Gustav Stresemann
Gustav Ernst Stresemann (German pronunciation: [ˈɡʊstaf ˈʃtʁeːzəˌman] ⓘ; 10 May 1878 – 3 October 1929) was a German statesman who served as chancellor of Germany from August to November 1923, and as foreign minister from 1923 to 1929. His most notable achievement was the reconciliation between Germany and France, for which he and French Prime Minister Aristide Briand received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926. During a period of political instability and fragile, short-lived governments, Stresemann was the most influential politician in most of the Weimar Republic's existence.
Gustav Stresemann
Position established
National list (1924–1929)
Potsdam II (1920–1924)
Hannover 2 (1912–1918)
Sachsen 21 (1907–1912)
10 May 1878
Berlin, German Empire
3 October 1929 (aged 51)
Berlin, Weimar Republic
National Liberal Party (1907–1918)
German Democratic Party (1918)
German People's Party (1918–1929)
Wolfgang
Hans-Joachim
Nobel Peace Prize (1926)
Stresemann attended the University of Berlin and Leipzig University, where he studied political economy, history and international law and developed his vision of liberalism and nationalism, a combination of views that would define his political career. After obtaining his doctorate, Stresemann worked in trade associations before entering politics. In 1907, he was elected to the Reichstag as a deputy for the National Liberal Party. He lost his seat in 1912 but was reelected two years later. During the First World War, he was a vocal advocate for German militarism and expansionism. Exempted from war service due to poor health, he gradually became the National Liberals' de facto leader, before formally taking over the party in 1917. Germany's defeat and the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy came as a significant shock to Stresemann, forcing him to gradually reassess his previous positions. He founded the German People's Party (DVP) and, despite his own monarchist beliefs, came to grudgingly accept Weimar democracy and became open to working with the centre and the left.
In August 1923, Stresemann was named chancellor and foreign minister of a grand coalition government. During his brief chancellorship, he abandoned the policy of passive resistance against the French-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, and introduced the Rentenmark in a (relatively successful) attempt to tame hyperinflation in the country. In November, Stresemann's reshuffled government collapsed after the Social Democratics withdrew from the coalition. He resigned as chancellor following a vote of no confidence, but remained as foreign minister in the new government led by Wilhelm Marx. His first major diplomatic success was the 1924 Dawes Plan, which reduced Germany's overall reparations commitment. It was followed by the Locarno Treaties in 1925, which confirmed Germany's postwar western borders, guaranteed peace with France, and provided for Germany's admission to the League of Nations a year later. Stresemann also moved to improve relations with the Soviet Union through the 1926 Treaty of Berlin. In 1928, he oversaw Germany's participation in the Kellogg–Briand Pact, in which signatory states promised not to use war to resolve international conflicts.
Amid failing health, Stresemann successfully negotiated the Young Plan which sought to further reduce German reparations payments. He died in October 1929 after a series of strokes at the age of 51.
Early years[edit]
Stresemann was born on 10 May 1878 in 66 Köpenicker Straße in Southeast Berlin, the youngest of seven children. His father worked as a beer bottler and distributor, and also ran a small bar out of the family home, as well as renting rooms for extra money. The family was lower middle class, but relatively well-off for the neighbourhood, and had sufficient funds to provide Gustav with a high-quality education.[1]
Stresemann was an excellent student, particularly excelling in German literature and poetry. At the age of 16, he joined the Andreas Gymnasium to study. His parents brought him up to have an interest in books — he was especially passionate about history, with his teacher, Mr. Wolff, commenting that he had an "almost sickly taste in history." He took an interest in Napoleon and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom he later wrote about in his work 1924: Goethe und Napoleon: ein Vortrag.[2] His mother, Mathilde, died in 1895. From December 1895, he wrote "Berlin letters" for the Dresdener Volks-Zeitung, often talking about politics and targeting Prussian conservatives. In an essay written when he left school, he noted that he would have enjoyed becoming a teacher, but he would only have been qualified to teach languages or the natural sciences, which were not his primary areas of interest.[3] Due to this, he enrolled in university.
