The German Democratic Party 1918-1930

Abstract

R EPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT in the West has depended on the middle class for its success. An alert, responsible and politically active group of business and professional men have manned the key posts in government in most western countries for the past century. The identity of the middle class with liberalism has generally been equally close. The middle class formulated and developed the liberal creed, and in spite of the increasing ambiguity of liberalism in the late nineteenth and in the twentieth century, the association between the middle class and liberalism persists. In German history the classic summary of the liberal program was the Bill of Rights of the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848. The principles of this document continued to inspire some members of the German middle class down to 1918, but a majority of German liberals compromised their ideals by embracing a fervent and often intolerant nationalism, militarism and governmental paternalism. There were few German middle class men before 1918 who were willing to agitate for true parliamentary government; rather than accept political responsibility the German liberal accepted the semi-authoritarian political system bequeathed to the German people by Bismarck.' The basis of middle-class faith in the German Empire collapsed, however, in November 1918. The army was defeated, the Emperor fled into exile, and then the power to create a new government was thrust on a National Assembly elected by universal suffrage in January 1919. The composition of the National Assembly seemed to indicate that the great mass of German voters had become supporters of democracy and liberal ideals. One of the clearest indications of a swing of the German middle class to the support of liberal democracy was the heavy vote given to the German Democratic party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei), the heir of the Progressive party (Fortschrittliche Volkspartei), the most genuine liberal party in Germany. The signs of January 1919, however, were not portents of things to come. The direction middle-class politics took was away from liberalism and democracy. The German Democratic party was soon abandoned by most of its middle-class electorate for more nationalistic and conservative parties. By 1930 it was a splinter party; the voice of Germany's liberal tradition was too faint to be heard. The rejection of the Democratic party was in many ways symbolic of the rejection of the Weimar Republic by the middle-class electorate. Its failures represent in microcosm the failures of German democracy. Its limitations reveal