Читать книгу A History of Germany 1918 - 2020 - Mary Fulbrook - Страница 15

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 merely the revision of Germany’s borders, and the resentment this caused within Germany, but also the ‘nationalist’ principles on which such boundary revision was based and their consequences for the European state system that posed longer-term problems. The nationality principle was momentarily enshrined as absolute, creating relatively small ‘nationally’ based successor states in central Europe in place of the former balance of power between the Russian, Austrian and German multinational empires. This fomented further nationalist unrest within ethnically mixed territories, where there were inevitably areas with mixed populations and any state boundaries drawn on ostensibly ethnic or linguistic ‘national’ lines were easily challenged. It also left substantial German minorities in areas outside the newly shrunken Republic (rather than, as before, the German Reich incorporating minorities, such as Danes, French or Poles, within its borders). Borders were therefore not merely continually contested by revisionist Germans (as in the case of Upper Silesia, where unofficial paramilitary activities continued throughout the 1920s) but also by other nationalist movements in Eastern Europe, rendering the Versailles settlement in this respect one which was far from stable and open to revisionist demands from a wide variety of quarters.

Ominously, the ethnonationalism underpinning the principle of self-determination of the postwar nation states also rendered the position of eastern European Jews more precarious. Targeted as scapegoats for postwar poverty, Jews were often victims of vicious pogroms; many fled their homes and sought refuge in other states, which were in general far from happy to take in impoverished refugees. These developments exacerbated anti-Semitic currents across Europe, including in areas of western Europe where Jews had been successfully assimilated. In France, for example, which had recovered from the Dreyfus affair of the turn of the century, ‘Eastern Jews’ (Ostjuden) came to live in cramped quarters in the centre of Paris, speaking in Yiddish and Polish and casting doubt on the status of assimilated French Jews who saw themselves primarily as loyal citizens. These pan-European processes would play a crucial role in the way the Holocaust would eventually unfold, with Nazis able to find eager collaborators and auxiliaries across Europe

In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, Germany was seen as the chief military threat and was dealt with accordingly. Border areas of Germany were officially to be demilitarized, and the left bank of the Rhine was placed under Allied supervision for a prospective period of fifteen years. Any union of Germany and the German-speaking Austrian rump of the now dismantled former Austro–Hungarian Empire was forbidden – although German nationalists in both countries did not give up this vision as something to strive for in the future. The German Army was to be reduced to 100,000 men, for domestic and defensive purposes only, while the German Navy was similarly restricted – submarines were forbidden – and an air force was not permitted at all. Article 231 stated that Germany and her allies were responsible for the war and the damage it had caused. In consideration of this responsibility, Germany was to pay an unspecified sum in reparation, to be determined later.

When the details of reparations were finally announced at the Paris conference of January 1921, the high sums involved were to arouse great indignation and to have tremendous political and (politically exacerbated) economic consequences. Arguably again, the perceptions and representations of reparations, and the ways actively chosen by German politicians to deal with reparations, posed the greatest problems with respect to the economic and psychological consequences of this aspect of the postwar settlement.

Altogether, the apparently very harsh treatment of Germany after the First World War was to prove a considerable burden for Weimar democracy, and a powerful cause of the persistent, widespread and energetic revisionism on the part of many groups and individuals in the following years – not only in Germany but also across other areas of central and eastern Europe where grievances festered or unrest could rapidly be fomented. Within Germany, the legend of the ‘stab in the back’ was to gain considerable currency in summer 1919, feeding into later prejudices against the perceived Judeo-Bolshevik threat. More broadly, for many people the political system of ‘democracy’ became synonymous with national humiliation and, increasingly, economic ruin.