Introduction:
Hello everyone. Welcome, or welcome back to, Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Times.
First, I want to apologize for the lengthy delay in releasing this episode. I didn’t want it to be just another history lecture when there is so much more life to see.
In that spirit I have added some character voices with the aid of the internet and other miracles of modern technology.
Without further delay, let’s step back into the streets of Weimar Germany!
Stop One: Eve of the Great Depression
By 1929, Germany looks like a country that finally gotten its act together: The economy was stable, jobs were up, prices were down. Families were planning for the future again.
Even major cities had disposable money to spend on public works, repairs, maintenance, that kind of stuff. So you saw a lot of new museums coming up, research institutes, health clubs, that kind of stuff. And Berlin itself became a showcase of modern planning and technological progress in Germany, and indeed Europe itself.
Culture began to change too. In the years after World War I, athletes began to replace the army heroes of the past. Newspapers and radios would quote sprinting times and boxing champion names with the same enthusiasm as they were reporting war victories back in the First World War. And it seemed like every young man knew world record times of sprinting or boxing just off the top of his head.
It was a far cry from the Imperial Army days. And from the outside, it looked like the Republic had weathered the hyperinflation storm.
And she had that storm, but a new one was coming. This time, it was coming from a faraway land and would have severe consequences. But that was a little bit later.
Today, she’s a happy camper.
You might be asking, “So where’s all this money coming from?” A large portion of it actually came from the United States.
Now you might be asking, “Wait, didn’t the United States just fight a war against Germany a few years back? Why would they be lending them money already?” The bottom line is, why not?
Wars end, and every nation has a right to free trade. Well, as we discussed in episode one, that is a little bit difficult for Germany. And-
The US gave her loans the USA never really liked the Treaty of Versailles anyway, so American investors, they viewed Germany as potentially lucrative opportunity, and why not? The country possessed a skilled workforce, abundant resources, and one of the most advanced industrial sectors on the entire continent.
The statistics actually supported this general optimism, too. Listen to this. Since the hyperinflation, retail sales were up twenty percent. Wages were up ten percent, and industrial output surged one hundred and twenty-two percent. On paper, like I said, Germany was recovering. But there was a catch. Much of this prosperity, it would have been impossible without borrowed money, also called credit.
Now, the entire global financial system was one giant circle of credit after World War I. American banks loaned credit to Germany. Germany used some of it to pay reparations. Britain and France then used those reparation payments to repay their debts to the United States, and the cycle just continued in a big circle like that.
As long as that credit generated real, live, tangible cash, everyone’s happy. And what had become of the odious Nazi party at this point? Well, they took a backseat to real politicians, and Germany thrived. Though they were still a presence, their politics were still too extreme for the majority.
Our friend Sebastian Haffner said:
Hitler…and his speeches were still rather a handicap for the movement that gathered around him. The delights in threats and cruelty, the bloodthirsty execution fantasies. Most those who began to acclaim Hitler would probably have avoided asking him for a light if they met him on the street.
Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler.
Then came October 1929.
Americans know it as Black Tuesday; that’s when the New York Stock Exchange crashed.
The reasons behind the crash are complicated enough to fill its own episode – but I’m not educated enough into finances to attempt it.
For our purposes, the important part is simple: investors panicked, fortunes literally disappeared, and lenders suddenly became very interested in getting their money back.
If Germany was a ship, she just got torpedoed.
Second Stop: Financial Crisis, Round 2.
You might ask how the fourth wall came crashing down in Manhattan to sink the German economy. Remember those high-risk American loans? Lenders attach higher interest rates to cover anticipated risk, and they get really jumpy when markets collapse. So they called in the loans. And this is the beginning of the Great Depression.
And we hear the word often enough, and we now understand the root cause. But what happens to a society when it entirely goes into debt? It’s a cascade of nightmares from the top down. Foreign investments dry up, exports slow, banks fail, businesses close, workers lose their jobs, and savings vanish.
Betty Scholem wrote the latest to her son, who emigrated outside Germany a few years prior.
It hit us like a catastrophe. An enormous fall in the demand for price tags caused our debts to swell. Just as all business came to a halt, the bank failed, so there was no one to speak to. The banks went into a government holding company, which showed no interest in the debts of customers. All of this happened at once.
Betty Sholem, Visitors to the Third Reich.
Well, that just sounds wholly upsetting, doesn’t it?
A depression isn’t some abstract boogeyman dreamt by politicians and newspaper editors to scare us. We’ve been through the rodeo a few times, and we know the signs by now. But we will sometimes forget it’s more than a hit on our 401K and stock portfolios; It’s dinner getting smaller. It’s an unpaid bill just sitting there for months at a time. It’s waking up every morning wondering if your family can even survive another month.
During the worst years of the crisis, 30% of Germans were unemployed! Now, I’m not a big lover of social statistics like these. Don’t get me wrong, numbers have a lot of use in the world, and I really wish I was better with them.
But when it comes to social history, percentages and statistical graphs most TikTok historians love to flout only give us a fraction or skewed picture of what’s what.
