Between the Fronts: The German National Union of Commercial Employees from 1928 to 1933

Abstract

One of the main causes for the increasing paralysis Qf the German parliamentary system toward the end of the 1920s was a breakdown in the functional relationship between economic interest group and political party. The role which economic interest groups played in the political process was greatly increased by the democratization of Germany's political structure after World War I, so that by the middle of the following decade an elaborate and complex system of Querx'erbindungen had developed between the major interest groups and the large, sociologically heterogeneous such as the Center (Deutsche Zentrumspartei), the German Democratic party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei), the German People's party (Deutsche Volkspartei, or DVP), and the German National People's party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP). Under the pressure of unrelieved economic distress during the 1920s, however, the level of social conflict within each of these parties was intensified to the point where it was no longer possible to maintain a balance between the various social groups which comprised their popular base. At this point the relationship between organized interests and the established bourgeois parties became increasingly problematic, with the result that the so-called people's parties began to fragment into the separate social groups which comprised them. This process was particularly acute within the German middle strata, where it led to the formation of a series of small splinter parties from the middle of the 1920s on.' Nowhere can a more perfect illustration of the problematic character of the relationship between middle-class interest groups and the established bourgeois parties be found than in the case of the German National Union of Commercial Employees (Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband, or DHV). The DHV had been founded in 1893 in the midst of the massive changes then