Contract revisionism

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Contract revisionism (of lat . Revidere - View again, check) referred to in the history of politics tends certain frequently in the wake of wars to reverse to the contractual rights have become facts. Mainly, revisionism seeks to present certain areas belonging to the territory of another country as legitimate and originally owned and to achieve their (re-) acquisition.

France

The cession of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870/71 to the German Empire , which in turn reversed the annexation by France that took place at the end of the 17th century , was the subject of French revisionism. For example, the statue of the city of Strasbourg on the Place de la Concorde in Paris was veiled as a symbol of efforts to revise the peace treaty concluded in 1871 .

Hungary

The assignments of territory to Czechoslovakia , Austria , the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and Romania, connected with the outcome of the First World War , fueled Hungarian revisionism in the years after the First World War .

Germany

Weimar Republic

The return of the German colonies was one of the demands of Weimar revisionism, postage stamp from 1921

The representatives of the German Reich were not allowed to take part in the negotiation of the Versailles Treaty ; its ratification took place on June 22, 1919 in the Reichstag under the ultimate threat of the victorious powers that otherwise they would invade. In addition, England did not lift the hunger blockade it had imposed on Germany in 1914, even after the end of the war, in order to force the Reich to sign the treaty. Therefore, almost without exception, the treaty was viewed by the German population as an illegitimate dictated peace . The aim of revising it was supported by all parties of the Weimar Republic represented in parliament . In addition to the Weimar Constitution, each schoolchild was given an appropriately designed edition of the Versailles Treaty. In public, only small pacifist groups such as the Radical Democratic Party and left-wing magazines with low circulation such as Die Weltbühne or Das Andere Deutschland resisted German treaty revisionism.

Weimar revisionism was directed in particular against the statement made in Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty and in its mantle note that Germany was responsible for the outbreak of the First World War . The reparation obligations , which were justified in the peace treaty with this very thesis, were also a central subject of the revision efforts. Because this responsibility was rejected by the vast majority of the population, the reparations also appeared to be unjust. The capital sum of 132 billion gold marks (excluding interest), which was fixed in 1921, also contributed to this impression: the last imperial budget before the start of the war-related inflation , however, only contained income of 2.35 billion gold marks in 1914. The fact that the Allies repeatedly tried to force the payment of this astronomical sum with military measures ( London ultimatum 1921, occupation of the Ruhr in 1923) also contributed to the delegitimization of the reparations. Although the German payment obligations were lowered in the Dawes Plan in 1924 and in the Young Plan in 1929/30, this changed neither public opinion nor the goal of all governments of the Weimar Republic to further reduce or completely abolish the reparations that were perceived as unjust. In nationalist propaganda they were therefore referred to as tributes and presented as the cause of all conceivable economic problems: from the inflation of the years up to 1923, to the tough austerity policy during the currency stabilization in 1924, the Berlin stock market crash of May 13, 1927 ( Black Friday ) to Mass unemployment in the world economic crisis . In truth, the reparations were only slightly causally linked to these problems.

The redesign of Germany's eastern border, which cut off East Prussia from the Reich and made it an exclave through the Polish Corridor without a referendum , was probably the point that sparked the deepest resentment and poisoned German-Polish relations throughout the 1920s. Only the German-Polish non-aggression pact of 1934 temporarily relaxed relations between the two countries.

Another argumentation pattern of the revisionist agitation was that the annexation , for which the Austrian National Assembly had already voted with an overwhelming majority in November 1918, had become impossible due to the Treaty of Saint-Germain and that of Versailles. The opponents of the Weimar Republic referred here to the right of the peoples to self-determination and the announcements of the American President Woodrow Wilson on this question. There was also agitation against the loss of the German colonies . Other points of the Versailles Treaty were hardly used for revisionist agitation. This mainly affected the changes to the western and northern borders and the arms restrictions.

The revisionism widespread in society favored the right-wing radical parties of the republic, in particular the NSDAP . By means of the stab in the back , right-wing extremists used the Versailles Treaty to agitate against the Weimar Republic and abroad by declaring the democratic parties and, above all, the SPD jointly responsible for the defeat in the World War and thus also for the Versailles Treaty. This conspiracy theory was additionally charged anti-Semitically by the NSDAP in particular , by claiming that the Versailles Treaty was the tool of high finance and world Jewry to exploit German workers. The central motto of all these groups was the uncompromising radical demand: “Away with Versailles!”. Gustav Stresemann's policy of understanding, supported by the SPD and the moderate bourgeois parties, was based on compromises in foreign policy and was therefore denounced by the right-wing extremists as a "policy of fulfillment " and "treason of the fatherland".

The communists also agitated for a radical revision of the Versailles Treaty and against its alleged vicarious agents from the SPD and the moderate-bourgeois parties. In 1923, for example, Karl Radek interpreted the peace treaty as a tool of " Entente capital ", that is, of French and Anglo-American finance capital for the exploitation of German workers. Clara Zetkin argued in the same year that the overthrow of the government would serve "to liberate the fatherland" from the French occupation forces. In 1930 Die Rote Fahne announced a “program declaration for the national and social liberation of the German people”, whereupon the social democratic forward stated with astonishment: “The KPD is becoming more nationalistic than Hitler”.

Nevertheless, this policy of the democratic and semi-democratic governments of the Weimar Republic was quite successful: between 1925 and 1932 they succeeded in ending the French occupation of the Rhineland five years earlier than laid down in the Treaty of Versailles and canceling the reparations except for a symbolic remainder and to receive the assurance that Germany was on an equal footing with the former victorious powers in terms of arms policy.

time of the nationalsocialism

The fruits of the revisionist propaganda were then reaped by the NSDAP in 1933, which from 1929 had put foreign policy issues at the center of its agitation. Having come to power, Hitler then slowed down the pace of revisions in some cases - for example in the case of colonial revisionism - but in some cases he increased it considerably: German armament began in 1935, the Wehrmacht marched into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936 , Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938 and the Memelland " home " in 1939 into the kingdom ”. These spectacular successes of the National Socialist revision policy, which were also based on the diplomatic preparatory work above all by Stresemann and Heinrich Brüning , contributed to the enthusiastic mass approval of the German population for the Nazi regime , as it was in the - largely not falsified - referendums of 1933 , 1936 and 1938 showed.

Federal Republic of Germany

After 1945, the Oder-Neisse Line , which was established by the Allies as a provisional (i.e. until a peace settlement ) Polish western border in the course of the Potsdam Agreement , was not recognized by the Federal Republic of Germany for many years. In particular, the expellees' associations did not want to accept the Oder-Neisse line as the German eastern border even after 1970. Only in the course of reunification in 1990 was the Oder-Neisse Line accepted by the German Bundestag as a German-Polish border and confirmed in the German-Polish border treaty .

In the meantime, only a small minority in Germany publicly takes revisionist positions. The displaced persons associations have meanwhile reduced their concerns to personal redress for injustices suffered, which by definition is not called revisionism.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gustavo Corni : Nutrition. In: Gerhard Hirschfeld , Gerd Krumeich , Irina Renz (eds.): Encyclopedia First World War. Updated and expanded study edition. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2009, ISBN 978-3-8252-8396-4 , p. 566.
  2. ↑ Christian Striefler: Struggle for power. Communists and National Socialists at the end of the Weimar Republic. Propylaen, Berlin et al. 1993, ISBN 3-549-05208-1 , pp. 96 and 398.

See also