German Empire/Parties
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Despite being only a flawed parliamentary democracy with a strong, semi-authoritarian political executive and a federal system that heavily favours the largest constituent state, the Kingdom of Prussia, Germany is rich in democratic and partisan tradition and favourable to multi-party politics...
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Despite being only a flawed parliamentary democracy with a strong, semi-authoritarian political executive and a federal system that heavily favours the largest constituent state, the Kingdom of Prussia, Germany is rich in democratic and partisan tradition and favourable to multi-party politics. Many of the established parties have an eventful history dating back to the 1860s and played a pioneering role in European history, a very prominent example being the SPD, the oldest Marxist party on the planet. Since the introduction of parliamentarism and proportional representation in selected urban constituencies the post-war March Reforms, the party spectrum has expanded to include numerous smaller parties, and the major establishment parties have gradually adopted an increasingly populist course that corresponds to the age of modern mass politics.

Since 1920, parliamentary-partisan control over the Reichskanzler and the government has vastly increased. On paper, the Kaiser can still appoint as chancellor whoever he pleases, but in practice, he refrains from doing so, as in case the chancellor he appointed doesn't enjoy at least the toleration of a majority within the Reichstag, the latter can launch a Vote of No Confidence to bring the newly appointed chancellor down. Therefore, Wilhelm would be well-advised to make a sensible choice in accordance with some kind of majority bloc in the parliament. Certain bureaucrats and officials might advise the Emperor in the process of finding a chancellor, naturally, but in most cases, candidates are provided by the political parties. Most of the time, the partisan candidates have "organically grown" into that role, e.g. are in a high-ranking position such as party chairman or leader of the parliamentary faction. However, if the Emperor believes that a certain non-partisan statesman might be a better mediating figure of e.g. a highly diverse coalition government, then there's not much that can realistically be done against the Kaiser's decision.

Germany's multi-party system is quite diverse and enables numerous potential coalitions. The link between most coalitions is usually the Zentrum, which, as a Catholic interest party, stands between right and left and can theoretically form coalitions with both conservative and liberal parties as well as social democrats. The party then often acts as a balancing, deradicalising factor that "tames" more extreme voices within the government. As a Catholic bulwark, the party's election results are comparatively stable, but in recent years the Zentrum's political profile as a permanent part of the government in the so-called March Coalition has been severely eroded

WIP

Left-Wing Parties[]

League of Communists (BK)[]

WIP!!!!

Communist Party of Germany (KPD)[]

WIP

Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD)[]

WIP

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)[]

Description[]

The SPD is Germany's most powerful left-wing party and has been the largest opposition party for decades, apart from a brief period in the late 1910s and early 1920s when it was part of the government under the chancellorships of Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau (1918-1920, 1924-1925), Wilhelm Solf (1920-1922), and Matthias Erzberger (1922). Due to Germany's electoral system, no left-wing party has yet managed to pose an alternative for the working class to the left of the SPD yet; as a result, the Social Democrats are an extremely heterogeneous mass of different currents, from neo-revisionists to the moderate centre to orthodox Marxists, held together primarily by their desire for further social reforms, to finally assume government responsibility on the national stage, and also their simultaneous rejection of the methods of the political system in England and France. Despite being marginalised at the imperial level, the SPD is involved in local governance in several constituent states, for example in Saxony, Baden, Hesse, and various Thuringian states.

Early History[]

Despite being the target of anti-socialist Sammlungspolitik throughout the entire late 19th century and most of the early 20th century, the SPD had become something that could without a doubt be described as a Volkspartei, a people’s party, when the Great War began in 1914. Especially in Baden, Bavaria, and parts of Thuringia, the party cooperated with progressive-minded middle-class parties especially when it came to electoral reform and other pressing matters of the day. During this time, the foundation was laid for a partisan alliance that would, since mid-1917, re-shape German parliamentary politics like barely anything before: The Interfraktioneller Ausschuss (Inter-faction Committee, IFA), a coordinating body of the three majority parties in the Reichstag (SPD, FVP, Zentrum) that backed the liberal course of Reichskanzler Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and paved the way towards parliamentarisation.

The path towards this, however, had been a long and rocky one. During the 1890s and 1900s, the SPD as the eternal opposition party got caught up in the so-called Revisionismusstreit, which escalated at the Dresden Party Conference of 1903. The chief revisionist at the time, Eduard Bernstein, postulated that substantial improvements for the working class could only be achieved within the boundaries of the existing political system: Reform instead of revolution had to be the approach to overcome capitalism. At the time, Bernstein’s ideas were still rejected by a majority of the party, who still suffered from the memories of the repressive Anti-Socialist Laws during the 1880s and wanted to remain loyal to the concept of class struggle.

However, throughout the subsequent years, the “orthodox Marxists” that had opposed the idea in 1903, among them Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, got increasingly sidelined, despite far-reaching events that would have theoretically had the potential to strengthen the leftists, e.g. the General Strikes in Italy, Belgium, and Sweden, the Russian Revolution of 1905, or the Ruhr Miner Strikes of 1905 and 1912. The “Mass Strike Debate”, triggered by the aforementioned incidents, ended in a victory for the party-internal trade union wing, which opposed the general strike as a political tool, fearing that it would result in repercussions that could destroy the hard-earned integration of the working class into German society. The initially ambivalent party leadership around August Bebel would adopt an increasingly Realpolitik-driven agenda after that which was in many aspects synonymous with Bernstein’s reformist thoughts. Especially with the appointment of Reichskanzler Bethmann in 1909, the SPD became more and more entangled in everyday government affairs, and their support for the government became crucial for its survival.

This strategy was further reinforced with the death of Bebel in 1913 and the ascension of Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann to the party leadership's top echelons. Both belonged neither to the revisionist, nor to he leftist wing of the party and generally pursued a quite pragmatic political course to keep the party-internal balance while strengthening the SPD’s integration into mainstream politics. Both of these developments were, however, cut short with the outbreak of the war in 1914.

The Great Divide (1914-1920)[]

Karl Liebknecht (*1871), Rosa Luxemburg (*1871), Hugo Haase (*1863), Philipp Scheidemann (*1865), Friedrich Ebert (1871-1928)

The Weltkrieg put a sudden end to this fragile party-internal balance. Conflicts broke out over the question whether to approve the credits for the government’s war effort in the Reichstag; while the entire SPD faction eventually unanimously voted in favour of these, cracks within the foundation of the party soon appeared. Internal resistance against Ebert’s and Scheidemann’s vision continued to grow, and while some opponents of this course, like Julian Borchardt, outright left the party, others decided to subvert it from within. These included most prominently Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, famous firebrands of the leftist opposition, who would eventually form the extra-parliamentary revolutionary “Gruppe Internationale” (later renamed “Spartacus League”), which at first tried to unsuccessfully gain control over the party to enforce a change of policy, and later went as far to openly propagate a violent revolution against the “broken, imperialist system”.

High-ranking old guard Marxists in the party leadership were concerned about the Spartacists’ actions and tried to seize control of the party-internal opposition, something that only succeeded in parts. They lacked the charisma of their younger colleagues and were not able to rally the masses, but at least managed to become leading figures of the parliamentary opposition within the SPD Reichstag faction. In early 1916, the “Social Democratic Working Group” (SAG) was officially formed as a secession group of the SPD in the Reichstag under the leadership of Hugo Haase, Georg Ledebour and Wilhelm Dittmann. However, a de jure split-up of the entire party had not officially ocurred at that point, only the Reichstag faction was divided.

In the summer of 1916, a party conference of the SPD was called, which painfully demonstrated the internal divide to the outside world. Around 60% of the party remained loyal to the leadership of Ebert and Scheidemann, who justified their continued support for the war with the fact that Germany was fighting against the world’s most powerful bulwark of reaction and oppression, Tsarist Russia. While opposing imperialist war goals, they generally supported the government’s efforts to “liberate” the oppressed people of Eastern Europe, especially the Poles. 40% of the party, mostly gathered around the SAG, spoke themselves out against a further continuation of the war, however. The conference also made apparent the forming rifts within the leftist opposition, as many SAG members were similarly concerned about the increasingly radical actions of the Spartacists.

Ebert and Scheidemann knew that they had to go all-in now, and that compromises would not be able to amend the inevitable split. In October 1916, the editorship of the party organ Vorwärts was taken away from the orthodox Marxists and given into the hands of the so-called “Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch group”, something that went into social democratic history as the “Vorwärts theft”. The aforementioned group was notorious for forming the most radical core of the SPD’s right wing: Anti-revisionist, unlike many other SPD right-wingers, they used the Vorwärts to undermine Ebert’s and Scheidemann’s actions with Marxist argumentation, portraying an Imperial German victory as a major victory for international socialism.

The February Revolution of 1917 damaged the raison d'etre of this argumentation, as one of the social democratic main war justifications, the struggle against Tsarist Russia, had suddenly become invalid. In connection with the large-scale anti-war strikes that broke out in Germany in early 1917, this was the final straw for the SAG. In April 1917, they officially seceded and founded a new party, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). Ebert’s and Scheidemann’s SPD was henceforth known as the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD).

Fearful of a soon-to-come revolution at home, the MSPD realised that it could not remain passive when it wanted to keep the upper hand over its far-left splinter in the long term. During the summer of 1917, the party entered into closer cooperation with the Zentrum and the social liberals, unconditionally supported Erzberger’s famous Reichstag Peace Resolution, and eventually played a leading role during the formation of the previously mentioned IFA. Later, the MSPD massively alleviated tensions with the working class after the 1918 January Strikes, and strongly opposed the Spartacists’ failed insurrection attempt in September 1918. The IFA would act as an increasingly powerful counterweight to the looming OHL dictatorship of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, and exerted high-ranking influence on government policy between 1917 and 1920, to the point where it could essentially decide over the political fate of the Reichskanzler. This slow, indirect parliamentarisation forced the Imperial government to coordinate their reforms with the IFA to not run the risk that the Reichstag majority would turn against them.

