What Was Democracy?
A History of the Weimar Republic. By Erich Eyck. (Harvard and O.U.P., 3 gns.) THE fall of the Spanish Republic has commonly been described as the classic case of democratic disaster. But what happened in Spain was far from a typical instance. All episodes there possess unique characteristics, tendering the history of Spain a separate affair, by no means comparable with developments in other Western States. The glamour of bloodshed under that sun has given the country more significance than it might deserve—under the terms in which it has been approached. These are poets' terms, writers' terms, however the fashionable phrasing lies, or lay at the time. Auden, Spender, Heming- way, Bernanos, Mauriac, Maritain set their inter- nationalist hearts on Spain. For the fall of the Weimar Republic there were few declaimers, mainly German: Hans Fallada, Ernst flinger, Ernst von Salomon, even • Bertolt Brecht, did not ignore it Nor, when things got a bit more exciting, did Christopher Isherwood (and his epigone Goronwy Rees). But then there was less slaughter here, little battles mostly in town streets, different dates, different areas, only 10,000 slain or maimed over fourteen years Officially the political machine never broke down; it was merely smothered by the pressure of events. No foreign armies interfered, though French and British troops were stationed in Western Ger- many as non-playing and increasingly reluctant observers.
But the workings of the Weimar Republic as a democratic society are far more instructive than anything that happened in Spain. From the 1919 I reaty of Versailles to the election of the old Field-Marshal Hindenburg in 1925, many of the traditional forces of Europe and tensions to which many European States were then sub- ject are at stake. According to that prodigiously misleading interpreter of German thought, Rowan Butler, liberal democracy was doomed to extinction on account of some peculiar kink in the Teutonic mind, noted especially since Kant and Herder. Bismarck and Treitschke and Moltke are lumped together by other historical scribes as responsible for the rise of Hitler and the disappearance of all hints of civilised ad- vance--as laid down by Goethe or parading under such pseudonyms as socialism, freedom, economic equality. But there was a strong demo- cratic tradition in the cities and provinces for some time. There were Stein and Scharnhorst, for instance, in the 1813 war of liberation. Ger- many, as it happened, was the first country to concede universal suffrage in parliamentary elections and the Welfare State began under Bismarck. In fact, the legacy left to Weimar was far from negative, according to modern con- cepts of democracy. It began with a fairly good constitution. Few constitutions can guarantee the preservation and growth of the system to which knees bend at the start (with the ex- ception of the United States). In most cases the mores of the extant society and the decisions of the meh in power are more crucial.
If the fall of the Weimar Republic had been inevitable as supposed, the history of Germany in that period would have been far less dull than it turned out to be. There would have been more room for intellectual playboys, artists and poets. Isherwood and friends, for instance, only come into their own around 1930. Previously the engine was ticking over fairly well. With the arrival of widespread hunger, the brown shirts and blond warriors appear on the scene —lass& ig rest::m.5e tg the great deplession, rather than to any innate eccentricities of the German nature or to the political system pre- vailing at the time. A great republic, decent mediocre minds and starving bodies go ill to- gether. If the German public had been a little more patient in the spring of 1933, the hungry sheep (and there were twenty-one million of them wholly or partially unemployed at the time) soon might have been frisking again. Or rounding the corner, as the English did, rather than looking up to Hitler.
The author of this book took up the craft of history rate in life. His work has been deemed a classic on the subject, and this volume brings. the story to 1926. He relies too much on hind- sight. The election of Hindenburg as President of Germany, for instance, is described in the final sentence as a 'triumph of nationalism and militarism and a heavy defeat to the republic and parliamentary government.' But this was not the way Hindenburg's friends or enemies saw it at that time. The main defect of this type of history is that it often fails to reconstruct the drama of events as witnessed by contemporaries. Eyck's book, for all its consummate mastery of detail, is partly slices of sociology, partly packets of popcorn to good little liberals in the Twenties, and partly improving tracts to German poli- ticians of today. His angels were democrats, of the Schacht-Naumann variety, and well-inten- tioned liberal academics. He has a proper sym- pathy for the SPD of 1919. The Catholic Zentrum does not receive much consideration. The activities of the right-wing parties are largely dismissed as machinations, and scant credit is given to the heroic aspects of the KPD (Communist Party) at the time. This party held many scoundrels, who unfortunately ran it; also, fortunately, a number of tame ideologues. There is nothing in Eyck's approach to seduce un- initiates to a wider, deeper understanding of all the forces involved in the years under discussion. Sheep and goats are for schoolboys only, not for serious students. Let the facts speak for themselves. The extreme nationalist view that all Germany's ills could be blamed on Western policies is rightly rejected. But if the birth of the Weimar Republic could well be described as a puerperal crisis, the child had lungs all the same. There were, however, serious nursing errors under the auspices of French and British foreign diplomacy. It is now fashionable to denounce Keynes's version of Versailles, but there is a great deal of sense in his classical indictment of the economic terms imposed. The inter- national bankers, including Montagu Norman, learned rapidly from the mistakes of their governments. But to redirect public opinion was another matter, full dyed as so many were by propagandist techniques grown out of the First World War. The problems of peace-making were better handled after 1945 than in that early flourish of Wilsonian liberalism. The Western powers bad their responsibilities at the time but they misused them, largely out of sloth, or cowardice in the face of the next elections. Foreign policy after all, despite Ranke's exag- gerated 'Prima! der Aussenpolitik,' has a good deal of influence on the course of internal affairs.
In Germany itself the Zentrum at least came nearest to following the score. Less entrapped by millennarian mystiques, it had under Briining (prodded by the very much under- estimated von Papen) the best seat in the ring. Unfortunately Briining lacked the will-power that springs from an intensely imaginative mind. The other ideological priggeries—liberal, socialist, nationalist--paralysed_reform. Benito Mussolini,
in his early days of power, oddly enough, was the most prudent analyst of the Weimar crisis.'
The curtain falls in this volume on Locarno. The naive optimism of Stresemann, Austen Chamberlain and Briand proved no more than I a brief illusion. Other men in the next few years, ruling Germany and its neighbours, might well have changed the next chapters. Meanwhile the old social tensions remained—between town and country, central government and 'particularism.' Perhaps the most cogent explanation of the sub- sequent
catastrophe was twofold: an unresolved economic crisis, for which the allied powers must share blame, and the failure of the Weimar leaders to achieve reconciliation between the' old and new regimes. The Germans, too, had ; not then learnt how to lose a war and gain a peace. They have now had a second chance and seem to be doing better. Their former oppo- nents have also learnt, thanks•to J. V. Stalin.
DESMOND WILLIAMS
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