Schriften des Historischen Kollegs - Kolloquien 6 - Historisches Kolleg

In the Shadow of Stabilization: Gennan Liberalism 31
in the process 38 • Just as thespecial-interest parties had implicicly challenged the legitimacy
of a party system which failed to protect the German middle dass against the
power of big business and organized labor, so were Stresemann and other liberal leaders
beginning to question the legitimacy of a party system whose very fragmentation
had made it difficult for the Reichstag to define and articulate the national interest.
While this represented a dramatic intensification of the legitimacy crisis which had
plagued the Weimar party system ever since the stabilization of the mark in the winter
of 1923-24, it also established a dose connection between the survival of Germany's
parliamentary institutions and the revival of Germany's liberal parties.
Between 1924 and 1928 the German liberal parties made a determined effort to recapture
the middle-dass support which they had lost either during the inflation or in
the aftermath of stabilization. Much of this involved a more direct and explicit appeal
to middle-dass economic interests. In 1925, for example, the DDP and DVP tried to
gain the support of those small savers and pensioners who had been dispossessed by
the inflation by supporting their demands for arevision of the revaluation provisions
of the Third Emergency Tax Decree 39 • By the same token, the two liberal parties readily
supported efforts to reform Germany's civil service salary structure so as to rectify
inequities resulting from the manner in which the mark had been stabilized 40 • What
distinguished these efforts from those of the special-interest parties was the fact that
the two liberal parties still conceived of themselves as Gesamtinteressenparteien, that is,
as parties which sought to represent the German nation in all of its sociological heterogeneity
and therefore refused to give primacy to the interests of any particular social
group. This was particularly true of the DDP, whose efforts to attract middle-dass support
on the basis of economic self-interest were consistently undercut by the party's
conception of itself as aVerfassungspartei whose primary responsibility was to defend
the integrity of the Weimar Constitution. Yet it was precisely this sort of ideological
ambiguity that left the DDP - and to a lesser extent the DVP - so vulnerable to the
agitation of special-interest parties which like the WP and VRP sought to mobilize
specific sectors of the German middle dass by promising them more effective representation
than either of the two liberal parties were capable of providing 41 •
38 Gustav Stresemann, Die Gegenwartsaufgaben des nationalen Liberalismus, in: Deutsche Stimmen
38/23 (Dec. 5, 1926) 553-58.
39 For the DDP's position, see Hermann Dietrich, Aufwertung und Deutsche Demokratische
Partei. Der Wahlschwindel der Deutschnationalen. Rede gehalten im Deutschen Reichstag am 8.
Mai 1925 (Berlin, n.d. [1925]). For the DVP's position, see the speech by Hans Wunderlich at the
DVP's Dortmund party congress, Nov. 13, 1924, BA R 45 11, 29/191-99, as weH as his article,
Aufwertung und Fürstenauseinandersetzung, in: Deutscher Aufbau. Nationalliberale Arbeit der
Deutschen Volkspartei, ed. Adolf Kempkes (Berlin 1927) 192-202.
40 For the DDP's position, see the proceeedings of the DDP's civil service congress in Dresden,
June 13-15, 1925, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Nachlaß Erich Koch-Weser (hereafter cited as BA NL
Koch-Weser) 90. For the DVP's position, see Albrecht Morath, Beamten, in: Deutscher Aufbau,
ed. Kempkes, 243-50.
41 On the dilemma in which the DDP found itself, see the revealing analysis by Werner Schneider,
Die Deutsche Demokratische Partei in der Weimarer Republik 1924-1930, (München 1978) 46-
57.