What I Am Reading: "Weimar Prussia 1925-1933: The Illusion of Strength" by Dietrich Orlow

Now that the rise of Weimar Prussia has been set up, it is time to cover the fall. The situation was more complicated than this, but basically, the elected Prussian government was deposed by federal executive order on June 20th, 1932, and Chancellor Franz von Papen installed new leadership of the state with no backing from the Landtag. The Weimar Coalition in Prussia had a long fall to get to this point, but the root cause was ultimately the same complacency that others, such as Neville Chamberlain, would go on to show in the face of the Nazi threat.

It receives less attention than its downfall, but the Weimar Republic did enjoy a brief economic golden age, coming from the stabilization of the currency after the Ruhr crisis in 1925 and lasting until the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Predictably, the three incumbent Weimar Coalition parties did well in the 1928 Prussian Landtag elections, regaining many of the seats that they had lost to the right in 1924. The Social Democrats (SPD) largely functioned as a well-oiled machine in the province under Prime Minister Otto Braun, but some systemic issues were beginning to emerge. Braun's cabinet and leadership weren't getting any younger, and Braun, with a high opinion of himself, evinced no interest in facilitating the rise of a younger generation; such as Kurt Schumacher, future SPD leader in the post-war West German parliament. In the meantime, Braun, a puritanical homebody, held little respect for his main legislative leader, Ernst Heilmann, who partied hard. Heilmann, who was administered a lethal injection in Buchenwald in 1940, was given the short shrift by many of his former colleagues in their memoirs, but his virtuoso legislative leadership was very important to maintaining the coalition’s stability.

Meanwhile, the explicitly Catholic Center Party (Z, for "Zentrum") continued its left-wing course in the Prussian state under Joseph Hess, its floor leader, and Heinrich Hirtsiefer, Welfare Minister in Braun's cabinet. The third coalition partner, the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), continued to die a slow electoral death, but still maintained two ministers in the cabinet. On the opposition side, the right-liberal German People's Party (DVP) was also dying, but they feared an acceleration of the process and thus tacitly backed the continuation of Braun's government during its 1925-8 term. During these years there were constant negotiations for the DVP to rejoin the governing coalition, but these never came to fruition due to differences on both sides. In fact, some in the bourgeois DVP favored a closer alliance with the aristocratic German National People's Party (DVNP), so there was always tension within the party. Party leader and international statesman Guztav Stresemann kept the party on a center-left course until his death in 1929.

After the 1928 election, which the DVNP lost on both the federal level and in Prussia, the party moved further rightward, under the new leadership of Alfred Hugenberg. The party became more nihilistic, alienating potential coalition partners and supporters of the republic alike. The party was almost comically anachronistic, with the Prussian delegation leader, Friedrich von Winterfield, listing his occupation as the "director of the Knights of Kumark" and the owner of a knightly estate. The other opposition parties, the Nazis and the Communists, were also largely opposed to any government action; the Nazis only had 8 delegates in the Landtag after the '28 election, and most of these were aligned with the Strasserite wing of the party, and less closely with Hitler.

Despite their success in the state elections, the Weimar Coalition party did not do as well in local elections, and many provincial and county parliaments were controlled by a Burgerblock - a right-wing coalition of the bourgeois parties, sometimes including the Center Party. This caused problems for the Prussian state because provincial legislatures controlled the votes of half of the state's delegation to the Reichsrat, the upper house of the federal legislature, and these votes were often cast to foil the Braun government's interests; even when this was detrimental to the state as a whole. The other half of the Reichsrat delegation was controlled by the cabinet, with Braun's aide, Robert Weismann, leading the effort. This is not the only problematic upper house; Prussia's own Staatsrat had no clear role in the constitutional infrastructure, despite the ambitions of its president, Konrad Adenauer, future West German Joe Biden. Adenauer, a conservative member of the Center party, was always lurking around somewhere, occasionally the object of Prime Ministerial ambitions, though he ultimately opposed Papen’s takeover to his credit.

