From the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and the National Assembly at Weimar through Versailles, the Kapp Putsch, the hyperinflation of 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch, and the Dawes Plan, the cultural brilliance of Bauhaus and Brecht, the Locarno settlement and the election of Hindenburg, to the Wall Street Crash, Brüning's deflation, the Nazi breakthrough, the year of five elections, and the Enabling Act that ended Germany's first democracy. Slide across the decades to read the major events of fourteen turbulent years.
After a week of street fighting in Berlin between Spartacist communists and government-backed Freikorps, the captured leaders of the Communist Party of Germany — Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht — are beaten and shot on 15 January. Luxemburg's body is thrown into the Landwehr canal.
From the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and the National Assembly at Weimar through Versailles, the Kapp Putsch, the hyperinflation of 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch, and the Dawes Plan, the cultural brilliance of Bauhaus and Brecht, the Locarno settlement and the election of Hindenburg, to the Wall Street Crash, Brüning's deflation, the Nazi breakthrough, the year of five elections, and the Enabling Act that ended Germany's first democracy. Slide across the decades to read the major events of fourteen turbulent years.
After a week of street fighting in Berlin between Spartacist communists and government-backed Freikorps, the captured leaders of the Communist Party of Germany — Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht — are beaten and shot on 15 January. Luxemburg's body is thrown into the Landwehr canal.
On 28 June, five years to the day after Sarajevo, the German foreign minister Hermann Müller signs the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors where Wilhelm I was proclaimed emperor in 1871. Germany loses 13 percent of its territory and 10 percent of its population, accepts the 'war guilt' of Article 231, and is presented with a reparations bill to be set later.
Meeting in the National Theatre at Weimar — chosen for its association with Goethe and Schiller, away from revolutionary Berlin — the National Assembly under jurist Hugo Preuß adopts a constitution. Germany becomes a federal parliamentary republic with proportional representation, universal suffrage for men and women, and an emergency-powers article — Article 48 — that will prove fatal.
On 13 March, rebel Freikorps under Wolfgang Kapp and General Walther von Lüttwitz march on Berlin. The army refuses to defend the Republic — General Hans von Seeckt declares 'Reichswehr does not shoot at Reichswehr' — but the trade unions call a general strike that paralyses the country within hours. The putsch collapses in four days.
On 16 April, on the margins of the Genoa Conference, Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau signs the Treaty of Rapallo with Soviet Russia: the two pariahs of Europe restore relations, renounce reparations, and open the way for secret German military cooperation on Russian soil. Two months later, on 24 June, Rathenau is murdered by right-wing assassins in Berlin.
When Germany defaults on reparations, French and Belgian troops occupy the Ruhr industrial basin in January. The government calls for passive resistance and prints money to pay striking workers; the result is the most spectacular hyperinflation in history. By November, one dollar costs 4.2 trillion marks.
On 8-9 November, a thirty-four-year-old Austrian agitator named Adolf Hitler tries to launch a 'march on Berlin' from a Munich beer hall. The National Socialists are dispersed by sixteen rifle shots from the Bavarian police at the Feldherrnhalle. Hitler flees, is captured two days later, and is sentenced to five years' imprisonment.
An international committee under the American banker Charles G. Dawes restructures German reparations on a sliding scale tied to economic capacity, and underwrites a stabilisation loan of 800 million gold marks. American capital begins to flow into Germany; by 1928 the Reich is once again the largest industrial economy in Europe.
In April, the seventy-seven-year-old Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg is elected Reichspräsident after Ebert's death. In October, foreign minister Gustav Stresemann signs the Locarno Treaties: Germany voluntarily guarantees its western frontier with France and Belgium. Aristide Briand and Stresemann share the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis opens in Berlin; the Bauhaus moves to a new Gropius-designed campus in Dessau; Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill stage the Threepenny Opera the next year. Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Heinrich Mann, Alfred Döblin, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Erich Maria Remarque, Marlene Dietrich — Weimar's brief flowering remakes modern culture.
On 3 October, Gustav Stresemann dies of a stroke at fifty-one. Three weeks later, on 24 October — Black Thursday — Wall Street crashes. American banks call in their short-term loans; the German economy enters free fall. By the end of 1932, German industrial production has been halved and six million Germans are unemployed.
On 30 March, the SPD-led Müller cabinet falls over unemployment insurance contributions — the last parliamentary majority of the Republic. President Hindenburg appoints Heinrich Brüning of the Centre as chancellor, governing by emergency decree. In the September Reichstag election the Nazis explode from 12 to 107 seats; the KPD also gains. The democratic centre is shattered.
In April, Hindenburg defeats Hitler for re-election to the presidency. In the July Reichstag election, the NSDAP wins 230 seats and 37 percent of the vote — the largest party in German history at that point. In November the Nazis lose 34 seats; their wave has crested. But by then Hindenburg's advisers are convinced that Hitler must be brought into government to control him.
On 30 January, after weeks of intrigue by Papen, the agrarian magnate Oskar von Hindenburg, and the banker Kurt von Schröder, the eighty-five-year-old Reichspräsident Hindenburg signs the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor. The cabinet contains only three Nazis. By summer it will be the only party in Germany.
On the night of 27 February, the Reichstag building burns. A young Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, is found inside. The next morning Hindenburg signs the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties under Article 48. On 23 March, with Communist deputies arrested and Social Democrats coerced, the Reichstag passes the Enabling Act — 441 to 94 — granting Hitler four years of dictatorial powers. The Weimar Republic is over.