REPORT: German Studies Association Conference, 2003
Session 157: "Die Praesidialgewalt in der Weimarer Republik"

Moderator: Larry Eugene Jones, Canisius College

"Friedrich Ebert als Reichspraesident,"
Walter Muehlhausen, Stiftung
Reichspraesident-Friedrich-Ebert-Gedenkstaette, Heidelberg.

"Was the Bruening Cabinet 'Presidential'?"
William Patch, Grinnell College.

"Die charismatische Ueberhoehung der Praesidialgewalt unter Hindenburg,"
Wolfram Pyta, University of Stuttgart.

Commentator: Dieter K. Buse, Laurentian University

All the presenters sought to reevaluate the extent to which the Office
of the Reich President played a constructive or destructive role in
attempts to stabilize democratic government in the Weimar Republic.

Walter Muehlhausen argued that Friedrich Ebert was "a much stronger
Reich President than previously thought," who sought tenaciously to
build bridges of understanding between workers and the middle class.
This theme was explored in four facets of presidential activity:

1) Coalition formation: Although constitutionally bound to appoint a
chancellor who enjoyed the confidence of the Reichstag, Ebert insisted
on his right to appoint "a man who enjoys my confidence" if the parties
could not agree on a candidate.  After the original Weimar Coalition
lost its parliamentary majority in June 1920, Ebert urged them "for
reasons of state" to broaden that coalition rightward to include the
German People's Party (DVP).  After two years of frustration in this
quest, Ebert seized the initiative in November 1922 by appointing the
business leader Wilhelm Cuno to head a cabinet of experts not bound to
any party.  Cuno proved a poor choice, but in August 1923 the Reichstag
delegations at last decided to support a cabinet of the "Great
Coalition."  The SPD's decision to withdraw from this coalition a few
months later disappointed Ebert deeply.  He nevertheless enjoyed some
success thereafter at employing the threat to repeat the Cuno experiment
to spur the Reichstag delegations into making the compromises necessary
to form coalition governments.

2) Foreign policy: Ebert deduced from his constitutional right to
conclude treaties that he also had a right to be consulted in the
appointment of foreign ministers and ambassadors.  He was outraged in
April 1922 when Chancellor Joseph Wirth concluded the Treaty of Rapallo
with the USSR without any advance warning to him.  Ebert succeeded,
however, at persuading Wirth's successors to accept the principle that
the foreign minister should have a special relationship with the
President.

3) "Guardian of the constitution:"  Ebert made extensive use of his
emergency decree powers under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, not
only to deal with threats of insurrection, but also for economic and
fiscal measures needed to put an end to the hyper-inflation of 1923.
This policy did not have the same anti-parliamentary tendency that it
later developed under President Hindenburg, however, because Ebert
always refused to invoke Article 48 with regard to any matter that was
being considered by the Reichstag.  Ebert employed decree powers only to
stabilize the Weimar Republic, never to undermine it.

4) Public image: Ebert also sought to promote national integration on
the symbolic level.  He lacked "symbolic capital," however, and paid
little attention to efforts to influence the mass media.  Published
photographs almost always depicted him in a dark suit, attending an
official function.  During his entire tenure, he only traveled outside
Berlin thirty times.  He did seek constructively to link the new
republic with the tradition of the revolution of 1848, but his efforts
to promote national unity also led to official recognition for the old
monarchist colors and the old national anthem.  In general, Muehlhausen
concluded, Friedrich Ebert worked skillfully and with great energy to
provide an element of continuity in government policy and to encourage
compromises among the Reichstag delegations.

