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Gustav
Stresemann: Weimar's Greatest
Statesman
Jonathan
Wright looks at the career of the statesman who might have
steered Germany safely through the Weimar era.
GUSTAV STRESEMANN BECAME Chancellor of Germany in August
1923 at a time when it seemed as though the state was about
to break up in chaos. With the French occupying the Ruhr
coalfield, the mark suffering hyper-inflation to the point
where it ceased to be a viable currency, separatists active
in the Rhineland, Hitler in Bavaria and Communists in Saxony
plotting different versions of revolution, the army wavering
in its loyalty and Stresemann's own party far from united
behind him, it was a desperate time. He wrote to his wife
Kate that to become Chancellor in such circumstances would
be `all but political suicide'.
By a mixture of courage, skill and luck he steered
Germany over the next six years to a remarkable recovery.
His government lasted only until November 1923 but he
remained as foreign minister in successive coalitions until
his death in October 1929. As Chancellor he took the crucial
step of ceasing financial support to the general strike
against the French in the Ruhr, making possible the
introduction of a new and stable currency. He authorised the
army to intervene against the extreme left in Saxony but
refused to give in to pressure from the chief of the army
command, General von Seeckt, to make way for an
authoritarian regime of the right. With Ebert, the Social
Democratic (SPD) President of the Republic, he faced down
the threat from Hitler and his Bavarian allies, watching
with relief as their divisions ended in the fiasco of the
Munich Putsch.
As foreign minister over the next six years he
consolidated these achievements: under Anglo-American
pressure the French withdrew from the Ruhr and accepted the
recommendations of the Dawes Committee for an interim
settlement of reparations underpinned by American loans. In
1925 he took the initiative which led to the Locarno Pact
under which Germany, France and Belgium mutually recognised
their Rhineland frontiers with Britain and Italy as external
guarantors. In September 1926 Germany joined the League of
Nations with a permanent seat on the Council in recognition
of its status as a great power. To allay Soviet suspicions
that Germany would join a capitalist crusade of the League
powers against it, Stresemann also concluded the Treaty of
Berlin in May 1926 by which both states promised to remain
neutral in the event that either was the victim of
aggression.
Stresemann's diplomacy paid off. He earned the respect of
his French and British counterparts, Aristide Briand and
Austen Chamberlain, who were prepared to make concessions to
Germany to win its co-operation. The first of the three
Rhineland zones, which had been put under Allied military
occupation by the Treaty of Versailles, was evacuated in
January 1926 and in 1927 the Inter-Allied Control Commission
to supervise German disarmament was withdrawn. In 1929 a
conference at The Hague agreed a `final' reparations
settlement with annual payments to continue until 1988,
though in fact the scheme lapsed in 1931 as a result of the
Depression. As part of the settlement Stresemann won
complete allied evacuation of the Rhineland by June 1930
(instead of 1935 as stipulated in the Versailles Treaty).
* * * * *
It is hardly surprising that when he died of a stroke in
October 1929 at the early age of fifty-one, Stresemann's
reputation stood very high. The British ambassador in Berlin
Sir Horace Rumbold described him as Germany's `greatest
statesman since the days of Bismarck', adding that
Stresemann's task had been `infinitely the more difficult of
the two'. In Paris, the German author Count Kessler noted:
It is almost as if an outstanding French statesman had died, the grief is
so general and sincere ... The French feel Stresemann to have been a sort
of European Bismarck.
From a different standpoint even Hitler, according to
Ribbentrop, acknowledged that in Stresemann's position `he
could not have achieved more'.
Though Stresemann's achievements were not in doubt,
controversy soon raged about his intentions. Was he a
`European Bismarck' leading Germany gradually to accept its
place within what Thomas Mann called `a European society of
nations' or was he simply, in the words of the left-wing
British journalist Claud Cockburn, `one of those Germans who
had, at a fairly early date, discovered that the way to get
away with being a good German was to pretend to be a good
European'? And what did it mean to be `a good German'? If he
offered an alternative to Hitler, what kind of alternative
was it? Was Locarno a first step in a policy of European
security or was it a screen to enable Germany to rebuild its
strength until it could force a revision of its eastern
frontiers, especially the bitterly resented frontiers with
Poland?
To answer these questions one has to place the
development of Stresemann's ideas in the changing contexts
of both domestic politics and Germany's international
position. Stresemann was both a German nationalist and a
liberal. His inspiration as a young man was the literature
of the 1848 revolutions which had shaken Europe a generation
before his birth.
