German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918 1933 by Larry Eugene Jones

Author:Larry Eugene Jones [Jones, Larry Eugene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807817643
Goodreads: 4222488
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1988-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

A Legacy Unfulfilled

THE STABILIZATION OF THE Weimar Republic from 192410 1928 took place through the co-optation of conservative economic interest groups such as the National Federation of German Industry and the National Rural League into the political fabric of Weimar parliamentarism. By the end of the 1920s, however, a strong reaction against the increasingly prominent role that organized economic interests had come to play in German political life began to materialize within the ranks of the younger generation and the so-called national movement. The efforts of Mahraun and his associates in the Young Liberal movement to free the German party system from the tyranny of economic self-interest was only one aspect of a more generalized assault against the influence that organized economic interests had gained in return for their help in stabilizing Germany’s embattled republican order. In its more virulent forms such as the Fürstenwald Hate Declaration, which the Stahlhelm issued in September 1928, this represented nothing less than an attempt to destroy the basis upon which the co-optation of conservative economic interests into the political fabric of the Weimar Republic had taken place.

The principal figure in the radicalization of the German national movement at the end of the 1920s was Alfred Hugenberg, the newly elected chairman of the German National People’s Party. Between 1918 and 1924 Hugenberg had supported a variety of right-wing organizations, including elements from the Christian labor movement, in hopes that this might culminate in the creation of a movement of national concentration or Sammlung sufficiently powerful to overthrow the hated Weimar system. But the split in the DNVP Reichstag delegation in the August 1924 vote on the Dawes Plan meant that many of those upon whose support Hugenberg had originally counted were prepared to betray the national cause for the sake of short-term economic gains.1 Hugenberg was not beholden to any of the conservative economic interest groups that had come to dominate Germany’s political development during the second half of the 1920s, and indeed his life’s mission was to subvert the role they had played in Weimar’s political stabilization. Summed up most epigrammatically by his slogan “Bloc or Mush?,” the first item on Hugenberg’s political agenda was to transform the DNVP from a sociologically heterogeneous reservoir of Christian, national, and conservative sentiment into a strong, compact bloc “fused together by the iron hammer of Weltanschauung.” This was to be accomplished by purging the DNVP of those special economic interests that had been responsible for the split in the vote on the Dawes Plan and for seducing the party into entering the government in 1925 and again in 1927. At the same time, Hugenberg and his associates sought to pulverize the more moderate bourgeois parties such as the DDP, DVP, and Center by polarizing the German party system into two mutually antagonistic and irreconcilable camps. Then and only then, they believed, would it be possible to free Germany from the Marxist poison that was slowly but surely sapping her national vitality.2

Hugenberg took the first step

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