One of the handicaps from which the republican
regime suffered was its acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles. The conduct
of foreign policy was, therefore, an especially tricky matter for any
republican government. Having opted for the West and for democracy in 1919,
Germany could regard herself as having been rebuffed by the West at
Versailles. It was natural to reconsider the other option, alignment with
Russia, without, of course, accepting communism. As a dissatisfied
''revisionist'' power, Russia could regard the League of Nations as an
organization of the victors alone.
Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, foreign minister in 1919 and later ambassador in
Moscow, tended to think in terms of an alliance with Russia. But Walther
Rathenau, the German foreign minister in 1922, conceived of German-Russian
relations differently. He wished to gain freedom of diplomatic maneuver by
means of treaties and agreements with Russia, but without sacrificing the
long-range goal of accommodation and alignment with the West.
I. Treaty of Rapallo
The celebrated Treaty of Rapallo between Germany and Russia reflects this
attitude. The treaty came into being more on Russian, not German,
initiative. The Russians took advantage of German reaction against what was
regarded as French sabotage of the Genoa conference on reparations. The
circumstances of its signing were more dramatic than its contents. It
provided for the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two
countries and for abandonment of any claims to reparations on either side.
It constituted, therefore, much more a liquidation of past unpleasantness
than an indication of a fundamental shift in German foreign policy for the
future.
The treaty was taken much more seriously in the West by public opinion and
the press, than by the governments whose protests were mostly pro forma. The
press tended to regard it as a symbol and to suspect that it contained more
than met the eye. Rapallo did not damage Germany's relations with the
western powers in general or with respect to reparations specifically. The
occupation of the Ruhr a few months later, had nothing to do with it.
The ghost of Rapallo is still brought up when a German rapprochement with
Russia is discussed, but an assessment of the treaty in cold-war terms is
off the target. There did exist secret agreements between Germany and
Russia, but these for the most part preceded Rapallo, were unrelated to it,
were concerned specifically with military matters. They were negotiated by
military leaders of the two countries, though with the knowledge of the
civilian leaders in the governments. They provided for purely practical
cooperation between the two armies in matters of supply and training,
without political implications. General Hans von Seeckt, the
commander-in-chief of the German army, did harbor ideas of a future
extension of the agreements into the economic and political spheres, and for
this reason welcomed Rapallo, but that does not mean that Rapallo reflected
Seeckt's anti-French views.
The best proof of the compatibility of Rapallo with a continuing
fundamentally western orientation of German foreign policy is the welcome
Gustav Stresemann gave to to Rapallo when he was in the middle of
negotiations with the western powers on reparations. Stresemann approved the
military cooperation agreements between Germany and Russia, though as a
right-of-center politician he, no more than Seeckt, had any use for Russian
domestic politics. The left-of-center politicians such as Rathenau and the
Social Democrat Carl Severing, who had consented to the military agreements,
were aware of and at least tacitly approved the undercover German rearmament
to which the agreements contributed. It should therefore come as no surprise
that Stresemann did likewise. He believed that a strong army would
strengthen his hand in negotiations to relieve Germany of the other
disabilities imposed at Versailles.
He believed even more strongly in Germany's capacity for economic recovery
and expansion, provided a lessening of political tension, a better
international climate, could be brought about. Therefore Stresemann's first
concern was to win confidence abroad in the peaceful aims of German foreign
policy, even while he was secretly supporting rearmament in violation of
Versailles. What he needed above all, in the short run, was to gain time.
He once compared himself to the medieval man about whom the story went that,
having been sentenced to death, he asked for a year's grace during which he
promised to teach the king's horse bow to fly. When his friends pointed out
that it was useless to prolong the agony with no hope in the end, the man is
said to have explained: ''By the time a year has passed, the king may die or
I may die or the horse may die. Or perhaps, who knows, the horse may really
learn how to fly!''
Stresemann's long-range aims, if he could succeed in gaining time, were to
put an end to the Allied occupation of the Rhineland; obtain a tolerable
solution to the reparations question; recover Danzig and the Polish Corridor
and seek restoration of territory in Upper Silesia; ultimately, unite with
Austria; and gain German admission to the League of Nations as a means of
achieving these other goals. Stresemann had not abandoned nationalism, but
was determined to pursue it realistically, in the tradition of Bismarck, not
after the fashion in which he had once been a fanatical annexationist. To
the extent that realism meant appreciation of the necessity of
re-establishing and maintaining a European comity, Stresemann, like
Bismarck, was a European, not just a German, statesman.
But attempts to see Stresemann as a ''good European'' by the standards of
the European Economic Community, are as wide of the mark and as false as the
cold-war perspective on Rapallo. On the other hand, it is equally true that
Stresemann should not be judged by comparison with the policies and
activities of the DNVP, or of even more extreme forms of nationalism, which
ought not be allowed to set standards.
It is nevertheless relevant to point out that Stresemann achieved a far
greater degree of success, from a purely German point of view, than the
nationalist hotheads who made his life miserable could have done. The Dawes
Plan for relief of the reparations burden; the treaties of Locarno and
Berlin; German admission to the League of Nations; the evacuation of the
Rhineland; and the final settlement of reparations in the young Plan-all
these were Stresemann's achievements (though the last two took effect only
after his death). They were achievements for which, as foreign minister in
successive governments, he had to struggle continually against the domestic
German opposition on the right which accused him of being ''soft on the
Allies.''
