Defunct
219-673: Defunct Defunct The German National People's Party ( German : Deutschnationale Volkspartei , DNVP ) was a national-conservative and monarchist political party in Germany during the Weimar Republic . Before the rise of the Nazi Party , it was the major nationalist party in Weimar Germany. It was an alliance of conservative , nationalist , monarchist, völkisch , and antisemitic elements supported by
438-465: A de facto official language of Namibia after the end of German colonial rule alongside English and Afrikaans , and had de jure co-official status from 1984 until its independence from South Africa in 1990. However, the Namibian government perceived Afrikaans and German as symbols of apartheid and colonialism, and decided English would be the sole official language upon independence, stating that it
657-499: A monarchist platform and was strongly opposed to the Weimar Republic in domestic affairs and Treaty of Versailles in foreign affairs. Typical of the party's views about Weimar was a 1919 pamphlet by Karl Helfferich entitled "Erzberger Must Go!", which was in equal terms violently anti-democratic, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. The target of the pamphlet was Matthias Erzberger of the Zentrum , whom Hellferich called "the puppet of
876-402: A second language , and 75–100 million as a foreign language . This would imply the existence of approximately 175–220 million German speakers worldwide. German sociolinguist Ulrich Ammon estimated a number of 289 million German foreign language speakers without clarifying the criteria by which he classified a speaker. As of 2012 , about 90 million people, or 16% of
1095-486: A " völkisch study group" under Wilhelm Kube was set up. Despite Kube's best efforts to work out a compromise, the leading völkisch activists' Wilhelm Henning , Reinhold Wulle and Albrecht von Graefe all resigned from the party in October 1922 when the party's leader Oskar Hergt supported by Otto Hoetzsch and Count Kuno von Westarp made it clear that they wanted no more calls for assassinations, which had caused
1314-612: A "commonly used" language and the Pan South African Language Board is obligated to promote and ensure respect for it. Cameroon was also a colony of the German Empire from the same period (1884 to 1916). However, German was replaced by French and English, the languages of the two successor colonial powers, after its loss in World War I . Nevertheless, since the 21st century, German has become
1533-577: A "demoralizing Jewish influence", but when this attitude failed to halt the party's fall in the polls this element was de-emphasized. Stoecker finally revoked the alliance in 1896. Though predominantly Protestant , the DKP opposed the Kulturkampf , but supported Bismarck when during the Long Depression he began to implement protectionist policies by restricting grain imports from Russia and
1752-642: A boycott of the Scherl newspapers and press owned by Hugenberg while encouraged a strike at the Scherel press.". At a debate at the Berlin Sports Palace between Goebbels and Hugenberg's right-hand man, Otto Schmidt-Hanover, thousands of Nazis showed up to boo Schmidt-Hanover and cheer on Goebbels; who won the debate by being the only one allowed to speak for any length of time. Leopold wrote that; "the DNVP
1971-451: A break with the industrialists who were greatly displeased with Hugenberg's unwillingness to take part in coalition governments. As a result, from 1929 onwards the millionaire Hugenberg spent his own considerable fortune to provide the funding for the DNVP. The dependence of the DNVP on Hugenberg to provide the bulk of the election funds very much strengthened Hugenberg's leadership, making it impossible to challenge. Hugenberg's efforts led to
2190-549: A common candidate for the presidential elections, and on 17 February 1932 Hitler unilaterally announced in a press release that he was running for president. This action effectively destroyed the Harzburger Front as Hugenberg had not been consulted before-hand. Hugenberg had much difficulty in recruiting a DVNP candidate for the presidential election as Prince Oskar of Prussia, the industrialist Albert Vögler, and General Otto vow Below all declined to run. Theodor Duesterberg
2409-771: A coup by which the Reich government deposed the SPD-dominated Prussian government of Otto Braun , usurping it by making Papen the Reich Commissar of Prussia. Baron von Gayl, the DNVP Interior Minister played a key role in planning the "Rape of Prussia" together with Chancellor von Papen and the Defense Minister General Kurt von Schleicher as part of the move towards authoritarian government by destroying one of
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#17327651800542628-466: A couple's "racial worth" before allowing them to marry or not, and breaking German citizenship into two grades of those allowed to marry and those who would not. In 1926, under its leader Count von Westarp the DNVP took office by joining the coalition government led by Chancellor Wilhelm Marx with the stated aim of pulling German politics towards the right. After the "betrayal" of the Dawes Plan vote,
2847-486: A crushing burden of reparations for the next sixty years (Hugenberg did not mention the fact that the Young Plan was not scheduled to end until 1988 because the plan had greatly reduced annual reparation payments, which was why the payments had been spread out over sixty years). In pushing for the referendum on the Young Plan , Hugenberg was quite consciously seeking to polarize German politics into two extremes, namely
3066-497: A good idea that was unfortunately abandoned, and made it clear that he wanted a return to Katastrophenpolitik . In seeking a vote on the "Freedom Law", Hugenberg was seeking nothing less than to begin the destruction of all of the middle-of-the-road parties in Germany in order to achieve a situation where the only alternatives for German voters would be the "national" parties and the Marxist parties. Hugenberg had initially planned in
3285-559: A greater need for regularity in written conventions. While the major changes of the MHG period were socio-cultural, High German was still undergoing significant linguistic changes in syntax, phonetics, and morphology as well (e.g. diphthongization of certain vowel sounds: hus (OHG & MHG "house") → haus (regionally in later MHG)→ Haus (NHG), and weakening of unstressed short vowels to schwa [ə]: taga (OHG "days")→ tage (MHG)). A great wealth of texts survives from
3504-529: A hysterical campaign warning his papers' mostly middle-class readers that Marxist SPD and KPD were going to mobilize the millions of unemployed created by the Great Depression to stage a bloody revolution and that only an authoritarian regime willing to use the most drastic means could save Germany. The Comintern 's Third Period , which meant that the Communists spent most of their time attacking
