The German Center Party and the Reichsbanner

Abstract

The problem of paramilitary organizations in Germany after 1918 forms an interesting and crucial chapter in the story of the ill-fated Weimar Republic. The organizations which gained the most notoriety stood on the far political right, unreconciled and unreconcilable both to military defeat and to the republic which was the child of that defeat. But the republic did have its militant defenders, who were recruited on the democratic left and organized in the Reichsbanner. The history of the Reichsbanner not only vividly demonstrated “the sharpness of political antagonisms” in the republic, but also reflected several developments during Germany's so-called golden years after 1924: the balance of political forces, Catholic-socialist and bourgeois-socialist relations, and in no small degree the disintegration of the Weimar Coalition (Social Democratic Party, Democratic Party, and Center Party).