Forged Through Fire by John Ferejohn

Author:John Ferejohn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

1918 New York Times front page reporting Germany's surrender and the end of the Great War.

The New York Times’s 42-point headlines on November 11, 1918, conveyed the chaos of the German vortex: ARMISTICE SIGNED, END OF THE WAR! BERLIN SEIZED BY REVOLUTIONISTS; NEW CHANCELLOR BEGS FOR ORDER; OUSTED KAISER FLEES TO HOLLAND. It began on November 4, when some eighty thousand sailors at Kiel mutinied rather than fight more pointless battles at sea; they were joined by workers in cities all over Germany, half a million in Berlin alone, striking for better conditions. Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated at the insistence of the Social Democrats and over the objections of the nonsocialist parties, but it was too little, too late to forestall months of bloodshed.89 Apart from a small left-wing group that had been harassed and jailed during the war for its antimilitarist socialism, most of the Germans who took the revolutionary side in November 1918 wanted two objectives that were already in train but not yet fully visible: peace and democratization (or peace and bread, depending on whom you asked).90 Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democratic Party who had formed a socialist-centrist legislative coalition, was in the unenviable position of suppressing the revolution violently with the help of the so-called Freikorps (paramilitary units) in return for the army’s support of his government.91

The new democratic constitution that was promulgated on August 13, 1919 (named Weimar, after the city where the constitutional assembly met) had a short life.92 With the wisdom of hindsight, it is easy to spot design flaws: a pure proportional representation system had the result of proliferating small parties that championed narrow interests, against which background the president’s and the legislature’s shared power to dismiss the cabinet set the stage for deadlock.93 As the constitutional adviser Max Weber perhaps had intended, the game board tilted toward strong executives accountable directly to the people.94 A humiliating defeat, the loss of territory, staggering war reparations owed to the French and the British, hyperinflation, and then a Great Depression that undercut prosperity with which to pay the reparations gave potential demagogues a steady stream of bad news with which to fuel public passions.95

Weimar successfully used the emergency powers in Article 48 of the new constitution to deal with the hyperinflation and from 1924 experienced a “golden” period even in the face of antisystem parties. It was not until the Depression hit in the early 1930s that the Nazis experienced large electoral gains and the senile president Hindenberg fatefully asked Hitler to organize a government. It did not help Weimar democracy that the constitution allowed the president to get things done with decrees over the heads of legislators tied up in knots.96

Hitler’s intoxicating cocktails of intimidation and false hope won him 36.8 percent of the vote in the presidential election in March 1932 and 37.4 percent of the popular vote in the Reichstag elections of July 1932. Although President Paul von Hindenburg was elected to a second seven-year term in March 1932, Hitler’s National Socialists gained a plurality of seats in the Reichstag in July.

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