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The defeat of the "reasonable republican" saved the republic in 1923

It was the acknowledgment of total defeat: On September 26, 1923, the Reich government under Gustav Stresemann announced the far-reaching decision, which was unavoidable for economic reasons, to break off passive resistance to the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr area.

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The defeat of the "reasonable republican" saved the republic in 1923

It was the acknowledgment of total defeat: On September 26, 1923, the Reich government under Gustav Stresemann announced the far-reaching decision, which was unavoidable for economic reasons, to break off passive resistance to the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr area.

On January 13, 1923, Stresemann's predecessor at Wilhelmstraße 77, Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno, called for the foreign troops, who had marched in on January 11, to refuse any cooperation. As a result, people everywhere in the occupied Ruhr area and in the regions on the left bank of the Rhine in Germany went on strike.

From then on, civil servants, employees and workers refused the orders of the occupation officers, railway workers drove their trains into unoccupied areas and parked them there, street signs and signposts were unscrewed. As a result, the French soldiers shut down mines and factories, confiscated public coffers and company assets, and soon expelled particularly recalcitrant Germans from the occupied territory.

The Reich government paid most of the wages to the long-term strikers in the occupied territory. Chancellor Cuno rated the political importance of the dispute, now known as the Ruhrkampf, as higher than the economic consequences. So even more money was printed, which fueled the already rampant inflation enormously.

After 256 days, the new Reich government under Stresemann had to acknowledge that the economic consequences far outweighed the political success. “Not a single vote for passive resistance. The public will come to terms with it,” summarized the chancellor as a result of the discussion in the Reich Chancellery on the evening of September 25. On the other hand, the ministers discussed the details of the proclamation at the end of the Ruhr struggle for a long time, sometimes with excitement.

Stresemann, born in 1878 into a lower middle-class milieu (his father was an innkeeper and beer dealer), had started a political career as a lobbyist after attending high school in 1901, initially for the Association of Chocolate Manufacturers. In 1907, at the age of 29, he moved into the Reichstag alongside his work as an association functionary. From then on he was a professional politician.

Politically, Stresemann belonged to the National Liberals, which together with the Progressive People's Party formed the bourgeois-liberal center of the political spectrum in the German Empire. To their left was the SPD, representing workers, to their right various conservative and reactionary groups. As the only mainstream party, this politically segmented society spanned the Catholic center, which appealed to voters ranging from moderately conservative to Christian working-class—but remained denominational.

During World War I, Stresemann initially supported the Reich government's war aims policy, but began to advocate reforms from the end of 1916. Even his biographers Kurt Koszyk and Jonathan Wright were unable to conclusively clarify to what extent this was his honest conviction and to what extent it was just tactics. Maybe it really was both at the same time.

After the end of the war, the left-wing liberals came together in the new German Democratic Party (DDP), while Stresemann founded the German People's Party (DVP) as a legacy of the national liberals. Initially he was skeptical about the new parliamentary democracy, but as early as 1920 he led his party into a governing coalition with the DDP and the centre. "He made his peace with the republic," is how Jonathan Wright describes this development.

In fact, like no one else, Stresemann personified the “reasonable republican” type. He persuaded his party to become state-supporting and to accept cooperation with unloved political competitors like the SPD. When the previous coalition broke up in the course of the enormous economic disruption caused by the Ruhr struggle and inflation in the summer of 1923, Stresemann formed the first grand coalition of DVP, DDP, Center and SPD with the support of Reich President Friedrich Ebert. As Chancellor, he had a majority in the Reichstag for the first time since his predecessor Hermann Müller.

Its main task was to calm the populist upheavals of 1923 with hyperinflation and left and right uprisings in Hamburg, the Ruhr area and Munich. At the beginning of November 1923, the SPD withdrew from the coalition, which from then on, like previous cabinets, only had a minority of MPs on its side.

But Stresemann still fulfilled his task: he had the Reichswehr take action against the left-wing extremist Popular Front governments in Saxony and Thuringia, and he mobilized the state-supporting persistence of army chief Hans von Seeckt against the Hitler putsch. He got inflation under control with the introduction of the Rentenmark as a new means of payment.

On November 30, 1923, the Center politician Wilhelm Marx took office as the new Reich Chancellor; Stresemann became his foreign minister. As the new chief diplomat, he focused on reconciliation with the West, primarily with France. His greatest success was the Locarno Treaty of 1925, which stipulated Germany's return to the international community. Shortly thereafter, the republic was admitted to the League of Nations. In 1926 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his policy of reconciliation.

On the other hand, to the east, mainly towards Poland, Stresemann relied on confrontation with the aim of revising the Versailles Treaty. For this he continued partial cooperation with the Soviet Union, but without enthusiasm. Stresemann was undoubtedly Western-oriented.

Because he wanted to lead the Weimar Republic to success, left and right alike hated him. The NSDAP regularly vilified him as a "fulfillment politician", Goebbels rejoiced at his alleged verbal "execution" in a Reichstag debate.

However, Stresemann's rhetoric appealed to his clientele. He could succinctly summarize complicated issues; populist simplification was alien to him. This is precisely why Hitler liked to attack the respected foreign politician, insulted him in 1928 as a "candidate by the grace of France" and polemicized: "Stresemann gave up the last bit of national sovereignty so that we can finally enter the League of Nations."

In 1929, the always physically ailing Stresemann died at the age of only 51 as a result of a stroke. The state funeral in his honor was the largest pro-democracy rally in the Weimar Republic - shortly before the global economic crisis, which gave left and right-wing extremists a tremendous boost.

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