Instead of using the aforementioned economic golden era, we could also mark this time period in the Weimar Republic differently, as the period of political stability between the Ruhr Crisis and the end of parliamentary democracy on the federal level. This came about in 1930, when the Reichspresident, Paul von Hindenburg, dismissed the last Chancellor to have the support of the legislature, Hermann Müller of the SPD, and instead installed one backed by executive decree, the Center’s Heinrich Brüning. This would have important implications for Prussia, which did maintain its parliamentary democratic system of government, but this to get ahead of the story slightly. In this era, 1925 and 1930, the Braun cabinet in Prussia went through a few different phases. For most of '25 and '6, the cabinet was in a precarious position, as the DVNP sought to overthrow it and establish a Burgerblock cabinet to mirror the one at the federal level. However, Otto Braun, in a display of the tactical competence that kept him in power for twelve years, saw that the federal government's policy disagreements, between the aggressive DVNP and Stresemann's internationalist DVP, would topple that coalition eventually, and remove the impetus for parallel Prussian change. This came about after the treaty of Locarno; though the Prussians again were unable to bring the DVNP into their coalition due to policy disagreements and middle-class turf wars with the DDP.

The latter phase of this stable era came after the Landtag elections in 1928. After the elections, there was yet again support for a grand coalition with the DVP on both the federal and the state level, possibly with a formal linkage between the Prussian and Reich leadership as their was in the Wilhelminian days. Otto Braun was briefly floated as the joint leader, though the federal SPD delegates did not support him and, embittered, he let the trial balloon pop. In hindsight, this would have been a good time to form such a coalition, but it fell apart due to the usual issue disagreement, plus some Weimar coalition cynicism in Prussia. The federal cabinet that formed, meanwhile, only had weak or informal support from its own delegations. A stronger government on the federal level and a more inclusive government in Prussia may have been able to better confront the challenges of the Great Depression.

At the end of 1926, the reformist SPD Interior Minister, Carl Severing, left office, worn out after spending every day of his life fending off votes of no confidence as he tried to democratize the Prussian civil service (slightly successfully) and police force (more successfully). He was replaced by the much more aggressive Albert Grzesinski, who dispensed with Severing's efforts to reform the civil service through attrition and coalition consensus on personnel. Grzesinski was a former metalworker, who came to political prominence in the Revolution-era Workers' and Soldiers' Councils before serving in the Landtag. Prior to serving as Interior Minister, he was the Police Chief in Berlin for several years. He brought in his own team of operators, including his close aide Wilhelm Abegg. Unlike the conciliatory Severing, Grzesinski scrapped often with his coalition partners and thrived on controversy. The Interior Minister, who ran the state's considerable bureaucracy (60,000 administrative personnel, 80,000 police, 110,000 teachers), had many occasions for political controversy. The security services were too tough on the posturing Communists; unlike the federal police, they also saw a threat from the right, but were more focused on the threat of a Putsch than the actual Nazi tactic of mass mobilization. A clear reform success was in abolishing the Gutsbezirke, a feudal holdover whereby estates were officially classified as administrative units, and large landowners received governmental dispensation to run them. This was a sensible, modern reform that was nonetheless voted against by the recalcitrant Communist party for not being immediate. Democratizing the civil services still went slowly under Grzesinski, with some successful replacements at the upper levels (the state was governed by three tiers of administrators, at the provincial, district, and county level; the cabinet also approved police chief and mayoral appointments). However, these successes were undermined when the Depression necessitated cuts in funding. Grzesinski liked to appoint "aussenseiters," those from outside the formal civil service bureaucracy, who sometimes lacked the necessary (but elite-favoring) educational qualifications. This brought some class and religious diversity to the civil service.

Unfortunately for Prussia, Grzesinski was ousted in 1930 when a disgruntled former bureaucrat publicized the fact that he was cohabiting with a woman who was not his wife (a divorce was pending). It is strange to think that an event like this may have played a moderate-sized role in the downfall of the Weimar Republic. Grzesinski hoped initially to ride out the scandal, but the Center Party Catholics were not supportive. As the next best option, he arranged for the appointment of Hermann Waertig, a financial academic, as his successor, hoping that he would be able to return once the scandal died down. However, Grzesinski returned permanently to the Berlin police department, and the arrogant and incompetent Waertig was soon replaced, once again, by Carl Severing.

