A History of Germany 1918 - 2020. Mary Fulbrook

the beginning of the century. A minority of women did achieve a certain status, if not actual power: the first Parliament of the Weimar Republic, for example, had a distinguished group of women members. But by and large, despite the spread of birth control and the progressive framework of the constitution, attitudes both of and towards women remained highly traditional. In the Depression, with rising unemployment after 1929, there was criticism of ‘double earners’ (Doppelverdiener), as people complained of the unfairness of some families having two incomes while others had no income at all. And when women voted they tended to vote disproportionately for parties which did not hold progressive attitudes on women’s questions, such as the conservative and Christian parties. The two parties with the most progressive views on women’s issues, the SPD and the KPD, failed to attract a proportional share of the votes of women.¹⁰ Formal appearances notwithstanding, most women neither were nor seemed to want to be ‘emancipated’. The minority who adopted what they held to be an emancipated style – smoking cigarettes in long holders, cutting their hair in short fashions, driving cars and indulging in an apparently glittering nightlife – attracted criticism from many of the more staid and stolid Hausfrauen of Weimar Germany.

      There was nevertheless widespread experimentation in lifestyles among some groups, with ‘reform’ movements in the areas of food and health, for example. There was an emphasis on nature, with members of youth movements indulging in long hiking trips through the German pine forests, swimming in lakes and rivers, camping and youth hostelling at every opportunity. There had been a tradition of such youth movements in Imperial Germany, such as the largely middle-class Wandervogel movement, and the comparable SPD youth organizations. Their activities continued to flourish in the Weimar Republic. Perhaps partly in reaction against the constraints and repressions, the restrictions and gloom of life in large cities, emphasis was given to escape into the countryside. But appeals to youth were similarly riven with political divides; both the far Right and the Left sought to mobilize youth for their diverse purposes. The right-wing mobilization of paramilitary groups that sought to forge a glorious future and make up for the humiliation of national defeat and the ‘shame’ of Versailles was to prove the most threatening in assisting Hitler’s rise to power, while the reformist and often pacifist youth cultures of the Left were ultimately defeated by the superior military might of the Right.

In every possible way, the nature and possibilities of modernity were contested, challenged, reshaped. For a few brief years, manifold possibilities for creating a different future fought to achieve dominance. Conflicting visions of the future and critiques of the present battled alongside and against each other, in an effort to create not only a new society, but also to reshape the very nature of what it meant to be human. Yet this battle was fought in highly unstable political and economic conditions. The fragility of the social compromise that marked the beginning of Weimar democracy became all too evident when it was rocked by the shocks of world depression. Whatever the ambiguities of Weimar society and culture, perhaps the deepest and most fatal splits were embedded in the Weimar social compromise and in the institutional framework of relations between the classes. It was these which contributed mightily to the breakdown of the Weimar political system, creating the opportunities which the Nazis were to seize. We must turn now to the complex and contentious task of explaining the ultimate collapse of the short-lived Weimar Republic.

3 The Collapse of Democracy and the Rise of Hitler

      Two rather different processes coincided in the late 1920s and early 1930s. One was the collapse of the democratic political system of the Weimar Republic. The other was the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party, immeasurably aided by the economic depression after 1929. The collapse of democracy effectively preceded, and was an essential precondition for, the rise of Hitler; and the appointment of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany was by no means the only possible, or inevitable, outcome of the collapse of Weimar democracy. Given the consequences of this appointment, it is scarcely surprising that the causes, the relative contribution and importance of different factors have been so hotly debated.

      The Flawed Compromise

We have seen that Weimar democracy was born under difficult circumstances. The 1918–9 revolution in effect represented a temporary abdication of responsibility on the part of old elites unwilling to take the opprobrium of defeat or shoulder the burdens of postwar reconstruction. Fearful of more radical revolution, they made crucial concessions to moderate socialist forces; but they did not view these concessions as permanent, and remained in the wings, waiting and watching for chances to revise both the domestic and international settlements of 1918–9. On the part of the urban working classes, on the other hand, the participation for the first time in government of the SPD and the newly recognized and established position of the trade unions awakened expectations which an impoverished postwar country would find it hard to deliver. Defeated in war, burdened with the harsh provisions of the Versailles Treaty, essentially contested in its very essence and attacked from both Left and Right, the Weimar Republic certainly bore a considerable weight of problems from the very start.

      Yet it survived the difficulties of the early years. A general strike in 1920 served to defeat the Kapp putsch; the hyper-inflation of 1923 was successfully dealt with, reparations were renegotiated, 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