The Black-Red-Gold Coalition (1920-1923)[]

Gustav Bauer (*1870), Philipp Scheidemann (*1865), Friedrich Ebert (1871-1928), Robert Schmidt (*1864) In 1920, the MPD left a major footprint on the March Constitution, in spite of the political right preventing the most far-reaching reforms. After that, the party played a leading role during the cabinets of Brockdorff I (1918-1920), Solf (1920-1922), and Erzberger (1922), and staffed high-ranking positions in said cabinets, e.g. the Labour Office under Gustav Bauer, or the Agricultural Secretariat under Robert Schmidt. The social democrats also became a major force in the regional governments of almost all constituent states at the time.

In autumn 1922, a new party program was passed that would go down in history as the “Liegnitz Program”, replacing the Erfurt Program of 1893. Due to being merely a secondary coalition partner in the Solf and Erzberger Cabinets and due to the lack of a strong party apart from the struggling USPD to the left of them, the program did not adopt a fully revisionist agenda, but stayed true to the SPD’s Marxist, proletarian roots, stating that its short-to-medium-term priority is the defence and expansion of the March Reforms, while not fully abandoning the principle of class struggle. Through a democratic system workers can express their interests and defend their rights, and thus their class consciousness will grow. International cooperation is emphasised, military influence in politics is criticised, and demands such as direct taxation and nationalisation of the resources industry are stressed, enabling the party to be flexible and to make fruitful cooperation with the middle-class parties possible while staying true to its roots; a daring balance act between Volkspartei (people's party) and Arbeiterpartei (workers' party).

In the Permanent Opposition (1923-1936)[]

Hermann Müller (*1876), Otto Wels (*1873)

With the fall of Erzberger in late ‘22, the MSPD moved to the opposition again, where it would remain apart from a short-lived participation in the second Brockdorff Cabinet in 1924/25. With pragmatic considerations in mind, MSPD and USPD – the latter of which had been in a constant state of decline ever since the end of the war – eventually decided to reunite in 1923, reinforcing the SPD’s self-perception as a moderate, yet proletarian worker’s party for which the Liegnitz Program had laid the groundwork.

The return of the USPD forced a change of leadership within the SPD. Hermann Müller, representing the party’s centre and a close ally of the late August Bebel, was eventually elected chairman - taking advantage of recent grassroots frustration with the fall of the Erzberger Cabinet and the defeat in the elections of the 1923, he tactically allied with the left wing, while Arthur Crispien of the USPD was elected vice-chairman to mend the party’s split. Müller put forth an oppositionist strategy - though the SPD is open to an alliance with the bourgeois parties and Zentrum, it must assume a leading role in such a government, and as long as this is not fulfilled, it will not cooperate with the governing coalition. Germany is mature enough for a Social Democrat Reichskanzler, the SPD claims, and it is about time for the largest party in Germany to be given an opportunity to rule on the national level. While this strategy was motivational to the party base, who found themselves somewhat betrayed by the promises of the Solf and Erzberger cabinets, it remains controversial with the pragmatic party right.

Despite its isolation at the national level, the SPD is by no means excluded from governing at the local level. Although the party is either marginalised or isolated in numerous states, particularly constructive-pragmatic regional associations in states with a strong working-class presence, such as Saxony, Hesse or the Hanseatic cities, have been involved in their respective state governments for years, sometimes even as minister-presidents.

Factions[]

Due to being the Empire's party with the strongest membership and electoral base, it is only obvious that the SPD is not a monolithic organisation. For years, new factions dominated by younger delegates, who are dissatisfied with chairman's Müller’s passivity, have started to emerge and challenge his moderate leadership.

“Monarchists by Reason”: The Centre[]

Hermann Müller (*1876), Otto Wels (*1873)

The two most influential men in the SPD are Hermann Müller and Otto Wels. Both have a clear division of roles - Müller, more adept in the parliamentary arena, commands the SPD Reichstag parliamentary group and is expected to be the SPD’s chancellor candidate for the the upcoming elections, whereas Wels commands the party executive and manages the internal matters of the party. Müller’s co-chairman Crispien, a remnant from the time of the MSPD'S reunification with the USPD, is mostly powerless. The party centre generally abides by the Austromarxist-influenced economic theories put forward by Rudolf Hilferding, which still believe in the inevitable evolution of capitalism to socialism, but recognise that creation and maintenance of a democratic, pluralist state in which the workers can eventually gain control of the monopolistic efficiency-focused enterprises and socialise them is the best way to achieve socialism.

As such, the party centre accepts the necessity of an all-democratic coalition, but only if the working class assumes a leading role in such a coalition.

The Next Generation: “Hofgeismarers” and “Hanoverians”[]

Otto Grotewohl (*1894), Max Seydewitz (*1892), Carlo Mierendorff (*1897), Kurt Schumacher (*1895)

The fresh blood of the Social Democrats, i.e. leaders and activists born in the 1890s or even later, view politics through an entirely different lens than their older predecessors. Though the SPD survived them, the Anti-Socialist Laws significantly affected the party’s psyche - it discouraged even peaceful struggle for rights and freedoms, and especially any attempt to take power through extralegal means, because of fear that this suppression could always be renewed. The SPD politicians of the “front generation” did not have such qualms - from their perspective, the party had become passive and unable to fight for its interests by any means but the parliamentary arena.

Two influential “circles” arose within the SPD's younger cadres after the war. The Hofgeismar Group, named after the Hesssian town where it first got together, formed in the early 1920s - among its influential leaders were Ernst Niekisch and Theodor Haubach, and they, influenced by Germany’s new Europe-spanning position as well as the sharp break between social democracy and radical socialism, contemplated a socialism within a German national framework. Though short-lived, it gave rise to the neo-revisionist faction within the SPD, associated with young talents such as Carlo Mierendorff and Kurt Schumacher. Neo-revisionism encompasses a wide spectrum between activist social democracy and in rare cases even National Bolshevism, but their common trait is that they do not view the world through Karl Kautsky’s brand of Marxist economic determinism and are open to new ideas about what motivates people for political action. They are practicians, not theorists - and their biggest criticism of the party old guard is that they’ve become too theoretical and do not answer the immediate needs of the people, which makes the masses vulnerable to far-right propaganda. Romania & Russia are only a few examples of states where masses that were not made prosperous through social reform ended up falling behind nationalist dictators.

The “Hofgeismarers” were almost immediately challenged by the Hanover Group, who, in comparison, are orthodox Marxists. They reject the idea of a “nationally-minded socialism” as an attempt to tame the working class, instead pushing for the the creation of a concept they refer to as the “United States of Europe”. The Hanoverians eventually surpassed their pragmatic opponents in the SPD youth, and became a part of the growing SPD Left current. Activist youth, former USPD members, various Marxists, all in a heterogeneous conflux, among which the most notable leaders are Kurt Rosenfeld, Max Seydewitz, and Otto Grotewohl. Siegfried Aufhäuser is a rare trade union leader who is firmly in the SPD left, and Friedrich Stampfer, current editor-in-chief of the party paper Vorwärts, holds sympathies towards them in spite of being aligned to the centre.

Colloquially, both groups are referred to as ”the Young Turks” (Jungtürken) due to their rebellious nature. They may be diametrically opposed, but they have one thing in common - they want the SPD to become more active, to take the fight to the rising conservative reaction and prove themselves to the people with active reform towards democratic socialism.

Subjects First, Socialists Second: Staatspolitiker and Trade Unionists[]

Albert Südekum (*1871), Otto Braun (*1872), Robert Wirth (*1866), Theodor Leipart (*1867)

Flanking the party centre from the right is a colourful array of neo-revisionists, veteran statesmen, “national socialists”, and trade union leaders which have sometimes been colloquially described as the SPD ”Right”. What unites them is their approach to the socialist movement’s role - little interest in even the farthest revolutionary dreams or state takeover, but rather pragmatic collaboration with the other democratic parties and, in certain instances, even the right in order to push forward gradual reform and improve the conditions of the workers.

The key ideologue of the Staatspolitiker wing, Albert Südekum, defined their vision already before the Weltkrieg - an uncompromising loyalty towards the Empire in order to hastily integrate the SPD into mainstream politics, and an alliance with reform-minded bourgeois parties under a reformist, but not necessarily Social Democratic Reichskanzler who will be able to advance democratic reforms. This clashes directly with the positions of Müller and the centrists, but the Staatspolitiker point to examples of fruitful pan-democratic cooperation on the state level, where especially social democratic rightists prevail. Robert Wirth, the current Minister-President of Saxony, is technically the SPD member with the highest political position in the empire, while Otto Braun and Carl Severing fruitfully cooperate with the other democratic parties in the Prussian House of Representatives.

Equally important to the pragmatist wing are the Free Trade Unions, the gigantic network of unions allied with the SPD which, after the Weltkrieg, unified into the ADGB, now led by Theodor Leipart. The history of the socialist trade union movement in Germany is fundamentally different from France - as in the former, the unions have always been closely connected to the SPD and have long dismissed the possibility of using worker strikes for political gains. The aforementioned lasting memory of the Anti-Socialist Laws was one of the reasons why - the real fear that an aggressive socialist movement would simply be destroyed - but also the increasing bureaucratisation of the unions. The ADGB is not merely a bargaining machine - it intends to become a worker’s social environment, offering insurance, community, and even education. Though important in maintaining class consciousness, it also instils complacency among many workers - to the point where the German far-left has long abandoned the idea of achieving “revolution through the unions” as in France, as the unions have become hopelessly reformist.

Certain members of the “rightist” wing have endorsed Kurt von Schleicher for Reichskanzler, to the dismay of the party centre - among the most famous names behind this initiative are August Winnig, Gustav Noske, and Leipart himself. From their point of view, it appears improbable that the SPD would ever receive the Reichskanzler office as long as Wilhelm II and his son live - so, even modest gains for the workers under an economically progressive Reichskanzler with SPD participation are preferable. Of course, it should also be stated that their own loyalty to social democratic ideology is fleeting - the Syndicalist revolutions and Germany’s victory in the Weltkrieg, awakening latent nationalist feelings, shook the perspectives of a lot of politicians within the SPD right and the trade unions. As Lothar Erdmann, another influential trade unionist who has endorsed Schleicher, states, "even if the trade unions have to give up many things that represented their historical nature, they do not need to change their motto 'Through socialism to the nation' if the national revolution follows its will for socialism with socialist deeds".

