From the beginning, the Weimar Republic were under great pressure from both left-wing and right-wing extremists. As mentioned earlier in November 1918 there was a power vacuum in the German government, there were three main groups scrambling to fill this space; firstly the Conservatives who wanted an authoritarian form of government, to make Germany more like it had been before the war. Next were the Liberals and moderate socialists who wanted to turn Germany into a modern democratic republic, and lastly were the Spartacist league who were the German communist party, they wanted Germany to become a communist state like Russia.
On the 5th January 1919, the Spartacist league led by Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, tried to take control of Berlin, they occupied buildings, organized a general strike and formed a revolutionary committee, however a group of hard men, called the free corps, were about to stop all of this, they despised communists and liked a fight. On the 10th January 1919 the free corps attacked, they captured a newspaper building held by the Spartacists, shot several of them and beat up the rest. The next day they captured all other occupied buildings in central Berlin, two days later they caught the Spartacist leaders and brutally murdered them. The rising thus failed.
The Constitution is a set of rules which state how a country should be run. On the 31st July 1919 Germany accepted the Weimar constitution however this wasn’t all for the best. It gave equal powers to those people who wished to destroy the Weimar Republic. The constitution gave each state their own regional government who had the right to make local laws they could be hostile to the national government in Berlin and try to overthrow it. Article 48 gave great power to the president this meant that he could destroy the republic and turn himself into a dictator.
The Treaty of Versailles was the peace settlement signed after World War One had ended in 1918. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were: war guilt; Germany had to take sole responsibility for the outbreak of World War One, this is untrue, the reasons for the outbreak of world war one were very complex and the Germans felt very angry that Germany alone had to take the blame for the war. The second was reparations; because Germany was forced to take full responsibility for the war the Allies could claim compensation for the damage done, Germany had to pay a total of £6600 million in annual installments and this meant that the government had less money to spend on Germans.
Another of the terms was military restrictions; the French wanted Germany to be made weak so that they could not start another war, this meant that: Germany was not allowed to have an air force, the army was limited to 100,000 men, the navy was limited to 15,000 sailors, 6 battleships and no submarines and lastly the border area of Germany near France was occupied by foreign troops and no German troops were allowed there. This term was unfair because if Germany was attacked then she would be at a disadvantage if she didn’t have a navy or air force and her enemies did also because before the war Germany had an army of nearly 2 million, to have an army of a mere 100,000 was a humiliating insult.
The last of the terms was territorial losses; Germany lost 13% of its territory and 6 million Germans now found themselves living in a different country. They lost territory such as: Alsace Lorraine to France, Posen and Silesia to Poland, North Schleswig to Denmark, Eupen and Malmedy to Belgium and all of her oversea colonies to Britain and France. Many Germans were distressed to find themselves now living in foreign countries due to the border changes enforced by the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was also a very proud nation and were very upset that they had to give their overseas colonies to their old enemies France and Britain. On 11th November 1918, representatives from the Weimar republic had to sign the Armistice which ended World War One. Many people in Germany didn’t accept that Germany had lost the war. They felt that they should have carried on fighting. The Treaty of Versailles bought in after the war was detested in Germany and the government was held responsible for signing that as well. This meant that the government faced a great deal of resentment and distrust and therefore it was not very stable. Besides trying to solve all the other problems, they needed to get people to accept the new style of government.
It’s an astonishing amount of problems that the Weimar Republic was faced with. They had to try overcoming the devastation that remained from World War One, the Treaty of Versailles, the Constitution and the Spartacist Uprising. Perhaps the greatest danger was the weakness within; the constitution gave the president, the states and the army too much power, whilst proportional voting meant the Reichstag was divided and weak, however worst was yet to come.
