What I Am Reading: "Weimar Prussia 1918-1925: The Unlikely Rock of Democracy" by Dietrich Orlow

If I'm being totally honest with myself, I have to admit that, no matter how much post-hoc intellectualizing I do, my interest in this topic is personality-driven. The Weimar Republic has one overarching villain, but no corresponding heroes on the political scale. Even those who stood in direct opposition to the Nazis, such as the Communists (KPD), contributed inadvertently to his rise.

However, at some point, I read in passing about Otto Braun, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) prime minister of the state of Prussia for almost the entire Weimar era. While the center-left coalition that created the Republic fell from power after a couple of years, rarely to regain it, Otto Braun kept that coalition in power in Prussia from 1920 all the way through to 1932. The state of Prussia gets a bit of a short shrift in the currently-popular genre of Weimar History, usually mentioned in connection with their downfall (a story for the next blog post). But this political arrangement, in the largest and most important German state, seemed to me to be a major accomplishment. This academic book from the '80s seemed to be the best treatment of the subject.

The state of Germany (or the Reich) was, of course, formed by the state of Prussia in 1871, as this large and famously militaristic state unified the other German states into a federal structure. Germany was authoritarian by design, and the Kaiser also retained the title of King of Prussia. Prussia held about 60% of Germany's land and population, including Berlin, and the Prussian state dominated the Reich government, setting policy and providing services. The weak federal parliament, the Reichstag, had comparatively liberal suffrage laws, but the Prussian state parliament, the Landtag, functioned under a three-tiered voting system that effectively enfranchised only the upper classes. In other words, Prussia dominated Germany. After Germany's defeat in World War 1, Prussia was reorganized as a democratic state.

Dramatis Personae

The breakdown of the old German political order left a series of political parties, some new and some not, finding their way in the new republic, and these parties existed on the state level in Prussia. The old Conservative party, dominant in the Wilhelminian era, was succeeded by the German National People's Party (DVNP). The Conservatives hadn't been an actual mass party, more of just a "social club," or gathering of various personalities. Now that they actually needed to win elections, the DVNP relied on the votes of supporters of the old order: agrarians, successful capitalists, some white-collar workers, and so on. The DVNP was in opposition to the Republic's existence, and many extremists within its ranks wanted to return to a monarchical or other dictatorial form of government (there was some conflict between state branches as to which royal house was the ideal).

The old Conservative party's junior partner had been the National Liberals, those favoring the previous system with some small level of reform. This party split into the right-liberal German People's Party (DVP), conservatives who were (to varying degrees) supportive of the republic, and the German Democratic Party (DDP) on the non-Marxist left. Sometimes these two parties seemed to have a Judean People's Front vs. People's Front of Judea relationship, where their primary motivation was the foiling of the other. The DVNP regarded the DVP as its junior partner in government, and the DVP's identity crisis thus revolved around fulfilling or denying this role. On the federal level, the party served as a base for Weimar Germany's best-regarded international statesman, Gustav Stresemann, who negotiated a decrease in tensions and reduction of reparations with the French. They fought the permanent-underdog DDP for the same base of middle-class and petit-bourgeois voters, white collar workers, and knowledge workers.

Meanwhile, despite its name, the Center (Z) was an explicitly Catholic party, serving the interests of a cross-class bloc of Catholic voters in majority-Protestant Germany. A part of every governing coalition, the Center Party leaned right on the federal level, but held to the center-left Weimar Coalition on the Prussian level, with the DDP and the SPD. Catholics had been disenfranchised under the old regime, and this underdog spirit made the party wary of supporting a right-wing bourgeois “Bürgerblock” coalition when they didn't have to, despite having formerly been in a defensive alliance with the Junker power structure. Additionally, though the book doesn't spend much time on it, it seems to me that the fact that the party's base was more working-class in Prussia than in the Reich as a whole (what with having to factor in conservative states like Bavaria on the Reich level) was an important tactical consideration in Prussia. The Center party was concerned heavily with keeping state-sanctioned Catholic education institutions intact.

The SPD, meanwhile, made up the largest voting block in the Landtag and, right until the Republic's end, in the Reichstag as well. An old party, still in existence today, the SPD was primarily a more moderate Marxist party, catering mostly to the interests of trade unions and slowly expanding into the middle class. Their support for the war led to a splintering during the early Weimar years, with the Independent SPD (USPD) taking a more leftward course, and influencing the outcome of the German Revolution at the end of the war. Nevertheless, this independent party proved nonviable in the long run, and some returned to the SPD while others joined the KPD, a perennially anti-republican element on the far left that took a vacillating and unsteady party line while sucking up protest votes. Anyway, comparable to the struggles of Léon Blum and the SFIO around the same time, the SPD underwent a long self-reflective journey while they decided if it was their official policy to try to join governing coalitions, which they eventually decided to do when they adopted the Görlitz Program in 1921.

After the war and the German revolution that established the republic, there was a serious question of whether Prussia should exist as a state at all, given its dominance of the federal structure. This question extended to leftists, who viewed the state as a bulwark of conservatism; but during the Revolution, when the state was governed under emergency circumstances by the SPD and USPD, their view came to change. The state was defended by those who, apolitically, wished to see it retain power, and to this defense joined those on the left who now saw it as a potential vanguard of leftist power. As the German state figured out its new configuration, the Weimar Coalition formed at the Constitutional Conventions governed Prussia after the 1919 election, made up of the SPD, Z, and DDP. These parties started to develop their working relationship at the time, introducing parliamentary secretaries, not employed on the national level, to facilitate a greater level of cooperation between parties on issue areas (these were members of party delegations assigned to watch over ministries run by their allies). As the constitution shook out, the Prussian state lost some of its autonomy, with rail and canal infrastructure taken over by the federal government, who also assumed full control over foreign policy and the military.

One issue that this transitional government had to deal with was the Kapp Putsch, an attempted reactionary coup that took over Berlin for a few days in 1920. As the federal leadership fled the city, the Prussian leadership stayed in the city to negotiate with the putschists, and more importantly try to form a united front with the other political parties. Though the DVNP tacitly supported the coup, enough seeds of doubt were planted in the DVNP to start a rupture; while on the left, negotiations with the coalition eased a wedge between the USPD and the KPD. After the coup's failure (brought about by a USPD-instigated and SPD-supported general strike), changeovers in power and appeasement of unions led to the emergence of three abiding leaders in the SPD: Otto Braun, formerly Minister of Agriculture, who was appointed as Prime Minister (technically the term is Minister-President, but the book uses Prime Minister); Ernst Heilmann, the party's leader in the Landtag; and Carl Severing, Minister of the Interior.

The 1921 elections dealt a setback to the Weimar Coalition parties, as they lost seats and just barely clung to power. After much dithering, they formed a new grand coalition, encompassing the DVP, who wished to contribute positively to the survival of the state of Prussia in the face of challenges and crises. These include the massive financial burden of the Treaty of Versailles, and the allies attempt to seize land in Silesia, part of Prussia, to give to Poland. At this time, as the Reich cabinet fell in the face of these issues, the linkage between the leadership of the Reich and the leadership of Prussia was severed, as parties no longer took it for granted that the leadership of both bodies would fall to the same coalition. This was an important step in the endurance of the Weimar Coalition in Prussia; the Center Party, viewing itself as the fulcrum of German politics, desired to keep a left coalition in Prussia to balance a developing right coalition on the national level. This came into play after the election when Braun was briefly replaced by Center Party member Adam Stegerwald, who, as a right-winger, was ultimately unable to command the loyalty of his theoretical SPD coalition partners, and failed in his larger effort of orienting the state toward a grand coalition of all non-Communist parties. Shortly before a right-wing cabinet took power on the Reich level, the pro-republican parties were also shocked back into cooperation by the assassination of Matthias Erzberger, Reich Minister of Finance; and after some SPD hostage-taking, the Center and Stresemann’s DVP caved and supported Braun’s return to power with a more moderate cabinet.

Other than the breaking of the Reich-Prussia leadership link, another policy development was the agreement among the four governing parties (DVP, DDP, Z, and SPD) of the necessity of keeping Prussia fully intact. As noted, they viewed Prussia as, as the book’s subtitle states, the rock of democracy and of the German state, and viewed territorial challenges as a toehold for centrifugal forces that would destroy the state and thus weaken the entire country. They were thus united in fighting off specific territorial claims and general reform of the federal structure.

In fact, the Weimar Coalition in Prussia did not enact much in the way of their own administrative reform; the structure of the government stayed the same as it was under the Kaiser, with provincial governors, regional leaders, and counties, all appointed by the central government (and under the control of the Interior Ministry). There was some devolution of local power and democracy to municipal government, but overall many institutions, such as the Workers/Soldiers Councils that sprung up after the revolution, did not see any formal role adoption or change. The government was more successful in personnel reform. The massive Prussian state controlled a considerable portion of the overall German civil service, and it was an important goal of the governing coalition to inculcate its bureaucrats with pro-republic values. This was initially accomplished through simple attrition, as the old upper-class civil service retired and was replaced by modern men. Contrary to some expectations, the coalition parties worked well together in finding an equitable balance of patronage distribution. There were questions on relaxing the education requirements, as the SPD and Z had, by nature of their constituency, fewer educated professionals to draw from; but mostly the requirements were kept intact (and the middle-class DDP received many appointments).

After the Kapp Putsch, the government kicked personnel reform into high gear, under Interior Secretary Karl Severing. Severing, a former locksmith and union-supported member of the SPD right-wing, did not fuck around. He was very successful in forming a pro-republic police force; and the Allies unwittingly helped him by mandating that this force not be centralized, but dispersed into local units. In other areas the coalition was less successful - the old Prussian post of Defense Minister was subject to sunset provisions as military control was transferred to the Reich government, and the second-to-last minister was an old Junker who stayed the course. The last minister, SPD member Albert Grzesinski, attempted to introduce more democratic, anti-elitist reforms into the Prussian wing of the military, but was too late in the changeover to effect any lasting change.

This was where things stood at the book's dividing point, 1921. In the second half, things largely stayed the course thanks to another crisis, the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr Valley, a part of Prussia. This desire for state unity in the face of crisis again kept the DVP in the grand coalition, with I think a considerable amount of praise for the government's functionality going to the ever-flexible Center Party. The Reich government was willing to desert the Ruhr region in order to regroup and prepare to gain it back, but the Prussian government held firm that its territorial integrity must not be threatened. Ultimately, the government ripped the band-aid off an economic crisis to smooth things over, and the resulting need to stabilize the currency led to budget cuts in Prussia and elsewhere as hyperinflation set in. The government again performed well in amenably negotiation the politics of civil service reduction.

As the currency stabilized and the state and country fought off hyperinflation (leading to the brief Weimar golden age before the Great Depression hit), the Prussian government sailed on through minor efforts at territory separation, fought off deftly (in retrospect only) by Otto Braun’s direct confrontation. Braun was an competent and undramatic leader by consensus, rarely calling formal cabinet votes to enact decisions, but instead guiding the debate toward an eventual informal consensus. Things proceeded smoothly until the Landtag elections at the end of 1924. The SPD, Z, and DDP held firm, but the DVNP gained seats, some at the expense of the DVP, and with other minor party fluctuations.

This led to the cabinet crisis of 1925, where the DVP decided that it was time to withdraw from the grand coalition that it had only been in because of various since-concluded crises. Amusingly, the vote of no confidence that formally triggered the crisis was initiated by the Communists, as the conservative and aristocratic DVP and DVNP voted with them to condemn the governing coalition for betraying the proletariat. Negotiations among the parties dragged on tediously, as the DVNP attempted to form a Bürgerblock government, until serendipitously, the first Reichspresident, Fredrich Ebert, died. This triggered a Presidential election that directly solved the cabinet crisis in Prussia by tipping the Center Party back over to its old allies, the SPD and DDP. For one thing, the DVP and DVNP ran a common candidate (Karl Jarres) in the first round of the Presidential election, precluding any negotiations or leverage with the Center. As a result, and due to their continuing desire for balance (as the Reich was governed by a right-wing Chancellor, as usual), the Z made a deal with the SPD, whereby they would back Otto Braun for the leadership once again if the SPD supported the Center Party candidate, Wilhelm Marx (who actually was the Center delegation leader, and at the time Prime Minister-designate, in the Landtag) in the Presidential runoff. Braun was elected Prime Minister, and his cabinet was confirmed on a narrow vote as some members of the opposition chose to blank the secret ballot. This contrasted with Wilhelm Marx's previous failed attempt to confirm his (very similar) cabinet, as two agrarian malcontents in his party, one of them rising star Franz von Papen, voted against him. These coalition arrangements, along with those in 1921, were very interesting to read about, though I’ve only summarized them briefly here.

This is the deceptively straightforward story of the first seven years of Weimar Prussia, formed by moderate leftists and governed by moderate leftists; in cooperation with the pro-republic middle class and with Catholics who fear the old Protestant aristocracy that was hostile to their interests. They made it work because they desired the state to succeed. As the author notes in the conclusion, the government does not have a considerable record of accomplishment, as the political crises, though dealt with summarily, ended up framing governing as an end, not simply a means to an end. Things will get more interesting in volume 2.