The June 1920 elections to the first Reichstag reflected the difficulties in which the new democracy found itself. The Weimar coalition parties, the Social Democratic Party, the Centre Party, and the Democrats, which in January 1919 had together received more than 75 percent of the vote, this time managed to win only 43.5 percent. Contributing to the problems that the republic faced in the early 1920s was the escalating rate of inflation that was eventually to destroy the German mark. Although the inflation was rooted in the huge debt that Germany had amassed in financing its war effort, the hyperinflation of 1923 was triggered by the French-Belgian military occupation in January 1923 of the German industrial district in the Ruhr valley. The occupation occurred in retaliation for Germany’s having fallen behind in its reparation payments and was intended to force German industry to provide compensation for the French and Belgian losses. Rather than accede quietly to the humiliation of occupation, the German government urged workers and employers to close down the factories. Idle workers were paid during the following months with a currency inflating so rapidly that printers gave up trying to print numbers on bills. By mid-1923 the German mark was losing value by the minute: a loaf of bread that cost 20,000 marks in the morning would cost 5,000,000 marks by nightfall; restaurant prices went up while customers were eating; and workers were paid twice a day. When economic collapse finally came on November 15, it took 4.2 trillion German marks to buy a single American dollar.
The social and political cost of the hyperinflation was high. Scholars note that the inflation did more to undermine the middle classes than the ostensibly socialist revolution of 1918. A lifetime of savings would no longer buy a subway ticket. Pensions planned for a lifetime were wiped out completely. Politically, the hyperinflation fueled radicalism on both the left and the right. The Communists, badly damaged by their failure in January 1919, saw greatly improved prospects for a successful revolution. In Munich the leader of the small National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party, Adolf Hitler, used the turmoil to fashion an alliance with other right-wing groups and attempt a coup in November 1923—the Beer Hall Putsch—that sought to use Bavaria as a base for a nationalist march on Berlin. He hoped to overthrow the democratic system of Weimar that he believed was responsible for Germany’s political and economic humiliation. Neither the radicals of the right nor those of the left succeeded in imposing their will. In the short run they did not succeed because of ineptitude and miscalculation; in the long run they failed because the government sponsored a currency reform that restabilized the mark and also decided to end its policy of passive resistance in the Ruhr in exchange for an end to the occupation and a rescheduling of the reparation payments that it owed to the Allies. The Weimar Renaissance
Amid the political and economic turmoil of the early 1920s, Germany’s cultural and intellectual life was flowering. The so-called Weimar Renaissance brought the fulfillment of the Modernist revolution, which in the late 19th century had begun to transform the European aesthetic sensibility. The Modernist rejection of tradition perfectly suited the need of many Germans for new meanings and values to replace those destroyed by the war. “A world has been destroyed; we must seek a radical solution,” said the young architect Walter Gropius upon his return from the front in late 1918. In 1919 Gropius became the founder and first director of the Bauhaus school of design in Weimar, the most important institution in Germany for the expression of Modernism’s aesthetic and cultural vision. Bauhaus artists believed that they were creating a new world through their painting, poetry, music, theatre, and architecture. The legacy of German Modernism in general, and of the Bauhaus in particular, is most immediately evident in the stark steel-and-glass high-rise buildings whose clear and clean lines have come to dominate the skylines of the world’s cities. Moreover, the paintings and sculptures decorating them, as well as the designs of the furniture and the lighting fixtures, are heavily influenced by the aesthetic principles articulated in Weimar Germany during the 1920s.
Beyond the Bauhaus, painters such as George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix pursued an artistic approach known as Expressionism; they were interested in depicting their emotional responses to reality rather than reality itself. In music the rejection of tonality by composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, and Alban Berg broke a centuries-old tradition. At the juncture between popular and serious music, the composer Kurt Weill collaborated with the poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht to create in 1928 Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), a bitterly satiric musical play in which the world of modern capitalism was equated with that of underworld gangsterism. In films such as Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), distorted sets and unusual camera angles probed for disturbing truths behind the surface appearances of reality.
Still from Robert Wiene's classic Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). From a private collection
Not everyone welcomed the Modernist attack on tradition. Angry audiences often interrupted opera performances and theatrical productions. Siegfried Wagner, the son of the composer Richard Wagner, deplored a Modernist version of his father’s Der fliegende Holländer (1843; The Flying Dutchman), calling the production an example of “cultural bolshevism.” Other artists—the novelist Thomas Mann, for example, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature—chose to remain above the fray in the Olympian heights of German Kultur.
Thomas Mann.Elliot Erwitt/Magnum
Years of economic and political stabilization
The financial recovery that began with the restabilization of the German currency in late 1923 received a boost in 1924 when the Allies agreed to end their occupation of the Ruhr and to grant the German government a more realistic payment schedule on reparations. A committee of the Allied Reparations Commission headed by the American financier and soon-to-be vice president Charles Dawes had recommended these changes and urged the Allies to grant sizable loans to Germany to assist its economic recovery. The Dawes Plan marked a significant step in the upswing of the German economy that lasted until the onset of the Great Depression. The 800 million gold marks in foreign loans had by 1927 enabled German industrial production to regain its 1913 prewar high. That same year the Reichstag addressed the vital need for social and class reconciliation by voting for a compulsory unemployment insurance plan. Reconciliation on the political level seemed achieved in 1925 when the 77-year-old Hindenburg was elected to succeed the deceased Ebert as president. Although no democrat, the aged field marshal took seriously his duty to support the constitution and the republic.
The guiding spirit in German foreign policy from 1924 through 1929 was the foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, who firmly believed that Germany was more likely to gain relief from the harshness of Versailles by trying to fulfill its terms than by stubbornly continuing to resist them. Stresemann’s efforts ushered in what came to be known as “the era of fulfillment.” It began in December 1925 when Germany signed the Pact of Locarno, in which it guaranteed to maintain the new postwar boundaries with France and Belgium and to submit to international arbitration any boundary disputes that might arise in the east with Poland or Czechoslovakia. Germany formally rejoined the family of nations by being granted membership in the League of Nations in September 1926. In 1928 Germany became party to the most dramatic symbolic gesture of postwar reconciliation, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which promised to outlaw aggressive war; this agreement was signed by nearly all the world’s major countries during the next year.