Liberal Parties[]

Liberal People's Party (LVP)[]

Description[]

By 1936, the LVP is essentially the only remaining representation of moderate liberal thought in German mainstream politics. Although the dream of so many liberal visionaries, namely the unification of the social-liberal FVP and the national-liberal NLP, was realised just over half a decade ago after countless efforts, dark clouds have already begun to emerge over the young party. Increasing political polarisation and radicalisation threaten to slowly but surely push away the moderate parties of the political centre. The fact that the Liberals have discredited themselves through their involvement in numerous unpopular governments in recent years does not make matters any better, and a looming internal power struggle between right- and left-wing Liberals could pose major challenges for the party.

Early Unification Attempts (1920-1924)[]

Friedrich von Payer (1847-1931), Eugen Schiffer (*1860), Friedrich Meinecke (*1862), Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929)

The path towards the unification of German liberalism was a long and rocky one; only half a century ago, a united liberal party would probably have been described as a political chimaera by many. However, times have changed, and compromises have been made in the meantime. Already during the early 1920s, members of the right wing of the social liberal Progressive People’s Party (FVP) and the left wing of the national liberal National Liberal Party (NLP) had initiated talks about a potential fusion. The rightist FVPers were sceptical about long-time cooperation with the SPD and preferred the establishment of a large liberal bloc party that would enter into a coalition with Zentrum and the conservatives. This vision had long been supported by the pragmatic chairman of the NLP, Gustav Stresemann, but negotiations broke down in 1922/23 after the disastrous collapse of the Erzberger administration, which led to the appointment of the conservative Posadowsky government which the NLP would become an integral part of.

The FVP, at that time under the lead of the moderate faction around Friedrich von Payer, remained reluctant about cooperation with the NLP and especially the DkP and FKRP due to their annexationist far-right rhetoric during the war, therefore deciding against participation in the cabinet - a decision that would temporarily widen the gap between FPV and NLP again. The proponents of liberal unification however would not remain silent.

The loudest voices in favour of the ambitious project were the national-liberal economist Eugen Schiffer and the prominent German historian Friedrich Meinecke, who maintained loose ties to the FVP. They would eventually go on to form the so-called “Liberale Vereinigung” (“Liberal Union”, LVg) in 1924, a loose organisation for inter-liberal exchange. The LVg was recognised and to a certain degree supported by the NLP leadership, but cooperation was nonetheless reluctant as Stresemann deemed liberal unification not as necessary anymore as he had during the early 20s as his party could rely on cooperation with the conservatives for now. The FVP on the other hand rejected any kind of cooperation with this group from the beginning, defaming it as a “useless [...] springboard of the national liberal cause”. Only a few FVP old guards like Otto Fischbeck, Julius Kopsch and Hermann Pachnicke could be convinced to join, but they didn’t perceive the LVg as a new party, but as a mere forum to propagate common liberal goals.

Cautious Rapprochement (1924-1929)[]

Georg Gothein (*1857), Wilhelm Kahl (1849-1932), Gustav Streseman (1878-1929)

After the humiliating Stresemann Crisis of autumn 1924, the Posadowsky Cabinet collapsed and was replaced by the big-tent Brockdorff Cabinet in the aftermath of a snap election in which the NLP had suffered considerable losses. While the party still remained part of the government, which now also included the FVP under its new pragmatic leader Georg Gothein, Stresemann had been massively discredited and withdrew to the background, despite keeping the position of party chairman. The weakened situation of the NLP made many national liberals worry about the future of their party, especially as the FVP had become the dominant liberal party within Brockdorff’s March Coalition again. Thus, many became more open towards the concept of inter-liberal cooperation again.

In spring 1925, prominent high-ranking national liberals attended a public meeting of the LVg, among them most prominently Wilhelm Kahl, an old icon of German liberalism respected both by the FVP and NLP alike. At the meeting, official guidelines for a potential future liberal fusion were drafted, and a working group for all kinds of liberal-minded public figures was set up. This time, Stresemann provided his official backing for the project in an effort to save his reputation at least within the pragmatic wing of the NLP that had long pushed for a more Realpolitik-driven policy in regard to the social liberals. The efforts of the LVg were indirectly supported by Chancellor Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, a non-partisan liberal.

Throughout the subsequent years, ties between both parties grew closer due to their continued cooperation within the government coalitions of Brockdorff and Marx, but the final step towards unification was postponed again and again due to subliminal resistance in both parties; within the FVP on the left wing, and within the FVP on the right wing. This would change during the late 20s, when far-reaching political developments shook German politics. The unification of DkP and FKRP a few months before the 1929 elections heralded a new era within the German conservative movement, as the newly united conservative unity party embarked onto a more reformist course to appeal to a broader electorate. Similar, potentially even more far-reaching events took place within the DVLP with the ascendance of the national revolutionary Ulrich von Hassell to the party chairmanship in mid-1929. The liberals realised that a quick and uncomplicated fusion and party reform was more urgently needed than ever before, and for the first time in their history, serious efforts to unite the two parties were initiated during the late summer of 1929.

In September, after lengthy negotiations at a joint party conference in Mannheim, the unification finally happened. To a large degree, the worsening situation of Stresemann had played into this; plagued by his deteriorating terminal illness and the growing opposition of the right wing of his party, Stresemann had begun to pull out all the stops to save face and his political legacy by uniting the national liberal Hauptverein (“main association”) with the FVP in an effort to achieve his vision of a broad liberal “middle party” before it would be too late. Merely a few weeks later, he would succumb to a stroke, and thus never got the chance to play a leading role in the party. The first two chairmen of the newly united liberal party, the Liberal People’s Party (LVP), would become Georg Gothein of the FVP and Wilhelm Kahl of the NLP.

A failed Strategy? (1929-1936)[]

Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff (*1862), Hjalmar Schacht (*1877), Erich Koch (*1875), Julius Curtius (*1877)

Directly after its foundation, the LVP was in for a rough start, as the powerful right-wing of the NLP refused to follow the orders of their chairman; instead, they would go on to maintain the rump NLP as a competitor party to the LVP. Heavily dominated by the heavy industry, the remnants of the national liberals preferred a clearly anti-Marxist, pro-far right Sammlungspolitik right-wing liberal party. At least vast swathes of the formerly NLP-aligned chemical industry could be swayed to support the LVP, however.

With NLP and FVP secretaries of state in the Marx Cabinet (1928-1931) now united under one party banner, the liberals were able to form a stronger front for their interests against the particularist Conservatives, both of the Catholic and the Protestant kind, with whom they shared the cabinet. In the long-term, this would cause subliminal tensions, which would fully escalate in late spring of 1931. In connection with the worsening of the economic situation after the Austrian Creditanstalt Crisis, many-Zentrum and DkP-dominated constituent states opposed the liberal plans for the 1931 budget and, and got their representatives to block it in the Bundesrat. Subsequently, by summer, the Marx Cabinet had gotten into an impasse, and voices in favour of a re-election grew louder to settle the budgetary conflict via the hard way. Eventually, the Kaiser gave in and announced the dissolution of the Reichstag and new elections.

The subsequent Reichstag Elections of August 1931, the LVP ran as one united party for the first time.

WIP

German Economic Party (WP)[]

The WP (Wirtschaftspartei) was founded in the dire times of the early post-war era by representatives of the conservative or liberal German middle class that were sceptical of both the NLP (due to their affiliation with the monopolist industry), the two conservative parties (due to their fixation on rural interests), the FVP (due to their progressive agenda and the many high-ranking jews in its leadership) and the DVLP (due to their extreme nationalism). The uncontested leading figure within the party since the beginning remains Hermann Drewitz, a baker from Berlin & long-time chairman since the foundation of the party. The backbone of the party form mainly artisans, house owners, retailers & other members of the petite bourgeoisie, which gives the WP considerable influence in urban centres, especially on the municipal level & mostly in Prussia and Saxony. The WP developed from various local middle class organisations that sprung up approximately around 1920; originally FVP-aligned, the ruling SPD-FVP-Zentrum coalition alienated many representatives of these local associations and drove them to separate themselves, eventually.

National Liberal Party (NLP)[]

Description[]

In 1936, the old NLP is a travesty of its proud former self. Since the formation of the LVP in 1929, the party is run as a mere rump organisation by the far-right industrialist wing, known colloquially as the Nationalkapitalisten (“National Capitalists”). These elitist radicals want to put an end to the in their eyes long-failed concept of parliamentarism, and are part of a broader scheme of reactionary far-right Sammlungspolitik that hopes to eventually enforce a return to the pre-1920 system. With barely any parliamentary presence, their political influence is limited, making them heavily dependent on the rising German Fatherland Party - within Western German heavy industry circles however, they are a force to be reckoned with.

An eventful history (1871-1920)[]

Ernst Bassermann (1854-1917), Eugen Schiffer (1851-1920), Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929)

The once mighty and omnipresent National Liberal Party, or rather what is still left of it, has fallen deeper than any other German party during the last few years. Many decades ago Bismarck’s most important base of parliamentary support, the NLP’s influence began to drastically wane after the Iron Chancellor made his “conservative turn” in the early 1880s. To maintain their former power, the party’s leaders decided for close cooperation with the German Conservative Party & Free Conservative Party, a pact known as the Kartellparteien (Cartel Parties), however, after the dismissal of Bismarck, conflicts within this informal “coalition” and devastating results in the elections of 1890, 1893 and 1898, these ties were soon severed.

Throughout the heydey of the Wilhelmine Period, the national liberals more and more turned into an interest party of high finance, industry, and the wealthy bourgeoisie and became a main pillar for the Empire’s imperialist and militarist foreign policy; many voters, members and leaders of the NLP had close ties to the German Colonial Society, the Pan-German League and the Navy League. Domestically however, the party slowly became more open towards the progressive reform attempts proposed by the social liberals. Especially in Southern Germany, Saxony and Silesia, the national liberals had many rather left-leaning deputies, and under the more or less shared leadership of Ernst Bassermann & Gustav Stresemann from the turn of the century onward, the official political agenda of the NLP could officially be described as “reform within, power demonstration abroad”.

During the Weltkrieg, the NLP surprisingly didn’t have much influence in a Reichstag dominated by the centre-left, despite Reichskanzler Bethmann Hollweg’s generally national liberal personal ideology. The Reichstag Peace Resolution initiated by the majority parties and the foundation of the DVLP in 1917 turned out to be an enormous blow for the party, as it slowly began to unveil the ideological cracks that had begun to form over the course of the preceding years. While the left-leaning wing was in favour of domestic reform and supported the progressive agenda of SPD, Zentrum & FVP to a certain degree, the heavily nationalist right-leaning wing refused cooperation of any kind with the “traitors around Scheidemann and Erzberger”, instead pushing for close cooperation with the newly formed far-right catch-all party, which aimed for the complete unification of the German right under the proud banner of Admiral Tirpitz. The death of Bassermann in the same year only worsened the party-internal conflict.

Ultimately, the internal turmoil of the wartime era could be weathered thanks to the adept guidance of Gustav Stresemann; a pragmatic and intelligent schemer, he managed to find a compromise with a majority of both factions, and was able to present the party more united and stronger to the outside world than it actually was at the time. Stresemann played a decisive role in the events that led to Ludendorff’s dismissal in early 1920 and the subsequent political liberalisation process, and national liberal foreign-political demands became a core part of Reichskanzler Brockdorff-Rantzau’s agenda at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. Nonetheless, the party did not join the first democratic post-war cabinet under chancellor Wilhelm Solf and was confined to the opposition, and Stresemann’s firm grip led to the secession of the influential Pan-German wing and several minor left-leaning deputies - general party unity however had been preserved for the moment.

Slow and painful decline (1920-1929)[]

Despite Stresemann’s role in the drafting of the March Constitution, the March 1920 Reichstag elections had ended in a minor, but annoying defeat for the NLP, as they remained notorious among the common people as “annexationist, imperialist war prolongers” due to the prominence of the Pan-German wing during the war. Stresemann therefore tried to set up a new political concept for his party, something more suitable for the young parliamentary era. The end goal of his ideas would have been the formation of a powerful middle-class bloc party on a national-democratic foundation with a pragmatic course towards both the left and the right to make all potential coalition constellations possible. However, these plans were merely wishful thinking; the party never managed to entirely leave the elitist rightist-aligned ivory tower, instead slowly becoming a de facto satellite of the conservatives and the heavy industry, a main reason for its eventual downfall. In 1923, the golden hour of the NLP had ostensibly finally arrived. The disgraceful fall of the Erzberger cabinet led to the appointment of the conservative Count Posadowsky as Reichskanzler, who decided to form a government with NLP participation in which Stresemann became Foreign Secretary. This sudden reemergence from the shadows of the opposition, however, threatened to go to the national liberals’ heads, and it shattered their own concept of a strong party of the middle as they had firmly moved into the sphere of the political right, making cooperation with the more left-leaning moderate parties like the FVP increasingly difficult. Fusion attempts between the NLP and the right wing of the FVP were put on ice for the time being, and many members of the NLP’s left-wing, among them prominent figures like Erich Koch and Hartmann von Richthofen, even decided to outright leave the party for the FVP.

During the short but eventful Posadowsky Era, the NLP had a great influence on Germany’s far-reaching shift in foreign politics, contributing a lot to Germany’s surprising intervention into the Rif War in late 1923; a more affirmative stance towards the French; and the foundation of the Mitteleuropa bloc. While the Mitteleuropa concept originally had its roots in social-liberal thought, the version realised under Posadowsky was heavily altered by conservative and also national liberal ideas; influential theoreticians close to the NLP like Arthur Dix had enormous influence on the final result.

This new foreign-political strategy, however, would ironically eventually lead to the end of the NLP’s political prominence, or at the very least the career of Stresemann for the time being; the Stresemann Crisis of September 1924, triggered after a controversial statement of the foreign secretary in which argued for a direct military intervention into the British Civil War which caused enormous public backlash, led to the resignation of the Posadowsky Cabinet a few weeks later and reduced the NLP to a minor background role again. While the party didn’t move to the opposition and remained a part of the new Brockdorff cabinet (a broad moderate coalition known as “March Coalition”), the FVP had now risen to the position of the most powerful liberal party again, and Stresemann was highly discredited not only among the population, but also within his own party.

Due to a lack of charismatic alternatives, Stresemann would remain party chairman for the next few years, but his position was increasingly being contested and undermined by radicals within. A large clique of deputies affiliated with heavy industry moguls in Westphalia and the Rhineland tried to get rid of the disgraced chairman at every given opportunity, something that was favoured by the gradual deterioration of Stresemann’s medical condition. At times, even the NLP’s own Reichstag faction took an opposing stance against Stresemann, who outright began to consider a resignation and even a withdrawal from political life during the mid-20s.

This, however, never happened, and Stresemann was able to save face until his early death in late 1929 - mostly due to his eventually fruit-bearing efforts to unite his party with the FVP to realise his political vision of a strong liberal “middle party”. When FVP and NLP finally officially merged to form the Liberale Volkspartei after lengthy negotiations in September 1929, mere weeks before Stresemann’s death, he proved his own determination for the last time by not conceding to the demands to the comparably small, but extremely powerful faction of his party-internal opponents, and thus managed to somehow redeem his tragic political fate in the last moment of his life.

“National Capitalist” Resistance (1929-1936)[]

Otto Hugo, Karl Jarres, Eduard Dingeldey, Paul Silverberg

Nevertheless, the foundation of the LVP did not effectively lead to the official and complete unity of German liberalism. While Stresemann did transfer the so-called Hauptverein (“main association”) of the National Liberals to the new party, numerous right-wingers opposed this decision for ideological reasons and recognised the merger as illegitimate. The National Liberal Party therefore never ceased to exist de jure and de facto, but nowadays has been mostly reduced to a more and more irrelevant rump party without any real parliamentary influence. During the last few years, the political wing of the party has gotten under the control of interchangeable right-wingers like Eduard Dingeldey and pursues an only vaguely defined concept of staunchly anti-socialist and anti-progressive national liberalism that has not been able to attract the broad masses.

In reality, the rump NLP has nothing to do with classical liberalism or even national liberalism anymore and drifted to the political extreme years ago. In many respects it strongly resembles the conservatives, in some even the Fatherland Party. The antiquated perception of society and leadership that is propagated by the old German elite of heavy industrialists and junkers forms a core part of the party's ideology; numerous cross-connections exist with economic policy functionaries of the DkP such as Tilo von Wilmowsky. NLP members with direct ties to the Westphalian industry like Otto Hugo or Paul Silverberg have long argued for a complete fusion with the rightist parties, but the long and proud tradition of the party has prevented its leaders from such measures until now.

The dominance of industrial lobby functionaries in the NLP’s party leadership has gotten the national liberals the scornful nickname “national capitalists” by its opponents, a term ironically originally coined by a now ex-NLP member himself. A few weeks before the merger of the national liberal Hauptverein into the FVP and the formation of the LVP, the leader of the national liberal youth organisation Jungliberale Frank Glatzel had held an emotional speech at a party meeting in which he argued that the attempted fusion with the social liberals would not lead to a unification of German liberalism, but to the fragmentation of the NLP into several competing factions, among them “a wing that could be called “National Capitalists”. Such a development, Glatzel continued, was certainly not in the party’s interest, but "it could be forced into it”.

Glatzel’s observations would turn out correct; ironically, he would leave the NLP himself in 1932, when he, after harsh discussions with the leadership, officially announced the secession of the Jungliberale, a group that had long been associated with volkisch-nationalist thought and the conservative revolutionary movement, and their merger into Hassell’s Fatherland Party. These news brought the national liberals onto the newspaper front pages of the nation for the last time; with their influence continuing to gradually decrease ever since, an eventual dissolvement has become practically inevitable.

Zentrum and Its Wings/Factions/Regional Branches[]

Zentrum Party[]

Description[]

In 1936, the old Zentrum Party is undoubtedly the most powerful of the March Coalition parties and towers over the rest of the political establishment as a vanguard of stability, with a stable electorate that is unlikely to reorient itself politically even in times of rising global tensions and economic recession. However, at closer look, it becomes apparent that the party is much less sturdy than it seems; deeply decentralised and lacking a determined path to pursue, fears have turned up that the only representation of Catholic interests in the Reichstag will be reduced to a mere power tool and stirrup holder for more opportunistic party blocs in the future, thereby reducing it to the role of a second fiddle.

Transformation during the War (1917-1920)[]

During the early stages of the war, the party was still dominated by old-guard functionaries like Karl Trimborn (1854-1921), Peter Spahn (1846-1926), and Georg von Hertling (1843-1919). Their influence would decrease from 1917 onward.

The history of themodern Centre Party as it exists now in the mid-1930s only began around the turn of 1916/17, when the old anti-parliamentarian and in parts even archconservative party leadership was slowly marginalised by a younger generation of more progressive and pragmatic parliamentarians around the Württembergian deputy Matthias Erzberger, who had openly agitated against the old elites since at least 1910.

Erzberger’s wing was deeply rooted especially in the progressive southwest of Germany, and dominated the Reichstag faction of the party until the end of the war and beyond. Erzberger played an important role in the so-called Interfraktioneller Ausschuss (IFA), a coordinating body of SPD, FVP & Zentrum, and ensured that Germany's domestic and foreign policies during the last years of the war were significantly influenced, if not determined, by the progressive majority in the Reichstag. Important events for which the IFA was responsible include, for example, the Reichstag Peace Resolution of 1917, which caused immense turmoil within the political right, and tentative attempts at electoral reform, including the partial introduction of proportional representation in urban regions in early 1918.

The Erzbergian Era (1920-1923)[]

Matthias Erzberger (*1875), Joseph Wirth (*1879)

When the OHL regime unspectacularly collapsed after the end of the war, the golden hour of the Zentrum had finally arrived. The party had a decisive influence on the March Reforms of 1920 and occupied high-ranking ministerial posts in the first democratically elected and parliamentary post-war cabinet under Reichskanzler Wilhelm Solf, like the Secretariat for the Interior. This move was extremely controversial, as while wartime cooperation with the openly atheist SPD as part of the IFA had been one thing, entering into an outright coalition with them after the victorious war was something entirely different. Especially more right-leaning Catholics and the Bavarians called the coalition a “political intermarriage with heresy”, but the vast influence of Erzberger’s wing on Zentrum-affiliated newspapers and organisations was a major factor in calming down these fears for the time being.

Although he was neither Zentrum’s parliamentary group leader in the Reichstag nor party chairman, Erzberger remained the driving force behind the “new” Centre Party in the first few post-war years. His appointment as State Secretary for the Treasury in 1920 would be the high point of his career so far, but not yet the crowning achievement. After the resignation of Solf in early 1922, it would be him who would succeed to the post of Germany’s most important government official, to the surprise of many, and certainly not without rightist uproar

At the time, Erzberger was practically the embodiment of the typical German post-war politician: Extremely pro-parliamentarian, genuinely democratic, idealist, charismatic, without any aristocratic background, and almost revolutionary in some of his ideas. However, his ”radical” positions did not win him many political friends. His 1921 tax reform, while not as radical as Erzberger had initially envisioned it, had, for example, scared off many federalist-minded party colleagues, and his close cooperation with the Social Liberals and Social Democrats was a thorn in the side of the traditionalist catholics within the party.

Shortly after the war, the Bavarian & Alsatian associations of the Zentrum had officially declared their autonomy from the main party, unwilling to embrace Erzberger's progressive course. Similar circumstances applied to the old Luxembourgian Party of the Right. And on a national level, infighting between Erzberger’s progressives and the old guard agrarian conservative catholics from Silesia, the Rhineland and Westphalia threatened to escalate. Thus, Erzberger’s standing within the party was not exactly stable after his appointment as Reichskanzler, especially as more and more initially Erzberger-aligned Zentrum newspapers began to adopt a more conservative stance again.

However, at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be his party-internal opponents that would bring him to fall, but an old arch enemy with whom Erzberger had maintained a tense rivalry for over a decade: Former Vice Chancellor Karl Helfferich. In late 1922, Helfferich published a memorandum in which he accused Erzberger of tax evasion, corruption and personal enrichment during the war; a subsequent court case ended in a humiliating defeat for the chancellor himself, leading to his disgraced resignation shortly before New Year’s Eve 1922. This decision plunged the divided Zentrum into turmoil, and ended the Erzbergian Era with one quick strike.

The Moderates back in charge (1923-1931)[]

Constantin Fehrenbach (1852-1926), Wilhelm Marx (*1863), Theodor von Guerard (*1863)

Erzberger’s resignation and temporary withdrawal from political life in the aftermath was the long-anticipated clean break the rightist wing had hoped for, as Erzberger had been a major obstacle for potential cooperation with the conservative parties, which had hampered Zentrum’s political flexibility massively. Erzberger’s resignation solved quite a lot of issues of the party at once, without its leaders being forced to actively do anything about it. Already in early 1921, the moderate Rhenish party representative Wilhelm Marx, a protege of the old chairman Trimborn, had been elected leader of the Zentrum parliamentary faction in the Reichstag, with his nomination as party chairman following suit in 1922, and after Erzberger’s fall, he and his fellow centrists began to reestablish their full influence over the party, leaving the progressives on the sidelines.

The official reunification of SPD and USPD in late 1923, which moved the social democrats slightly more towards the radical left, was seen as proof by the Zentrum leadership that the fears back in 1920 about entering into a coalition with the social democrats had been justified. From now on, the party took a firmly reluctant stance towards their old coalition partner, believing that cooperation with the SPD in the future could only be possible as part of a grand coalition. In any case however, a middle-class bloc led by Zentrum should be preferred.

A main reason why Zentrum was able to drop the SPD quite easily again was its own well-established labour wing, with some people going as far to say that it was only the party’s Christian-oriented social welfare agenda that had brought it to such a popular and uncontested position in the first place. Three politicians represented that current within Zentrum like practically nobody else: Adam Stegerwald (Germany’s leading Christian trade unionist), Heinrich Brauns (leader of the People's Association for Catholic Germany) and Johannes Giesberts (prominent representative of the Catholic Labour Society). With the decline of Erzberger’s progressives and the growing importance of social political matters and the newly parliamentarised Empire, the trade union wing became more important than ever before.

With the rise of the trade unionists, new radical ideas began to appear. While agreeing in some aspects with Erzberger’s concepts, the main difference of the trade union wing was its pronounced right-wing agenda (as they believed that close cooperation with the SPD would erode Zentrum’s popularity and weaken their influence in working class circles) as well as it controversial interconfessional approach. Especially Stegerwald was a main proponent of a united Christian middle-class bloc party and fought for the creation of an interconfessional “Christian People’s Party”, thereby tearing up old wounds from the early 1900s “Zentrumsstreit”. While the controversial ideas of the trade unionists were never able to fully convince the moderate, relatively reluctant Rhenish party leadership, the concept of a united Christian party would not lose traction over the years, especially not with the slow decline of the moderate parties from the late 20s onwards.

In autumn 1924, the Posadowsky Cabinet spectacularly collapsed after the Stresemann Crisis, and in the subsequent Brockdorff Cabinet, Zentrum became a leading force in the government coalition again, where the party was represented by statesmen such as Constantin Fehrenbach (Vice Chancellor & Secretary for the Interior), [????] (Secretary for the Post), and later on Johannes Giesberts (Secretary for Labour) as well as Albrecht von Rechenberg (Colonial Secretary). The party would maintain its key role over the course of the coming years and would shape especially German domestic policy like barely any other party. Fehrenbach died in 1926 and was replaced by party chairman Marx himself, and after Brockdorff’s death in 1928, Marx would succeed him as Reichskanzler, making him the first Zentrum chancellor of the parliamentary post-war era.

Marx can be considered the last of the towering “Zentrum titans”, i.e. party leaders that had grown naturally into their leading positions and were elected more or less unanimously and without much controversy at the party conferences, mostly due to their conciliatory behaviour and ability to mediate. Other examples included Georg von Hertling, Peter Spahn, Adolf Gröber and Carl Trimborn. With the dawn of the 30s however, this concept of natural succession would begin to waver. When Marx was appointed Reichskanzler in 1928, at age 65, he already suffered from numerous mild diseases, something that would slowly deteriorate over the course of the following years. Thus, the party began quite early to make thoughts about a potential successor for when the time had come - nonetheless, when disaster struck in 1931, nothing concrete had been agreed on, and both Zentrum and the government were thrown into disarray.

The collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange in May 1931 sent shockwaves over the European Continent, and caught the old and ailing chancellor off guard. Burdened by massive stress and illness, Marx would hand in his resignation later that year, feeling unable to weather the storms yet to come. Simultaneously, he would also announce his retreat from the Zentrum party and Reichstag faction chairmanship; an unprecedented case in Zentrum history, as all previous party leaders had died while in office.

A decisive factor for his resignation was probably also the feeling that he and his party had drifted apart. Marx was still too strongly imbued with the old Catholic ideals of selfless service to confession and state and self-evident loyalty to the party and its leaders to be able to follow the more contemporary course of the various emerging cliques in the Reichstag faction. He did not understand why many of his colleagues no longer wanted to be satisfied with the consciousness of having done their duty in the government, but pressed for stronger representation of their own specific interests. In the Imperial Chancellery, Marx would eventually be replaced by the non-partisan liberal diplomat Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff - but the selection of a proper successor for the Reichstag faction and party chairmanship would turn out more difficult, and would have far-reaching consequences in the long-term.

The Catholic Identity Crisis (1931-1936)[]

Joseph Wirth (*1879), Carl Ulitzka (*1873), Theodor von Guerard (*1863), Adam Stegerwald (*1874), Fritz Schäffer (*1888)

At the time of Marx’ withdrawal, Zentrum found itself in an uneasy and unsatisfying status quo. The moderate Rhenish leadership had resided over the party leadership for far too long, leaving the main representation of the German catholic community in politics with an increasingly lacklustre political profile. Marx, completely overstrained with all of his leading political positions, had struggled to prepare the party for the new parliamentary era, naturally to the benefit of more radical parties both to the left and to the right. However, his successor would not do a better job at this task: Despite many objections, another prominent Rhenish representative, vice chairman of the Zentrum faction in the Reichstag and one of several deputy party chairmen Theodor von Guérard was recommended by Marx and chosen “temporarily” as acting chairman without any proper democratic voting at a party conference.

Of course Guérard had primarily been chosen to prevent outright open conflict between Zentrum’s various wings at a very inappropriate time; the other political parties and especially the Catholic electorate should be prevented from taking note of Zentrum’s ever-growing factionalism and internal disunity at all cost. This was underlined by the fact that the slogan Mehr Führung! (“More/firmer leadership!”) made the rounds and the call for a united, forward-looking party board, for better cooperation and coordination between party leadership and parliamentary group did not fall silent. But naturally, the decision to undemocratically instate a party-internally not really popular chairman came much to the dismay of many of the new emerging political wings within the party that had risen to prominence throughout the 20s; they had hoped that Marx’ withdrawal would be their time to shine.

At the time, three factions had been on the rise for quite some time to challenge the uncontested leadership of the Rhenish moderates: Most prominently of course the popular trade union wing around the infamous Adam Stegerwald, which had enormous backing not only in the extra-parliamentary Christian Labour Movement, but also within Zentrum’s Reichstag faction.

A second (re-)emerging current were the old Erzbergian progressives. Erzberger had returned to the Reichstag after a long political break during a by-election in the mid-20s, and even though he now refrained from behaving too controversially and mostly remained in the background instead of meddling directly in parliamentary politics, he secretly had begun to orchestrate a new political offensive against the moderates via his loyal associate Joseph Wirth, the de facto leader of the progressive faction in the Reichstag. The

And thirdly, the rightist federalist wing of the party. Upset by the ever-growing influence of the Imperial government on federal matters since the start of the parliamentary era, many of the more autonomous regional branches of the Centre Party, most prominently those in Bavaria, Luxemburg, Alsace-Lorraine and the local party associations in Westphalia and Silesia, had begun to call for the implementation of a new truly federalist order in which greedy party politicians won’t be able to harm the interests of the sovereign constituent states. Willing to enter into closer cooperation with the political right, their main goals included the limitation of parliamentarism and a more resolute stance towards the socialist powers to the west.

Guérard was aware that his political rivals needed to be satisfied at least to some degree to calm the party-internal factions down, manifest his own leadership and guarantee unity and stability. Thus, he adopted a strategy of installing his rivals in nominally powerful positions that would keep them busy from challenging his authority: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. After long discussions, Stegerwald would be confirmed as leader of the parliamentary faction in the Reichstag, the progressive trade unionist Joseph Joos, known for being relatively unassertive, was chosen as Vice Chairman, and several rightists and progressives like Heinrich Brüning and Wirth were politically neutralised for the time being by nominating them for various semi-relevant state secretary posts both on the Imperial level and in Prussia over the course of the following years. As 1936 dawns and the Reichstag elections in April approach, Guerard’s construct is still holding together, albeit on very shaky ground. The various competing factions within the party still have not given up their claim to leadership, and will certainly seize the right opportunity as soon as it arises to capitalise on potential weaknesses. Stegerwald is considered by many to be “inevitable”: The “Ikarus of the Zentrum” has already begun to self-confidently put himself into the limelight via his charismatic speeches in an effort to reinforce his image as a man of the people. With Zentrum’s position slightly weakened due to the unpopularity of the Dirksen Cabinet, a leadership change at some point definitely will be unavoidable; by now it is not a matter of if, but a matter of when.

Factions

Progressives[]

The progressive wing of the Zentrum had its great heyday during the early 1920s and has since been somewhat sidelined. Although there are many well-meaning ideas on the wing's political agenda, its leaders are too closely associated with the controversial Erzberger era, a time during which the Reich, too distracted by overly ambitious internal reforms, was insufficiently devoted to its foreign policy security, which has in the eyes of the right contributed significantly to Germany's current foreign political malaise. Hence, only a few party leaders adhere to the progressive wing’s principles.

The most prominent of these is certainly Joseph Wirth, similar to Erzberger a charismatic and relatively young politician from the southwest. In general, the progressives are still well-established in Baden and Württemberg, despite their lacking performance on the national level, and many of their visions have their roots in said region. These include, among others, a firm opposition against the anti-Polish policies in East Elbia, the willingness to find a compromise with the political left, the concept of a “Social People’s State” based on Christian values, close cooperation with the Austrians due to Pan-German tendencies, and the unconditional embracement of parliamentary democracy.

However, deeply rooted in their progressive aims is also the scepticism towards the concept of a All-Christian People’s Party, a vision especially propagated by trade unionists and rightists in recent years. Already before the war, Erzberger and his protege Wirth played a very ambiguous role in the famous Zentrumstreit ( a conflict between the party’s Berlin wing and Cologne wing about whether Zentrum should finally “leave the tower” and expand into the protestant electorate), at times openly supporting Ultramontanist hardliners like Hermann Roeren and Hans Georg von Oppersdorff. There is a particular fear that an expansion into the conservative Protestant clientele could move the party to the right, naturally to the detriment of the progressives. The prominence of high-ranking prelates within the progressive wing, like Carl Ulitzka, only contributes to this ambiguity.

Christian Trade Unionists[]

Trade unionism has been deeply entrenched within the Zentrum Party since at least the end of the Weltkrieg, arguably even earlier, and is far away from being one ideologically united movement. Three larger currents that all to some degree stand in the tradition of Catholic social activists like Franz Hitze and Wilhelm Emmanuel Freiherr von Kettelercan be made out:

The United Federation of Christian Trade Unions in Germany (Prominent representatives: Stegerwald, Imbusch, Brüning, Kaiser)

The People's Association for Catholic Germany (Prominent representatives: Brauns,

The Catholic Workers Associations (Prominent representatives: Joos, Giesberts,

While especially the Catholic Workers Association and some leaders of the People’s Association for Catholic Germany include relatively left-leaning, initially pro-Erzbergian representatives like Johannes Giesberts and Joseph Joos, the broader Christian Trade Union movement can be considered quite right-leaning, despite maintaining a relative ideological flexibility for the most part.

The trade union movement’s most powerful leader, Adam Stegerwald, the current leader of the Zentrum parliamentary faction in the Reichstag, has been infamous over the course of the last two decades for his concept of an interconfessional “German, Christian, national and social People’s Party” that would form a partisan bulwark for the interests of the patriotic, Christian and deeply monarchist middle and working class and simultaneously weaken the upswing of Marxist parties and trade unions. According to Stegerwald, Zentrum inherently has to be right-leaning, as a too left-leaning Zentrum would deny the generally national conservative christian unions the right to exist and thus strengthen the political left in the long-run. Thus, close cooperation especially with conservative parties like the DkP is a main part of Stegerwald’s overall vision.

In spite of Stegerwald’s ideas, the trade unionists are nonetheless one of the most flexible wings within the party, and have proven in the past (for example during the early stages of the Brockdorff cabinet) that they can practically cooperate with anyone, including the SPD. Politicians like Heinrich Brauns and Jakob Kaiser propagate a similar concept as Stegerwald without the pronounced anti-socialist stance. What only further contributes to the trade unionists' far-reaching influence is their enormous popularity in urban, majority catholic areas especially in the Ruhr and the Rhineland, where Christian trade unions in some cities outright rival/outrank their far-left and moderate leftist counterparts.

Prussian Branch[]

Since the very beginning, the Prussian branch of Zentrum has been one of the most traditionalist wings of the party, mostly due to the dominance of catholic agrarians and industrialists from Upper Silesia, Westphalia and the Rhine Province. Especially around Oppeln, a predominantly rural and overwhelmingly Catholic region with the highest concentration of entailed hereditary estates in Prussia after Pomerania, the branch’s leadership was and is deeply rooted. There, in the remote Silesian countryside, the Zentrum Party profited from the unfair Prussian Three-Class Suffrage for decades, a main reason why Prussian Zentrum leaders opposed the franchise reform of 1918 until the bitter end.

Interestingly however, the arch-conservative faction is only a minority group within the Prussian Zentrum (making up merely 30% of it), and yet has held local affairs firmly under its control for a long time. The long-time cooperation with the Conservative Party, based on mutual agrarian interests, is one of the main points of contention with more reformist Zentrum representatives in Prussia, who still recall the bad memories of the Kulturkampf a few decades ago. A powerful party-internal resistance which opposes the leadership of leading archconservatives like Felix Porsch and Carl Herold, mostly consisting of Catholic middle class representatives from Western Germany, has existed for quite some time, but was enormously decapitated after the death of its most powerful and charismatic leader Joseph Heß in 1932. With no change in sight, most reformists therefore have resorted to pursuing their career on the Imperial level, where they are however challenged by powerful Rhenish moderates like Guerard and Adenauer or Stegerwald’s trade unionists.

However, the future of the agrarian dominance within the Prussian Zentrum is by no means secure, as more and more old-guard leaders are slowly dying away. The wing’s most famous representatives already died during the early 30s, and now the leadership is in the hands of questionable characters like Franz von Papen, known for his dubious military ties, or Engelbert von Kerckerinck zur Borg, a powerful agricultural functionary from Westphalia. Both try to present themselves as politically unaligned moderates, but it is more than clear that they are very far-right on the political spectrum and hold quite similar corporatist convictions as politicians in even more right-leaning parties.

Apart from a short caesura during the early 20s, in which even the archconservative Prussian Zentrum had to make concessions and enter into a short-lived coalition with the powerful social democrats and social liberals, Prussia has been ruled by a conservative coalition for many years of the post-war era in which Zentrum has always taken in a major pillar. Nonetheless, the parliamentary post-war reforms as well as the introduction of the plural suffrage have weakened the old rightist parties and has made anti-SPD “Sammlungspolitik” (a grand coalition of the bourgeoisie parties) a necessity; a Zentrum-DkP majority in Prussia is only a memory of the past nowadays, and the majority can only be maintained with the help of the liberals and smaller middle-class splinter parties.

On the national level, the conservative Prussian Zentrum delegates are not as present as they are on the local level; here, they most of the time leave the stage to the moderate representatives of the Rhenish Zentrum and take care of their own affairs in the conservative bulwark of Prussia. Only when they see their own interests endangered, for example in the field of agricultural policy, do they begin to mobilise against their political enemies. These are mostly manifested in the trade union and progressive wing. For this, they don’t refrain from forging temporary alliances with the particularist and often fiercely anti-Prussian Zentrum representatives from Bavaria, Alsace-Lorraine and Luxemburg.

Bavarian People's Party (BVP)[]

The Bavarian People’s Party is technically not its own independent party, but the autonomous branch (Landesverband) of the Centre Party in the Kingdom of Bavaria, quite similar to the Bavarian Patriots’ Party that existed between 1869 and 1887. Ties between the Rhenish/Westphalian and Bavarian wings of Zentrum had always been loose and relations were charac

terised by underlying tensions; on multiple occasions, the Bavarians had considered leaving Zentrum again due to particularist tendencies and agrarian-related disagreements with the party leadership’s course, but a split could be eventually prevented due to the mediation of Georg von Hertling, who, despite also being Bavarian, rejected a special treatment of his state.

However, during the final years of the Weltkrieg, these long-existing tensions eventually bursted out into the open, further fueled by rampant anti-Prussian rhetoric in war-weary Bavaria. At the time, the Bavarians formed the backbone of the party’s right wing and frequently criticised leading progressive Zentrum parliamentarians like Matthias Erzberger for their stance on peace terms, parliamentarization and the political future of Germany. Two Bavarians stood out the most: Georg Heim, known infamously as “The Farmers’ Doctor” due to his vast popularity on the Bavarian countryside, and Sebastian Schlittenbauer. Both men had ties to the Bavarian Christian Farmers’ Association (BCB), a populist agrarian interest group in favour of political catholicism and corporate statism. Within the Bavarian Zentrum, Heim’s and Schlittenbauer’s faction stood in opposition to the moderate leadership around Georg von Hertling, Franz Seraph von Pichler and Heinrich Held, who generally supported Berlin’s course silently.