This ‘30%’; it’s an anchor against national productivity, safety, and logistics.
Inside the home, income slowed to a trickle or stopped coming in altogether. I think most of us know what that feels like at some point, right? We listeners lived through the Great Recession and the Pandemic. Of course we know!
And what do we do? Cut expenses! Logical right?
The German were of the same mind as us. Memberships to museums, clubs, and social organizations declined. Fewer people could afford private cars – I’m sure many were sold for its cash value. Attendance at concerts and [health clubs] fell.
Archivist’s Note: I use the term “health club” because it is a better understood against the original word, ‘Bathhouse’.
Even enrollment in vocational schools dropped as families focused on survival instead of long-term opportunities!
In the town of Northeim, in what is today, central Germany a place we will visit frequently through our travels through time, pet ownership fell by nearly a third!
That detail always sticks with me. People don’t give up a beloved dog or cat because they want to. They do it because they can’t afford to feed another mouth.
When hard times drag on, desperation starts to set in and begin to sell off assets. Those with assets had a small cushion but would still suffer. Those without…begin to skip meals to save money. Anything to keep a roof over your head, right?
In 1931 Lady Rumbolt, the wife of the British Ambassador at the time, wrote Home to the Foreign Office about the state of affairs inside Germany. These are her words:
No one has any money. The price of bread does not fall and unemployment remains high. It is the lack of any hope makes the situation seem to them so depressing…
Lady Rumbold, Travellers in the Third Reich.
I cannot, CANNOT underestimate the dangers of food insecurity among a formerly healthy population.
In the 1790s, food shortages in Paris helped lead to the French Revolution. Fast forward a century and change to 1917, St. Petersburg, Russia. Starvation diets and imperial apathy send people running to the Bolsheviks. More recently, it helped lead to the overthrow of Sudan’s government in 2019.
But people would soon find a new rock-bottom thanks to their government.
Surely, we don’t know what that is like, right?
Well, In June 1932, there was an emergency decree restricting welfare payments to those who had previously held steady employment. This measure helped balance government finances. For long-term unemployed workers, however, it was devastating!
Two out of every three unemployed Germans now found themselves dependent upon public charity to survive.
Across the country, household budgets tightened, then broke.
Imagine standing aboard a ship that is slowly sinking beneath the waves. You can’t stop it. You can’t escape. All you can do is watch as the water rises around you and hope help arrives before it is too late.
Remember my point earlier about statistics? Follow me here:
136 families were effectively homeless. But homeless is a broad term and does not necessarily conjoin with unemployment. Some of these homeless had jobs but those jobs couldn’t keep up with the basic needs of the person. We will touch more on this later.
Back to it!
Of these 136 families; Some moved in with relatives. Others occupied condemned buildings. Some found shelter through state assistance programs. A few were able to rent rooms in a nearby refurbished army barracks for five marks a month.
Let’s dissect this really fast: Some occupied condemned buildings. What does it say when you illegally reside in structurally unsound or unhygienic building with a spouse and potentially young children? What sort of future does that paint for a child? There are several schools of thought on that topic and few of them point to bright long-term outcomes.
In the other context, family members took some in as is expected. Others with none living nearby or otherwise rented rooms in an army barracks. Most in this period are not designed to house families and are cramped, cold, and likely fed from public soup lines or charity groups.
A young man of just seven years old at the height of the Great Depression, this young citizen lived next door to an Employment Office and a pub.
I had to walk past it every day on my way to school and the number of people lined up waiting for work was incredible. There was a pub on the corner, and I still have vivid recollections of seeing women with their children watching over their husbands. They were there to keep them from going in and drinking what little money they had.
Gottfried Farhrmann, Voices from the Third Reich
With finances in the home stretched thin it began to fall to the matriarchs to take a firmer hand in managing the family which included preventing their doting husbands from falling into despair which is a real symptom of hard times.
Our dear friend, the British transplant, Christopher Isherwood, in 1929 lived in a Berlin slum with his boyfriend. He had a peculiar analogy for the time comparing the socio-economic attitude to a boiling pot of tea.
The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty, and other potent ingredients.
Christopher Isherwood, Travellers in the Third Reich
One of these other potent ingredients include petty crime. Sociologist will sometimes call them “survival crimes” when the System upends. Things like small-value fraud, theft, smuggling, things like that
Keep in mind that is not an apologist for someone whose done fraud and we should all be understanding to people’s circumstances. No, there’s a limit. Fraud is never okay.
But it helps support my argument that even during the worst of the crisis, people searched for solutions. Just make sure yours, listener, stays on the correct side of law and order.
Whoo! I’m on fire with these transitions. Speaking of solutions, the good people of Northeim concocted this one to solve their homeless problem:
An organization of unemployed workers in the town proposed an ambitious housing project: Unemployed laborers would construct inexpensive homes designed by an unemployed architect. The plan would create jobs, provide housing, and help struggling families regain some measure of stability. The proposal reached the city council and approval seemed likely.
Then politics got involved.
The council chairman was a Nazi. He dismissed the project as socialism and killed it. Later, Nazi officials would insist they had actually supported the idea all along, claiming only that the timing had been wrong.
You will notice this pattern repeat. The Nazis were remarkably skilled at opposing solutions, preventing solutions, and then taking credit for solutions once public opinion shifted in their favor.
You see, the other potent ingredient Mr. Isherwood was referring to is the rise in the popularization of political extremism. Germany saw it before in the Aftermath of the 1918 Revolution, the hyperinflation, and now would again.
Everywhere, citizens began to look at politics to solve their problems. The Republic, they quickly saw, was unable to rise to the challenge. What they couldn’t see were the invisible chains wrapped around the Reichstag by men and women sabotaging the workings of democracy for their own ends.
Stop 3: The Battle for German Culture
The symbolic heart of Germany’s troubles sat inside the Reichstag.
Imagine trying to govern a country with 29 political parties. 29! [mein Gott!]
Conservatives, liberals, socialists, communists, social parties, religious parties, and every shade of political opinion in between all competed for influence.
Coalitions rose > Coalitions collapsed. Governments came and went.
Compromise became increasingly difficult.
Meanwhile, powerful industrial interests began exerting more influence behind the scenes. Old aristocratic families still held considerable social prestige. New money sought political leverage. Everyone had a different vision for Germany’s future.
Unfortunately, most of those visions were, more or less, incompatible with one another.
Beyond Parliament’s walls, public mood was growing darker.
- Refugees continued arriving from the Soviet Union seeking safety and opportunity (even with an economic Depression it was preferable to life inside oppressive Russia).
- Economic uncertainty touched nearly every household.
- Political movements on both the Left and Right promised dramatic solutions to increasingly desperate people.
A common theory in politics is you only have legitimacy if the People give it to you. They can withdraw their good graces at any time.
GRR Martin illustrated this particular point beautifully in that riddle with the King, the Priest, and the Sellsword.
Citizens stopped believing in the words and promises of moderates and centrists because their assurances and predictions about the future were proving far from correct. It was the Communists and the Nazis which were promising radical change!
That’s what the people wanted: radical change.
Geoffrey Cox, a British journalist in Germany as elections loomed took away a stark and unsettling prediction for the coming decade:
I give it six months before she either goes Communist of invades Poland. The great danger, I feel, is the Dictator party will make war as soon as the Army is up to strength. It is a hell of a shame as the Germans are such splendid people.
Geoffrey Cox, Travellers in the Third Reich
Reading that today feels almost eerie. The warning signs were already visible a decade before any European war started. We’ll tackle Germany’s issue with Poland in a later episode but the fact it’s mentioned before the Nazis even come to power signifies what a thorn in the side it was.
Cox also looked at the pulse of Communism in Europe and saw the invisible tether of Russian money, political influence, and which connected Germany to the early Soviet Union. But journalists, especially foreign correspondents, have an uncanny sense of prophecy because they receive more data than the great mass of others at the time. This detail will be more evident as the show progresses.
This wasn’t visible to only those visiting the country. As stated, citizens began exploring other political options. In Southern Germany, one man visited as many political rallies as he could near his hometown in Baden.
After listening to what was said, I came to the conclusion that given the fact that million of Communist Germans already looked to the Soviet Union as a Fatherland – there were two options. One could try with the Communists under Russian leadership or the National Socialists. I didn’t see any third option back then and I guess millions of others didn’t either.
Otto Kumm, Voices from the Third Reich
In 1930, 3 Army officers were arrested for distributing Nazi propaganda among members of the military. [chuckle] This was…a Very Serious Offense.
Why? Members of the German Army were expected to keep their nose out of politics. Any political opinions they might were were expected to remain unspoken in any official capacity. Yet these officers were promoting a political movement which had already tried to overthrow the country once.
The officers were accused of rallying support for an armed Nazi coup. The scandal made headlines and the trial became a stage. Why not? Parliament already was.
One of the star-witnesses was none other than Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party who took this opportunity to lie his ass off and sell his devoted acolytes down the river. In a shameless sacrifice, he distanced himself from the officers and portrayed his movement as law-abiding and will achieve power through legal means.
The problem isn’t that Hitler was shameless in lying and manipulation. He offered a story to go along with it. A nation which ushered in the modern era turned to shambles by democracy would rise again and reclaim her place under the Sun. Those who let the democratic devils in the door (also known as the ‘November Criminals‘) would be dealt with harshly and any notion of Enlightenment extinguished.
Herr Haffner’s words next could be said of almost every wanna-be political despot. I don’t think we need to look far in seeing history repeat itself.
He promised everything to everybody which naturally brought him a vast, loose army of followers and voters from among the ignorant, disappointed, and dispossessed.
Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler.
I think we have reached a natural stopping point in our journey through time. Next time on, Ordinary Lives Extraordinary Times we’ll keep tackling the fall of the Weimar Republic though the eyes of those who were there. Until next time, be careful out there.
And remember: Long Live the Republic.
Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Times 