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A broad spectrum of the
German people opposed the Treaty
of Versailles and its “humiliating” terms
for Germany. There were three main goals in foreign policy during
the Weimar era:
-
Find a means of rearming Germany—eventually this led
to secret negotiations with the U.S.S.R. to arrange for arms
and training in secret.
-
Find a means for scaling down the reparations payments—the
reparations were blamed for the economic dislocation of the
era and were blamed on the Allies.
-
Find a means for reestablishing Germany as a member of the
European
Community.
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Map: Political realignments of Europe
after World War 1. Courtesy of United States Military Academy’s
Department of History. |
 |
Photo: Walther
Rathenau was Jewish and a Liberal republican. He was blamed for
many problems
with the economy. In particular, the right wing directly accused
him of the many currency inflations.
On 24 June 1922, Rathenau left home for work in his car. He was
assassinated when riders in a passing car threw a hand grenade
and shot him with a submachine gun. |
In 1922, the Treaty
of Rapallo provided for secret negotiations with
the U.S.S.R. for the creation of the Black Reichswehr, a secret Army,
not permitted in the Treaty of Versailles. Also, with the inflation mounting
in the
years immediately following the war, efforts were made to resist payments
to the French. A widespread boycott against production went into effect
in January 1923 when French troops entered the Rhineland, after the Germans
defaulted on their reparations payments. These tensions declined in 1924,
when the Dawes Plan set forth a scaled down payment schedule.
Gustav Stresemann, Chancellor for a short time in 1923 and subsequently
the Foreign Minister until 1929, was the architect of a foreign policy
that ushered in an era of peace and stability. Stresemann, a member
of the Peoples’ Party, worked closely with the Social Democratic
Party in his tenure as Foreign Minister. He was first and foremost a
German
nationalist that sought to restore Germany’s place among European
nations. To this end, he worked towards the acceptance of Germany in
the League of Nations (1926). He was also the principle architect of
the Locarno
Pact, a series of agreements between Germany and Great
Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Poland, regarding
borders
with Germany and security issues that had been unresolved since World
War I.
Throughout his negotiations he sought to create an international
order based on reason and peace. He had no doubt that Germany deserved
to be a player in
the international arena, but sought to achieve this by working in cooperation
with other nations. Thus, in Stresemann’s policy, what was perceived
as good for Germany was also perceived as good for Europe.
The writer Thomas
Mann remarked on Gustav Stresemann’s policy
in “An
Appeal to Reason,” Berliner Tageblatt (October 18, 1930):
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The remarkable
thing is that he won all sympathy and admiration, this trust and
authority,
despite the fact that his colleagues, not excepting the French
ones, perfectly knew—what was quite obvious—that Stresemann’s
policy was the policy of a German patriot and aimed at the very
thing that one would have thought most obnoxious to the leaders
of the former entente: namely, “to put holes into" the Versailles
Treaty and to achieve the liberation and rehabilitation of Germany.
They ought to have fought against any success in that direction,
and the more he succeeded, the more they should have feared and
hated him . . . . If that was not the case,
but quite the
contrary, the reason is of course that his work for Germany was
at the same time done in the interest of Europe, and that at his
death, as Lord D’Abernon says, “he left Germany infinitely
stronger than when he took the helm in 1923, and Europe comparably
more peaceful."
As quoted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds.
Anton Kaes et.al., p. 158. |
Photo: Composite
photograph of Weimar intellectuals and writers Alfred Döblin
(left), Heinrich (center) and Thomas Mann (right). They were later
persecuted
under the Nazis' antisemetic policies. From Sefton
Delmer, Weimar Germany: Democracy On Trial, p.92-93. |
Stresemann died in the fall of 1929 while negotiating the Young Plan
on reparations. While there was much mourning and ceremony to mark his
passing, his right-wing critics swiftly moved away from his conciliatory
position to a more aggressive nationalist foreign policy.
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