Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of Middle-Class Politics

A Study in the Dissolution of the German Party System, 1923–28

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9645979
AutoresLarry Eugene Jones (autor de correspondencia)
Año1979
Volumen12
Número2
Páginas143-168
Fecha de publicación1979-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCentral European History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0008-9389 • E-ISSN: 1569-1616
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0008938900022330
OpenAlexW2138697783
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas10

The dissolution of the German party system during the Weimar Republic was well advanced long before either the world economic crisis descended upon Germany with all of its intensity in the early 1930s or the National Socialists scored their first decisive breakthrough into the ranks of Germany's middle-class parties. While both the onset of the depression and the rise of National Socialism greatly accelerated the dissolution of Germany's bourgeois parties, their principal effect was not so much to catalyze this process as to intensify disintegrative factors that had been present ever since the founding of the Weimar Republic. The ultimate cause of the dissolution of the bourgeois party system during the Weimar Republic lay precisely in the inability of established bourgeois parties such as the German Democratic Party ( Deutsche Demokratische Partei or DDP), the German People's Party ( Deutsche Volkspartei or DVP), the German National People's Party ( Deutsdmationale Volkspartei or DNVP), and to a somewhat lesser extent the German Center Party ( Deutsche Zentrumspartei ) to integrate the diverse and increasingly antagonistic social and economic interests which constituted their material base into a viable and effective social force. The emergence of special-interest parties in the second half of the 1920s bore dramatic testimony to the failure of Germany's nonsocialist parties to provide the more traditional elements of the German middle class with the effective political representation they needed in order to maintain their social and economic position in the face of mounting economic adversity. Not only did the formation of such parries reflect the process of social and political decay that was at work within the German party system, but the increasing fragmentation of Germany's established bourgeois parties greatly facilitated the penetration of National Socialism into the ranks of the German middle strata

Bourgeoisie · Communism · Democracy · Economic history · German · Middle class · Petite bourgeoisie · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social Democratic Party · Socialism · Sociology · Weimar Republic · European history and politics · History · Law · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies