Outline the political, social and economic problems facing the Weimar Republic in the years 1918-1923.

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Simon Cornish        12MH        Page         

Modern History

Post WWI Politics in Germany

  1. Outline the political, social and economic problems facing the Weimar Republic in the years 1918-1923. (2-3)

Political Problems

From 1920 neither the Weimar Coalition nor the parties of the Right alone could achieve majority in the Reichstag due to the numbers of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and the KPD, the great parliamentary problem of the Weimar Republic was the relationship between the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and The Peoples Party (DVP).

This relationship determined the possibility, at any given time, of continuing government at all, either through a minority of the bourgeois parties or through a Coalition. The difficulty was that the SPD was the party of the workers and the DVP the party of the employers. The struggle to change the party's character was therefore a struggle to make it more suitable to collaboration with the SPD, and a struggle for the survival of the Republic itself.

The whole parliamentary life of the Weimar Republic was fundamentally different from that of the Empire. It was a constitutional state, in which political parties played a vital and active role, as distinct from the shadow-boxing to which they had been condemned by Bismarck's constitutionalism. One consequence was that the parties reorganised and strengthened their internal machinery. The lead was taken by the successor to the two imperial conservative parties, the National People's Party (DNVP. The DNVP from campaigned militantly for the restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy.

The fact that such a party could exist is partially due to the SPD's unwillingness to destroy the position of the Prussian Junkers during the provisional government. Even apart from its cautious approach, the SPD as an urban party had taken little interest in the problems of peasants or of agriculture in general. SPD leaders tended to regard large-scale agriculture as economically sensible. They thought that because of the loss of territory in the east and the economic damage of the war, the time was particularly inappropriate for any radical measures of land reform.

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The consequences for the new republic were disastrous. Of all the forces from imperial Germany that survived into the Weimar Republic, none was as dangerous as the Junkers, with their economic base in agriculture and their positions of power in the army and the civil service. Hugo Preuss had said that “no constitution would work which was not accompanied by a positive national spirit”. The regime was the target of a constant stream of denunciation of democracy and parliamentary government in general as un-German and wicked. This was supported by the Versailles treaty and the ''stab in the back'' ...

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