A History of Germany 1918 - 2020. Mary Fulbrook

of industry and the trade unions.

There were fears among members of the Army High Command, not only of the effects on the troops of the abdication of the Emperor, to whom they had traditionally owed obedience, but also of the possibility of a Soviet-style Bolshevik revolution in Germany. On 10 November General Groener (who had succeeded Ludendorff as Quarter-Master General) decided that the best approach would be to enter into a pact with Ebert, whom Groener, like Prince Max, considered to be the most sensible and moderate of the Social Democrats. Groener offered Ebert the support of the army in maintaining law and order and suppressing revolutionary uprisings; Ebert accepted. In this pact lay the seeds of many future problems. It illustrated the limited nature of the revolution – not only the army but also the other elites of Imperial Germany (including the civil service, the judiciary and the economic elites) were to remain untouched and unscathed by what remained a purely political, rather than a far-reaching social and economic, revolution. Perhaps more importantly, it also laid the foundations for the repeated repression of radical movements in the following months and years, inaugurating a split between moderate and radical socialists that was ultimately to contribute to their failure to unite in defence of Weimar democracy.

      The other early compromise was that negotiated by the trade unionist Carl Legien and the employers’ leader Hugo Stinnes. With the ‘Stinnes– Legien agreement’ of 15 November 1918 the employers made certain crucial concessions to labour. These included recognition of the legitimacy of trade union representation of the workforce and agreement no longer to support ‘employer-friendly associations’; the smooth reincorporation, so far as possible, of former employees returning from war into their old jobs; the establishment of ‘Workers’ Committees’ (or Works Councils) in enterprises with more than fifty employees to ensure discussion between employers and employees over conditions of work; the limitation of the working day to 8 hours; and the institution of a ‘Central Committee’ (Zentralausschuss) made up of representatives of the unions and the employers to regulate not only the more immediate problems of demobilization and the reconstruction of a war-torn economy but also the longer-term issues of wages, working conditions and other contentious matters that might arise in labour affairs. This committee laid the foundations for the Zentral-Arbeits-Gemeinschaft (ZAG), which was to give Weimar democracy a corporatist element that later played a role in the economic elites’ utter rejection of the ‘system’ that allowed workers such a considerable voice. Concessions made by employers to workers, when the latter were relatively strong and the former feared a more radical revolution, were to be fundamentally queried and subject to sustained assault – as was the political system that guaranteed those concessions – when the relative circumstances of the parties had changed.

By December 1918 the USPD had fallen out with Ebert’s cautious course. The radical socialists had wanted to seize the opportunity for a thoroughgoing reform of the army and for the socialization of the means of production; in short, they wanted to effect a genuine revolution, not to administer affairs on a temporary basis pending national elections. The USPD left the government; and at the end of December the far Left formed the German Communist Party (KPD). In January 1919 the split between moderate Social Democrats on one hand and radical socialists and communists on the other became an unbridgeable chasm. A largely spontaneous uprising in Berlin, occasioned by the dismissal of the radical Police Chief Eichhorn, belatedly came under the control of the Spartacist leaders. The SPD overreacted to the demonstrations, requesting the support of the army and Free Corps (Freikorps) units (privately financed paramilitary groups of demobilized soldiers) to suppress the revolt by force. This they did with a vengeance. In the process of being arrested and imprisoned, the Spartacist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were brutally murdered. Radicals never forgave moderate Social Democrats for their use of force – which was to be repeated all over Germany, many times, in response to unrest in the following months and years – and the bitter resentment and hostility aroused at this early date helped to sustain the Communists’ later (Moscow-dominated) view of Social Democrats as ‘social fascists’, a worse enemy even than the Nazis.

      Street-fighting, strikes, demonstrations and barricades provided the backdrop for a national campaign for the elections of 19 January 1919. The SPD, which had been relying on this for a solid majority confirming its mandate to govern the new republic, was disappointed. It gained only 38% of the vote, which under the system of proportional representation entailed forming a coalition government in conjunction with the Catholic Centre Party (Zentrum) and the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP). On 6 February 1919 the National Constituent Assembly convened in the town of Weimar (hence the name ‘Weimar Republic’), because Berlin was deemed too dangerous. Within a week Ebert had been elected the Republic’s first President, while Scheidemann became head of the coalition cabinet.

      The Weimar Constitution and the Treaty of Versailles

      During December 1918 a group of experts under the leadership of Hugo Preuss, a left-liberal professor of law, started to develop a draft constitution for the Republic. This draft constitution was considered by the National Assembly, and an agreed version took effect on 11 August 1919. It appeared – and indeed was – very progressive but has subsequently come under much criticism for alleged weaknesses which facilitated the subsequent collapse of democracy.

The electoral system was to be one of proportional representation of parties in the national Parliament according to the percentage of votes cast by all men and women over the age of 20. In the event, the nature of the party system in the Weimar Republic, and what might be called the ‘political culture’ of a number of Weimar parties, rendered post-election bargaining over possible governmental coalitions much more difficult than it has proved to be in other democracies where proportional representation prevails. As we shall see, it was not so much the rules of the game as the nature of the parties playing the game that rendered proportional representation a serious liability for Weimar democracy. The constitution also stressed the participatory, rather than purely representative, aspects of the democratic system. Referenda could be called with direct popular votes on policy issues of considerable importance. The President himself was to be elected by direct popular vote for a 7-year period of office. The elected President, who as a ceremonial head of state replaced the hereditary office of Emperor, was in many ways what has been called an Ersatz-Kaiser (substitute emperor). He had tremendous personal powers, including the right to appoint and dismiss Chancellors, to dissolve the Parliament and call new elections, and, in cases where no parliamentary majority could be found in support of governmental policies, to authorize the Chancellor to rule by presidential decree. The notorious Article 48 of the constitution, which gave the President such emergency powers, also permitted military intervention in the affairs of the different local states or Länder if it was deemed that a state of emergency obtained. Given the considerable personal power of the President, a lot depended on the particular character who held the office. Friedrich Ebert made use of presidential powers to stabilize democracy; his successor, the ageing military hero Field Marshal Hindenburg, turned out to be much less committed to upholding parliamentary democracy and was to play an important role in its destruction.

      One of the first tasks of the new government was to sign a peace treaty with the victorious powers. The provisions of the Versailles Treaty, when they were finally revealed in the early summer of 1919, proved to be harsh and were widely interpreted as even more harsh: perceptions, in turn, became self-fulfilling prophecies in terms of the political consequences. Scheidemann’s cabinet resigned, and a delegation from a new cabinet under the Social Democrat Gustav Bauer went to sign the treaty on 28 June 1919. Germany lost not only her colonies but also large areas of German territory in Europe: Alsace-Lorraine was to be returned to France (which was also to enjoy the fruits of coal production in the Saar basin); West Prussia and Posen (Pozna) were to be restored to a newly reconstituted Poland, as was around one third of Upper Silesia (the most industrialized eastern part); and Danzig was to become a free city under the supervision of the newly established League of Nations. The Silesian border question occasioned not only a plebiscite but also three uprisings, and there was continued unrest in the region. Polish Pomerania, popularly known as the ‘Polish Corridor’ created by Versailles, also separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany.

It was not