3723-737: A major public relations problem. Henning, Wulle and Graefe founded the German Völkisch Freedom Party in December 1922. In September 1923, the DVP Chancellor Gustav Stresemann announced the end of "passive resistance" to the occupation of the Ruhr ( Ruhrkampf ) under the grounds that hyperinflation had destroyed the economy and the Ruhrkampf must end in order to save Germany. As a result,
3942-608: A major surge of interest in the National Socialists. Indeed, for many it marked the first time that they ever heard of Hitler, and it led during the winter of 1929–30 to a huge influx of new members into the NSDAP. Hamilton wrote that it was the 1929 referendum, which the National Socialists had treated as a gigantic 5-month-long free political ad (Hugenberg had paid for the entire referendum out of his own pocket) running from July to December 1929 that had enabled them to enter
4161-482: A majority. Fearing that Marx would win the second round (something made the more likely by the fact that the SPD's Otto Braun had dropped out to endorse Marx), Admiral Tirpitz made a dramatic visit to the home of the retired Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg to ask him to run for the second round in order to "save" Germany by gaining the presidency for the right. Tirpitz persuaded Hindenburg to run, and though Hindenburg won
4380-482: A man unafraid, indeed proud to state his belief that Germany should be the world's greatest power. Finally, President Friedrich Ebert applied more pressure by warning the DNVP that if the Dawes Plan were rejected, he would dissolve the Reichstag for early elections, and the party would then face the wrath of angry voters. After much internal fighting between the pro- and anti-Dawes Plan factions, in order to prevent
4599-463: A massive motion of no confidence in the Reichstag . In response to losing the motion von Papen dissolved the Reichstag again. In the elections in fall of 1932 the DNVP made overtures to the NSDAP attempting to reform the Harzburg front. The German historian Hermann Beck wrote that the election in the autumn 1932 was the "absolute nadir" of DNVP-NSDAP relations when Hitler had decided to make the DNVP
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#17327651800544818-458: A native tongue today, mostly descendants of German colonial settlers . The period of German colonialism in Namibia also led to the evolution of a Standard German-based pidgin language called " Namibian Black German ", which became a second language for parts of the indigenous population. Although it is nearly extinct today, some older Namibians still have some knowledge of it. German remained
5037-425: A party committed to total opposition to the republic it doomed itself to being an opposition party forever. Many of the DNVP's supporters made it clear by 1924 that they were unhappy about supporting a party whose role was purely negative in opposing everything that the government did while refusing to take part in any of the coalition governments. The British historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett wrote "At no time during
5256-570: A petition in the fall of 1929 objecting to the section of the "Freedom Law" calling for the prosecution of those politicians who supported the Young Plan as "detrimental" to the workings of politics and stated that a victory for the Yes side in the referendum on the Freedom Law "would frustrate all efforts at improving the German situation for the foreseeable future". Hugenberg's leadership brought about
5475-696: A popular foreign language among pupils and students, with 300,000 people learning or speaking German in Cameroon in 2010 and over 230,000 in 2020. Today Cameroon is one of the African countries outside Namibia with the highest number of people learning German. In the United States, German is the fifth most spoken language in terms of native and second language speakers after English, Spanish , French , and Chinese (with figures for Cantonese and Mandarin combined), with over 1 million total speakers. In
5694-485: A portion would still vote German-National today, were the party not so stupid to trade in anti-Semitism) and even in merchant circles, this way of thinking prevails." Extremely nationalistic and reactionary and originally favouring restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy, it later supported the creation of an authoritarian state as a substitute. Its supporters came from dedicated nationalists, the aristocracy, parts of
5913-483: A result, the surviving texts are written in highly disparate regional dialects and exhibit significant Latin influence, particularly in vocabulary. At this point monasteries, where most written works were produced, were dominated by Latin, and German saw only occasional use in official and ecclesiastical writing. While there is no complete agreement over the dates of the Middle High German (MHG) period, it
6132-477: A return to monarchy in its manifesto, and participating in centre-right coalition governments on federal and state levels. It broadened its voting base—winning as much as 20.5% in the December 1924 German federal election —and supported the election of Paul von Hindenburg as President of Germany ( Reichspräsident ) in 1925. Under the leadership of the populist media entrepreneur Alfred Hugenberg from 1928,
6351-572: A statement saying Tirpitz as Chancellor would be the end of any effort to improve Franco-German relations while the American and Belgian ambassadors both issued warnings to the German government that Tirpitz as Chancellor would be a source of tension in their relations with Germany. The British Ambassador Lord D'Abernon warned that "If the Germans want to find a closed front hostile to them they cannot do anything better but to make Tirpitz Chancellor of
6570-410: A stunning "lack of realism". The Chancellor Wilhelm Marx rejected all of the DNVP conditions and informed the party that they either vote for or against the Dawes Plan, thereby settling off a bitter factional battle within the DNVP. In addition, Stresemann—who had privately bristled at Admiral Tirpitz's charges that he was conducting a foreign policy of Ohnmachtspolitik (policy of powerlessness) before
6789-464: A time in the mid-1920s to keep Social Democrats out of power. Before its alliance with Nazis, the party sought support of the national liberal German People's Party . Between 1925 and 1928, the party slightly moderated its tone and actively cooperated in successive governments. In the presidential election of 1925 , the DNVP supported Karl Jarres for president, who was defeated in the first round by Zentrum' s Wilhelm Marx , who however failed to gain