At the time, the Bavarian Zentrum underwent an increasingly crippling leadership crisis. Prior to the war, the branch had been led by an uncontested moderate leadership of mostly aristocrats spearheaded by Hertling, Pichler, Balthasar von Daller, Georg von Orterer and Franz Xaver Schädler, but after the latter three had all dies within a timeframe of merely 5 years, Heim’s populists grew more and more powerful and unavoidable. In 1919, Hertling died as well, Pichler was too old to keep the querulants in check, and Held would soon after adopt a policy of pragmatism to secure his own position even under changed circumstances. As early as late 1918, Heim and his associates would gather regularly to discuss the establishment of a “new party for all societal classes, carried by true Bavarian spirit”, but only in early 1920, these plans would truly reach a coherent form.

→ mention the formation of the Dandl Cabinet, Heim’s opposition!

Enraged by the Zentrum’s far-reaching influence on the post-war parliamentarization and March Constitution, the continuously growing prominence of Erzberger and the eventual formation of a SPD-FVP-Zentrum Cabinet under Reichskanzler Solf, Heim and Schlittenbauer gathered the BCB in Regensburg and officially proclaimed the establishment of a so-called “Bavarian People’s Party” in March 1920. In a fiery speech, Heim said, among other things, that “If the Zentrum on the Imperial level wants us to maintain connections to it, then it should deport deputy Erzberger to the Social Democrats!"

This was harshly protested by the Zentrum chairmanship in Berlin and by a few Bavarian moderate delegates, but in the end, the party leadership in Munich around Heinrich Held, parliamentary leader of the Zentrum faction in the Bavarian Landtag, gave in and agreed to negotiate. Held’s motivation was mainly driven by pragmatism, as he was well-aware that a total split-off of Heim’s faction could spell an end to his own career and those of many others in the Bavarian Zentrum quite quickly.

After fierce discussions, in which the pro-unity Bavarian Zentrum delegate Wilhelm Mayer played a major role, a compromise with Heim could be reached: A split was amended, the Bavarian Centre Party was officially renamed in accordance with the populists’ earlier plans, and vast autonomy from the party board in Berlin was agreed upon, even though Bavarian delegates remained part of the Zentrum faction in the Reichstag. The arch-conservative Bavarians were not interested in any way to be associated with the controversial policies of Erzberger in Berlin, who had become State Secretary for the Treasury in the meantime. This notion was further reinforced during Erzberger’s short chancellorship in 1922.

The Bavarians’ stubbornness inspired similar movements in Alsace-Lorraine and the newly-integrated Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and it was indirectly supported by right-wing Zentrum delegates from East Elbian Prussia that opposed the progressive leadership of the Erzbergians. A strong rightist-federalist front had formed that would prevent centralisation attempts of the Zentrum party board over the course of the following years, and that contributed a lot to Erzberger’s downfall in 1922/23.

People's Party of Alsace-Lorraine (ELVP)[]

Description[]

The ELVP has been the pivotal element of political life in Alsace-Lorraine since the end of the Weltkrieg, very similar to the Bavarian People’s Party – a major inspiration for the Alsatians – in Munich. Like its Bavarian counterpart, the ELVP is extremely regionalist, particularist and quite conservative, observing the events in Berlin often with a certain degree of suspicion. Of all the Zentrum branches in the Empire, the ELVP is one of the most autonomous and heavily opposed to both liberalism and social democracy.

History[]

The history of political Catholicism in Alsace-Lorraine is a long and complicated one, and always has been more tainted by particularist notions than even in the most conservative areas of Bavaria. Party political groupings had long been a rarity, almost a taboo, especially in the early Imperial era, when the old French influence was still persistent. The French system had relied less on parties and more on politics with individuals, i.e. notables and dignitaries; the reputation/merits of the running candidate stood in the centre of attention, not the agenda of the electoral alliance that stood behind them. On top of that, the Reichsland had deliberately inherited an old French association law that allowed clubs with a membership number above 20 only after the local administration’s approval. Only in the 1900s, these restrictions were fully lifted.

In the eyes of the leading Alsatian Catholic politicians during the late 19th century, Landolin Winterer, Joseph Guerber & Ignatius Simonis, the lack of proper partisan movements was, however, not an issue at all - as traditionalists and regionalists, they opposed both partisan democracy and cooperation with the Catholics in Germany proper (manifested in the Zentrum Party). This strategy turned out to be a mistake from the 1890s onwards, when the social democrats, who were clever enough to circumnavigate the electoral restrictions with refined methods, emerged as additional powerful contestants to the Catholics, on top of the liberal movement.

Integration into the Empire (1894-1906)[]

The eventual result was the outbreak of a severe intergenerational conflict within the Catholic political community in Alsace-Lorraine. The younger Catholics favoured closer ties with the German Zentrum, and recognized the need to create a unified Alsace-Lorraine Catholic party, prior to eventual future unification with the Zentrum, to fend off liberal and social democratic rivals. Thus, despite objections of the older generation, the Catholic priest Dr. Paul Müller-Simonis would go on to establish the Katholische Volkspartei (Catholic People’s Party) in 1894 (later renamed Elsass-Lothringische Landespartei (Regional Party of Alsace-Lorraine)). This party, which had its roots in the relatively progressive Alsatian branch of the People’s Association for Catholic Germany (VfdkD), set up a fixed political agenda, including demands such as the equality of Alsace-Lorraine with the other federal states, universal, equal, common and direct suffrage for the local parliament, and denominationalism of school education.

The Landespartei left its most profound impact in Alsatian urban areas, but barely exerted influence in Lorraine. Here, particularist, oftentimes Francophile groups still dominated the political scene. They resisted attempts to enrol them in a German Catholic party, and rejected just as vigorously any attempt to integrate them into an Alsatian Catholic party. The conservative Lorrainers cared little for Alsatian culture and Alsatian particularism and resented the domination of Alsatian politicians within the Reichsland’s Catholic political movement.

To supplement the Landespartei and challenge the particularists, Catholics in major cities all over the Reichsland formed so-called Zentrumsvereine, i.e. local political associations loosely tied to the German Zentrum. In 1906 these would be used as the main basis for the establishment of the Elsaß-Lothringische Zentrumspartei (Alsace-Lorraine Centre Party), which also absorbed the Landespartei. This party was formed at a time when old anti-partisan restrictions had been lifted in the Reichsland, and the increasingly anti-Catholic secular reforms in France had alienated even most of the former Francophiles. It had become apparent for many that Alsace-Lorraine would have a brighter and more prosperous future under German rule. Thus, close cooperation with the German Zentrum was encouraged, in an effort to show the population in Germany proper that the people of Alsace-Lorraine were willing to integrate.

Nonetheless, a small, but influential wing of Francophile “Protestler” (protestors) remained, gathered around the abbés Emile Wetterlé and Nicolas Delsor, due to the demise of many older representatives like Winterer & Simonis. A compromise could be reached between those that pushed for affiliation with the Zentrum and those who, for political reasons, continued to rigorously reject such an affiliation. The Alsace-Lorraine Zentrum adopted a program almost identical to that of the German Zentrum, however without becoming part of the German equivalent.

The Era of Ambivalence (1906-1920)[]

Ties between the ELZP and Zentrum would continue to grow over the course of the following years, despite various major crises that would put their relationship at stake, like the debates in the run-up to the Reichsland’s constitutional reform; the conservative German Zentrum leadership had refused to support liberal amendments proposed by Catholic deputies from Alsace-Lorraine, like proportional representation, which caused led to the resignation of various Alsatian deputies. Nonetheless, by early 1913, two clearly defined wings within the ELZP had formed: A democratic-particularist & Francophile wing led by Wetterle, Delsor, and Anselm Laugel, and a more conservative German-oriented group led by Karl Hauss, Eugen Ricklin, Charles Didio, and Martin Spahn.

At this point, it seemed as if the Catholics of Alsace-Lorraine were on a good way to finally fully integrate into the broader framework of the Empire. In late 1913, however, the Zabern Incident destroyed all of these efforts within just a few weeks, and when the war broke out in July 1914, anti-German sentiment in the Reichsland had reached new heights in the most inappropriate situation. Shortly before hostilities began, most of the Francophile faction began to defect to the French, and those who didn’t were interned far-away from Alsace or sent to the Eastern Front. The Reichsland, due to its close proximity to the front and due to the scepticism about its population’s loyalty, was subject to more restrictions than other parts of the Empire, effectively putting all political activities to a halt.

Due to the harsh martial law imposed over A-L during the war, discontent and anti-German tendencies among the population grew. Even Germanophile politicians began to think that life under French rule might be better after all, but nobody dared to utter it; the party maintained a generally ambivalent stance towards Berlin during the war, on the one hand criticising the measures imposed on the Reichsland, on the other hand repeating an oath of of loyalism to the Empire, despite enormous criticism.

In October 1918, a pivotal moment in the history of the Alsatian Zentrum had come. After the September Insurrections, the Brockdorff Cabinet in Berlin decided that an immediate political reform in A–L was necessary to prevent further unrest. Karl Hauss was approached to preside over the first partisan, democratic government in Alsatian history, while liberal mayor of Straßburg Rudolf Schwander was supposed to become Statthalter This offer proved to be highly controversial; a few remaining Francophile Catholics around Joseph Pfleger and Franz Xaver Haegy urged Hauss no to accept it, as they still believed in a French victory and didn’t want to accept any concessions from the German oppressors so close to the decisive turn of the war. In the end, however, rational voices prevailed. Hauss accepted, but Pfleger and his colleagues seceded from the party out of protest.

