Weimar Republic Established
The German national assembly met at Weimar in February 1919 because Berlin was too dangerous, and wrote a constitution that lasted fourteen years. The empire had ended in November 1918 with a naval mutiny, workers' and soldiers' councils in the cities, the Kaiser's abdication and two competing proclamations of a republic on the same afternoon. The provisional government under Friedrich Ebert then made a bargain with the army command to suppress the far left, and the Spartacist rising in January 1919 was put down by Freikorps units who murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The constitution written that summer was among the most democratic on paper anywhere: proportional representation, universal suffrage at twenty, a bill of rights, referendums, and a directly elected president. It also contained Article 48, allowing the president to suspend civil liberties and rule by decree in an emergency, which was used more than a hundred times before 1932 and then continuously. Proportional representation without a threshold produced a parliament of many parties and coalitions that rarely lasted a year. The republic carried the treaty, the reparations, the stab-in-the-back legend and the hyperinflation in its first four years, stabilised remarkably between 1924 and 1929, and was destroyed by the Depression. Its cultural record — Bauhaus, Brecht, Döblin, Weill, the cinema, the physics — is out of all proportion to its length. Hitler was appointed chancellor within its rules in January 1933, and the constitution was never formally repealed. The lesson most often drawn from it — that proportional representation and emergency powers destroyed a democracy — is built into the Federal Republic's design, with a five per cent threshold, a constructive vote of no confidence and no directly elected president.
- Year: 1919 CE
- Category: Political
