Did Germany Try Democracy?
Germany Tried Democracy.
by S. William Halperin.
New York, Crowell, 1946. 567 pp. $3.75.
Professor Halperin deals very sparingly with democracy as it was experienced and practiced (more or less successfully) by the German people themselves or by the various strata of which the German nation was composed. He prefers to concentrate on the more spectacular forms—the deeds of party leaders and parties in parliamentary politics—in which the real struggle for and against a democratic form of government and a democratically conceived foreign policy for Germany reflected itself. The greater part of his book is the condensed reproduction and expert historical interpretation of a great mass of carefully selected documents, especially the public speeches made by political leaders on the occasions of great parliamentary decisions or of international meetings between statesmen and diplomats.
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Within its limits—that is, as a general political, or “parliamentary” history of the German Republic from 1918 to 1933&mdashProfessor Halperin’s book is an outstanding contribution. But this reviewer, who lived through the critical years in which “Germany tried democracy,” and who participated in the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary phases of that historical experience, feels that a predominantly parliamentary approach is particularly unsuited to the understanding of the decisive events of this period.
Of all the statesmen who were in the author’s view the foremost champions of German democracy, none ever committed himself unambiguously to the fight for a permanent democratic government. The Social Democrat Ebert, who was People’s Commissar and later Reich-President, from the first cooperated secretly with the military chiefs of the Kaiser’s defeated army, and said of himself that he “hated the revolution like sin.” Stresemann, Ebert’s successor during the period of the so-called stabilization of the Weimar republic and a representative of the big industrial interests, professed a “conciliatory policy” but helped the monarchist and authoritarian Hindenburg write his Tannenberg speech of 1927; Stresemann was fond of saying that he remained a monarchist at heart in spite of his recently adopted “realistic attitude.”
Even more ambiguous was the position of that extraordinary “democratic” leader of the last phase of the German republic, singled out by Professor Halperin for the most enthusiastic praise—the Centrist Chancellor Bruening. Professor Halperin reports how Bruening, who had just suffered a humiliating defeat at the polls and was backed only by “the president, the Reichswehr, and the palace camarilla,” announced at the beginning of his second term of office in September 1930 that he would “fight the Reichstag tooth and nail, even if, in the process, a dictatorship would have to be created.” A few pages later, however, Professor Halperin solemnly assures us that at that very moment the unfortunate Chancellor was “more than ever able to impress all but the most prejudiced with the sincerity of his faith in the democratic process.”
We seem to find the same paradox in the events which brought Bruening’s government to an end in 1932. We are told that the Chancellor was suddenly asked to resign by the very man for whose re-election he had just fought with “leonine energy”&mdashHindenburg. And then Professor Halperin writes a few sentences that seem to embody all the contradictions and distortions that arise when historical figures are judged, not by their actions, but by what they themselves say about their own motives. “The dismissal of Bruening sealed the fate of German democracy. True, he had not hesitated to govern in undemocratic fashion and to defy the representatives of the people. He had been sustained in office by the forces of reaction and had permitted himself to be used by them for their own purposes. But he believed in the democratic principle and hoped to see it resurrected when the need for emergency measures had vanished.”
It was not the dismissal of Bruening in 1932 but rather his assumption of office in 1930 that “sealed the fate of German democracy.” It was Bruening who inaugurated that particular form of “democratic rule” which even Professor Halperin calls “the presidential dictatorship,” and which was in fact no longer based on a parliamentary majority but exclusively on the constant and patent misuse of the far-reaching emergency powers of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. There was no difference in this respect between rule by emergency decree as practised by Bruening and the kind of rule maintained by his two successors during the last nine months of the agony of the German Republic. The only time a semblance of parliamentary majority rule was reintroduced in Germany after 1930 was when the chancellorship was transferred with unimpeachable parliamentary correctness to the sworn enemy of the Republic, Adolph Hitler, in January, 1933.
For a glimpse of the really decisive forces that were locked in mortal struggle in every sphere of the economic, social, and political life of the Weimar Republic—most of them outside parliament—we refer the reader to the books written by such “participant observers” as the late Arthur Rosenberg, and to the great mass of new material brought to light recently by the opening of the secret archives of the Republic and the Third Reich.
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Professor Halperin does examine a few of the hidden undercurrents at play in Germany’s struggle for democracy, but he fails to recognize the real meaning of certain contradictory and startling situations that arose periodically without relation to the intentions and speeches of leading statesmen. Thus he does no justice to the violent struggle for and against the Factory Councils fought between different currents of the workers’ movement in 1919; this struggle is here dealt with as a minor jurisdictional conflict between the Social-Democratic party and the trade unions.
Professor Halperin is far too reticent about the important effects of anti-Russian and pro-Russian influences at various times on internal developments in Germany. He speaks of the futile demands made by the Allied powers for the dissolution of the Free Corps and other semi-military units in 1920&mdashbut he forgets the practical assistance and encouragement given to these secret organizations by anti-Bolshevist Allied generals and statesmen during the first phase of the Republic. Similarly, he recognizes a positive relationship between Germany and Russia only to the extent that it was formally expressed in the treaties of Rapallo and Berlin in 1922 and 1926&mdashbut he does not mention the fact that the secret cooperation of reactionary German generals and politicians with Soviet Russia had important consequences in connection with the growth of anti-democratic tendencies in domestic and foreign policy during the later phases of the Weimar republic.