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7008-661: A vengeance those DNVP deputies who left to form the Conservative People's Party , whom Hugenberg called Weimar-supporting "Tory democrats" (democrat being a term of abuse for Hugenberg) who he believed practiced a watered down conservatism along the line of the British Conservative Party without any völkisch or monarchist convictions. Hugenberg's vendetta against the Conservatives meant that he focused most of his time on attacking them in
7227-717: Is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family , mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe . It is the most spoken native language within the European Union . It is the most widely spoken and official (or co-official) language in Germany , Austria , Switzerland , Liechtenstein , and the Italian autonomous province of South Tyrol . It is also an official language of Luxembourg , Belgium and
7446-601: Is a recognized minority language in the following countries: In France, the High German varieties of Alsatian and Moselle Franconian are identified as " regional languages ", but the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1998 has not yet been ratified by the government. Namibia also was a colony of the German Empire, from 1884 to 1915. About 30,000 people still speak German as
7665-612: Is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects , with many varieties existing in Europe and other parts of the world. Some of these non-standard varieties have become recognized and protected by regional or national governments. Since 2004, heads of state of the German-speaking countries have met every year, and the Council for German Orthography has been the main international body regulating German orthography . German
7884-558: Is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages . The Germanic languages are traditionally subdivided into three branches: North Germanic , East Germanic , and West Germanic . The first of these branches survives in modern Danish , Swedish , Norwegian , Faroese , and Icelandic , all of which are descended from Old Norse . The East Germanic languages are now extinct, and Gothic
8103-478: Is called the "German Sprachraum ". German is the official language of the following countries: German is a co-official language of the following countries: Although expulsions and (forced) assimilation after the two World wars greatly diminished them, minority communities of mostly bilingual German native speakers exist in areas both adjacent to and detached from the Sprachraum. Within Europe, German
8322-430: Is complicated by the existence of several varieties whose status as separate "languages" or "dialects" is disputed for political and linguistic reasons, including quantitatively strong varieties like certain forms of Alemannic and Low German . With the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties, it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language , 10–25 million speak it as
8541-535: Is generally seen as ending when the 1346–53 Black Death decimated Europe's population. Modern High German begins with the Early New High German (ENHG) period, which Wilhelm Scherer dates 1350–1650, terminating with the end of the Thirty Years' War . This period saw the further displacement of Latin by German as the primary language of courtly proceedings and, increasingly, of literature in
8760-611: Is generally seen as lasting from 1050 to 1350. This was a period of significant expansion of the geographical territory occupied by Germanic tribes, and consequently of the number of German speakers. Whereas during the Old High German period the Germanic tribes extended only as far east as the Elbe and Saale rivers, the MHG period saw a number of these tribes expanding beyond this eastern boundary into Slavic territory (known as
8979-565: Is less closely related to languages based on Low Franconian dialects (e.g., Dutch and Afrikaans), Low German or Low Saxon dialects (spoken in northern Germany and southern Denmark ), neither of which underwent the High German consonant shift. As has been noted, the former of these dialect types is Istvaeonic and the latter Ingvaeonic, whereas the High German dialects are all Irminonic; the differences between these languages and standard German are therefore considerable. Also related to German are
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9198-435: Is one of the major languages of the world . German is the second-most widely spoken Germanic language , after English, both as a first and as a second language . German is also widely taught as a foreign language , especially in continental Europe (where it is the third most taught foreign language after English and French), and in the United States. Overall, German is the fourth most commonly learned second language, and
9417-597: Is one of the three biggest newspapers in Namibia and the only German-language daily in Africa. An estimated 12,000 people speak German or a German variety as a first language in South Africa, mostly originating from different waves of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries. One of the largest communities consists of the speakers of "Nataler Deutsch", a variety of Low German concentrated in and around Wartburg . The South African constitution identifies German as
9636-401: Is partly derived from Latin and Greek , along with fewer words borrowed from French and Modern English . English, however, is the main source of more recent loanwords . German is a pluricentric language ; the three standardized variants are German , Austrian , and Swiss Standard German . Standard German is sometimes called High German , which refers to its regional origin. German
9855-525: Is the Sachsenspiegel , the first book of laws written in Middle Low German ( c. 1220 ). The abundance and especially the secular character of the literature of the MHG period demonstrate the beginnings of a standardized written form of German, as well as the desire of poets and authors to be understood by individuals on supra-dialectal terms. The Middle High German period
10074-578: Is the only language in this branch which survives in written texts. The West Germanic languages, however, have undergone extensive dialectal subdivision and are now represented in modern languages such as English, German, Dutch , Yiddish , Afrikaans , and others. Within the West Germanic language dialect continuum, the Benrath and Uerdingen lines (running through Düsseldorf - Benrath and Krefeld - Uerdingen , respectively) serve to distinguish
10293-485: Is understood in all areas where German is spoken. Approximate distribution of native German speakers (assuming a rounded total of 95 million) worldwide: As a result of the German diaspora , as well as the popularity of German taught as a foreign language , the geographical distribution of German speakers (or "Germanophones") spans all inhabited continents. However, an exact, global number of native German speakers