The values of liberalism and nationalism remained central
for him but the way he applied them varied with time and
circumstance. In the first phase of his career, from
1901-14, he built up a highly successful organisation
representing the small scale, export industries of Saxony
and launched himself into politics in the National Liberal
party. His organisation opposed the dominant lobbies of
heavy industry and agriculture. They were protectionist
whereas Stresemann's clients depended on imports of raw
materials and exports of their finished goods and were
therefore generally in favour of lower tariffs. Stresemann
believed passionately that the only way Germany could
support its rapidly expanding population was by the growth
of its export trade which provided most of the new jobs.
Taking the British empire as his model he wanted to see
an expansion of Germany's overseas colonies to reduce its
dependence on imports. He urged the National Liberal Party
to distance itself from the Conservatives and become a truly
`people's party' winning over the working class by appealing
to its interest in imperialism. His politics were
distinguished by the belief that by using constitutional
methods the groups he represented could defend their
interests and help the German empire to become a fairer and
less divided society. He rejected both the revolutionaries
of the left and the counter-revolutionaries of the right.
From the antisemites on the right he was also separated by
his marriage in 1903 to Kate Kleefeld because she was of
Jewish descent.
* * * * *
The context changed again with the advent of the First
World War. Unfit for military service, Stresemann threw
himself into the debate over war aims with the abandon of
the true believer. Seeing the war as the inevitable
challenge by the powers--especially Britain--who felt
threatened by the rising power of Germany, he wanted above
all to secure Germany's continental base so that it could
challenge Britain's maritime supremacy. `Now' he wrote in
December 1914:
... the great moment of world history has arrived, we will advance to the
sea lanes of the world and create for ourselves a German Gibraltar in
Calais.
Stresemann pushed for the adoption of unrestricted
submarine warfare as the only means to defeat Britain. This
proved to be the single most disastrous decision of the war
for Germany--countered in time by the convoy system and
helping to bring the United States into the conflict.
The war also saw an important development in Stresemann's
liberal views. He recognised that all sections of the
community had proved their patriotism and that the
discriminatory `three class' franchise in Prussia had become
indefensible. He also blamed the civilian government for
failing to give leadership at home and losing the propaganda
war abroad. Even in arms production Germany had been less
efficient than Britain, and when he asked a departmental
official the reason he was told `we have not had a Lloyd
George'.
All this convinced Stresemann that parliamentary
government on the British model was not only a more liberal
but also a more successful way to govern a modern state. He
led the National Liberal Party in the Reichstag in 1917-18
to support constitutional reform. He hoped that victory and
reform would come together allowing an imperial Germany to
achieve both a dominant position on the continent and unity
at home.
This was a vain hope. A German empire on the European
continent could never have been sustained by liberal
principles. The parallel with the British empire was
misleading and in any case its days, too, were numbered. It
was also unrealistic because in the last two years of the
war Germany's precarious unity broke down: the right wanted
victory and no reform, the left wanted reform and a
negotiated peace. As the two sides pulled apart, Stresemann
found himself stranded in the middle. With the German defeat
in October 1918, the National Liberal Party--whose Reichstag
leader he had become the previous year aged only
thirty-nine--broke up. The bulk of the party defected to
join the Left Liberals in a new Democratic Party from which
Stresemann was excluded because of his reputation for
extravagant war aims. His political career appeared to be
over.
In the years immediately following the revolution of
November 1918 and the foundation of the Weimar Republic,
Stresemann was torn by contradictory feelings. He resented
the way in which, as he thought, he had been made a
scapegoat by the Democrats for views which had been widely
shared. He fought back by founding a new party, the German
People's Party (DVP), with the rump of mainly right-wing
National Liberals. He felt no particular loyalty to the
Republic, seeing it as the result of an unnecessary
revolution--since Germany had already achieved parliamentary
government in October 1918--and fearing it might degenerate
into Bolshevism. When a military revolt broke out in Berlin
in March 1920--the Kapp putsch--he did not at first condemn
it but instead tried to mediate to find a peaceful solution.
* * * * *
Stresemann was, however, impatient with the role of
opposition and as early as April 1919 he made clear his
intention to recapture the old National Liberal constituency
and become a party of government. There were several reasons
for his attitude. He believed that the National Liberal
tradition was best suited to government, as in the days when
it had supported Bismarck. He saw his party as providing,
like the Catholic Centre Party, an essential element of
balance between the Conservatives, re-grouped as the German
National People's Party (DNVP) on the right, and the
Socialists on the left. Without that balance, Germany would
be governed from the extremes with the danger that it would
slide into civil war.
But the nature of politics had also changed with the
arrival of the Republic. Stresemann may be seen as an
example of the new type of `professional politician'
described by the sociologist Max Weber. Professional
politicians used modern forms of political organisation and
sought power unlike the nineteenth century `notables' who
were content to represent their communities while
governments were appointed by the crown. There was now the
opportunity for politicians like Stresemann to participate
in government.