The Golden Era of Alsatian Regionalism (1920-1935)[]

The March Reforms of 1920 finally elevated Alsace-Lorraine to a proper constituent state. In the direct aftermath, far-reaching developments would take place within the Alsatian Zentrum: In May 1920, it was officially decided to cut ties with the German Zentrum and establish an own political party, the Elsaß-Lothringische Volkspartei/People’s Party of Alsace-Lorraine (ELVP), for several reasons: Firstly, to further stress the particularist agenda of the party in an effort to gain voters disillusioned by the repressive measures during the war; secondly, to restore party unity with the Francophiles, something that indeed could be achieved shortly after; and thirdly, to show the disapproval of the Alsatians for the centralist, progressive course of powerful Zentrum leader Matthias Erzberger in Berlin. Several catholic-conservative politicians previously associated with the Francophile, particularist Bloc Lorrain decided to join the new ELVP as well and established their own sub-branch in Lorraine, the People’s Party of Lorraine under Victor Antoni and Robert Schuman.

The Landtag Elections of autumn 1920 resulted in a major victory for the newly-founded ELVP. Nonetheless, in accordance with the developments on the national level and to make some concessions to SPD and FVP, the formation of a catch all black-red-gold (ELVP-SPD-FVP) coalition was eventually agreed on, a highly controversial decision especially in devout Catholic and right-wing circles. The secession of far-right Catholic Martin Spahn and his followers a few months later was one of the main consequences. The groundwork of the cabinet was unstable from the beginning and the government was plagued by constant infighting; when the Zentrum-SPD-FVP coalition broke apart on the national level in late 1922, the ELVP-SPD-FVP administration in Alsace-Lorraine followed suit a few weeks later. Subsequently, the government was formed exclusively by the ELVP under Minister-President Eugen Müller, which had a very slight majority over both the FVP and SPD.

The single-rule of the ELVP was harshly criticised by other parties, who feared that the Catholics could grow increasingly authoritarian and corrupt. However, support for the Müller cabinet did not wane. In 1925, a wave of repression against Catholics in the neighbouring Commune boosted the popularity of the ELVP massively, mostly out of protest to show solidarity with the oppressed Catholic brethren on the other side of the border. Subsequently, the party was able to amass even more votes during the 1925 Landtag elections.

In early 1926, however, the Francophiles seceded from the ELVP for a second time out of protest against the Grand Duchy’s political institutions and the military units stationed there after a violent crackdown on French-language and remotely Francophile newspapers had been initiated to “uncover plots by hostile elements within German territory”. However, due to its further electoral expansion during the 1925 elections, the ELVP was able to maintain its majority even without the few Francophile deputies, which would go on to form the autonomist Volksbund in the aftermath.

Throughout the late 20s, the ELVP’s rule indeed became more and more authoritarian, and, even more importantly, increasingly Francophobe and Germanophile. In 1926, the ELVP officially re-joined the Zentrum as an autonomous regional branch akin to the BVP or the Luxembourg Party of the Right after theZentrum had started to pursue a more conservative agenda under chairman Wilhelm Marx again. Consequently, in 1928, a common front of liberals, social democrats and the Francophile Volksbund was formed intended to defend the old multilingual, autonomist nature of Alsace-Lorraine against the ever-growing influence of the right-wing Catholic, increasingly authoritarian ELVP. While this alliance was shaky, it held together for the time being and was indeed able to oust the EVLP from power after the 1930 Landtag Elections.

The next five years, the party would remain in the opposition; during this time, it started to radicalise. Corporatist, agrarian populist, anti-semitic and in parts even integralist notions gained traction, especially within the party’s youth organisation, the Jugendbund. The early 30s were defined by the looming agrarian crisis which also hit Alsace-Lorraine hard, an approaching recession after the Austrian Creditanstalt Crisis and rising tensions between the German and the Syndicalist bloc. All of these influences had major effects on Alsace-Lorraine; as the living conditions of the rural population deteriorated, the liberal-social democratic-Francophile government was usually blamed. The 1935 Landtag elections would see their downfall and the emergence of the Alsatian right: Another ELVP-led cabinet under Joseph Brom was appointed, this time with participation from the far-right, DVLP-aligned Christian-Social Homeland Party. One of the ELVP’s government ministers includes Karl Roos, a lower-ranking party functionary ideologically aligned with the right-wing Jugendbund of the party. Thus, by 1936 the ELVP has effectively turned into a party with right-wing extremist tendencies, riding high on populism, agrarianism, aggressive regionalism and anti-liberal, anti-socialist and anti-French sentiment.

Luxembourgian Party of the Right (LRP)[]

While most of the pre-accession to the Empire political parties in Luxembourg eventually merged into existing parties of the Imperial German political establishment (e.g. Socialist Party into SPD & Liberal League into FVP & NLP) throughout the 20s, the catholic-conservative Party of the Right still maintains a certain degree of autonomy. Similar to the Bavarian People’s Party, it is loosely tied to Zentrum (Landesverband) & part of the same Reichstag faction, but at home in Luxembourg it acts almost entirely independently from the party leadership in Berlin - in short, not much has changed to the pre-1919 circumstances.

Also quite similar to the Bavarians, the Luxembourgian branch of the party maintains a quite right-leaning political stance and is very keen on their state’s sovereignty and autonomy as well as a traditionalist view on the world.

Conservative Parties[]

German Conservative Party (DkP)[]

Brief Description[]

In 1936, the German Conservative Party is struggling to keep up with the drastically changing political climate. An ambitious reform plan over the course of the past two decades, heavily inspired by the British Tories, has transformed the old reactionary particularists from Prussia into a more contemporary mainstream party which claims to represent the interests of the middle class, all farmers (not only Junkers) and the church, but the DkP’s participation the every single government cabinet since 1923 has slowly eroded its popularity among the aforementioned groups. A political reorganisation seems imminent, but that will depend on the results of the 1936 Reichstag election.

Decline during the Wilhelmine Era (1890-1919)[]

For most of its existence, the Conservative Party has been, quite ironically, the quintessential German opposition party - despite Germany’s well-known stance on traditionalism, the DkP played only a limited role in early Imperial politics, especially in post-Bismarckian times. With the begin of the Wilhelmine Era in 1890, the golden times for the Prussian Junker were over: Weltpolitik, the ever-increasing power of the central government and the slow integration of the social democrats into political life was the exact manifestation of what the protectionist, Prussian-particularist & reactionary conservatives had always despised. While the DkP rose to moderate prominence again during the era of Bülow, even contributing to the latter’s fall in 1909, the subsequent Bethmann Era (1909-1914) forced the DkP into the eternal opposition again, as the progressive chancellor preferred working with Zentrum, SPD & FVP instead.

However, while isolated in the Reichstag, the conservatives continued to dominate the Prussian House of Representatives, where they constantly formed majorities with the help of the national liberals & free conservatives. This was of course mostly only possible due to the controversial Prussian three-class franchise, which the conservatives ruthlessly defended until the end, blocking any kind of suffrage reform in Prussia until 1917. However, in the end, the DkP was not able to prevent the introduction of the plural suffrage in 1918; while it still guaranteed them a strong standing in Prussia, the House of Representatives was now almost evenly split between leftist & rightist parties, and the House of Lords, once a bulwark of conservative aristocrats & junkers, had been transformed into a representative second chamber.

The Conservative Renewal (1919-1928)[]

At the end of the Weltkrieg, the DkP had probably reached its absolute low point popularity-wise. The common people were well-aware that the conservatives had actively fought against any kind of reform attempt throughout the whole conflict, and they demonstrated their anger at the 1920 elections, during which the DkP gained the most disastrous election result in their entire history - they had lost many votes to the democrats, but also to their former ally, the DVLP, which had participated in a Reichstag election for the first time. Calls for the unification of all rightist parties became loud, but this move was harshly opposed by the party leadership around Ernst von Heydebrand (Head of the parliamentary faction in Prussia) & Kuno von Westarp (head of the Reichstag parliamentary faction), who feared for their own positions.

The electoral defeat was soon after capitalised upon by Westarp who staged a symbolic coup within the party, forcing the 69-year old Heydebrand, who had dominated the party board since 1911 & the parliamentary faction in Prussia since 1905, to relinquish some of his powers to younger conservatives. The party was from now on headed by a dual chairmanship of both Westarp & Heydebrand, but the latter had been de facto sidelined & mostly focused on Prussian affairs while Westarp, the connecting peace between Reichstag faction & chairmanship, built a “new” DkP from scratch. Westarp knew that the DkP needed to evolve into something that would be able to survive the parliamentary era in the long-term, otherwise it would succumb to the radical changing political landscape one day.

The DkP immensely profited from several major political developments in the early 1920s: First, from the fact that the progressive governments of Solf and Erzberger struggled to secure Germany’s newly-gained hegemonic position. In the Empire’s periphery, turmoil was still brewing, and the post-war recession destroyed the dream of prosperity through victory. Many German voters began to question whether the parliamentary reform had been the right decision, and whether party politicians were sturdy enough to properly lead the country. These notions of course benefited the anti-parliamentary opposition. Another major factor was the increasingly crippling factionalism within the Zentrum which slowly weakened Germany’s most powerful middle-class party, and the quick radicalisation of the DVLP under its new chairman Wolfgang Kapp, which made the party unappealing to many moderate voters. When the Erzberger Cabinet collapsed in late 1922, the DkP thus became the lucky, but unexpected winners.

Between 1922 and 1924, the conservatives formed the backbone of the FKRP-led Posadowsky Cabinet. Westarp had achieved all of his goals - the parliamentary parties had been sidelined, the reaction had regained the upper hand via the electoral way, and he himself had been appointed State Secretary of the Interior, one of the government’s most powerful ministries. During this time, he would develop a new understanding of conservatism that would later influence an entire generation of young moderate conservatives, and shape the party’s governing policy for over a decade: Angewandter Konservatismus, i.e. “Applied Conservatism”, a notion that the conservatives have the god-given obligation to rule and should slowly leave their elitist ivory tower in favour of a catch-all approach able to appeal to the broad masses. Key aspect of this concept: State and authority nonetheless always have to stand above the “Volk”; the traditional societal order that has grown over long periods of time, manifested in Christian religion and the monarchical system, is more fundamental to the German people than mode