Weimar Republic the Weimer Republic,

Weimar Republic The Weimer republic, of post-WWI Germany was in many ways doomed to social and political failure, most profoundly because of the economic climate of the period which it encompassed. The climate of the close of WWI was to make an enemy of Germany, and in turn demand economic reparations from a nation that could hardly pay, following a disastrous war and an already post depression economic instability.

A in only a few years those who remember the great inflations that rocked Germany and Austria after the war will also have disappeared. Nothing had prepared people for the uncanny power of the inflation that reached its peak in Germany in 1923.

The ever-faster-swelling stream of money betrayed long-held persuasions, swept away economic livelihoods, and destroyed the trust and confidence of a whole generation." The downfall of the Weimer Republic, at the hands of economic and social devastation was almost set in stone, as the European community, but especially Germany and Austria were searching for a new plan, a revolutionary plan that would bring to an end more than twenty years of economic instability.

This instability fed ideals and standards that sought a rebirth of a mythical good old day, when there was no inflation, no food lines and less unemployment. The situation left the Weimer Republic in a precarious position and left the people of Germany looking for a hero that would alter the course of history. The hero, that they found demonstrated an uncanny ability to develop a long held belief in the idea that social and moral change brought about social, moral and most importantly economic instability.

One of the best examples of this sentiment, i.e. that moral change and depravity brought about moral decline and social and economic unrest can be found within the Weimer Republic Sourcebook. The editorialized words of Hans Oswald, in his treatise called: "A Moral History of Inflation," published in 1931, just before the nation found its revolutionary agent of change, but following many years of economic and social unrest, Oswald speaks to the masses about the depravity of economic hardship. In his treatise, debauchery, sexual demands of women, profiteering, illicit trade...

were all blamed for the inflation that was rampant in post war Germany. Ostwald stresses the development of his time as one of clear social upheaval and blames the symptoms and desperation of economic depravity upon moral failings, including but not limited to sexual indiscretion, the failure of family values and the usury created by desperate economic times.

Yet, he calls to mind the symptoms of economic recovery, stating that the German people were obviously, once again reformed, falling in line with the core morals that they must have just set aside during the serious economic downturn: "Despite the apparent collapse of all the values that has guided human life for centuries, indeed for millennia, they were transformed or newly defined only to a very small extent, with only some of them emended." Germany, was therefore, capable of reform, and to reform the economy, which by all accounts was clearly not in a full recovery at the time of this writing, a fact that will be seen by later editorial examples in this work, the people must embrace a moral code that is better than the one they have recently embraced, in the acceptance of debauchery and moral turpitude.

From this single example, though it comes across as a preachy attempt to moralize something that was far less moral than it was logical one can see how a revolution turned from a demand for economic change to a moral assessment of a whole nation of people.

This assessment by Oswald is pointed out by others who build a case for fear of social unrest as the root of economic depravity: Looking back at the years of inflation the crazy image of a hellish carnival comes to mind: Plunderings and riots,.. painful hunger and wild gluttony, rapid pauperization and sudden enrichment, excessive dancing and horrible misery of children, nude dancing, currency conjurers, hoarding of material assets,.. occultism and psychics -- gambling passion, speculation, a divorce epidemic, emancipation of women, early maturity of youth, Quaker-food kitchen,..

police raids and racketeering, jazz and drugs" (7- 8). For Ostwald the period of inflation marks the time of a radical transvaluation that affected all spheres of society and culture. "Someone who once was rich and could afford all luxuries suddenly had to be happy if caring people gave him a bowl of soup. Little apprentices in banks turned overnight into 'bank directors' with endless supplies of money. Poor foreign pensioners could come to Germany and live on their valuta like princes" (7).

Everything suddenly had turned around, and for Ostwald, whose social codes were rooted in imperial Germany, the sudden transgressions of established gender roles were particularly threatening. 1 He saw family structures falling apart, "an erotic ecstasy jumbling up the world" (ibid.), and women becoming more demanding, especially in erotic matters.

It took only a few people for the ideas of the economic revolution to turn to one of the need for moral change, and the more radical and far reaching the better, as such change might just bring about a more rapid end to the fear that was brought about by the instability of the market and the desperation it caused.

The people of Germany were seeking, from every angle a system that would change the character of the economy, and do so rapidly, so that the economic developments of the post war period would ceases and life would return to some semblance of normalcy. As we all know, this is not what happened, as the period culminated into a period of even greater social unrest, at the hands of the Nazi power which developed into a war that will infamously regenerate its disparate acts for eternity.

Yet, the reasons that Germans were particularly drawn to the idealism of the Nazis and other reformers were logical, they were in a desperate state of social and economic unrest that was very visibly tearing their nation to shreds. Friedrich Kroner's now famous assessment of the contemporary streets of Germany, with its huge stone, monolithic buildings, legacies of the stable past overshadowing enormous crowds of desperate people simply seeking enough food to feed their families' at a reasonable price, "Overwrought Nerves" was written and published in 1923.

The editorial gives a human face to the fear that economic instability creates. The lines have something suggestive about them: the women's glances, their hastily donned kitchen dresses, their careworn, patient faces. The lines always send the same signal: the city, the big stone city will be shopped empty again.

Rice, 80,000 marks a pound yesterday, costs 160,000 marks today, and tomorrow perhaps twice as much; the day after, the man behind the counter will shrug his shoulders, "No more rice." Well then, noodles? "No more noodles." Barley, groats, beans, lentils-always the same buy, buy. The piece of paper, that spanking brand new-bank note, still moist from the printers, paid out today as a weekly wage, shrinks in value on the way to the grocer's shop.

The zero, the multiplying zeros!...They rise with the dollar, hate, desperation, and need...daily emotions like daily rates of exchange....It rises with the dollar, the haste to turn that piece of paper into something one can swallow, something filling The nerves of the masses were frayed as they all stood online, and riots broke out for rice, beans and not to mention the unrealistic appearance of meat.

It took only a few people to begin a rush on products, as they realized that no matter how much money they earned by the time they reached the grocery line the prices of goods would be so inflated that they could hardly afford to buy anything.

In this manner shopping became something one did not put off and if one had the funds to do so they bought all they could, for fear that by the morning they could only afford half as much, the invocation of fear being the impetus for the need to find rapid solution.

Another moving social representation, published as an editorial almost ten years following that of Kroner (1933) but just a few months following Oswald is the essay titled "The Unemployed." In this essay Heinrich Hauser stresses that not much has changed, as Oswald suggests, by his observation of a return to normalcy. An almost unbroken chain of homeless men extends the whole length of the great Hamburg-Berlin highway.

There are so many of then moving in both directions, impelled by the wind or making their way against it, that they could shout a message from Hamburg to Berlin by word of mouth....There was something else that had never been seen before-whole families that had piled all their goods into baby carriages and wheelbarrows that they were pushing along as they plodded forward in dumb despair. It was a whole nation on the march.

I saw them -- and this was the strongest impression that the year 1932 left with me-I saw them gathered into groups of fifty or a hundred men, attacking fields of potatoes.

I saw them digging up potatoes...while the farmer...watched them in despair and the local policeman looked on gloomily from the distance...What did it remind me of? Of the war, of the worst period of starvation in 1917 and 1918, but even then people paid for the potatoes.|...| Hauser does not agree with Ostwald that times are finally returning to normal and in fact has his own moral message about the events of the day, as gangs of many men overtake well intentioned farmers by stealing their crops, without recourse and whole families, rather than just unemployed men roam the streets seeking food and refuge.

The two, living in the same time see things froma very different perspective, and yet both harbor undertones of morality as a breaking point in the culture of the nation. It is also important to mention that Germany was seeking and finding solutions in more than one camp, as it was not just the Nazi's who formed whole platforms of reform on the fears of the populous. One fantastic example of this is from a speech given in 1918 by Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of the communist movement in postwar Germany.

It was typical of the first period of the revolution down to December 24 that the revolution remained exclusively political. Hence the infantile character, the inadequacy, the halfheartedness, and the aimlessness of this revolution. Such was the first stage of a revolutionary transformation whose main objective lies in the economic field, whose main purpose it is to secure a fundamental change in economic conditions...but within the last two or three weeks a number of strikes have broken out quite spontaneously.

Now, I regard it as the very essence of this revolution that strikes will become more and more extensive, until they at last become the focus of the revolution. (Applause) Thus we shall have an economic revolution and.