The collapse of the Weimar Republic

The collapse of the Weimar Republic

1) Explain why the Weimar Republic collapsed.

1) In January 1919, the German voters, elected a national

assembly to write a constitution. The assembly met in Weimar, and in

August 1919, the constitution established a democratic republic known

as the Weimar Republic. It provided for a parliament of two houses ;

the Reichstag and the Reichsrat, and a president elected by the

people. The chancellor and the cabinet members were appointed by the

president, but they could be removed from office by the Reichstag.

However, the Weimar Republic, like many new parliaments, was weak from

the start and was faced with a lot of problems which by the end caused

its failure.

Firstly, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were harsher than the

Germans had thought. They were not expecting to be treated badly as

they expected the treaty to follow the same lines as Woodrow Wilson’s

fourteen points. Some of the clauses in the treaty included, the

infamous War Guilt clause, the Reparations clause and the cutting down

of Germany’s army to such a small number that it could hardly police

itself. The German Navy scuttled their ships at Scapa Flow in protest.

The whole of Germany felt betrayed by the allies and by their own

politicians. Those who had signed the armistice were now dubbed the

November Criminals who had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’.

Secondly, the parliamentary system laid down in the new Weimar

constitution had weaknesses. The most serious of them was that as it

was a democracy, a system of proportional representation was

introduced so that all political groups would have a fair

representation. Unfortunately, there were so many different groups

that no party could ever win over a majority; this resulted inevitably

to serious successions of coalition governments. The other weakness

concerned the political parties which had very little experience of

how to govern a democratic parliamentary system. This led to

disagreements and every party organized its own private army