10512-689: The Ostsiedlung ). With the increasing wealth and geographic spread of the Germanic groups came greater use of German in the courts of nobles as the standard language of official proceedings and literature. A clear example of this is the mittelhochdeutsche Dichtersprache employed in the Hohenstaufen court in Swabia as a standardized supra-dialectal written language. While these efforts were still regionally bound, German began to be used in place of Latin for certain official purposes, leading to
10731-523: The Junkers (landed nobility) and the Pan-German League who wanted to destroy democracy with no thought to the consequences. The in-fighting over the Dawes Plan together with the related bad feelings within the DNVP's Reichstag delegation led to Oskar Hergt being ousted later in 1924 as the party's leader and his replacement with the interim leader of Johann Friedrich Winckler who in turn
10950-594: The Reichstag election of 20 May 1928 (the party's share of votes fell from 21% in 1924 to 14% in 1928) led to a new outbreak of party in-fighting. The immediate cause of the in-fighting was an article published in July 1928 entitled "Monarchism" (Monarchismus) by Walther Lambach , a board member of the German National Association of Commercial Employees (DHV). In his article, Lambach stated that
11169-639: The Alamanni , Bavarian, and Thuringian groups, all belonging to the Elbe Germanic group ( Irminones ), which had settled in what is now southern-central Germany and Austria between the second and sixth centuries, during the great migration. In general, the surviving texts of Old High German (OHG) show a wide range of dialectal diversity with very little written uniformity. The early written tradition of OHG survived mostly through monasteries and scriptoria as local translations of Latin originals; as
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#173276518005411388-537: The Early Middle Ages . German is an inflected language , with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative); three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two numbers (singular, plural). It has strong and weak verbs . The majority of its vocabulary derives from the ancient Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, while a smaller share
11607-417: The European Union 's population, spoke German as their mother tongue, making it the second most widely spoken language on the continent after Russian and the second biggest language in terms of overall speakers (after English), as well as the most spoken native language. The area in central Europe where the majority of the population speaks German as a first language and has German as a (co-)official language
11826-598: The German resistance to Nazism and took part in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The party was formed in December 1918 by a merger of the German Conservative Party and the Free Conservative Party of the old monarchic German Empire . It was joined soon afterward by the most right-wing section of the former National Liberal Party , and most supporters of the dissolved radically nationalist German Fatherland Party ,
12045-522: The German states . While these states were still part of the Holy Roman Empire , and far from any form of unification, the desire for a cohesive written language that would be understandable across the many German-speaking principalities and kingdoms was stronger than ever. As a spoken language German remained highly fractured throughout this period, with a vast number of often mutually incomprehensible regional dialects being spoken throughout
12264-746: The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I , and the other being Meißner Deutsch , used in the Electorate of Saxony in the Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg . Alongside these courtly written standards, the invention of the printing press led to the development of a number of printers' languages ( Druckersprachen ) aimed at making printed material readable and understandable across as many diverse dialects of German as possible. The greater ease of production and increased availability of written texts brought about increased standardisation in
12483-537: The Locarno Treaties . By serving in a government that signed Locarno, which recognized Alsace-Lorraine as part of France and voluntarily agreed to accept the demilitarized status of the Rhineland, many party activists charged that Westarp had committed another "betrayal" by serving in a government that accepted the "robbery" of what was claimed to be German land. A result of this anger was that even through
12702-439: The Old High German language in several Elder Futhark inscriptions from as early as the sixth century AD (such as the Pforzen buckle ), the Old High German period is generally seen as beginning with the Abrogans (written c. 765–775 ), a Latin-German glossary supplying over 3,000 Old High German words with their Latin equivalents. After the Abrogans , the first coherent works written in Old High German appear in
12921-404: The Organisation Consul terrorist group. Faced with a possible ban for encouraging terrorism after the Rathenau assassination and a public backlash over its initially jubilant reaction to Rathenau's murder, the party started to crack down on its extreme völkisch wing, who had been the most vociferous in calling for Rathenau's blood. To stop a total break with its völkisch wing, in September 1922
13140-418: The Pan-German League . Ideologically, the party was described as subscribing to authoritarian conservatism , German nationalism, monarchism, and from 1931 onwards also to corporatism in economic policy. It held anti-communist , anti-Catholic , and antisemitic views. On the left–right political spectrum , it belonged on the right-wing , and is classified as far-right in its early years and then again from
13359-574: The Prussian Diet , where the three-class franchise gave rural elites and the wealthy disproportionate representation. Predominantly Prussian traditionalists , the party members had been skeptical at first about the 1871 unification of Germany —unlike the Free Conservative Party , a national conservative split-off dominated by business magnates unrestrictedly supporting the policies of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck . The policies of Old Conservatives like Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke or Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau generally embraced support for
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#173276518005413578-399: The Reich ". The clash between Stresemann and Tirpitz over the Dawes Plan marked the beginning of a long feud that was to continue until Stresemann's death in 1929. Right from the moment that Admiral Tirpitz was elected to the Reichstag in May 1924, he emerged as Stresemann's most "tenacious adversary" in the Reichstag and presented himself as the unabashed champion of German power politics,
13797-573: The Reichslandbund , the German People's Party and the Stahlhelm paramilitary organisation briefly formed an uneasy alliance known as the Harzburg Front . Attending the Bad Harzburg rally were most of the figures of the German right ranging from General Hans von Seeckt , Heinrich Class , Franz Seldte , General Walther von Lüttwitz , Admiral Adolf von Trotha, the economist Hjalmar Schacht , Crown Prince Wilhelm, Admiral Magnus von Levetzow, Prince Oskar of Prussia, Prince Eitel Friedrich, and on to figures such as Hugenberg and Hitler. The Harzburger Front
14016-428: The Reichstag to have a majority. In the summer of 1929, two prominent DNVP Reichstag deputies Gottfried Treviranus and Hans Schlange-Schöningen resigned from the party's caucus in protest against the "Freedom Law" as Hugenberg's referendum bill was known which they called irresponsible in the extreme. They would be joined shortly afterwards by the former chairman Count Kuno von Westarp and 20 other DNVP MdRs leaving
14235-417: The Reichstag . The Reichsausschuß comprised Hugenberg, Heinrich Class of the Pan-German League , Franz Seldte of Der Stahlehlm and Adolf Hitler of the NSDAP. Hugenberg saw himself as the leader of the Reichsausschuß and believed through the Reichsausschuß he would become the leader of the entire right-wing national bloc and in turn the bloc he intended to create would at last win enough seats in
14454-465: The Ruhrlade , the inner cabinet of the western coal and steel industry, found him increasingly wrong-headed and impossible to work with. When Hugenberg began to attract the political limelight his characteristic slogan was "solid or mash" ( Block oder Brei ). Those who wanted a broad conservative party able to influence republican politics were the mash, his prescription was dynamic force through principled confrontation. In July 1929, Hugenberg decided that
14673-427: The Sprachraum in Europe. German is used in a wide variety of spheres throughout the country, especially in business, tourism, and public signage, as well as in education, churches (most notably the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (GELK) ), other cultural spheres such as music, and media (such as German language radio programs by the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation ). The Allgemeine Zeitung
14892-422: The Standard German language in its written form, and the Duden Handbook was declared its standard definition. Punctuation and compound spelling (joined or isolated compounds) were not standardized in the process. The Deutsche Bühnensprache ( lit. ' German stage language ' ) by Theodor Siebs had established conventions for German pronunciation in theatres , three years earlier; however, this
15111-460: The United States . Following this, the DKP strongly opposed the New Course of his successor Leo von Caprivi . It also withdrew its confidence in Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow in 1909 when he tried to implement an inheritance tax reform; Bülow resigned following the reform's failure. The party supported Kaiser Wilhelm II 's naval policies and Germany's arms race with the United Kingdom but initially kept its distance towards colonialism and
15330-400: The Upper German dialects spoken in the southern German-speaking countries , such as Swiss German ( Alemannic dialects ) and the various Germanic dialects spoken in the French region of Grand Est , such as Alsatian (mainly Alemannic, but also Central–and Upper Franconian dialects) and Lorraine Franconian (Central Franconian). After these High German dialects, standard German
15549-409: The Young Plan referendum on 22 December 1929. The NSDAP were one of the groups which joined Hugenberg's campaign against the Young Plan, and the resulting wave of publicity brought Adolf Hitler back into the limelight after five years of obscurity following his trial for high treason in 1924. After his trial in 1924, Hitler had been largely ignored; the 1929 edition of the diaries of Lord D'Abernon ,
15768-469: The pagan Germanic tradition. Of particular interest to scholars, however, has been the Hildebrandslied , a secular epic poem telling the tale of an estranged father and son unknowingly meeting each other in battle. Linguistically, this text is highly interesting due to the mixed use of Old Saxon and Old High German dialects in its composition. The written works of this period stem mainly from
15987-551: The " Black Horror on the Rhine " occupied much of the DNVP's time in the early 1920s. Kolb wrote that the DNVP played a major role in the "brutalization of politics" in the Weimar Republic with its relentless denigration of its enemies as "traitors" together with its insistence that murder was a perfectly acceptable procedure for dealing with one's political opponents, who the DNVP claimed did not deserve to live. The climax of
16206-568: The "lawless" method of a general strike to defeat the putsch than it did the putsch itself, which was portrayed as an understandable, if extreme response to the existence of the republic. The outcome of the Erzberger-Helfferich libel trial encouraged the DNVP to engage in a campaign of vituperative and vitriolic attacks on leaders of the Weimar Coalition who supported the republic, usually accompanied with calls for
16425-595: The "liberation of Germany" (i.e. doing away with the Treaty of Versailles), restoring the monarchy under the Hohenzollern family, a return to the policy of pre-1914 navalism in order to make Germany a world power, a "strong state" to combat the Great Depression and a "moral rebirth of our people" by the "deepening of Christian awareness". On 11 October 1931, the DNVP, the NSDAP, the Pan-German League,
16644-544: The "national" camp opposed to the Young Plan and everyone else, believing that such a polarization would work for his own benefit. Hugenberg saw compromise and negotiation as so much weakness that led to DNVP's poor showing in the elections of May 1928 and believed that the best chances for the DNVP to come to power was by creating a political climate where no compromise and negotiation was possible by seeking to divide Germany into two diametrically opposed blocs with no middle ground in between. Hugenberg did not actually expect to win
16863-467: The 1930 election, sending the Stahlhelm in to disturb speeches by Westarp and spent little time defending the DNVP against the attacks of the NSDAP. During the 1930 election, the DNVP issued a statement proclaiming that there were no important differences between them and the NSDAP on the "Jewish Question", arguing that the few differences that did exist concerned a small number of the "radical demands of
