Weimar Republic founded

In early 1919 Germany's newly elected National Assembly met in Weimar, a small city in Thuringia best known as the home of Goethe and Schiller. Berlin was too dangerous: street fighting between revolutionaries and soldiers had broken out in the capital. The Assembly chose Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, as the first president and adopted a constitution that took effect in August 1919. The state it created, a parliamentary democracy, is known to history as the Weimar Republic after the town where it was written.¹²

The republic grew out of defeat. After four years of World War I, sailors mutinied, workers rose, and on November 9, 1918 the Kaiser abdicated and a republic was proclaimed from a window of the Reichstag. Ebert's provisional government restored order by allying with the army and with volunteer Freikorps units, which crushed the left-wing Spartacist uprising in January 1919. The Assembly was elected on January 19, 1919, in Germany's first national vote open to women. Then the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June, imposed territorial losses, limits on the army and reparations. Many Germans blamed the new democrats for a peace that the old regime's generals had made unavoidable.²

The constitution guaranteed civil rights, used proportional representation, and gave a directly elected president strong emergency powers under Article 48. Proportional voting produced many small parties and fragile coalitions. The republic survived a rough first decade: the 1923 Ruhr occupation, hyperinflation and the Beer Hall Putsch, then a calmer middle period under the statesman Gustav Stresemann. The Great Depression after 1929 sent unemployment soaring, voters moved toward extremes, and presidents began ruling by decree. Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, and the Enabling Act of March 1933 ended the democratic system in practice.¹²