A primary focus of the Prussian Government in the late '20s was the negotiation of a concordat with the Holy See, allowing for the church to receive official recognition, state funds, a Berlin diocese, and an institutional role in education (the latter proved controversial enough to be removed). This provides another interesting point, not quite of a sea change, but of increased polarization. The Landtag could likely have approved of the concordat in a mixed vote, with secular SPD votes in opposition replaced by those of Catholic members of the DVP and DVNP (plus DVP goodwill votes to curry favor with the Z). However, Braun's overriding desire to preserve the existing Weimar Coalition, and not let the Center Party draw closer to the two right-wing parties, meant that he forced it through on a party-line vote, and the DVP and DVNP thus selected staunch opposition; the concordat had already been a sticking point for the divided DVP to join the governing coalition. Landtag polarization increased. In exchange for the SPD's support of state religion, the party, and more specifically Ernst Heilmann, demanded the resignation of the Minister of Education, C.H. Becker, a respected nonpartisan (but DDP-adjacent) scholar and longtime education administrator. This power play, which prompted an outcry among the Prussian intelligentsia, was a shabby affair, but his handpicked successor, Adolf Grimme, who was very well-respected throughout the land. "Even the Nazis lauded his "Germanic enthusiasm" and complained only of his philo-Semitism" (p. 64). A stand-up guy.

Changes in the political culture came about after the depression hit in 1929. Though there were only Landtag elections every four years, there were both Reich and local elections at this time; so party strength in the Landtag did not always reflect overall party strength, especially in the streets. In the last years of Weimar Prussia and the Weimar Republic, the SPD continued to have tensions between reformists and Marxist radicals; while the Center Party continued its dichotomy between its Reich-level conservatism and Prussia-level leftism. The terminally ill DDP joined with a bizarre, elitist, formerly semi-fascist Young German Order to form the German State Party (DStP), and waged internal battles with itself, eventually leading longtime Finance Minister Hermann Höpker-Aschoff to resign from the cabinet after he had failed to receive the leadership of his new party (and alienated everyone by pushing austerity measures). After Stresemann's death, the DVP moved to the right, and hopes of a grand coalition ended. The DVNP, as noted earlier, eventually gave up on the idea of a Burgerblock to support the Nazis. Some of its Landtag members privately told Braun of their misgivings over this, but none took any action (sounds familiar). Finally, as Germany's economic situation worsened and the parties failed on the Reich level, the Weimar Coalition braced for a drubbing in the 1932 Landtag elections (though they had fought off right-wing referenda to dissolve the assemply earlier). The elections led to major gains by the Nazis and the Communists, with no party able to form a functioning coalition. The DStP was almost wiped out entirely.

From a purely electoral standpoint, you can't say Braun's government didn't earn its defeat. Its economic policy in response to the Depression was purely orthodox fiscal austerity, with taxes raised and spending cut. The state had to rely on the federal government for a good deal of its money, and Chancellor Brüning, an authoritarian who wished to see Germany return to its pre-Republican days (in this book, anyway; David Pietrusza, a writer I trust less, portrayed him as a good-faith actor), did not negotiate in good faith, reducing Prussian budgets and control. Prussia lived close to its means in the best of times. Ironically, the issue that eventually contributed to Brüning's downfall, his opposition to bailing out bankrupt Junker estates in East Elbia, was a mantle he usurped from the Prussian government after they refused the funding. Meanwhile, Braun's government was unwilling to confront the hostile Reich, even when doing so would have been in their best interests. This extended as far as following the federal lead on suppression of the Nazis; the government took some police action, but while Grzesinski wanted to chase Hitler out of the country "with a dog whip," Severing was unwilling to do so. The German right, loyal readers will recall, was at this time focused on using the Nazis for their own ends of demolishing the Republic. Braun's government continued on, beset on all sides by bad-faith actors with only the heavy hand of the police to combat increased radicalization, not any kind of positive economic program.

The right, in the Reich, Prussia, and other states, was focused on bringing the Nazis into a new Burgerblock government. The first of these, in the state of Thuringia, lasted only a few months in 1931 with Nazi Wilhelm Frick in its cabinet (also sounds familiar). The Braun government, seeing the writing on the wall prior to their 1932 Landtag elections, took some parliamentary action. They changed their bylaws so that a new Prime Minister needed to be elected by a majority support; previously they only needed a majority on the first ballot, or a plurality on a subsequent ballot (this is very different from the rules of the New Jersey legislature). After the defeat in 1932, no coalition had a majority (since the Communists refused to vote with the Nazis on this, despite cooperating on them with some other votes and some strikes prior to this era). Thus, after the failure to form a coalition, the Braun government continued on in a caretaker capacity.

Byzantine negotiations ensued. The Nazis refused to join any form of coalition, especially a Burgerblock that included the Center Party. After a couple of months of stalemate, and an incident where Wilhelm Abegg was duped by future war criminal Rudolf Diels into making overtures to the Communists, the end came. Chancellor Franz von Papen, former Landtag member and supercilious cavalry officer who had parlayed his fondness from President Hindenburg into an appointment as Chancellor (sans any Reichstag support), was less secretly hostile than Brüning and more openly hostile. Declaring the caretaker government incapable of ensuring order, Papen exercised emergency powers to depose the Prussian government and appoint his own leadership in the state.

This is it. This is what you came for. The fall of Prussia. It was undramatic. Many have lamented this; we read in the Carl von Ossietzky novel that he wondered why Braun and Severing, with their loyally Republican police force, didn't put up a fight. I wondered it myself for a long time. The truth is that the Braun government, which had been in office for a long time with little organic turnover, was too tired to do anything. Grzesinski may have been a hardliner, but Severing was not. Braun wasn't even there, he was convalescing at his country house, Heinrich Hirtsiefer had to serve as acting PM. It had been decided beforehand that there would be no general strike like the one that foiled the Kapp Putsch; the labor unions figured that if the right wing was coming for the Socialist party, then the survival of any form of labor movement depended on their survival, and they tried not to draw fire. This was the wrong strategy, obviously; but a general strike likely would not have been effective in a period of such high unemployment. The Communists offered one, belatedly, but it was likely a hollow show. Additionally, the crisis had in fact come about because of the Braun administration's loss of support in a recent election, they did not think they could count on popular support, and any armed resistance would have been a betrayal of Prussia's purpose as the "rock" of Germany.

Prussia's capitulation was important for several reasons. It would have been very difficult to overthrow republicanism when a state encompassing 60% of the country still had a republican system of government. Additionally, when the Nazis did come for democracy the next year, the pro-democratic forces were too demoralized, and had not been mobilized in its defense. The Braun government did mount a legal challenge; the court found that the Reich's justification of unrest in the State was not legitimate, but its use of emergency powers was nonetheless fully legal.

Interestingly, upon assuming power, the right-wing forces faced the same problems that had bedeviled their democratic predecessors. The Nazis attempted to foil their rival, Papen, by negotiating with the Center party to form a coalition. The new administrators of Prussia resented federal encroachment upon their prerogatives, and stinginess with funds. They purged the civil service and replaced it with their own, pre-1918-style hardliners; the only SPD provincial governor to keep his job was the bloodthirsty Gustav Noske, who had helped put down the Spartacist Uprising in 1919. The aristocratic revival was stymied by the Nazis when they took power; the sort-of Burgerblock didn't care about democracy, but did care about the rule of law. The Nazis cared about neither. Braun went into exile in Switzerland. Some members of his government and of the Landtag went on to have reasonably successful careers in postwar Germany; he and Severing were not among them.

This is a very interesting topic that doesn't get much attention in many Weimar books. The Braun government was brought down by the very instincts that kept it in power throughout the entire era: they prized the stability of their coalition above all else. This meant that they fought off many attempts to pry them apart earlier, and negotiated many rough waters together. However, it also meant that they were unwilling to take risks, to rock the boat with the federal government (which could bring the political hammer down upon them) by attempting to counter the economic cycle, or by suppressing the right-wing forces that threatened them. They wouldn't compromise to let the DVP rejoin their coalition, as they could have led the Center party rightward, or neutralized the DDP. This fear of change helped stymie the formation of a loyal opposition. They didn't prop up the ailing federal government when they had an opportunity to, by bringing their influence to bear on behalf of stabilizing the Müeller administration, the last Weimar coalition government and last elected government period. Instead of holding power to accomplish things, the Braun administration came to hold power only for the sake of perpetuating their own power.

I like Braun, I thought of him as a competent if unimaginative statesman. I liked Severing too for a while, though I came to think of Grzesinski as a superior Minister of the Interior. Other officials were competent, and Heilmann may have epitomized the Weimar era. But I think that at the end of the day, rather than romanticize these people, it is important to remember that they fucked up. They didn't save themselves, they didn't save their constituents. On their watch, the Nazis came to power. They were not equal to the challenges that faced them. Beyond the other unfathomable death and devastation that this brought, it also brought about the end of Prussia, dissolved by the Allied occupation government.