In the years leading up to his appointment as Chancellor
in August 1923, Stresemann acquired a unique reputation. He
made his peace with the Republic, advocating the `great'
coalition from the SPD to the DVP to consolidate democracy
against the extremes of left and right. In foreign affairs
he showed a new realism: arguing that revision of the
Versailles Treaty could come only from the mutual
recognition of common interests between Germany and its
former enemies. Germany still had one great asset, the
importance of its market to the exports of other European
states. If Germany collapsed it would drag France down with
it. They shared a common destiny. Therefore, he predicted in
1921, `The day of understanding will come because it must
come.' Stresemann started to talk the language of
statesmanship: the shared values of `national community'
(Volksgemeinschaft) at home and economic interdependence
abroad.
It was Stresemann's good fortune to be able to see his
ideas put into practice while he was in government. The
Republic was never truly consolidated, the divisions were
too deep and the economic revival too weak, but by 1928 it
no longer appeared threatened by its enemies on the left or
the right. And its international position had been
transformed by the intervention of Britain and the United
States to reverse the Ruhr occupation, and the flow of
American loans that followed.
How did Stresemann's ideas develop in these years? In
1924-26 during the domestic battles over the Dawes Plan,
Locarno and the League, he had a particular strategy in
mind. He hoped to win over the nationalist DNVP, which had
become a mass party. Alternatively, he thought he might be
able to force a division between its pragmatic sections--who
understood the importance of American loans--and its
ideologues. If the DNVP broke up, he reasoned, and its
moderates joined the DVP, which would then become the main
party of the Protestant middle class, the Republic would
gain stability and legitimacy.
* * * * *
As a nationalist himself Stresemann was able to talk the
language of the DNVP. He shared their anger at the way
Austria had been prevented from joining Germany (in
violation of the principle of self-determination), at the
mistreatment of German minorities by Poland or by Fascist
Italy in South Tyrol, and at the loss of colonies. To his
nationalist critics, he defended his policy as a tactical
necessity. He argued that his purpose in accepting
international obligations in the form of loans or membership
of the League was that ultimately Germany should be
`independent and free'. In a letter to Crown Prince Wilhelm
in September 1925 he defended joining the League, saying
that the first objective was to free the Rhineland from
foreign occupation, `getting the strangler from our neck',
and that this could be done by a policy of `finesse' as
Austria and Prussia had once manoeuvred to liberate
themselves from Napoleon.
Once the main lines of Stresemann's policy were
established and it became clear that the DNVP would neither
be won over nor broken up, the emphasis of his arguments
shifted. From 1926-29 he became increasingly preoccupied
with the preservation of peace, not simply as a tactical
necessity but in the wider interests of both Germany and
Europe. War, he wrote in 1928:
... would mean that the old Europe with its deep-rooted national conflicts
would inevitably tear itself completely to pieces and destroy its economy
and civilisation. This destruction would be above all Germany's
destruction.
Stresemann worked to achieve what he called:
... the securing of a free Germany with equal rights and the inclusion of
such a Germany together with all other states in a stable international
structure.
In practice, this meant that Germany would not give up
what it saw as its legitimate claims to revision of the
treaty: the Polish frontier, union with Austria, colonies.
However, Stresemann knew that the prospect of achieving
these goals peacefully was remote. He also became
increasingly sceptical about union with Austria (which would
change the balance of German politics by adding to it
substantial numbers of Socialist and Catholic voters) and
the value of colonies which were already beginning to
challenge European rule. The Polish frontier remained a
serious problem. Stresemann was not prepared to give up the
demand for the return of Danzig (a German port made a `Free
City' under the League of Nations by the Treaty) and the
northern half of the Polish `corridor' to the sea which
separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. He regarded
the frontier as the worst mistake of the Treaty and a threat
to peace. But he had no realistic way of changing it. In
1925 he suggested that if Germany first established good
relations with Britain and France one day peaceful revision
might be possible, perhaps as a result of Polish economic
collapse or of Soviet pressure for revision of Poland's
eastern frontier. But by the end of his life he seems to
have accepted the ideas of his envoy in Warsaw, Rauscher,
who recommended a policy of detente and trade in the hope
that eventually Poland's economic dependence on Germany
might make frontier revision possible. In effect this meant
putting the issue on ice.
