The proud nation which sought to dominate the world is reduced to a country without army or navy, with an enormous burden of debt, and without influence or prestige in international politics.1
W
ith these astute words, the Literary Digest characterized the Ger-man situation in May 1919. Just days earlier, the terms of the Ver-sailles peace accord made clear that Germany, in defeat, would have to bear heavy territorial losses, military disarmament. and the burden of reparations. But the American magazine recognized that, in addition to eco-nomic and political isolation Germany had an ominous lack of “prestige in international politics,” an absence that weighed perhaps as heavily on Germany as the more tangible provisions of the peace treaty. As Germany would soon come to realize, the ramifications of its defeat extended beyond the economic or military fields to include the moral and cultural realms. Conversely, for it to regain great power status, it would not only need to overturn the written terms of the peace treaty but also to recapture its prestige and moral standing in the world. Not least, it needed to achieve this in the one country that German dip-lomats, businessmen, and publicists soon identified as a key partner in revising the Versailles treaty: the United States.Postwar Germany, Moral Isolation and the Revision of Versailles
To note that Germany had an “image problem” in 1918/19 would be a gross understatement. German defeat was not limited to the military battlefield but extended to world opinion. The exigencies of a total war had necessitated the
1 “Terms That Take All the Fight Out of Germany,” Literary Digest, May 17, 1919.
cultural mobilization of civilian populations on all sides of the conflict, lead-ing to an unprecedented demonization of the enemy. Although at least some Allies had initially been inclined to distinguish between what they deemed to be the detestable German leadership and a hapless public, between conniving elites and innocent people, these distinctions had long since given way to a near wholesale condemnation of the German nation.2 The German breach of Belgian neutrality in August 1914 and the German army’s ruthless behavior in invading that country (which Allied propaganda called the “rape of Belgium”) had turned public opinion against Germany, even in neutral nations. By the war’s end, a once-admired nation of “thinkers and poets” had been recast in the public imagination as an aggressive, militarist power out to rape, pillage, and mutilate.
The long armistice period, from November 1918 to June 1919, did little to normalize relations. The democratic sea change that had taken place in Ger-many just days before the armistice never profoundly altered public sentiment or official policies. On the contrary, the armistice period revealed the full ex-tent of anti-German feeling. The general election campaigns in the United Kingdom in December 1918 were famously built around the slogans that read
“Hang the Kaiser” and “Make Germany Pay,” and through the spring of 1919 the Allies maintained the blockade of Germany to force it to accept the peace terms.3 German claims of widespread civilian suffering at first elicited limited compassion or were dismissed as “German propaganda.” For example, Amer-ica’s chief propagandist George Creel, in responding to suggestions that the former enemy needed to be fed to avert social unrest, pointed out what he saw as German hypocrisy on November 16, 1918: “Even the women of Germany … who never lifted their voice in protest when the babies of Belgium were
slaugh-2 By the time of the armistice, the distinction once drawn between the German ruling class and the common people had collapsed in American news reporting. As the North American Review asserted in February 1918: “You can no more separate the German government from the Ger-man people than you can separate the bite of the mad dog from his blood. The wickedness and infamy of the German people is in their blood; it is the corruption and poison of their blood that have made the German people […] a nation of savages […] We must kill to save,” North Ameri-can Review (February 1918), qtd. In Cynthia Wachtell, “Representations of German Soldier in American World War I Literature” in “Huns” vs. “Corned Beef”: Representations of the Other in American and German Literature and Film on World War I, ed. Schneider and Wagener, 59–83 (Osnabrück, 2007), 61; The New York Sun found that “the Germans are not human beings in the common acceptation of the term,” qtd. in Frederick Franklin Schrader, 1683–1920 (New York, 1920), 28; for a few more sophisticated analyses in the Saturday Evening Post, see Michaela Hoe-nicke-Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–45 (New York, 2010), 37.
3 In January 1919, an American newspaper reminded its readers that though Germany’s war-time careers as an “armed enemy of civilization” had come to a halt, “she can no more be trusted than a torpid serpent warmed into renewed vitality at a friendly hearth.” “The War Not Yet Over,”
Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 24, 1919, 16; Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915–1919 (Athens, OH, 1985), 101.
Postwar Germany, Moral Isolation and the Revision of Versailles 41
tered at the breasts of their mothers … are now flashing their cry to America for sympathy and for help, while the male propagandists are holding out their hands dripping with blood and begging for mercy … the damnable cant of Germany is trying to poison the mind of the world at this late date.”4
Indeed, the distrust and disdain toward Germany on the Allied home fronts proved to be so strong that they complicated the peace-making process in Paris. With his constituents in a punitive mood at home, even U. S. President Woodrow Wilson almost immediately shrank back from his commitment to
“open covenants, openly arrived at” and returned to closed sessions just days into the peace negotiations.5 The Paris conference itself was replete with small humiliations and symbolic indictments of Germany.6 German delegates left ample record of the hostility they encountered. They went for weeks without being invited to the conference table, isolated from the other delegates in un-heated, freezing cold accommodations. This situation prompted Ernst von Simson, the director of the Foreign Ministry’s legal department, to speak of an
“ice wall between us and the former enemies.”7
The peace terms and the accompanying correspondence embodied this sense of moral tribulation. According to the Allied and Associated Govern-ments’ cover letter of June 16, the harsh peace terms expressed the “judgment passed upon the war by practically the whole of civilized mankind.” Germany was accused of having planned and started the conflict in pursuit of its expan-sionist aims and was held directly responsible for the war’s millions of dead and maimed. Moreover, the communication once more elaborated on Germa-ny’s ruthless conduct of war, including the illegal invasion and occupation of neutral Belgium, the pioneering use of poison gas, civilian bombings, subma-rine warfare, and the maltreatment of prisoners of war. Furthermore, the cover letter made it clear that such behavior placed Germany – a nation that had cho-sen “to gratify her lust for tyranny by resort to war” – outside of the pale of the family of “civilized” nations.8 While such moralistic language was largely ab-sent from the treaty itself, articles 227 to 230 still demanded the extradition and trial of the emperor and other war criminals to conform to the requirements of “international morality.” Article 231 asked Germany to assume responsibil-ity for the damages caused to the Allies in a “war imposed upon them by the
4 See Creel in the New York Times, Nov. 17, 1918, qtd. in Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Rev-olutionary Germany and Peacemaking (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 143.
5 William R. Keylor, “Versailles and International Diplomacy,” in The Treaty of Versailles: A Re-assessment after 75 Years, ed. Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser, 469–505 (New York, 1998), 481 ff..
6 See Gerd Krumeich, “Versailles 1919. Der Krieg in den Köpfen,” in Versailles 1919. Ziele – Wirkung – Wahrnehmung, ed. Gerd Krumeich, 53–64 (Essen, 2001).
7 See Dieter Neizert, “‘Das Amt’ zwischen Versailles und Rapallo. Die Rückschau des Staatsse-kretärs Ernst von Simson,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 60, no. 3 (2012): 443–490, 455.
8 Reply of the Allied and Associated Powers to the Observations of the German Delegation on the Conditions of Peace, June 16, 1919, FRUS, Paris Peace Conference (PPC) 6, 928.
aggression of Germany and her allies.” Whereas this much-debated “war guilt”
clause served in a strictly legal sense only to justify reparations payments, Ger-mans interpreted it as a concerted humiliation.9 When the Versailles treaty was signed on June 28, 1919, and ratified a few weeks later, this ended the legal state of war, but the “cultural demobilization”, i. e., the waning of war mentalities, had hardly begun.10
Fig . 1: J . N . Darling, “Outcasts,” editorial cartoon, October 1918
© “Ding” Darling Wildlife Society
9 Ulrich Heinemann, Die verdrängte Niederlage. Politische Öffentlichkeit und Kriegsschuldfrage in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 1983), 17.
10 On the concepts of “cultural mobilization” and “cultural demobilization,” see Horne, “Demo-bilizing the Mind”; contemporaries tended to speak of “moral demobilization.” See, for example, Gustav Stresemann, “Rede vor der ausländischen Presse vom 30. Dezember 1924,” in Reden der Kanzler- und Außenministerzeit (1923–1929), by Gustav Stresemann, ed. Wolfgang Elz, 516–533.
