Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Weimar Republic

The essence of German history from 1918 to 1933 can be found in the statement There “was no revolution in 1918. For there to have been a revolution it would have been necessary to liquidate the Quartet or, at least, subject them to democratic control. The Quartet represented the real power in Germany society because they represented the forces of public order (army and bureaucracy) and of economic production (landlords and industrialists). Even without a liquidation of this Quartet, it might have been possible for democracy to function in the interstices between them if they had quarreled among themselves. They did not quarrel, because they had an esprit de corps bred by years of service to a common system (the monarchy) and because, in many cases, the same individuals were to be found in two or even more of the four groups. Franz von Papen, for example, was a Westphalian noble, a colonel in the army, an ambassador, and a man with extensive industrial holdings, derived from his wife, in the Saarland.

Although there was no revolution—that is, no real shift in the control of power in Germany in 1919—there was a legal change. In law, a democratic system was set up. As a result, by the late 1920’s there had appeared an obvious discrepancy between law and fact—the regime, according to the law, being controlled by the people, while in fact it was controlled by the Quartet. The reasons for this situation are important.

The Quartet, with the monarchy, made the war of 1914-1918, and were incapable of winning it. As a result, they were completely discredited and deserted by the soldiers and workers. Thus, the masses of the people completely renounced the old system in November 1918. The Quartet, however, was not liquidated, for several reasons:

They were able to place the blame for the disaster on the monarchy, and jettisoned this to save themselves;

most Germans accepted this as an adequate revolution;

the Germans hesitated to make a real revolution for fear it would lead to an invasion of Germany by the French, the Poles, or others;

many Germans were satisfied with the creation of a government which was democratic in form and made little effort to examine the underlying reality;

the only political party capable of directing a real revolution was the Social Democrats, who had opposed the Quartet system and the war itself, at least in theory; but this party was incapable of doing anything in the crisis of 1918 because it was hopelessly divided into doctrinaire cliques, was horrified at the danger of Soviet Bolshevism, and was satisfied that order, trade-unionism, and a “democratic” regime were more important than Socialism, humanitarian welfare, or consistency between theory and action.

Before 1914 there were two parties which stood outside the Quartet system: the Social Democrats and the Center (Catholic) Party. The former was doctrinaire in its attitude, being anti-capitalist, pledged to the international brotherhood of labor, pacifist, democratic, and Marxist in an evolutionary, but not revolutionary, sense. The Center Party, like the Catholics who made it up, came from all levels of society and all shades of ideology, but in practice were frequently opposed to the Quartet on specific issues.

These two opposition parties underwent considerable change during the war. The Social Democrats always opposed the war in theory, but supported it on patriotic grounds by voting for credits to finance the war. Its minute Left wing refused to support the war even in this fashion as early as 1914. This extremist group, under Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, became known as the Spartacist Union and (after 1919) as the Communists. These extremists wanted an immediate and complete Socialist revolution with a soviet form of government. More moderate than the Spartacists was another group calling itself Independent Socialists. These voted war credits until 1917 when they refused to continue to do so and broke from the Social Democratic Party. The rest of the Social Democrats supported the war and the old monarchial system until November 1918 in fact, but in theory embraced an extreme type of evolutionary Socialism.

The Center Party was aggressive and nationalist until 1917 when it became pacifist. Under Matthias Erzberger it allied with the Social Democrats to push through the Reichstag Peace Resolution of July 1917. The position of these various groups on the issue of aggressive nationalism was sharply revealed in the voting to ratify the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed by the militarists, Junkers, and industrialists on a prostrate Russia. The Center Party voted to ratify; the Social Democrats abstained from voting; the Independents voted No.

The “revolution” of November 1918 would have been a real revolution except for the opposition of the Social Democrats and the Center Party, for the Quartet in the crucial days of November and December 1918 were discouraged, discredited, and helpless. Outside the Quartet itself there was, at that time and even later, only two small groups which could possibly have been used by the Quartet as rallying points about which could have been formed some mass support for the Quartet. These two small groups were the “indiscriminate nationalists” and the “mercenaries.” The indiscriminate nationalists were those men, like Hitler, who were not able to distinguish between the German nation and the old monarchial system. These persons, because of their loyalty to the nation, were eager to rally to the support of the Quartet, which they regarded as identical with the nation. The mercenaries were a larger group who had no particular loyalty to anyone or to any idea but were willing to serve any group which could pay for such service. The only groups able to pay were two of the Quartet—the Officers’ Corps and the industrialists—who organized many mercenaries into reactionary armed bands or “Free Corps” in 1918-1923.

Instead of working for a revolution in 1918-1919, the two parties which dominated the situation—the Social Democrats and the Centrists did all they could to prevent a revolution. They not only left the Quartet in their positions of responsibility and power—the landlords on their estates, the officers in their commands, the industrialists in control of their factories, and the bureaucracy in control of the police, the courts, and the administration—but they increased the influence of these groups because the actions of the Quartet were not restrained under the republic by that sense of honor or loyalty to the system which had restrained the use of their power under the monarchy.

As early as November 10, 1918, Friedrich Ebert, chief figure of the Social Democratic Party, made an agreement with the Officers’ Corps in which he promised not to use the power of the new government to democratize the army if the officers would support the new government against the threat of the Independents and the Spartacists to establish a soviet system. As a consequence of this agreement Ebert kept a private telephone line from his office in the Chancellery to General Wilhelm Groener’s office at the army’s headquarters and consulted with the army on many critical political issues. As another consequence, Ebert and his Minister of War Gustav Noske, also a Social Democrat, used the army under its old monarchist officers to destroy the workers and radicals who sought to challenge the existing situation. This was done in Berlin in December 1918, in January 1919, and again in March 1919, and in other cities at other times. In these assaults the army had the pleasure of killing several thousand of the detested radicals.

A somewhat similar antirevolutionary agreement was made between heavy industry and the Socialist trade unions on November 11, 1918. On that day Hugo Stinnes, Albert Vogler, and Alfred Hugenberg, representing industry, and Carl Legien, Otto Hue, and Hermann Müller representing the unions, signed an agreement to support each other in order to keep the factories functioning. Although this agreement was justified on opportunist grounds, it clearly showed that the so-called Socialists were not interested in economic or social reform but were merely interested in the narrow trade-union objectives of wages, hours, and working conditions. It was this narrow range of interests which ultimately destroyed the average German’s faith in the Socialists or their unions.