17082-621: The Allies once Germany won the war. Erzberger sued Helfferich for libel over his statement that Erzberger was "dishonestly combining political activity with his own financial interests". Amid much media attention the libel trial ended on 12 March 1920 with the judge ruling that some of Helfferich's statements were true while fining Helfferich a nominal sum for technical libel for the statements that he declared that Helfferich lacked sufficient evidence to back up with. The German historian Eberhard Kolb wrote none of Helfferich's claims were true, and that
17301-611: The Allies to exiting the Rhineland in June 1930 (which was five years earlier than what Versailles had called for) was irrelevant to Hugenberg. He argued that a properly patriotic government would not pay any reparations at all and would force the Allies to leave the Rhineland at once. As such, Hugenberg drafted "A Bill against the Enslavement of the German People" which declared acceptance of the Young Plan to be high treason under
17520-654: The Allies—asked the German embassies in London, Paris, and Washington to inquire of their respective host governments what would be their reaction to Tirpitz becoming Chancellor. The very negative international response that the prospect of Tirpitz as the Chancellor generated was then leaked by Stresemann to various Reichstag deputies as a way of showing how absurd the DNVP was in demanding that Tirpitz being appointed Chancellor, and how isolated Germany would be with Tirpitz as
17739-494: The British ambassador to Germany 1920–26 had a footnote that read: "He [Hitler] was finally released after six months and bound over for the rest of his sentence, thereafter fading into oblivion". At the various campaign rallies against the Young Plan in the autumn of 1929, the charismatic Hitler easily out-shone the stuffy Hugenberg, who as one of his aides Reinhold Quaatz wrote in his diary had "no political sex appeal". Hugenberg
17958-481: The DNVP MdRs voted for the Dawes Plan while the other half voted against. The final vote was 49 DNVP MdRs for acceptance vs. 48 MdRs against. The support of the pro-Dawes Plan DNVP MdRs was just enough to get the Dawes Plan ratified by the Reichstag . The passage of the Dawes Plan produced much turmoil in the Reichstag with considerable cheering and jeering. One of the anti-Dawes Plan DNVP deputies, Alfred Hugenberg
18177-521: The DNVP and the NSDAP were prepared to co-operate with the Communists when it suited their purposes as in the case of the Prussian referendum. Hugenberg argued that Prussian referendum was necessary to force out the Braun government whom he accused of responsibility for "the decline in the German economy, the bad state of the finances and the chaos in governance". On 9 August 1931 when the Prussian referendum
18396-628: The DNVP co-operated with the Nazis, joining forces in the Harzburg Front of 1931, forming coalition governments in some states and finally supporting Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany ( Reichskanzler ) in January 1933. Initially, the DNVP had a number of ministers in Hitler's government, but the party quickly lost influence and eventually dissolved itself in June 1933, giving way to
18615-481: The DNVP found itself joining forces with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in denouncing the end of the Ruhrkampf as treason and as a cowardly surrender to "a half-sated irreconcilable France". The DNVP announced that if they were in charge that they would continue the Ruhrkampf regardless of the economic costs and misery. At a party conference in early April 1924, the DNVP had come out clearly against
18834-579: The DNVP had promised to vote against the Dawes Plan when it came up for ratification in the Reichstag on the grounds that Germany should not have to pay any reparations at all, resulting in many of the economic lobbying groups that donated to the party such as the Landbund , the Reich Association of German Industry (RDI) and the Chamber of Industry and Commerce threatening to cease donating to
19053-565: The DNVP ministers had served in the Cabinet that had signed Locarno, the party's MdRs voted against ratifying Locarno in the Reichstag , and the DNVP walked out of the government in protest at Locarno. Another problem for the DNVP was the 1926 referendum , in which the Communists proposed to confiscate without compensation all of the property belonging to the former Imperial and royal families of Germany and give it to small farmers, homeless people and those living on war pensions. The DNVP leadership
19272-539: The DNVP parliamentary delegations. When the National Assembly convened to write the new constitution for Germany on 6 February 1919, the DNVP's chief contribution to the debates was a lengthy defence of the former Emperor Wilhelm II by Clemens von Delbrück , and a series of long speeches by other DNVP deputies defending Germany's actions in the July Crisis of 1914, the ideology of Pan-Germanism and
19491-644: The DNVP's Reichstag delegation and with his finger pointing clearly at Helfferich, shouted "The enemy is on the right! Here are those who drip poison into the wounds of the German people!". Wirth, who was shaken by the murder of his friend Rathenau, pushed through the Reichstag the Law for the Protection of the Republic on 21 July 1922. It increased the penalties for conspiring to political assassination and allowed
19710-503: The DNVP's leading economic expert, had published two detailed critiques in Die Kreuzzeitung that purported to prove that the Dawes Plan existed only to "enslave" Germany by allowing the Allies to take control of and exploit the German economy forever. The spring 1924 campaign was largely led and organized by charismatic, media savvy Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz who was presented as the "savior" type figure, able to rally together
19929-499: The Dawes Plan loan required the Reich government to amend the constitution to put up the Reichsbahn as collateral, which required a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag . At first, the DNVP tried to avoid an internal split caused by the up-coming Dawes Plan vote by insisting upon several conditions in exchange for voting for the Dawes Plan such as the appointment of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz as Chancellor, firing Stresemann as
20148-723: The Empire. Its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Prague (German: Prag ) and Budapest ( Buda , German: Ofen ), to name two examples, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain; others, like Pressburg ( Pozsony , now Bratislava), were originally settled during the Habsburg period and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, and cities like Zagreb (German: Agram ) or Ljubljana (German: Laibach ), contained significant German minorities. In