It is only a slight oversimplification to suggest that Stresemann bought the
consent of the DNVP for his foreign policy with domestic concessions. As
early as 1924 the DNVP was brought into government at the insistence of
Stresemann's own party, which felt exposed to the pressure of the DNVP,
which was twice its size. This move did indeed bring about some moderation
within the DNVP under changed leadership. At the same time, a policy of
compromise with the still anti-republican DNVP endangered the support that
Stresemann also needed from the SPD. No sooner was the DNVP in the
government than it began pressing for reintroduction of protective
agricultural tariffs, adopted against SPD opposition in the Reichstag. The
tariffs were of such nature that they helped the big estate owners more than
the small peasants, large numbers of whom continued to be evicted from the
land for nonpayment of mortgages.
Under such conditions discontent with the republican ''system'' grew among
those who remained on the land. When in 1927 the SPD finally abandoned its
admiration of large-scale agriculture and came out for land reform, it was
too late. The SPD had tried to establish cooperation between peasants and
urban workers in support of the republic and of democracy. It also wanted to
maintain a balance between producers and consumers. But it did not work. The
Junkers were strongly entrenched and the peasants alienated.#
II. Breakdown of Stresemann's Government
On the other hand, the SPD also bore much of the responsibility, indirectly,
for the entry of the DNVP into government. This shifted of the whole
political spectrum further to the right. The SPD had left the Stresemann
government as early as October 1923, because of the inequity in Stresemann's
treatment of right wing radicalism in Bavaria and left-wing radicalism in
Saxony. The first ''Great Coalition'' had lasted less than two months. But
the SPD found itself no better off, for Stresemann's rump government was in
a minority in the Reichstag and could survive only if it were tolerated by
either the DNVP or SPD. Since the DNVP would have nothing to do with the
chancellor who had called off the Ruhr resistance, the responsibility was
still the SPD's.
It was the misfortune of the SPD, the most wholehearted of all the parties
in its commitment to the Weimar Republic, to be repeatedly confronted with
insoluble problems of operation of a multi-party system in an unsettled
society with disloyal oppositions on both left and right. In this particular
situation, the party's leaders were fairly certain that if they brought
Stresemann down the next government would be no better from their point of
view; on the other hand, they were convinced that they would lose many
voters to the Communists if they did not maintain their strong stand against
federal intervention in Saxony.
This latter consideration prevailed; President Ebert, himself a Socialist,
declared to the SPD leaders in the Reichstag after they had voted Stresemann
out in November 1923: ''The reasons for your overthrow of the government
will be forgotten in a few weeks; but you will continue to feel the
consequences of your folly for ten years.'' The futility of the SPD's
gesture was emphasized by the fact that the party saw itself obliged not
only to tolerate the succeeding government of the Center leader Wilhelm
Marx, which did indeed stand to the right of Stresemann's, but even to grant
it temporary emergency powers.
By the following March, however, the SPD could no longer hold to this line.
The Communists were again putting pressure on SPD voters over the
government's use of its emergency powers, and the SPD forced a dissolution.
But this policy proved no better than the other, for in the elections the
Communists made big gains. Most former USPD voters did not follow their
leaders in their fusion with the SPD, but voted KPD instead. Marx still
found himself with a minority government, and in due course called a second
election; but the middle parties still remained a minority needing support
from either right or left. It was then that the new chancellor, the
Independent (but generally conservative) Hans Luther, on the DVP's urging,
drew the DNVP into the cabinet.
The two parliamentary elections of 1924 were followed by the presidential
election of 1925 after Ebert's death. Here also there was a marked drift to
the right, precipitated by short-sighted and inconsistent behavior on
Stresemann's part. He torpedoed the candidacy of Otto Gessler, a member of
the Democratic Party but a Catholic and as minister of war a strong
supporter of the army, on whom all the non-Socialist parties were about to
agree, on the ground that he would make a bad impression in France. But
when, after an inconclusive round in which each party offered its own
candidate, the DVP and DNVP drafted Field Marshal von Hindenburg to stand
against Marx, the candidate of the Weimar Coalition parties, Stresemann
raised no objection.
Hindenburg won, partly because of his great personal prestige and his
attraction for all who indulged in monarchical nostalgia or Great-Power
longings, partly because the KPD persisted in its own candidacy which drew
off sufficient votes from Marx to throw the election to Hindenburg. The
president of the Republic had been elected by an anti-republican plurality,
as well as being anti-republican himself. Perhaps the closest parallel to
such an event is the election of Louis Napoleon in 1848.
The rightward trend in German politics continued until 1928, when it was
halted by the return of a political issue from another world. The DVP,
regarding itself as the successor to the National Liberals and in memory of
the Kulturkampf, brought down Marx's fourth coalition government over a
confessional-school bill. This development was not unwelcome to Stresemann,
who had been pressing for some time for a government oriented more toward
the parties which approved his foreign policy. When the elections registered
a modest swing to the left, he successfully urged the formation of a Great
Coalition similar to his own of 1923, but under the leadership of the SPD as
the largest party. The SPD leader, Hermann Müller, thereupon became
chancellor.
But the decision to seek support on the left came too late. Stresemann was
losing control of his own party. Nobody will say that he had not enough to
do directing German foreign policy and in a general way watching over
domestic developments with a view to securing freedom to execute that
policy. Nevertheless, it remains that he was also a party leader, and his
failure to align the party firmly behind him proved extremely damaging both
to him and to the idea of political reconciliation and collaboration with
the SPD. In fact, the DVP was drifting rapidly to the right and became
increasingly restless as the SPD's coalition partner. It was in the cards
that any serious tension would cause the coalition to break apart again, as
had Stresemann's own coalition.