Revision as leitmotif 43 Revision as leitmotif
Germany’s international ostracism would soon prove to be a significant polit-ical problem. It was in this hostile climate, and from this circumscribed, iso-lated position, that Germany had to begin its efforts to revise the provisions of the peace treaty. While none of the victors was truly satisfied with the treaty, Germans saw it as a devastating injustice and a calculated humiliation heaped upon an exhausted people. The treaty placed the odium of responsibility for the war on German shoulders, heavily reduced its army and navy and entirely dissolved its air force, took sizeable German lands and all colonies away from it, saw the Rhineland and the Saar area occupied, and stipulated that Germany would have to pay reparations of a yet to be determined amount. In a rare Weimar consensus, opposition to the Versailles dictate was nearly ubiquitous at the time. German professors, publicists, and politicians of nearly all political persuasions described the peace as a major injustice, even as “Carthaginian” in nature.11 An internal memorandum by the German peace delegation astutely summarized German sentiment, characterizing the peace terms as “insuffer-able,” “unfulfill“insuffer-able,” “dishonest,” and “dishonorable.”12 Although the Weimar National Assembly ratified the treaty (under the threat of Allied military oc-cupation and continuing blockade), German debates began to focus on how to revise its terms even before the ink had dried.13 Revision would become the leitmotif of foreign policy in the Weimar period.
Despite some discussion about the respective priority of overturning the treaty’s economic, military, and territorial provisions, economic questions soon emerged as the most pressing concern. Settling the amount of German repa-rations payments to the Allies, in particular – which had remained unresolved due to inter-Allied disputes at Paris – would pre-occupy the great powers dur-ing the 1920s.14 Between 1921 and 1924 alone, more than two dozen interna-tional conferences sought to determine the final amount and payment meth-ods. The centrality of the reparations question to European politics derived from a number of factors: For one, the fight over who would have to shoulder the immense financial burdens of the war was crucial because it would greatly
11 Michael Grüttner, “Nachkriegszeit,” in Geschichte der Universität unter den Linden,Vol. 2, Die Berliner Universität zwischen den Weltkriegen, ed. Grüttner et al., 5–65 (Berlin, 2012), 28.
12 Denkschrift der deutschen Friedensdelegierten zu den Friedensforderungen der Entente, June 17 1919, Akten der Reichskanzlei (AdRk), Weimarer Republik/Das Kabinett Scheidemann/
Vol. 1/No. 113, 469–475.
13 German leadership had definitely been aware that the peace treaty would not resemble Wil-son’s 14 Points since March 21, 1919; for the detailed instructions on how the peace negotiations were to be approached, see Kabinettssitzung, Mar. 21, 1919, AdRk, Das Kabinett Scheidemann.
Vol. 1/No. 19, 74–83.
14 Walter Zechlin, Pressechef bei Ebert, Hindenburg und Kopf. Erlebnisse eines Pressechefs und Diplomaten (Hanover, 1956), 39.
affect the redistribution of power in postwar Europe. For France, in particular, with its destroyed departments, staggering war debt (it owed 3 billion dollars to the United States alone), clouded demographic prospects, and fears of German revanchism, the question of reparations amounted to the question of its future standing in Europe.15 Only large reparation payments, by economically weak-ening Germany and strengthweak-ening France, could ensure France’s security and truly reinforce the reality of German defeat and French victory. Conversely, for Germany, a viable reparations settlement was of eminent political importance because it would determine the pace of its economic recovery and therewith – many German decisionmakers believed – its return to great power status.16 If Germany succeeded in minimizing its reparations burden, it could attract the necessary capital from abroad to rebuild its dominant economic position on the continent. For this reason, a favorable settlement of the reparations ques-tion was both a financial prerequisite and a potential precedent for the revi-sion of other peace terms. As a consequence, reparations became one of the determining foreign policy questions of the decade and, in many respects, the linchpin of Germany’s revisionist politics.
Treaty Revision and the United States
These questions kept the United States – the world’s main creditor nation – at the heart of German attention. Indeed, since October 1918 the United States had stood at the center of German foreign relations. When the collapse of the Ger-man military was imminent, GerGer-many’s newly established democratic govern-ment under Chancellor Max von Baden had approached U. S. President Wilson on October 4, 1918, about armistice negotiations on the basis of his Fourteen Points. There were both ideological and strategic reasons for this “turn” to the United States. At least partly, it was due to the enormous psychological impact that Wilson’s vision of a new world order had on war-weary publics around the world.17 German liberals close to the von Baden government like Max War-burg, Walter Simons, and Moritz Julius Bonn embraced Wilson’s vision as a
15 Even the German finance minister, if only internally, admitted that the “French economic position, if that is even possible, is even a lot sadder than ours. The French have about 180 billion debt, much of it abroad, their industrial territories are destroyed, their industry is to a large part a luxury industry, that can find no markets in an impoverished world (and) they have only 40 million people.” Ausführungen des Reichsfinanzministers vor dem Reichskabinett über die finanzielle Leistungsfähigkeit des Reichs, Apr. 26, 1919, AdRk, Das Kabinett Scheidemann/
Vol. 1/No. 54, 233.
16 Berg, Gustav Stresemann und die Vereinigten Staaten, 17.
17 Manela, The Wilsonian Moment.
Treaty Revision and the United States 45
solution to Europe’s long-standing problems.18 But the appeal to the American president was also a strategic decision. The war had not only left the United States with greatly enhanced international prestige and economic strength, but Wilson’s Fourteen Points (at least in the way that Germans liked to understand them) simply promised the most lenient possible peace to Germany. It was partly in deference to perceived American wishes that Germany further re-formed its constitution in October 1918; the abdication of the Kaiser, even the declaration of the German Republic on November 9, 1918, were widely per-ceived as concessions to American democratic ideals.19
After the armistice, Germany tried hard to keep up direct lines of commu-nication with a powerful Amerika. It was to the American president and the American public that German foreign secretary Wilhelm Solf and civil society groups first turned to relax the armistice terms on November 12. Throughout the long armistice period, the German government invoked Wilson’s Fourteen Points on every occasion both to calm revolutionary unrest at home and to avert the more punitive intentions of the Allied governments abroad.20 In a memorandum on the United States in late November 1918, Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the former German ambassador to Washington (1908–1917), who was now in charge of preparing what Germans believed would be peace negotiations, held that “because the United States has decided the war, its po-sition and especially that of President Wilson has become decisive for the fu-ture.” Consequently, “the entire world will become economically and finan-cially dependent on the United States. […]We will thus have to lean on the United States politically during the peace negotiations and arrange the later reconstruction of Germany with its help.”21 While this process would not be as straightforward as Bernstorff might have hoped at the time, these thoughts already reflected the main approach that German governments would take to-ward the United States in the 1920s, aspiring to recover Germany’s place in the world with American support.
Germans’ prevalent hope in the United States was not lost on Americans.
Summing up his impressions after a two-week special mission to Germany
18 Horst Gründer, Walter Simons als Staatsmann, Jurist und Kirchenpolitiker (Neustadt an der Aisch, 1975), 69.
19 Klaus Schwabe, “America’s Contribution to the Stabilization of the Early Weimar Republic,”
in Germany and America: Essays on Problems of International Relations and Immigration, ed.
Hans Trefousse, 21–28 (New York, 1980), 26.
20 As the Reich finance minister explained to the cabinet on April 26, 1919: “Wilson’s 14 points are a shield against the demands of our victorious enemies.” Ausführungen des Reichsfinanz-ministers vor dem Reichskabinett über die finanzielle Leistungsfähigkeit des Reichs, Apr. 26, 1919, AdRk, Das Kabinett Scheidemann/Vol. 1/No. 54, 233.
21 “Aufzeichnung des Leiters der vorbereitenden Massnahmen für die Friedensverhandlungen Graf von Bernstorff,” Nov. 24, 1918, ADAP Series A, Vol. 1, No. 36, 55.
in December 1918 and January 1919, Ellis Loring Dresel, the future American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, reported back:
The most conspicuous feature of all conversations, which I had with all classes was that somewhat over-friendly disposition toward America and Americans. This is undoubt-edly partly due to self-interest, but is also largely owing to the former close ties with America, to social, economic and financial intercourse which existed before the war and to the large population of German extraction in the United States: also to an appreciation of the fact that America has no selfish ends to serve and to the hope that she may be in-duced to plead the German cause with her allies. The result is that there is a strong wish to take up relations again with the United States at the same point where they were before the war, and the hope is cherished that the events of the war will be overlooked and con-doned and that by the help of America, Germany will be enabled to rehabilitate herself. It is perhaps needless to add that I was careful to give no encouragement to this desire for a policy of forgiving and forgetting.22
Just as Dresel was personally careful not to encourage German hopes, few American actions could justify German belief in the nation’s particular good-will during the armistice period. In reality, the Wilson administration had never made republican government in Germany a prerequisite for peace ne-gotiations, and the events of the German Revolution elicited apprehension rather than enthusiasm in Washington. If Germany’s independent socialists
Just as Dresel was personally careful not to encourage German hopes, few American actions could justify German belief in the nation’s particular good-will during the armistice period. In reality, the Wilson administration had never made republican government in Germany a prerequisite for peace ne-gotiations, and the events of the German Revolution elicited apprehension rather than enthusiasm in Washington. If Germany’s independent socialists