A History of Germany 1918 - 2020. Mary Fulbrook
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.
Political Unrest and Economic Chaos
The early years of the Weimar Republic were, for most Germans, marked by the shattering human costs of war and its aftermath.6 The impact of battle wounds, bereavements and psychological traumas were exacerbated by widespread malnutrition and heightened susceptibility to devastating disease. In 1918–9 the epidemic known as Spanish flu swept the world, infecting perhaps 500 million people worldwide – one in three on the planet – and killing up to 50 million people, far more than had been killed by the war. In the absence of vaccines or effective medication, it was the deadliest pandemic of the twentieth century. In Germany, mortality rates were extremely high, including among young adults, whose health was adversely affected both by wartime experiences and postwar malnutrition. In all, although figures are hard to gauge with any accuracy, well over a quarter of a million people in Germany died from the influenza pandemic.
Not only public health but also political and economic circumstances posed massive challenges at this time. Weimar society was deeply divided, with opposing visions of any possible future that could be built on the basis of defeat. Young people were deeply critical of the parental generation, with growing generational divides. And physical violence was widely seen as a legitimate political weapon, both on the right and the left – although, over the course of time, right-wing extremists would be treated far more leniently by the courts than their left-wing counterparts. Some demobilized soldiers joined Free Corps units and engaged in violent skirmishes in the contested borderlands of the new republic, as well as targeting political opponents in individual killings that they glorified as in some way justified. Younger people who had been influenced by the glorification of militarism during their school days and had indulged in playground games of warfare were readily recruited to nationalistic violence. And the army and the Free Corps took the lead in suppressing left-wing uprisings.
The first four years of the fledgling Republic were characterized by a high level of political violence, with frequent political assassinations, coup attempts, strikes and demonstrations, these last being put down with considerable force. In May 1919, Free Corps units brutally suppressed a second attempt at establishing a Bavarian Republic, following the assassination of Kurt Eisner, with around a thousand deaths. An attempted national right-wing putsch in March 1920, with a march on Berlin led by the East Prussian civil servant, monarchist and nationalist Wolfgang Kapp and Infantry General Freiherr von Lüttwitz, with the support of the Free Corps unit led by Hermann Erhardt, caused the flight of the government. In the end, it lasted only a couple of days, but it was brought down only by a general strike called by the SPD, after the army had refused to fire on the putschist troops. Even so, the Kapp putsch assisted right-wing causes elsewhere. A military-supported coup in Bavaria installed a right-wing regime under Gustav Ritter von Kahr, turning Bavaria into a haven in which small nationalist (or völkisch) groups could safely organize and foment unrest against democracy. One among many agitators at this time, who began to stand out through his growing abilities in speech-making and rabble-rousing, was Adolf Hitler, demobilized and disorientated but finding a new role for himself on these right-wing fringes. But the time was not yet ripe, even if the Republic was far from secure.
The army’s inclinations towards the right were evident; despite its unwillingness to act against the Kapp putsch, it was only too happy to fire on the so-called Red Army in the Ruhr, when there were left-wing uprisings against the Republic in spring 1920. As we shall see, the army and Free Corps were also keen to intervene to suppress communist-led uprisings and left-wing regimes in Saxony, Thuringia and Hamburg in autumn 1923; and from the mid-1920s, elements in the army leadership would be ever more actively conspiring to overturn the provisions of the Versailles Treaty and overthrow the democratic system.
Faced with repeated strikes, demonstrations and political violence, the SPD sadly misjudged the situation and, instead of responding to the causes of distress, sought to use force to suppress the symptoms of unrest. Moreover, the judiciary throughout the Weimar Republic displayed considerable political bias in treating left-wing offenders very harshly while meting out lenient sentences to offenders on the Right. A deeply polarized society was hardly coming to terms with the new political circumstances of the time.
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