* * * * *
What was the purpose, then, of Germany's secret
re-armament in cooperation with the Soviet Union, which had
started unofficially in the early 1920s but was continued
with cabinet approval after 1927? Different groups had
different ideas: General von Seeckt thought in terms of a
war of revenge against France; Colonel von Blomberg, later
to be Hitler's war minister, thought Germany should prepare
for an offensive against Poland. But in the 1920s the
priority was defensive. A war game in 1927 showed that
Germany would be unable to defend East Prussia from Polish
attack, even if France remained neutral. The defence
minister General Groener persuaded the cabinet that
rearmament beyond the limits imposed at Versailles was
necessary.
Stresemann was sceptical of the military value of `old,
buried guns' but he was prepared to tolerate limited
rearmament provided it did not interfere with his foreign
policy. In his last months he floated the idea that Germany
should be allowed some rearmament since the international
disarmament foreseen by the League Covenant had become
deadlocked. He told a French journalist that he dreamt of a
`close political, economic and military alliance' between
their two countries. Would he ever have considered an attack
on Poland? The necessary conditions would have been the
evacuation of the Rhineland and a rearmed Germany, the
cancellation of reparations and freedom from American loans.
Even if all these had been in place, he would still have had
to accept the danger that a full-scale European war would
break out with Germany as the battleground, and that the
fragile consensus behind the Republic would be shattered.
After his experience of division and defeat in 1918 and near
breakdown in 1923, it is inconceivable that he would have
taken such a risk.
By 1929 Stresemann was forced to conclude that there was
no ready answer as to how to achieve further revision of the
Treaty. German expectations for new concessions were matched
by French fears of a resurgent Germany. Stresemann looked to
economic co-operation as the way to bridge the differences.
The prospects appealed to his imagination--he drew a
parallel between the divisions of Europe and the petty
states of pre-unification Germany. Echoing French fears he
suggested that for Europe to be able to resist American
competition, it would have to achieve greater economic
integration. In his last speech to the League, he even
raised the question of a single European currency. This was
a far-sighted strategy but it had made little headway before
it was interrupted by the Depression.
It was obvious in 1929 that Germany was on the brink of a
financial crisis. Stresemann knew that the DNVP under its
new leader Hugenberg was drawing closer to the Nazis to take
advantage of the crisis and bring down the Republic. He
warned that `the end may be civil war'. He hoped, however,
that Hugenberg's extreme tactics would alienate the more
moderate members of the DNVP and that they would finally
combine with the DVP and the Democrats into a new Protestant
bloc in defence of constitutional government, national unity
and civilised values.
* * * * *
Could Stresemann have prevented the disastrous
developments that followed his death? He was the one person
who might have given effective leadership to a new
Protestant party of the middle ground, but given the trend
to the extremes, as the Depression deepened, the prospects
of success were slight. He would also have been the person
best able to maintain co-operation with France, and in
particular to take advantage of French offers of long-term
loans albeit with political strings. But again even
Stresemann would have found it difficult to manage the
tensions which had mounted on both sides of the Rhine.
However, Hitler's appointment as Chancellor by President
Hindenburg in 1933 was, even without Stresemann, far from
inevitable. And there is one intriguing possibility that
might just have made a crucial difference. Before Stresemann
died, the idea was discussed that he might contest the
elections for the Reich Presidency when Hindenburg's term
ended in 1932. In fact Hindenburg was seen as the candidate
to stop Hitler, and was re-elected with the votes of the
democratic parties. If one could imagine Stresemann being
elected instead of Hindenburg, then German and European
history might well have taken a different course.
By the end of his life Stresemann had come to occupy a
unique place in German and European politics. At root he was
still both a liberal and a nationalist. But the values of
liberalism, above all toleration, had enabled him to build
bridges: between right and left, Protestant and Catholic,
the lower middle class of his parents and the Berlin society
of often Jewish intellectuals, journalists, musicians and
theatre directors which he frequented in the 1920s. He had
also become a focus for hopes of European peace. When
Stresemann died on October 3rd, 1929, Briand is reported to
have said: `Order a coffin for two. We have two deaths to
lament.' For many contemporaries his memory mattered not
only for what he had achieved but for the way he symbolised
what might have been, in contrast to the terror and tragedy
of the Third Reich.
FOR FURTHER READING
A.J. Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise of Hitler (4th edn.,
Macmillan, 2000); Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany
(Eng. edn., Macmillan, 2000); Marshall Lee & Wolfgang
Michalka, German Foreign Policy 1917-1933: Continuity or
Break? (Berg, 1987); Henning Tewes and Jonathan Wright
(eds.), Liberalism, Anti-Semitism and Democracy (Oxford
University Press, 2001); Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann:
Weimar's Greatest Statesman (OUP, 2002).
Jonathan Wright is a Tutorial Fellow at Christ Church,
Oxford, and a University Lecturer in Politics.
COPYRIGHT 2002 History Today Ltd. in association with The
Gale Group and LookSmart.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
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