In April 1897, Stresemann enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he was convinced by a businessman to study political economy instead of literature.[4] During his university years, Stresemann also became active in the Burschenschaften movement of student fraternities, and became editor, in April 1898, of the Allgemeine Deutsche Universitäts-Zeitung, a newspaper run by Konrad Kuster, a leader in the liberal portion of the Burschenschaften. His editorials for the paper were often political, and dismissed most of the contemporary political parties as broken in one way or another.[5] In these early writings, he set out views that combined liberalism with strident nationalism, a combination that would dominate his views for the rest of his life.[6] In 1898, Stresemann left the University of Berlin, transferring to the University of Leipzig so that he could pursue a doctorate. In Leipzig, he stayed in the Gottschedstrasse. He studied history and international Law, and took literature courses. Influenced by Martin Kriele, he also took courses in economics. In March 1899, he stopped being an editor for the Allgemeine Deutsche Universitäts-Zeitung. He completed his studies in January 1901, submitting a thesis on the bottled beer industry in Berlin, which received a relatively high grade, but was a subject of mockery from colleagues.[7][8][9] Stresemann's doctoral supervisor was the economist Karl Bücher.[10]
In 1902, Stresemann founded the Saxon Manufacturers' Association. In 1903 he married Käte Kleefeld (1883–1970), daughter of a wealthy Jewish Berlin businessman, and the sister of Kurt von Kleefeld, the last person in Germany to be ennobled (in 1918). At that time he was also a member of Friedrich Naumann's National-Social Association. In 1906 he was elected to the Dresden town council. Though he had initially worked in trade associations, Stresemann soon became a leader of the National Liberal Party in Saxony. In 1907, he was elected to the Reichstag, where he soon became a close associate of party chairman Ernst Bassermann. However, his support of expanded social welfare programs did not sit well with some of the party's more conservative members, and he lost his post in the party's executive committee in 1912. Later that year he lost both his Reichstag and town council seats. He returned to business and founded the German-American Economic Association. In 1914 he returned to the Reichstag. He was exempted from war service due to poor health. With Bassermann kept away from the Reichstag by either illness or military service, Stresemann soon became the National Liberals' de facto leader. After Bassermann's death in 1917, Stresemann succeeded him as the party leader.
World War I[edit]
The evolution of his political ideas appears somewhat erratic. Initially, in the German Empire, Stresemann was associated with the left wing of the National Liberals. He initially believed in the maintenance of a balance of power between the British Empire, the United States, and Germany, whom he believed would be the world's economic superpowers in the future. Yet he also supported the Anglo-German naval arms race, believing that the expansion of the Imperial German Navy was necessary to protect German international trade.[11]
During World War I, he gradually moved to the right, expressing his support of the Hohenzollern monarchy and Germany's expansionist goals. He believed that Germany would need to annex the Low Countries, Eastern Europe, parts of north-east France, and the French protectorate in Morocco in order to economically compete with the United States in the future. He was a vocal proponent of unrestricted submarine warfare.[11] However, he still favoured an expansion of the social welfare programme, and also supported an end to the restrictive Prussian three-class franchise.[12] In 1916, he visited Constantinople and learned about the Ottoman Empire's Armenian genocide, writing in his diary: "Armenian reduction 1–11⁄2 million." Stresemann recommended the recall of the German ambassador, Paul Wolff Metternich, accusing him of being too sympathetic to Armenians.[13]
The collapse of the German Empire after its defeat in World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 drove Stresemann into a mental and physical breakdown, which shocked him into totally abandoning his earlier militarism and annexationism.[11] When the Allied powers' peace terms became known, including a crushing burden of paying reparations for the war, Constantin Fehrenbach denounced them and claimed "the will to break the chains of slavery would be implanted" into a generation of Germans. Stresemann said of this speech: "He was inspired in that hour by God to say what was felt by the German people. His words, spoken under Fichte's portrait, the final words of which merged into Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, made it an unforgettably solemn hour. There was in that sense a kind of uplifting grandeur. The impression left on all was tremendous".[14]
After the war, Stresemann briefly joined the German Democratic Party, formed from a merger of the Progressives with the left wing of the National Liberals. However, he was quickly expelled for his association with the right wing. He then gathered the main body of the old National Liberal Party—including most of its centre and right factions—into the German People's Party (German: Deutsche Volkspartei, DVP), with himself as chairman. Most of its support came from middle class and upper class Protestants. The DVP platform promoted Christian family values, secular education, lower tariffs, opposition to welfare spending and agrarian subsidies and hostility to "Marxism" (that is, the Communists, and also the Social Democrats).
The DVP was initially seen, along with the German National People's Party, as part of the "national opposition" to the Weimar Republic, particularly for its grudging acceptance of democracy and its ambivalent attitude towards the Freikorps and the Kapp Putsch in 1920. Beginning in 1919, Stresemann emphasized that Germany should try to regain its great-power status by leveraging the continued global economic influence and creditworthiness of its multinational corporations, pursuing peaceful economic expansion, and establishing friendly relations with the United States.[11] By late 1920, Stresemann gradually moved to cooperation with the parties of the left and centre — possibly in reaction to political murders like that of Walther Rathenau. However, he remained a monarchist at heart.
Weimar Republic[edit]
Chancellor 1923[edit]
On 13 August 1923, Stresemann was appointed chancellor and foreign minister of a grand coalition government in the so-called year of crises (1923). In social policy, a new system of binding arbitration was introduced in October 1923 in which an outside arbitrator had the final say in industrial disputes.[15]
On 26 September 1923, Stresemann announced the end to the passive resistance against the Occupation of the Ruhr by the French and Belgians, in tandem with an Article 48 (of the Weimar Constitution) state of emergency proclamation by President Friedrich Ebert that lasted until February 1924.[16][17] In October 1923, when the Communist Party of Germany entered the Social Democratic-led governments of Saxony and Thuringia with hidden revolutionary intentions, Stresemann used a Reichsexekution to send troops into the two states to remove the Communists from the governments.[18] By this time, Stresemann was convinced that accepting the republic and reaching an understanding with the Allies on the reparations issue was the only way for Germany to gain the breathing room it needed to rebuild its battered economy.[17] He also wished to recover the Allied-occupied Rhineland, as he wrote to Wilhelm, the former German Crown Prince on 23 July 1923: "The most important objective of German politics is the liberation of German territory from French and Belgian occupation. First, we must remove the strangler from our throat".[19]
Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic reached its peak in November 1923.[20] Since Germany was no longer able to pay the striking workers, more and more money was printed, which finally led to hyperinflation. Stresemann introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, to end hyperinflation. He also persuaded the French to pull back from the Ruhr in return for a promise that reparations payments would resume. That was part of his larger strategy of "fulfillment". Although he, like nearly every other German politician, cursed the Treaty of Versailles as a Diktat, he had come to believe that Germany would never win relief from its terms unless it made a good-faith effort to fulfill them. To his mind, this would convince the Allies that the reparations bill was truly beyond Germany's capacity. The effort paid off; the Allies began to take a look at reforming the reparations scheme.[21]
In early November 1923, partly because of the reaction to the overthrowing of the SPD/KPD governments in Saxony and Thuringia, the Social Democrats withdrew from his reshuffled government and, after a motion of confidence, he was voted down on 23 November 1923, after which Stresemann and his cabinet resigned.
Fashion[edit]
Stresemann popularized the style of substituting a short dark lounge-suit jacket for a morning coat but otherwise wearing morning dress for men's day wear. The look became so identified with Stresemann that such outfits are often called "Stresemanns."
Media related to Gustav Stresemann at Wikimedia Commons