Germany Rises - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 118

weapons at the ready. All through Germany, royal rulers vacated their thrones. Kings, grand
dukes, and dukes surrendered power. The kaiser was the last to go, claiming that although
no longer kaiser (emperor), he was still King of Prussia. When the Allies talked about
bringing him to trial as a war criminal, he petitioned the Queen of Holland for asylum and
subsequently took refuge there. [109]
WEIMAR: AN UNCERTAIN DEMOCRACY
War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.
— Karl Von Clausewitz, On War [110]
A democracy, if it is to succeed, needs widespread support that, over time, brings legit-
imacy, usually defined as widespread loyalty to the regime. At any given time, leaders of
the government can be rejected, and the party in power can be viewed as immoral and un-
worthy. But even so, the system of government (the regime) is deemed worthy of loyalty
and support. Alas, for the Weimar Republic, its legitimacy was called into question at the
outset.
Even before the end of fighting—the Armistice was November 11, 1918—German
military leaders, unwilling to accept responsibility for defeat, claimed that the country had
been betrayed. It had been stabbed in the back by enemies within—a conspiracy of so-
cialists, Communists, pacifists, alien influences, and those with insufficient patriotism. Be-
lief in the conspiracy was widely accepted, and the violence in German cities at war's end
somehow gave greater credence to the conspiracy. Thus, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933)
was built on shaky foundations.
The moderate socialist leaders who had assumed office in the fall of 1918 confronted a
nation already under almost unendurable stress due to the external defeat and internal
dissension….they decided, once in power, to preserve what remained of the exist-
ing social and economic order. Thus, they took it on themselves the thankless task
of liquidating the bankrupt …empire, accepting, on the one hand, the peace set-
tlement…and on the other, the odium of crushing… the radical movement which
threatened to engulf Germany in a Communist revolution… [Russian style]. [111]
CRISIS YEARS
Weimar was a republic in constant crisis. In March 1920 an anti-republican military force
marched on Berlin as a fearful government fled first to Dresden, then to Stuttgart. A gen-
eral strike in support of the government followed as “The workers left en masse. Life in