Republican Party of Germany (1924)

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The Republican Party of Germany (RPD) was a small German party that only appeared publicly in 1924.

Its foundation was preceded by the worst crises of the Weimar Republic to date . These included the occupation of the Ruhr area by France, separatist movements in the Rhineland with the temporary proclamation of a Rhenish Republic , the height of inflation and the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch in Munich.

The party founders primarily pursued the goal of strengthening the young republic and winning over new sections of the population. At the same time, they were of the opinion that the parties of the Weimar coalition had failed in this task.

The initiative to found the party came from a small group of Berlin intellectuals, some of whom were employed by the Berliner Volks-Zeitung , but had already been politically active in various contexts. They included Berthold Jacob , Carl von Ossietzky and Karl Vetter .

On February 6, 1924, the founding group went public with an appeal for political renewal . The attempt to win parts of the bourgeois peace movement and the left-wing liberals organized in the DDP to participate in the RPD was unsuccessful, apart from a few individual cases. The party's program was also too ambivalent to be classified as pacifist or liberal . The writers and publicists who temporarily supported the new party included Fritz von Unruh , Stefan Großmann , Walter Hammer or Hösterey , Walter Mehring and Erich Weinert . In addition to Vetter and von Unruh, the lawyer Hans Simons, a former member of the SPD and Wilhelm Westphal, a former DDP member, were represented on the executive committee .

In the Reichstag election on May 4, 1924 , the RPD ran its own candidate lists in 24 of the 35 constituencies. With 45,722 votes, it achieved a share of around 0.2 percent. In her stronghold of Greater Berlin she achieved 0.6 percent, but remained a long way from winning a mandate. Disappointed with this result, most of its founders turned their backs on the RPD. Under the chairmanship of Manfred George , the party led only a shadowy existence and is said to have dissolved again in the same year.

literature

  • Werner Boldt: Carl von Ossietzky. Champions of democracy. Ossietzky, Hannover 2013. ISBN 978-3-944545-00-4 (On the RPD: pp. 181–195)
  • Burkhard Gutleben: The Great Republican Party ... Unsuccessful collection efforts in the Weimar Republic. In: Liberal. Vol. 32, H. 1, 1990, ISSN  0459-1992 , pp. 95-102.