Weimar Germany- T,U, V

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this Article by Sarah Zama here

 

[Hendryk]

They had been led to believe Germany was winning the war and were shocked when it lost it.

Even worse than rushing their country headlong into a catastrophic war, Germany's officer class bears responsibility for conning the population into believing that the war was being won right up to the moment when the whole military effort collapsed, and then passing the buck for the defeat to a nebulous conspiracy of domestic traitors. Combined with their overt disdain for liberal democracy, this laid the groundwork for revanchist sentiment.

 

[Coiler]

This quote brought back a fond memory of my European history professor explaining multi-party coalition systems to us Anglo-Americans and our FPTP.

The most apparent disunity was the one in the parliament itself. Throughout the republican history, the Reichstag was made up of many small political forces which seem to have a hard time getting along.

His explanation, which I remember clearly to this day, was "Instead of two stupid parties, you had ten stupid parties".

 

[Gary Oswald]

Comparing the Treaty with the Treaty of Versailles that ended the Franco-Prussian war, as a proportion of annual production, the 1919 Treaty was a lot less stringent in terms of reparations than that of 1871.

And certainly the Treaty of Versailles was a lot gentler than the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

By the standards of the time, there was nothing remarkable about the Treaty of Versailles. The whole mythology that has sprung up about it being an onerous treaty comes down to the Powers That Be in Germany wanting to find all sorts of convenient scapegoats.

I'm not remotely an expert on this time period hence taking Sarah's word on it. I know you know more a lot more about this than I do.

From skimming through some websites, Brest-Litovsk saw 6 billion marks agreed to be paid, the Treaty of Frankfurt saw 5 million marks and Versailles saw 132 billion marks agreed. That seems on the surface a significant difference, even though I accept that a) there is inflation, b) the german empire was producing more and c) Brest-Litovsk was much harsher in terms of productive land lost, as was Sevres for instance.

Germany losing Namibia is not the same as Russia losing Ukraine, it meant Russia lost most of it's railroads and industry and so ability to provide money and I think there's no argument to be made that Germany could have paid had Germany wanted to pay.

But it looks like a large amount of money and I think you can recognise the shock of the german people being told a) the war was your fault and b) this much money is owed without ignoring the reasons for that money being asked for (in terms of damage done to french and belgian industry even without anything else) and that Germany would likely have been equally harsh if not harsher has they managed to win.

I think the problem with saying by the standards of the time it was normal, is it ignores how few peace treaties there were at that time. It wasn't that normal for a European country to lose a massive European war, because that hadn't really happened much. I agree that Versailles is a standard result of a European war (and a hell of a lot better than any non European country would have got in that situation, where the result was annexation) but well it was the only major European war in a generation so there isn't much precedent.

Any treaty is going to look and feel very harsh because there'd never really been a war on that scale since 1815.

 

[Ricardolindo]

The biggest problem with the Treaty was the way the reparations were handled. That caused problems for Germany during the Great Depression. They did try to fix it with the Lausanne Conference. However, by then, Bruning had been ousted.

 

[iainbhx]

The biggest problem with the Treaty for the German Government was reparations, the biggest problem for the German people was the loss of territory. For all the talk of self-determination, it only seemed to apply to the victors.

 

[Jared]

Attitude seems to be that self-determination was fine so long as the German people were more determined than any others.

 

[Ricardolindo]

The biggest problem with the Treaty for the German Government was reparations, the biggest problem for the German people was the loss of territory. For all the talk of self-determination, it only seemed to apply to the victors.

Attitude seems to be that self-determination was fine so long as the German people were more determined than any others.

Theoretical self-determination for all peoples would have led to the practical end of it for some peoples, though. Czechoslovakia would have been crushed much earlier than in our timeline if Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland had been allowed to unite.

 

[iainbhx]

Attitude seems to be that self-determination was fine so long as the German people were more determined than any others.

There’s certainly an element of that and some of the plebscites were a bit dodgy and the Germans wouldn’t have got much more anyway - being hampered by Stadt/Land differences. But the butthurt would have been a lot less.