Reich Citizens' Council

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The Reich Citizens 'Council was founded on January 5, 1919 in Berlin as the central organization of the Citizens' Councils, which had emerged in the course of the November Revolution as a counter-foundation to the workers 'and soldiers' councils in numerous German cities.

development

background

The citizens' councils were committees and committees, the purpose of which was initially to gather together the bourgeois politicians and other city notables who had been temporarily marginalized by the revolutionary crisis . These committees came into being in November and December 1918 in many German cities and mostly referred to themselves as "councils" based on the workers 'and soldiers' councils. Two leading functionaries of the Hansa Association, Curt Köhler and Jacob Riesser, were the main stimuli behind these foundations . Initially, the citizens' councils devoted themselves primarily to the propaganda for the rapid convocation of a national assembly , from which they hoped to delegitimize and disempower the workers' and soldiers' councils. Many citizens' councils paid particular attention to influencing the returning soldiers from the front. In December, individual citizens councils favored the use of the preparation of the volunteer corps to initiate or fund, including the Berlin Citizens' Council, led by Salomon Marx . The Leipzig Citizens' Council cooperated with a group of former and active officers who called themselves the “White Guard”. The Munich Citizens' Council , together with officers and right-wing extremist circles, participated in the preparation of a - failed - coup d'état (see Buttmann conspiracy ), the Bremen Citizens' Committee intended to put a coup against the workers and soldiers' council with the help of the returned 75th Infantry Regiment . In the spring of 1919 the citizens 'councils played an important role in smashing the workers' councils in many towns and communities - by sending out “calls for help”, drawing up arrest lists and, in some cases, independent armed action.

Organization and Political Practice

On January 5, 1919, at the invitation of the Berlin Citizens' Council, representatives of around 300 citizens' councils met in the auditorium of the Berlin University to found a Reich Citizens' Council . Friedrich Naumann spoke a greeting. The first chairman was the Berlin pastor Ludwig Wessel , deputies were the chairmen of the Munich and Danzig Citizens' Councils, Rudolf Meyer-Absberg and Julius Jewelowski . The Reich Citizens' Council initially put its propaganda under the catchphrase of "equal rights for the bourgeoisie", "lawless class rule" of the working class was rhetorically staged and resolutely rejected. Revolutionary leftists like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were portrayed as a “power-hungry minority”; At the founding meeting, Wessel spoke of the “insane ideology of un-German, Russian, and alien people”.

After initially seeing itself, the Reich Citizens' Council was a “ non-partisan rallying movement” in which politicians from the DDP to the DNVP worked together. From the beginning, however, differences were obvious, especially with regard to the question of whether one should fight the SPD or work with it. In addition, isolated left-wing liberal voices did not reject the November Revolution in fluff and recognized it as being “deeply rooted in our own circumstances”, but a majority saw it as “a senseless copy of Russian events”.

The rapid reorganization of the bourgeois parties took away some of the importance of the Reich Citizens Council shortly after it was founded. With the largely disempowerment in the spring of 1919 and the eventual disappearance of the workers 'and soldiers' councils, interest in a unified political "civic bloc" also waned, at least at the level of Reich politics. Nevertheless, the Reich Citizens' Council was able to stabilize as an organization after a second Reich Conference on March 30, 1919. He initiated the establishment of regional citizens 'councils, of which 13 existed in the spring of 1920, which in turn led around 330 local citizens' councils. The Bavarian State Citizens 'Council , which traded as the Bavarian Citizens' Block , drove the expansion of the regional resident defense and later maintained close relationships with the Escherich organization , achieved great importance . In many places, the local citizens' councils developed into coordinating centers for existing civic organizations and interest groups. The Bremen and Dortmund Citizens' Councils included representatives from 90 associations and corporations, the Leipzig one around 200 associations and 7,000 individual members. The Reich Citizens' Council was joined by:

Conversely, the Reich Citizens Council joined other organizations, including the Anti-Bolshevik League , which it co-financed in this way. He also concluded various working group agreements, for example with the Kyffhäuserbund . On July 26, 1919, the Reich Citizens' Council went public with a program of action in which the following goals and demands were named: "Education of the people to a sense of community and devotion to the state", "Promotion of efforts to establish resident defense", "Support anti-Bolshevik propaganda ”,“ bridging the class antagonisms ”,“ dismantling the forced economy ”,“ maintaining a healthy class of craftsmen and small businesses ”.

Friedrich Wilhelm von Loebell, the longstanding 1st chairman of the Reich Citizens Council (1931)

At the end of 1919, the forces who wanted to terminate the temporary cooperation with the Social Democrats and - without saying so openly - considered the restoration of the monarchy possible, took over the leadership of the Reich Citizens ' Council in the form of the former Prussian Interior Minister Friedrich Wilhelm von Loebell . Loebell presented a Reich Citizenship Program based on the action program , in which calls for the revision of the Versailles Treaty - a brochure on the " guilt lie " was distributed with a circulation of 4.5 million copies - and for the elimination of the domestic political consequences of the "collapse" in were brought to the fore. Workers' strikes should henceforth be fought - as has already happened here and there - with bourgeois "counter-strikes". Strong emphasis was also placed here and subsequently on the need for a “free economy”, political and economic measures that restricted it, including the eight-hour day and the right to unemployment benefits , should be removed . The second chairman Meyer-Absberg saw in the Reich Citizens Council the nucleus of a bourgeois "united front" which only "has to fight one enemy, and indeed in every form of its appearance, Marxism ", the result being "right-wing socialists, Bolsheviks , syndicalists and communists “To turn off equally.

The Kapp Putsch exposed the structural problem of the citizens' council movement : some councils spoke out openly in favor of the coup , others - as in Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main , Bochum and Stuttgart - against. A majority, including the Reich Citizens' Council, turned against the general strike, advocated the maintenance of "peace and order" and thereby passively supported the putsch. Loebell visited Kapp on the evening of March 14th and informed him of the initially wait-and-see attitude of most of the citizens' councils, which is said to have made a “strong impression” on him. After Kapp's departure, the Reich Citizens' Council tried urgently to prevent the brief formation of a pure “workers government” made up of SPD, USPD and trade union representatives . To this end, he organized several submissions from business associations. He advocated "here and in the following years a corporately -oriented presidential", as the main political opponents he saw the KPD .

After the coup, the importance of the Reich Citizens 'Council and the individual Citizens' Councils declined rapidly and drastically, as the different strategic concepts of the various factions and currents of bourgeois politics could no longer be organized in a stable manner with the removal of the revolutionary threat. The fact that a fundamental criticism of the political and organizational concept of the Reich Citizens Council now found influential supporters also played a role here: in particular, left-liberal and young conservative ideologues, some of whom experimented with propaganda concepts of a “German” or “ national socialism ”, spoke out against them ostentatious self-portrayal of the bourgeoisie as a class embodied by the Reich Citizens Council, since in their opinion it was precisely the main task of bourgeois politics to deprive the working class of the consciousness of being a class itself or of having a “class opponent”; the - according to Max Hildebert Boehm - public "struggle for bourgeois class consciousness " only consolidates the class consciousness of the workers, is "indirect Marxism" and should therefore be avoided. Although decidedly anti-socialist themselves, they rejected the citizens' council rhetoric, which was teeming with aggressive slogans such as “socialist plague”, “anti-socialist mass bloc”, “civic united front” and “violence against violence”.

The magazine of the Reich Citizens' Council - Der Reichsbürger - ceased to appear in 1921, and after 1922 no more Reich conferences were held. The Reich Citizens' Council continued to exist and from 1924 had published a new magazine, Deutschenspiegel . One of the most active and influential nationalist propaganda organizations developed in these years from the founding of the Working Committee of German Associations to create a united front to combat the guilty lie , which he encouraged in 1921 . In 1925, the Reich Citizens' Council played an important role in the launch of Paul von Hindenburg's candidacy for the election of the Reich President , as well as in the following year in the agitation against the expropriation of the German royal houses without compensation . The election of Hindenburg and the failure of the referendum are regarded as the last spectacular successes of the traditional style collection policy of the Reich Citizens Council with the "methods of bourgeois-noble dignitaries policy [promoted]." Together with the old right-wing conservative camp, in whose agitation against the political left , the “ fulfillment policy ”, the League of Nations , the Locarno Treaties and the Young Plan, the Reich Citizens' Council took part without any recognizable accents of its own, he got into a structural crisis after 1926. In the phase of the rise of the NSDAP , its political functionality was exhausted. The Reich Citizens' Council is said to have existed in 1933, nothing is known about its further development.

literature

  • Hans-Joachim Bieber: bourgeoisie in the revolution. Citizens' councils and citizen strikes in Germany 1918–1920 . Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-7672-1148-3 .
  • Erwin Könnemann : Reich Citizenship Council . In: Dieter Fricke (ed.): The bourgeois parties in Germany. Handbook of the history of the bourgeois parties and other bourgeois interest organizations from Vormärz to 1945 . Vol. 2, Leipzig 1970, p. 507.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Bieber, Hans-Joachim, Bürgerertum in der Revolution. Citizens' councils and citizen strikes in Germany 1918–1920, Hamburg 1992, p. 76f.
  2. ↑ See Bieber, Bürgerertum, pp. 201ff.
  3. ↑ Quoted from Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 78.
  4. ↑ Quoted from Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 79.
  5. ↑ Quoted from Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 79.
  6. ↑ See Könnemann, Erwin, Reichsbürgerrat, in: Fricke, Dieter (Ed.), Die bürgerlichelungen in Deutschland. Handbook of the history of the bourgeois parties and other bourgeois interest organizations from Vormärz to 1945, Leipzig 1970, Volume 2, p. 507.
  7. ↑ See Könnemann, Erwin, Residential Services and Temporary Volunteer Associations. Their role in building a new imperialist military system (November 1918 to 1920), Berlin 1971, p. 236.
  8. ↑ See Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 345.
  9. ^ See Könnemann, Reichsbürgerrat, p. 507.
  10. ↑ See Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 346.
  11. ↑ See Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 345.
  12. ↑ Quoted from Könnemann, Reichsbürgerrat, p. 508.
  13. ↑ See Presidium of the Reich Citizens Council to all Regional Citizens Councils. Berlin, March 23, 1920, printed in: Könnemann, Erwin, Schulze, Gerhard (eds.), Der Kapp-Lüttwitz-Ludendorff-Putsch. Documents, Munich 2002, pp. 374–377.
  14. ↑ See consultation of the undersecretaries and ministers with Vice Chancellor Schiffer about the situation. Berlin, March 16, 1920, printed in: Könnemann, Schulze, Kapp-Lüttwitz-Ludendorff-Putsch, pp. 228–234, p. 233.
  15. ↑ Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 343.
  16. ↑ See Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 344.
  17. ↑ See Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 343.
  18. ↑ Quoted from Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 244.
  19. ↑ Quoted from Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 243.
  20. ↑ See Bieber, Bürgerertum, pp. 347, 387.
  21. ^ Bieber, Bürgerertum, p. 387.
  22. ↑ See Bieber, Bürgerertum, pp. 386f.