was a period of time I think you can say that the Weimar Republic was dying. They had changed government — they changed the government in Germany practically every three months — and the government was already ruling by emergency decrees. I think the atmosphere of Germany was one of great poverty, there’s no doubt about it, it was very distinguishable even when one came from England, which wasn’t in a very good way either. There were six and a half million unemployed, every weekend there were political marches taking place between the Nazis on one side, the Communists on the other… practically every weekend there were deaths through shootings and so forth. I think the ordinary burgher was absolutely tired of this situation and was on the lookout for someone who could come along and clean up the place… there were forty eight political parties altogether I believe — no government had been able to govern, to get a majority in parliament… (22)
Among all the chaos and deprivation, the Nazi Party stood out as something new. The party was adept at harnessing the power of modern mass media to present itself as all things to all people, while at the same time clearly spelling out what it was against. It railed against Versailles, the ‘November Criminals’, exploitative capitalism, ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, the failure of Weimar democracy and ‘degenerate’ modernism in all its forms. Instead, they promised frightened and desperate Germans the creation of a shining new national community that would make Germany great again. Demonstrating their power of organisation at rallies, the party staged colossal mass public spectacles that took on a hypnotic, almost pagan, nature, out of the blinding light of which would emerge the charismatic Führer who would lead the people to a glorious new future. The Nazis had become a popular mass movement, which the old conservative elites could no longer ignore; indeed elements within the establishment increasingly sought to harness this movement to their own objectives.
The constitutional dilemma was becoming ever more acute. Hindenburg could not keep dissolving the Reichstag and calling new elections; there had been two in 1932 alone. However Article 25 of the constitution stated that the President could not allow for there to be no parliament for more than sixty days. Each step down this road only weakened Germany further and institutionalised the instability. Hindenburg wanted to find a solution that would unite the
parties of the centre and the right to create a workable majority in parliament.
In the second election to take place in 1932, the Nazis lost 2 million votes. They had run out of money and much of big business was frightened off by the socialist wing of the party. The beneficiaries were the nationalists and the communists who picked up 800,000 and 700,000 additional votes respectively. With the fortunes of the Nazis in apparent decline, the conservatives and nationalists began a renewed momentum to bind them into a new coalition of national forces on the right. They were keen to do this before the Nazis’ fortunes waned any further, and whilst they appeared to have the upper hand. They hoped to break the constitutional deadlock and achieve a working majority in the Reichstag. Conservative and nationalist party leaders persuaded President Hindenburg, against his better judgment, to appoint Hitler as Chancellor in a coalition of national forces in which the Nazis would only receive two Cabinet posts. The other parties of the right believed they could call the shots and box in Hitler’s National Socialists. Hitler’s Vice Chancellor was Franz von Papen, the former Chancellor, close associate of Hindenburg and leader of the Centre Party, who famously stated, ‘Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.’(23)
With Hindenburg as President, Papen as Vice Chancellor, Hugenberg and the nationalists and conservatives holding the majority of Cabinet posts, there was good reason to believe Hitler’s room for manoeuvre would be severely restricted. Hitler was thereby levered into power and handed the chancellorship by a coalition of conservative and nationalist politicians on 30th January 1933. That night, a torchlight parade lit up the streets of Berlin, as the Nazis celebrated their ‘seizure of power’. A grim-faced President Hindenburg watched the seemingly endless march pass through the Brandenburg Gate and the government quarter. They had all underestimated the ruthlessly revolutionary nature of the Nazi movement. The two Cabinet posts the Nazis had received were significant, not least Hermann Goering’s appointment as Prussian Minister of the Interior. This post gave Goering the opportunity to fill the ranks of the police in Germany’s largest state with 12,000 new SA and SS men, who immediately began a reign of terror against the Nazis’ left-wing opponents.