Germany in the 1920s Germany

Germany in the 1920s

Germany in the teens and into the 1920s suffered from a number of strains. The nation had only recently been unified under national rule, and this was tested with World War I and the loss entailed in that conflict. The way the victors treated a defeated Germany added to the sense of inferiority that many wanted to overcome, contributing to the political will for an assertion of German national rights and for a stronger military presence in Europe.

Seton-Watson cites three general characteristics of national unification: 1) a sort of Messianism transcending the normal pattern of nationalistic rhetoric and arrogance; 2) the laying of claim to territories where others lived, showing little nobility in sparing the treatment of the inhabitants; and 3) a combination of exalted claims and excessive territorial greed brought about disasters on a heroic scale: "The triumph and collapse of the Second and Third Reichs left the lands of German culture divided in three" (Seton-Watson 89). Seton-Watson also notes how the German movement toward unity held center stage for the last half of the nineteenth century and how this movement continued to threaten world peace into the middle of the twentieth century. Before 1860 there were only two great nation-states, Great Britain and France. Spain appeared united on the map, but in truth it was internally divided. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, and the Netherlands were small and peripheral nation-states. The more characteristic shape of European political organization at the time took the form of small states comprising fragments of a nation, and these included the small states found strewn across the middle of Europe, such as Hanover, Baden, Sardinia, Tuscany, or the Two Sicilies; or large sprawling empires made up of all sorts of peoples and ruled from afar by dynasties and bureaucracies, such as the Romanov, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires. Between 1860 and 1870, there would be a change so that since that time, the nation-state has been the predominant form. The development of the consolidated nation-state began with the ferment of the late eighteenth century and such actions as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic domination of Europe. These efforts were frustrated in Germany, Italy, and Central Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century. The development of a nation-state required that there be a people who thought of themselves as a people and not as a collection of human beings who happen to be in the same area. The population must sense that it belongs to a community, that the government is their government, and that outsiders are "foreign." The consolidation of the nation-states meant first the union of pre-existing states, and second the creation of new ties between the government and the governed. Seton-Watson traces the beginnings of the trend toward the formation of a German nation some four or five centuries before it actually occurred, and he notes that such things as the religious wars of the sixteenth century retarded any progress in this direction. After Napoleon, there were 39 states in Germany:

The German Confederation which now replaced the defunct Holy Roman Empire... had no central parliament... All the states were ruled by German governments... There was thus no question of Germans suffering from foreign rule. The problem was not independence but unity. (Seton-Watson 93)

The national identity of Germany developed slowly and in stages. Even after World War I, while Germany had become a republic, the old internal state boundaries were maintained, with considerable powers still devolving to the state governments (Seton-Watson 99).