1923…2024?

Most students of German history probably associate the year 1923 with Adolf Hitler’s semi-farcical, failed “Beer Hall Putsch,” when the provincial agitator, having cobbled together an alliance of far-right-wing and paramilitary groups in Munich, along with his own Nazi party, held up leaders of the Bavarian state government at gunpoint in that city’s Bürgerbräukeller beer hall. Trying to emulate Benito Mussolini’s “March on Rome” of the previous year, Hitler tried unsuccessfully to co-opt Bavaria’s ultra-conservative government to join him in a March on Berlin to seize power nationally.

The next morning, the Nazis’ march to Berlin was stopped by an armed police barricade before it had even left the centre of Munich. After a few minutes’ shooting, which left 18 dead, Hitler’s putsch collapsed. It took nearly ten years before Hitler was invited by Germany’s conservative elites to form a coalition government as Chancellor, by which time the Nazis had become the largest party in Germany’s national parliament. 

That story has often been told. Mark Jones, an Irish historian who has also written a well-regarded history of the German revolution of 1918/19, seeks to give a fuller account of the Weimar Republic’s year of multiple crises, 1923.  

Our students of German history may also recall 1923 as the year in which Germany’s inflation turned into hyper-inflation. This was the time when money lost its value with eye-watering rapidity, when even the cost of keeping the country’s paper-mills rolling to maintain the supply of banknotes ran into astronomical trillion-trillions, and when people proverbially went shopping with wheelbarrows of money to buy a wallet-full of goods.

Jones gives a vivid description of the stark poverty and social misery that many Germans suffered during the inflation. Widespread famine was only averted through the efforts of aid agencies such as the American Quakers, and European countries such as Switzerland providing food aid to Germans. 

As Jones points out, the inflation started with the Imperial German government’s choice to finance its war effort from 1914 to 1918 by borrowing money, mainly from its own population, rather than by taxation. The financial situation was exacerbated by a series of political events. Assassinations of prominent Weimar politicians by extreme right-wing terrorists in the early 1920s shook confidence in the republic.

Then, French and Belgian troops, at the instigation of the conservative nationalist French President Raymond Poincaré, occupied the Ruhr region of Western Germany—the country’s most productive industrial region—to enforce the payment of the reparations that Germany owed to the Allies. 

The German government, under the shipping magnate Wilhelm Cuno, embarked on a policy of “passive resistance.” The deadlock that followed ensured that France and Belgium barely derived any benefit from their occupation of the Ruhr, but it was ruinous for the German republic, which was left without revenue from its industrial heartland. It would not be an exaggeration to state that Weimar governments did more damage to their economy by their efforts to get out of paying reparations than the reparations themselves would have done.

“Passive resistance” was accompanied not only by strikes from Ruhr workers, but by sabotage, assassinations, and guerrilla war-like activities by German nationalist extremists, directed against the occupiers and those Rhinelanders who collaborated with them. The French reacted with more violence, and with efforts to sponsor Rhenish separatist movements. 

Jones gives detailed accounts of the violence that accompanied the Ruhr occupation, including sexual violence against German women by French troops (and violence committed by German nationalists against women suspected of collaborating with the French). Jones describes himself as a “historian of violent conflict in modern Europe,” and his book gives a detailed and sometimes confronting account of the toll of violence suffered by Germans in 1923. 

Other important events that Jones describes includes the intervention of Chancellor Gustav Stresemann (who replaced Cuno in August 1923) to suppress elected left-wing coalition governments in Saxony and Thuringia, and the subsequent botched attempt by German communists at staging a “German October” by trying to seize police stations in Hamburg.

He also describes the waves of antisemitic violence in late 1923, which were not confined to Bavaria, which was a haven for far-right antisemitic groups before the Hitler Putsch, but also took place in the East End of Berlin, where many Jews from Eastern Europe had settled. 

Jones’ book is briskly narrated for a general readership, and is consistently readable. While Jones gives plenty of “thick description” of the violence in Germany in 1923, and analyses how it was presented in the press at the time, the book’s political analysis is sometimes a little thin.

He describes the wartime split between the majority Social Democratic Party and the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) as due to the “unduly conservative policies” of the former, when the split was essentially the result of the war, with the USPD breaking with the majority’s support for continuing the war.

The Social Democratic politician (and socialist theorist) Rudolf Hilferding is erroneously characterised as an anti-republican conservative, possibly through confusing his name with that of the banker and nationalist politician Karl Helfferich.  

Jones is correct in disagreeing with the old saying that the Weimar Republic was a republic without republicans—over 80 percent of Germans in 1919 voted for parties that supported a democratic republic. But he overstates his case when he refers to Germany drawing on half a century of democratic political culture.

Germany’s governing elites—the industrialists, the generals, higher civil servants, the judges (who executed left-wing political offenders and let convicted right-wing terrorists and putschists like Hitler off with absurdly lenient sentences), all tended to view a democratic republic as an aberration, an undesirable by-product of military defeat. When the republic was weakened again by another economic catastrophe (the Great Depression), its enemies seized their opportunity.  

It is interesting to compare Jones’s book with that by veteran German historian Volker Ullrich, Germany 1923, which also appeared in time for the centenary (publishers may well be preparing for an avalanche of books to appear in time for the centenary of Hitler’s assumption of power, 2033). Ullrich’s account is in some ways the more rounded account of the period, including a rich chapter on Weimar culture, which is mostly absent from Jones’s work. But both books are worth reading. 

Jones’s book is in many respects a cautionary tale. He seeks to show how German democrats were able to muster the fortitude to defend democracy from extremist threats in 1923, in contrast to 1933, when Hitler came to power. For Jones, the history of Weimar’s crises “offers a powerful reminder that even strong democracies, if they are continually undermined from within, may eventually collapse into authoritarianism.”

He sees dangers in today’s “politics of hatred” playing out in what he strikingly calls “the digital beer halls of the present.” As I write this, some of my colleagues in the United States are nervous, and the historians of modern Germany may be more so than most, because they know what happened when conservative elites and the mainstream political right turned on democracy in Weimar Germany to ally themselves with fascism. 

This review of Mark Jones’ 1923. The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup was published by the Australian Institute for International Affairs.