Schriften des Historischen Kollegs - Kolloquien 6 - Historisches Kolleg

2 Thomas Childers
performance in the last pre-depression Reichstag election in May 1928. In the four
years since the "inflation election" the Nationalist vote had slumped sharply from its
apex of approximately 20 percent to 14 percent, while the NSDAP, Weimar's most
vociferous and radical opponent, attracted less than 3 percent of the vote 2 • FoIlowing
the 1928 campaign, the moderate liberals, the Catholic Zentrum, and the Social
Democrats were able to form a broadly based coalition government that would falter
only after the emergence of renewed economic crisis in 1929-30. On the eve of the
great depression, electoral trends in Germany hardly indicated a radicalization of the
middle dass or a polarization of German political life.
Yet, in spite of these developments that strongly, if superficiaIly suggest a stabilization
of the Weimar political system between 1924 and 1928, the inflation and its aftermath
did exert a profoundly destabilizing influence on German politics. The nature of
that destabilization, however, cannot be effectively examined unless our analysis expands
beyond the immediate impact of the hyperinflation to the difficult and divisive
process of stabilization that foIlowed. IronicaIly, it was the government's policy of
harsh stabilization - not inflation - that dominated the so-caIled "inflation election" in
May 1924 and that continued to shape the contours of partisan political debate on
economics throughout the woefuIly mislabeled "Golden Twenties". Indeed, the manner
in which the Reich government liquidated the inflation would prove as destabilizing
to the Weimar political system as the inflation itself3.
The political impact of the inflation and stabilization crises is, however, not to be
found in a sustained radical reaction at the polIs but rather in a portentous fragmentation
of middle dass electoral loyalties between 1920 and 1928 that gravely und ermined
the stability of the Weimar party system weIl before the onset of the depression
and the rise of the NSDAP. That fragmentation is most vividly reflected in the sudden
emergence and surprisingly strong showing of special interest, single issue, and regional
parties between 1920 and 1928. These parties were, of course, hardly newcomers
to German electoral politics. They had played a marginal role in imperial Germany,
daiming at times as much as 10 percent of the vote 4 • Yet, in the. first post-war elections,
these Interessen- und Landesparteien attracted only a tiny constituency, winning
a mere 1.5 percent of the vote in 1919 and 3.7 percent in the first Reichstag elections a
year later. In 1924, however, these parties, each of which dammored for the support of
some element of the middle-dass electorate, made a substantial leap forward. AI-
2 For details see Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter. The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany
1919-1933, (Chapel Hili 1983) 51-191.
3 This argument is developed more extensively in Thomas Childers, Inflation, Stabilization, and
Political Realignment 1924-1928, in: Gerald D. Feldman, Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, Gerhard A.
Ritter, Peter-Christian Witt (eds.), Die Deutsche Inflation. Eine Zwischenbilanz, (Berlin 1982)
409-43l.
4 A summary of pre-war national election returns is found in Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche
Reich 44 (1925) 388-389. A useful breakdown of national and regional elections in the imperial
period is also found in Gerhard A. Ritter and Merith Niehuss (eds.), Wahlgeschichtliches
Arbeitsbuch. Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs 1871-1918, (Munich 1980).