William Patch noted that most histories of the Weimar Republic declare
that the era of "presidential government" began with the appointment of
Heinrich Bruening as chancellor at the end of March 1930, but he
proposed the formation of the second Bruening cabinet in October 1931 as
a more appropriate starting point.  In 1929 most political observers
agreed that something was wrong with a parliamentary system that had
produced sixteen cabinets in the last decade. Many advocates of a
"Hindenburg cabinet," supported by General Kurt von Schleicher, called
for a dramatic departure from existing constitutional practice, arguing
that Article 48 authorized the President to violate any provision of the
constitution, at least temporarily, and dissolve the Reichstag
indefinitely.  Bruening firmly opposed any such experiment, however.
With his appointment, Hindenburg in effect endorsed a more modest
program developed in 1929 by Gustav Stresemann and Eugen Schiffer, who
argued that the President should simply become more active in
discouraging efforts to topple a chancellor who pursued a well balanced
program.  Hindenburg, they argued, had been far too passive during his
first years in office; he should become involved in the effort to choose
a truly capable chancellor and then seek to persuade public opinion that
the chancellor was defending the common good against the selfish special
interests.  Bruening certainly did not launch an offensive against
"parliamentarism" when he took office; he retained nine of twelve
ministers from the Great Coalition, added three moderately conservative
members of parliament, and sought for three months to secure a
parliamentary majority for what was basically the same budget written
under the previous, Social Democratic chancellor.  Even after Bruening
felt compelled to invoke Article 48 to pass fiscal and budgetary
measures by emergency decree, he adhered (with one major exception in
July 1930) to the rule that the contents of such decrees must be cleared
with leaders of the SPD in advance to make sure that they were
acceptable to a Reichstag majority.  Under the first Bruening cabinet,
presidential emergency decrees functioned primarily as a political alibi
for party leaders who privately agreed that the painful austerity
measures proposed by the cabinet were unavoidable, but did not want to
accept direct responsibility for them.  The President played
surprisingly little role in formulating policy.

This style of government changed dramatically after 1 August 1931, when
Hindenburg received the reactionary leader of the Nationalist People's
Party (DNVP), Alfred Hugenberg, for a cordial audience and then
instructed his chancellor to seek an understanding with Hugenberg.  When
Bruening proved unable to do this, the President demanded that he
dismiss the three most left-leaning members of his cabinet and replace
them with ministers acceptable to the DNVP. This decision was made
entirely on Hindenburg's personal initiative and led to the first
cabinet crisis of the Weimar Republic caused solely by a President's
loss of confidence in his chancellor.  Bruening sought frantically to
recruit prominent rightists for his cabinet, but most of his invitations
were declined because he would not promise any change of policy that
might antagonize the SPD. Hindenburg signaled his displeasure with the
modest results of this cabinet shuffle by refusing to authorize Bruening
to decide whether or not to dissolve the Reichstag.  On 15 October 1931,
the President's chief of staff, Otto Meissner, approached the DNVP
leadership to ask if the Right was united, and who its candidate for
chancellor was.  Satisfactory answers to these questions could not be
obtained until January 1933, but the intent that led to the appointment
of the Hitler-Papen cabinet was already formed.  Thereafter all of
Bruening's initiatives were overshadowed by the need to demonstrate to
Hindenburg that he was not the obstacle to the emergence of a united
"National Front."  Something happened in the summer of 1931 to persuade
Hindenburg for the first time that he must take personal risks and
utilize his powers to the utmost to bring about a change of political
course rightward.  His exact motives remain unclear but were doubtless
related to the Stahlhelm's unsuccessful referendum campaign to topple
the SPD-led state government of Prussia (which climaxed in August 1931),
demands by the Reichslandbund for autarchy, the replacement of Wilhelm
Groener in the President's inner circle by his son and military
adjutant, Oskar von Hindenburg, and perhaps the decision by Ruhr heavy
industry and the DVP to break with Bruening.

