My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Germany 1923: Hyper Inflation, Hitler's Putsch and...."

 Weimar’s Trial by Fire

I previously reviewed Volker Ullrich’s two volume biography of Adolf Hitler. ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939" and Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945 )                                      Here the distinguished German historian focuses in on the critical year of 1923 which almost brought with it the premature death of the then five-year year-old Weimar Republic. His hero is the grand coalition prime minister, Gustav Stresemann, who manages to hold it together long enough so that the nascent republic survives its first trial by fire. It won’t be so lucky the next time.

 

What Stresemann faces is a hyper inflation that brings the Mark’s valuation down to 4.2 trillion to the dollar, the French occupation of the Ruhr for nonpayment of reparations, the Hitler Putsch in Munich, and a communist rising ordered by the Comintern in Moscow in Saxony, Thuringia, and Hamburg.  If this weren’t enough a separatist movement arose in the Rhine Valley where one of the leading figures was Cologne mayor Konrad Adenauer. As Keynes noted in his “Economic Consequences of the Peace,”  

       “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

 

Indeed, it was this inflation that destroyed the relationship between debtors and creditors, wiped out middle-class savings and immiserated huge swaths of the hitherto prosperous middle-class. Although not fatal at the time, when hard times returned to Germany in 1930, it happened with a vengeance.

 

Yet through it all, with all of its inherent faults, parliamentary democracy survived in Germany. By the end of the year the introduction of the Rentenmark, stabilized the currency which created the precondition for a substantial economic recovery in the late 1920’s. Working very effectively behind the scenes was U.S. Ambassador Alanson Houghton who worked tirelessly with Stresemann to get German acceptance of what was to become the Dawes Plan that enabled American loans to Germany. Later when American credit dried up, the roof fell in.

 

All the while Germany was in political and economic crisis the arts were flourishing. Germany became the second largest producer of motion pictures with such luminaries as Emil Jennings, Fritz Lang, and Conrad Veidt. Veidt would go on to play Major Heinrich Strasser in “Casablanca.” There was also the artist George Grosz, the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius.

 

Underneath it was a far right that never accepted democracy, industrialists who sought to undo the labor reforms of 1918, a judicial system that punished the Left far mor more severely than the Right.  Through it all Stresemann, originally a man of the Right, ended up being one of Weimar’s biggest supporters and by 1925, as foreign minister, he negotiated the Locarno Treaty with France confirming Germany’s western borders.

 

After reading this book I became more optimistic about the future of America. If the fledgling Weimar democracy could survive the challenges discussed above, certainly the 250-year-old democracy of the United States can survive our current dyspepsia. Germany faced far worse and came through it.

For the full Amazon URL see: Weimar's Trial by Fire (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Frank McDonough's "The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933"

 On the Road to Perdition

 

Third Reich historian Frank McDonough has written a year-by-year tick tock history of the Weimar Republic from its founding in 1918 to its demise on January 30, 1933. It is largely a political history where he sometimes goes into excruciating detail about the various cabinet changes over the years. His hero is Gustav Stresemann, prime minister and for many years foreign minister. He was perhaps Germany’s most influential politician from 1925 -1929 where he negotiated a détente with the West though the Locarno Treaty. Unfortunately, deliberate, or not there was not Locarno for the East where Stresemann had designs on the eastern territories taken away from Germany at Versailles.

 

McDonough rightly notes that the premature deaths of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau by assassination in 1922 and the deaths by disease of President Friedrich Ebert and Stresemann severely eroded the talent of the regime. I have written elsewhere that Stresemann’s death in 1929 removed the last politician of stature who could have stood up to Hitler.

 

Weimar was plagued from the beginning by a flawed constitution and its lack of legitimacy among the German Right. The two fundamental flaws in the constitution were proportional representation that allowed for the smallest of parties to have a voice in Reichstag and Article 48 which enabled the president to rule by decree. That would haunt the government as the economic crisis of the 1930’s hit.

 

Further, it was this government that signed the Versailles Treaty that established Germany’s sole guilt in starting World War I and placed a severe reparations burden on the economy. It was a tough start and that along with crippling inflation almost brought the government down. However, as Robert Gerwath noted in “November 1918: The Great Revolution” Weimar survived and with Dawes Plan loans in 1925 actually prospered.

 

So why did Weimar collapse? To McDonough the faults lie with the lack of responsible parties on the Right and with President Paul von Hindenburg, the hero of World War I, who in the late 1920’s was supportive of the government, returned to his monarchal roots as a Prussian land baron. It was he, along with the intrigues of Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher who brought down the hapless Heinrich Bruning government in 1932. Bruning’s government was imposed on the Reichstag by Hindenburg. He never had a parliamentary majority and with the lack of foreign currency reserves he was forced to impose a draconian austerity policy on an economy already in depression. To me Bruning did not have much of a choice. By the way, the best tick-tock on the end of Weimar is in Rudiger Barth’s and Hauke Friedrichs’ “The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic.”

 

Indeed, the decay was evident in December 1930 when Nazi goons disrupted the German premier of the anti-war film, “All Quiet on the Western Front.” So great were their disruptions that the film was banned a week after the failed premier. This has a familiar ring today in America where pro-Palestine mobs are canceling Jewish performers and Israeli officials.

 

 

Away from politics McDonough discusses the flowering of culture in art (abstract expressionism), architecture (Bauhaus), and film (Metropolis). Indeed, Berlin was second only to Hollywood in film production in the 1920’s. There was also the very free and licentious culture of Berlin’s nightclub scene. It was not for nothing that the recent German TV series was called “Babylon Berlin.” What McDonough does not mention is that this Avant Garde culture just might have turned off small city and rural Germany who overwhelmingly voted for Hitler in 1932.

 

However, my two primary concerns with McDonough’s otherwise excellent work is that he down plays economics. He should have taken seriously the works of Frederick Taylor’s “The Downfall of Money,” and Tobias Straumann’s “1931: Debt Crisis and the Rise of Hitler.” Simply put, Weimar was not up to the task. However, to his credit, McDonough does not that Hitler’s opposition to the Young Plan in 1930 made him respectable.

 

My second concern is that he failed to emphasize the long-standing division in the Left between the Socialists and the Communists. The split started during World War I and was exacerbated by the Socialist government with the support of the Army and the Free Corps in putting down the communist Spartacist Revolt in early 1920. Later in 1929 a different socialist government put down the “Bloody May” communist demonstration in 1929. McDonough doesn’t even mention this and with the communists calling the socialists “social fascists” it less of a surprise seeing them join forces with the Nazis in bringing down the Bruning government and in supporting a transit strike in Berlin in late 1932. Thus, part of the blame for the rise of Hitler has to fall on the disunity of the Left. As I have written previously the global impact of the Russian Revolution was to split the Left and harden the Right. It certainly played out in 1930 Germany.

 

With my concerns aside, McDonough’s book is important. I learned much from it and there are certainly lessons for today.

For the full amazon URL see: On the Road to Perdition (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Paul Jankowski's "All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War"

 

From Postwar to Prewar

 

Brandeis University history professor has written a very dry academic book about the origins of World War II through the twin lenses of the 1932-34 League of Nations Geneva Disarmament Conference and 1933 London World Economic Conference. He spends most of the book on the disarmament conference. He not only covers the major powers, but he also covers Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

 

By mid-1932 the Versailles settlement was breaking down. Germany was given the right to rearm and reparations, for all practical purposes, were eliminated at the Lausanne Conference. Thus, before Hitler Germany was free to become a great power once again in Europe.

 

The lynchpins of the postwar era were the notion of collective security via the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaty which formalized borders in the west and the Kellogg-Briand Pact which in principle outlawed war. On the economic side the Dawes and Young plans of 1925 and 1929 established an orderly process, at least temporarily, for German reparations payments and the recycling of capital through American loans. This gives lie to the notion that the United States was isolationist in the 1920’s. Further the U.S. with observer status was an active participant in the disarmament talks in Geneva.

 

Nevertheless in 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League sat idly by and allowed it to happen, so much for collective security. With Mussolini’s Italy hellbent to seize Ethiopia and Stalin’s Russia beginning to develop a major armaments industry, the disarmament conference was in major trouble. A rearmed Russia and Germany force the states in between to rearm as well. Simply put everyone is going their own way.

 

The fatal conceit of the disarmament conference was that if Europe could not agree with a Locarno in the east that would confirm the borders there, how could it possibly agree on a general disarmament. The coup de grace, is of course Hitler coming to power with his very aggressive aims towards eastern Europe.

 

The World Economic Conference does not get the attention it deserves. Faced with a global depression the leading countries of the world got together in London in June 1933. Britain left the gold standard in 1931, the U.S. had just left it in May 1933, and under the weight of the economic collapse and worldwide protectionism international trade went into a tailspin. The goal of the conference was to restore trade and some form of the gold standard. It failed miserably when President Roosevelt blew up the conference with a telegram and sent the American delegation home. Keynes applauded Roosevelt’s decision because any return to gold, would have put the global economy into a straitjacket by preventing the needed reflation. From the point of view of economics Keynes was correct, but from the point of view of politics it sent a signal to Hitler and Mussolini that the U.S. had withdrawn from Europe. Collective security was done for with the U.S. withdrawing from the world. America’s true isolation was in the 1930’s, not the 1920’s. As a result, the world moved decisively from a postwar to prewar world.

 

Jankowski’s lessons for today are obvious. America’s withdrawal from the world and Britain’s from Europe contain the same seeds of destruction we witnessed in the early 1930s. An all against all world ends badly. I only wish Jankowski wrote with more drama.

For the full amazon URL see: From Postwar to Prewar (amazon.com)