Schriften des Historischen Kollegs - Kolloquien 6 - Historisches Kolleg

36 Larry Eugene Jones
election of Alfred Hugenberg to the DNVP party chairmanship in October spelled the
defeat of Stresemann's hopes that the Nationalists might eventually be won over to the
support of the Republic 62 . An implacable foe of those special-economic interests
which had dominated German politics ever since the founding of the Weimar Republic,
Hugenberg sought nothing less than to destroy the more moderate bourgeois parties
that stood between his own DNVP and the Social Democrats and to polarize the
German party system into two mutually antagonistic bioes. Only then would it be possible
to free Germany of the Marxist poison that was slowly, but surely sapping her national
vitality63.
Though inspired primarily by a militant anti-Marxism, the nationalist campaign
against the "Weimar System" was also directed against the increasingly prominent role
which organized economic interests had come to play in German political life since
the turn of the century and as such represented a stinging indictment of the German
party system as it had developed during the course of the 1920's. By no means, however,
was this sort of criticism confined to the German Right, for it extended deep into
the ranks of the German liberal parties as weIl. This was particularly apparent in the
case of the DDP, where such prominent party leaders as Erich Koch-Weser, Willy
Hellpach, Hermann Dietrich, Gertrud Bäumer, and Ernst Lemmer were both openly
critical of the way in which the Weimar party system had developed and fearful that
efforts to reform it might gravitate outside the liberal orbit 64 . The Democrats responded
to this situation by cultivating doser relations with the leadership of the
Y oung German Order in hopes that this might lead to the establishment of more
permanent political ties 65 . At the same time they undertook a dramatic step towards
restoring their party's badly decimated social base by unveiling a new economic program
at the DDP's Mannheim party congress in early October 1929. This program addressed
itself to those social groups which had been victimized by the general course
of economic development since the outbreak of World War land sought to provide a
common platform upon which Germany's beleaguered middle dass could unite in defense
of its vital interests against big business and organized labor. Although it contained
little in the way of specific recommendations for the different sectors of the
German middle dass, it dearly tied the DDP to the defense of middle-dass economic
interests and established the social and economic rehabilitation of the German middle
dass as the first priority of state economic pOlicy66.
62 Stresemann to Zapf, Oct. 23, 1928, PA NL Stresemann, 102/174478-80.
63 For Hugenberg's ideological orientation, see Al/red Hugenberg, Klare Front zum Freiheitskampf.
Rede gehalten auf dem 9. Reichsparteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Kassel
am 22. November 1929 (Deutschnationale Flugschrift No. 339, Berlin 1929).
64 Bäumer to Koch-Weser, Oct. 19, 1929, BA NL Koch-Weser, 101/105.
65 Minutes of the DDP managing committee, Jan. 28, 1930, BA R 45 III, 23/1-3. On earlier contacts
between the DDP and the leaders of the "younger generation", see Rheinbaben to Strese-.
mann, Mar. 23, 1929, PA NL Stresemann, 78/169430-35.
66 Gustav Stolper, Die wirtschaftlich-soziale Weltanschauung der Demokratie. Programmrede auf
dem Mannheimer Parteitag der Deutschen Demokratischen Partei am 5. Oktober 1929 (Berlin
1929),4-10.