Wolfram Pyta noted that many historians are turning their attention away
from the Weimar Republic because it is unlikely that major new
collections of primary sources for this period will be discovered.  He
argued vigorously, however, for the importance of reexamining the known
documentary record with the help of new theoretical models.  He is
writing a biography of Hindenburg that will seek to expand our
understanding of politics with the methods of cultural history.
Hindenburg's political career was culturally anchored in a way that
Ebert's was not.  Already by the end of the year 1914 he displayed great
instinctive skill at exploiting his prestige as the victor of Tannenberg
to disseminate images of himself as a symbol of national unity, and to
stage political events that gave onlookers an experience of national
unity.  To understand his career, we must therefore go beyond the
traditional methods of political history, for example by utilizing the
research of Karl Rohe and Andreas Doerner into German "political
culture," and the techniques of cultural sociology pioneered by Ernst
Cassirer and practiced today by sociologists such as Bernhard Giesen.
Pyta proposed "charismatic leadership" as the appropriate label for
Hindenburg's approach to government, not because he inspired mindless
devotion among the masses, but because he proved so effective at
"emotional communication" with the German people.  Throughout most of
his tenure as President, Hindenburg displayed relatively little interest
in utilizing the powers granted him by the Weimar constitution.  He was
interested instead in "symbolic politics," meaning both the deliberate
fabrication of symbols of national unity and the staging of political
events.  His rapid rise to popularity during the First World War showed
him how deeply the German people yearned for such symbols and events to
compensate for their deep social divisions.  As President he later
became a prisoner to the ideal of national unity, afraid to utilize the
powers of his office in any way that would alienate an important sector
of public opinion. During the year 1932, however, he experienced an ever
sharper contradiction between the charismatic legitimation of his
authority and his constitutional duty.  He proved so reluctant to
campaign for reelection as President because he sensed that this might
jeopardize his symbolic role, and this feeling became much stronger when
so many famous monarchists and heroes of the First World War endorsed
the rival candidacy of Adolf Hitler.  By the end of the year 1932, an
authoritarian "presidential government" based on the army, as advocated
by Schleicher, offered the only alternative to a Nazi seizure of power,
but Hindenburg agonized that such a policy would destroy his mythic
status and historic reputation.  His advisors did not pressure him into
the decision to appoint the Hitler-Papen cabinet; rather, this was the
logical outcome of Hindenburg's preference for symbolic politics over
constitutional duty. Hindenburg had long yearned to transfer political
responsibility to a cabinet of the united Right, and he waited so long
to do so only because the Right was so deeply fractured.  In his mind
the Hitler-Papen cabinet was not "presidential" at all but the only
cabinet with a real opportunity to secure a parliamentary majority.
Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg blundered by assuming that they
could rely on the President to restrain the new chancellor, when in fact
he was determined to withdraw from the political arena.  During the last
months of his life, Hindenburg displayed nothing but satisfaction with
the consequences of this decision, because he had found in Hitler and
Joseph Goebbels disciples who understood how to exploit the link between
the "field marshal" and the "corporal" to create the most effective
political symbolism on behalf of national unity that the world had ever
seen.

In his commentary Dieter Buse, an expert himself on the career of
Friedrich Ebert, argued that Muehlhausen had neglected troubling
questions about Ebert's career.  Why was Ebert so decisive in
suppressing the radical Left in 1918/19 but so cautious thereafter?  Why
did he invoke Article 48 in 1923 to depose the leftist state governments
of Saxony and Thuringia, but not the rightist state government of
Bavaria?  If his goal was to build bridges between workers and the
middle classes, why did he accept the dissolution of the Central
Association of Employers and Employees in 1923 and the abolition of the
eight- hour day?  Ebert was certainly an active President who functioned
effectively in small meetings of leading politicians, but he lacked
popular support and should not really be considered a strong political
figure.  Buse suggested that Ebert had assembled a staff of stridently
nationalistic advisors, from a "liberal imperialist" background, who
exerted an unfortunate influence on his policies. Buse commented that
Patch had offered a detailed and clearly organized paper that raised
interesting questions about the exact definition of "presidential
government."  Should the Cuno cabinet of 1923 be considered
"presidential"? Hindenburg's intentions at the key junctures of his
political career remained unclear, however.  Patch's conclusions also
implied a disagreement with Pyta over the influence of special interests
on Hindenburg and the role of "intrigues" in the presidential palace,
which they should thrash out between them.

Buse found Pyta's search for a new theoretical perspective to understand
Hindenburg's career most intriguing.  Perhaps we should proceed like art
historians, who begin their analysis with the work of art.  Pyta had not
been entirely clear, however, at explaining the nature of the
relationship between Hindenburg and his public.  Would it be possible to
provide specific examples of how they interacted?  What evidence is
there regarding the ways in which Germans interpreted the symbols
offered them by Hindenburg, or the strength of the influence of those
symbols?  What evidence is there for Hindenburg's exact intentions while
fabricating those symbols?

William Patch
Grinnell College


For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2003 German Studies
Association Conference, please visit <http://www.g-s-a.org>.

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS