Schriften des Historischen Kollegs - Kolloquien 6 - Historisches Kolleg

40 Larry Eugene JOIles
one of the numerous splinter parties - or even, for that matter, for ihe German State
Party - remained in doubt 83 .
The emergence of middle-dass splinter parties, liberal appeals for aregeneration
and reform of the German party system, and the dramatic breakthrough of National
, Socialism into the ranks of the German middle dass were all tangible manifestations
of the legitimacy crisis which the Weimar party system experienced in the second half
of the 1920's. The origins of this crisis, however, are to be found in the runaway inflation
of the early 1920's and the circumstances surrounding the stabilization of the
mark in 1923-24. For while the legitimacy of the Weimar party system rested upon
extremely fragile foundations ever since the founding of the Weimar Republic, it is
only after the stabilization of the mark in 1923-24 that doubts regarding its legitimacy
began to penetrate into the ranks of those parties which had always identified themselves
most dosely with it, namely, the German liberal parties. To be sure, the inflation
contributed to this legitimacy crisis in no small measure by inflicting severe economic
hadship upon those social groups which had traditionally supported the German liberal
parties. But in a more immediate sense, it was the combination of the way in
which the mark was stabilized with the antisocial effects of the government's stabilization
program that did so much to undermine public confidence in the ability of those
parties which identified themselves most dosely with the Weimar party system to represent
the vital interests of those who had been hurt by the general course of social
and economic development during the first half of the 1920's. In this respect, the German
liberal parties were compromised both by the way in which they had abdicated
responsibility for the formulation and enactment of the government's stabiliiation
program and by their failure to protect middle-dass economic interests during the inflation
and subsequent stabilization of the mark. This, in turn, directly encouraged the
formation of special-interest parties which were opposed to specific aspects of the government's
stabilization program and whose programmatic statements evinced a latent
antipathy to the German party system as it had developed during the first years of the
Weimar Republic.
If the history of the Weimar Republic during the decade of the 1920's was characterized
by what one historian has identified as "the new primacy of interest politics
and the edipse of ideology"84, then the last years of the Weimar Republic witnessed a
sharp re action against this trend, areaction which sought to reestablish the primacy of
the national and political moment in German public life over the purely economic.
This reaction, which drew much of its impetus from the idealism of the younger generation,
represented an assault upon the legitimacy of the Weimar party system of
even greater consequence than that of the special-interest parties. For just as the stabilization
of the mark in 1923-24 initiated a legitimacy crisis that manifested itself in
the formation of middle-dass splinter parties which placed special economic interests
83 On the NSDAP's electoral breakthrough into the ranks of the German bourgeois parties, see
Thomas Childers, The Social Bases of the National Socialist Vote, in: Journal of Contemporary
History 11 (1976) 17-'42.
84 Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 484.