20367-748: The Frisian languages— North Frisian (spoken in Nordfriesland ), Saterland Frisian (spoken in Saterland ), and West Frisian (spoken in Friesland )—as well as the Anglic languages of English and Scots. These Anglo-Frisian dialects did not take part in the High German consonant shift, and the Anglic languages also adopted much vocabulary from both Old Norse and the Norman language . The history of
20586-483: The German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the Migration Period , which separated Old High German dialects from Old Saxon . This sound shift involved a drastic change in the pronunciation of both voiced and voiceless stop consonants ( b , d , g , and p , t , k , respectively). The primary effects of the shift were the following below. While there is written evidence of
20805-579: The German people the belief in and therefore the will to victory" [By "July action" Helfereich was referring to the Reichstag Peace Resolution of July 1917, which Erzberger played a major role in writing]. Helfferich especially hated Erzberger for making a speech in July 1919 that blamed him for the bad shape of German budget, with Erzberger noting during the war Helfferich had decided not to raise taxes, and instead ran up colossal debts which he planned to pay off by imposing reparations on
21024-451: The German states; the invention of the printing press c. 1440 and the publication of Luther's vernacular translation of the Bible in 1534, however, had an immense effect on standardizing German as a supra-dialectal written language. The ENHG period saw the rise of several important cross-regional forms of chancery German, one being gemeine tiutsch , used in the court of
21243-681: The Germanic dialects that were affected by the High German consonant shift (south of Benrath) from those that were not (north of Uerdingen). The various regional dialects spoken south of these lines are grouped as High German dialects, while those spoken to the north comprise the Low German and Low Franconian dialects. As members of the West Germanic language family, High German, Low German, and Low Franconian have been proposed to be further distinguished historically as Irminonic , Ingvaeonic , and Istvaeonic , respectively. This classification indicates their historical descent from dialects spoken by
21462-507: The House of Hohenzollern while his party was participating in a republican government. An especially difficult case for Westarp came in 1927 when it became time to renew the Law for the Protection of the Republic, a law passed in 1922 in the aftermath of Rathenau's assassination, and which was clearly aimed at the DNVP for its incitement of murder at the time. Section V of the law had implicitly banned
21681-520: The Hugenberg press's anti-Marxist campaign were not the DNVP as intended, but rather the National Socialists who were able to portray themselves as the most effective anti-Marxist fighting force. The DNVP was declining rapidly as many workers and peasants began to support the more populist and less aristocratic NSDAP while upper-class and middle-class DNVP voters supported the NSDAP as the "party of order" best able to crush Marxism. Hugenberg pursued with
21900-655: The Irminones (also known as the Elbe group), Ingvaeones (or North Sea Germanic group), and Istvaeones (or Weser–Rhine group). Standard German is based on a combination of Thuringian - Upper Saxon and Upper Franconian dialects, which are Central German and Upper German dialects belonging to the High German dialect group. German is therefore closely related to the other languages based on High German dialects, such as Luxembourgish (based on Central Franconian dialects ) and Yiddish . Also closely related to Standard German are
22119-865: The Italian autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia , as well as a recognized national language in Namibia . There are also notable German-speaking communities in France ( Alsace ), the Czech Republic ( North Bohemia ), Poland ( Upper Silesia ), Slovakia ( Košice Region , Spiš , and Hauerland ), Denmark ( North Schleswig ), Romania and Hungary ( Sopron ). Overseas, sizeable communities of German-speakers are found in Brazil ( Blumenau and Pomerode ), South Africa ( Kroondal ), Namibia , among others, some communities have decidedly Austrian German or Swiss German characters (e.g. Pozuzo , Peru). German
22338-452: The Jews!". The Dawes Plan vote brought to the surface the conflict between the party's pragmatic wing most closely associated with industrial interests and farmers from the western part of Germany who were prepared to work inside the system within certain limits if only to safeguard their own interests versus those who were mostly closely associated with the rural areas of East Elbia, especially
22557-414: The Jews", and called openly for his assassination to avenge his "crimes" such as signing the armistice ending World War I. Helfferich wrote that Erzberger's career was "a sordid mixing of political activity with his own pecuniary advantage... at the crucial moment of the war, acting for his Habsburg-Bourbon patrons, he cowardly attacked German policy from the rear with his July action, and thereby destroyed in
22776-561: The Lutheran clergy, the Bildungsbürgertum (the upper middle-class), university professors, and Gymnasium (high schools for these destined to go to university) teachers supported the DNVP until 1930, the party had a cultural influence on German life far beyond what its share of the vote would suggest. Because so many university professors and Gymnasium teachers supported the DNVP, everyone who went to university in Germany under
22995-518: The MHG period. Significantly, these texts include a number of impressive secular works, such as the Nibelungenlied , an epic poem telling the story of the dragon -slayer Siegfried ( c. thirteenth century ), and the Iwein , an Arthurian verse poem by Hartmann von Aue ( c. 1203 ), lyric poems , and courtly romances such as Parzival and Tristan . Also noteworthy
23214-522: The May elections was a result of the party running on a platform of restoring the monarchy, a goal that most Germans were simply not interested in. Lambach's article with its call for the DNVP to transform itself into a party of conservative republicans set off a storm, with the party's core monarchist supporters successfully pressuring Westarp to expel Lambach. Led by Alfred Hugenberg , the enraged monarchists then turned their sights on Westarp himself, claiming he
