The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity - Softcover

Peukert, Detlev

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809015560 ISBN 13: 9780809015566

Verlag: Hill and Wang, 1993

Inhaltsangabe

The nature of Weimar's terminal crisis - how a politically liberal and culturally progressive society could succomb to fascism - remains one of the central historical questions of our century. In this major work, Detlev J.K. Peukert offers a stimulating interpretation that not only places Weimar in the history of twentieth-century Germany but also reveals it as an archetype of the ambivalences and pathologies of advanced industrial society.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Detlev J. K. Peukert is the author of Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, a highly accaimed study of daily life in the Third Reich. Former professor of modern history at the University of Essen and director of the Research Institute for the History of the Nazi Period, he died in 1990 at the age of thirty-nine.

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The Weimar Republic

By Detlev J. K. Peukert

Hill and Wang

Copyright © 1993 Detlev J. K. Peukert
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780809015566

The Weimar Republic

I. INTRODUCTION

 

 

An age is always a farrago of different ages. Whole parts of it are unleavened and undercooked; it contains the husks of old forces, and the seeds of new ones.

Alfred Döblin, 1924

1. THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC AND THE CONTINUITY OF GERMAN HISTORY

 

 

To define a phenomenon is to specify its boundaries. But it is an indication of the problems that the Weimar Republic poses for historians that even its temporal boundaries are open to dispute. The demarcation of a period of history necessarily rests on a particular conception of the period, explicitly underpinned to a greater or lesser extent by theoretical analysis. What different dates, then, can be proposed for the beginning and end of the Weimar Republic, and what analytical conceptions of the period are implicit in these different datings?

POLITICAL TURNING-POINTS

Some accounts of Weimar actually begin with the Imperial monarchy:1 to be precise, with the October reforms of 1918, which, as military defeat loomed, introduced parliamentary democracy into the constitution of the Reich and brought to power the governing coalition of Social Democrats, Catholic Centre and liberals that was later to usher in the Weimar constitution of 1919. In such an account, the continuity represented by the socialist-liberal-Catholic settlement takes centre stage, and the November revolution appears as a false trail.

On the other hand, to take the revolutionary proclamation of the Republic in Berlin on 9 November 1918 as a starting-point2 is to emphasize the break with the imperial monarchy and to highlight the role of the mass revolutionary movement. This approach was adopted early on by the political right, with the Dolchstoßlegende (the legend ofthe 'stab in the back') and the Nazis' vilification of the 'November criminals'. The left, on the other hand, has been faced with the dilemma whether or not to define the period by reference to a revolution which the Weimar Republic itself was responsible for terminating.3

Similarly, for those who view the creation of the Weimar Republic as the result of a verdict in favour of bourgeois parliamentary democracy and against Bolshevik dictatorship,4 the crucial event of the new era is the election of the National Constituent Assembly on 19 January 1919 (or perhaps even the promulgation of the Weimar constitution of the Reich on 14 August 1919).

Historians who deny that this was the only choice and whose interest is in the untapped potential for democratization that was present during the early period of upheaval, notably in the Rate movement (the soldiers' and the workers' councils, or soviets),5 inevitably focus their attention on the mass movements of the winter and spring of 1919, or even, indeed, on the so-called March revolution of 1920 that followed the Kapp putsch.

To do this, however, is to prolong the moment of the Republic's birth until it becomes identical with an entire phase of the republican era, namely the revolutionary post-war crisis. This crisis can be said to have ended with the Reichstag elections of 6 June 1920, in which the Weimar Coalition responsible for enacting the constitution lost its electoral majority, or perhaps to have lasted until the stabilization of domestic and foreign policy that was achieved at the close of the crisis-ridden year 1923.

Although stability arrived in 1924, contemporaries were not prepared to regard it as more than 'relative'.6 Certainly, it is only in comparison with the several near-fatal crises of the early post-war period, and then with the world economic crisis at the end of the decade, that the years 1924-9 can be termed 'stable'. The cracks in the fabric of the Republic remained fully visible, an outward sign of hidden weaknesses that might prove fatal when the structure was next subjected to severe strain.

Clearly, then, the way in which we judge the years of the mid-1920s are of crucial importance when we come to assess the extent to which the Weimar Republic was, on the one hand, prone to crises and, on the other, able to withstand them.7

In similar fashion, verdicts differ as to how long the collapse of the Republic was really averted after the renewed bout of crisis that began in 1929. The fall of the Great Coalition on 27 March 1930 can be viewed as the end of 'Weimar', if the relevant criterion is taken to be the capacity of the political system to produce a stable parliamentary majority and of the representatives of employers and workers to sustain the compromise on economic and social policy that was reached in 1918.8 The decision by Heinrich Brüning, appointed Chancellor two days later, to govern on the basis of emergency decrees and the backing of the Reich President, and not to depend on majority support in Parliament, was -- and was intended to be -- the first step in a change to a quite different form of constitution.9

Only after (though not before) the sensational success of the National Socialists in the Reichstag elections on 14 September 1930 (followed by their later successes in 1932 and the Machtergreifung, or seizure of power, of 1933) is there a case for the argument that the different form of republic which Brüning and Hindenburg wanted offered an alternative to Hitler as well as to Weimar .10 On this view, it was not until the fall of Brüning on 30 May 1932 that the precipitous slide towards the Third Reich can be said to have begun. By the same token, there were the Hitler-Papen cabinet on 30 January 1933, the emergency decrees following the Reichstag fire on 28 February 1933, the Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Law) of 23 March 1933 and the amalgamation of the posts of Reich Chancellor and Reich President in the person of the 'Führer' on 2 August 1934-before the functions and significance of the constitutional order of Weimar were finally nullified.11

In terms of political history, then, the Weimar Republic has neither a clearly defined beginning nor a clearly defined end. From the historiographical point of view, as we have said, periodization is always dependent on interpretation, and historical controversy on the interpretation of the Weimar era is still very passionate. But these very ambiguities also tell us something about the character of the Weimar Republic. The beginning of the Republic was not marked by an event that served as an old-fashioned but politically unifying symbol of a pivotal moment in national history, along the lines of the American Declaration of Independence, the quatorze juillet in France or indeed Sedan Day after the creation of the German Empire in 1870-71. On9 November 1918, the day when the German Republic was established, there were competing symbolic proclamations by the Spartacist Karl Liebknecht in front of the Hohenzollern palace and by the Social Democratic parliamentarian and minister12 Philipp Scheidemann in front of the German Reichstag: the revolutionary masses see-sawed between the two. The fact that the Republic had no legitimizing founding ritual implies a lack of legitimacy in general: it suggests that there was a lack of active commitment to the new order.

MODERNIZATION AND ITS TRIBULATIONS

The Weimar Republic did not come into being as the result...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Hill and Wang
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1993
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0809015560
• ISBN 13: 9780809015566
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 360
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland