The Evolution of Germany by John A. Hawgood

Author:John A. Hawgood [Hawgood, John A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, General
ISBN: 9781000007817
Google: f0yfDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-26T03:03:04+00:00

As befitted a country which had been a pioneer in social and economic legislation under the Hohenzollern Empire, the German Republic made special provision for the regulation of economic life. In this connection it was more frankly experimental and original than in purely political matters. Thus both the right and the duty to work were affirmed (article 163 of the Weimar Constitution); labour was placed under the special protection of the Reich; a ‘decent standard of living’ was asserted to be of primary importance; and a federal economic council (in addition to local workers’ and employers’ councils) was to be set up.

The Weimar Constitution was full of good ideas and even fuller of good intentions (such as the federal economic council which never actually amounted to anything) and it failed less because it was a bad constitution than because it was adopted in the shadow of defeat and operated in the midst of very hard times—first the inflation of the early 1920’s and then (after the brief ‘honeymoon period’ of Locarno and Stresemann between 1925 and 1929) the depression of the early 1930’s. All the cards were stacked against it, and Hitler was able to sweep it (or as much as he desired of it) away overnight in 1933.

In the long striving for a truly unified Germany the Weimar period and the Weimar Constitution occupied a significant place and performed an important part. It went beyond the Frankfurt Constitution of 1849 and far beyond the Bismarckian constitution of 1871 (with its concessions to particularist feeling and the predominance it gave to Prussia). It was more than a purely verbal change that the Staaten of 1871 became Länder—whose boundaries could be changed without their own consent and whose form of government had to be republican—in 1919. It has been well said that ‘The Reich which Bismarck forged was a federal union of hitherto sovereign states; the new Reich was the political organization of a single people, subsidiarily divided into largely autonomous political units to which the name state might or might not be given.’

After 1919 Germans who had been disappointed that a more truly unitary state had not been created at Weimar, attempted from time to time to reform the republican constitution in a unitary direction, or else to devise informal administrative machinery that would draw its several parts more closely together. Nothing as thoroughgoing .as the amalgamation of several small territories into a new Land of reasonable size (as had happened when Thuringia came into being) was achieved, although a conference of Lander governments held in 1928 proposed a number of equally far-reaching reforms, including the formation of 21 new Lander (in place of the existing 17) equal in size and population with the major provinces of Prussia ranking as Lander along with the rest. An alternative plan (sponsored by the then Reich-Chancellor, Dr. Luther) would have permitted Prussia to remain as one Land, and indeed would have absorbed several of the smaller Lander within Prussia, leaving only Thuringia, Mecklenburg,

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