23433-715: The NSDAP and the DNVP MdRs walked out of the Reichstag on 11 February 1931 to protest the high-handed ways of the Brüning government. During the summer of 1931, the DNVP, the NSDAP and the KPD all joined forces in campaigning for a yes vote in the Prussian referendum, which led the liberal Berliner Morgenpost newspaper to write of an alliance of "the swastika and the Soviet star" who were engaging in Katastrophenpolitik . Despite their vehemently expressed anti-communism both
23652-647: The NSDAP" which were "hardly important since in practice they cannot be implemented". Despite the bitterness caused by the 1930 election, in February 1931 Hugenberg met with Hitler to discuss common co-operation on a referendum for early elections in Prussia that were intended to defeat the government of the Social Democrat Otto Braun , and thereby allow a NSDAP/DNVP coalition to win the resulting elections. As part of their efforts to co-operate,
23871-478: The NSDAP's 2.6% of the vote in 1928). This marked the NSDAP's electoral breakthrough to the mainstream. Since the NSDAP did very well in areas that had traditionally voted for the DNVP like East Prussia and Pomerania , the German historian Martin Broszat wrote that would strongly suggest that most of the DNVP voters had deserted their old party for the NSDAP. Broszat argued that what happened between 1929 and 1932
24090-523: The Nazis were products of the twentieth century. Alienated and deprived, inured by the hardships of the war, the frustrations of inflation, and the humiliation of the depression, these were men of action. No Spenglerian historicizing for them; power was the goal". Despite this, the conflict between the Nazis and the Left Wing parties was much more intense. German language German (German: Deutsch , pronounced [dɔʏtʃ] )
24309-542: The Nazis' single-party dictatorship with the majority of its former members joining the Nazi Party. The Nazis allowed the remaining former DNVP members in the Reichstag, the civil service, and the police to continue with their jobs and left the rest of the party membership generally in peace. During the Second World War , several prominent former DNVP members, such as Carl Friedrich Goerdeler , were involved in
24528-413: The Pan-German League was going to serve in the provisional government, though he backed out later on 13 March 1920 on the grounds that the putsch was "hopeless". Within the party's leadership, Count Kuno von Westarp was in favour of supporting the putsch while Oskar Hergt was opposed. After the putsch failed, the DNVP issued a statement that condemned the government far more harshly for resorting to
24747-635: The Pan-German League, the Colonial League and the Navy League. The women in the DNVP tended to be most concerned with wiping out "trash and dirt" which was their term for pornography and prostitution, and was seen as especially threatening to women. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer called the DNVP "...the party of the traditional, often radical anti-Semitic elites...." The writer Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1924 that "Even in Jewish circles (of which
24966-544: The Plan while the other half had voted against meant the DNVP made only very modest gains in the second 1924 election. The outcome of the second 1924 election together with the appointment of the nonpartisan Hans Luther as Chancellor in early 1925 allowed Count von Westarp to persuade the DNVP to join Luther's government. While it sought the ultimate demise of Weimar Republic, it participated in its politics and ruling government for
25185-613: The Reformation. Protestant spirit must remain strong in our Fatherland." The Anti-Catholic character of the DNVP is traced back to the tradition of Kulturkampf , under which Otto von Bismarck "associated the meaning of being German with Protestantism". Catholicism was portrayed as un-German and associated with foreign and "papist" influence. As such, DNVP focused solely on Protestant voters while marginalising and attacking Roman Catholics - Richard Steigmann-Gall remarks that in Weimar Germany, "the narrative of national identity in Germany
25404-485: The Rhineland (the so-called " Black Horror on the Rhine "), claiming that African and Asian men were genetically programmed to rape white women with DNVP politician Käthe Schirmacher stating in a speech: "The lust of white, yellow and black Frenchmen for German women leads to daily violence!" Schirmacher wrote in her diary in 1919 that: "The only thing uniting us with Poland is our common hatred of Juda". It favoured
25623-488: The Social Democrats as "social fascists" was not reported by the Hugenberg press, which instead portrayed the KPD and the SPD as working together for a revolution. The Hugenberg papers argued that only the DNVP could save Germany from revolution, and that democracy and civil liberties were major impediments to battling the supposed Marxist revolution that was just on the verge of happening. The major beneficiaries of
25842-450: The Treaty of Versailles. In fact, the parties of the "Grand Coalition" were in favor of a gradualist, step-by-step approach of doing away with Versailles by negotiation instead of the confrontational Katastrophenpolitik (catastrophe politics) of the early 1920s that led to the disastrous Ruhrkampf and hyper-inflation of 1923, a nuance that did not interest Hugenberg in the slightest. Hugenberg for his part regarded Katastrophenpolitik as
26061-409: The Weimar Republic did they make a single constructive contribution to the government of the country". At the same time, there was another equally influential fraction within the DNVP who took it for granted that it was only a matter of time before the republic disintegrated, and that the best thing to do was to maintain the current course of total opposition to the republic, secure in knowing that all of
26280-463: The Weimar System". At the meetings to work out a policy platform for the Harzburger Front, the German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher wrote that Hugenberg made concessions to his partners in the front "with the indulgence born of assured arrogance that is fed by the certainty of being in command". The DNVP hoped to control the NSDAP through this coalition and to curb the Nazis' extremism, but
26499-465: The Weimar republic was exposed in some way to Deutsch-National influence. More women than men voted for the DNVP, and despite the party's traditionalist values, women were very active in the DNVP. The women in the DNVP came mostly from the evangelical Protestant church leagues, associations representing housewives who had become politically active during World War I and women who been active in groups like
26718-400: The antisemitic Christian Social Party and German Völkisch Party . Thus, the party united most of the formerly fragmented conservative spectrum of the Empire. The process that led to the DNVP began on 22 November 1918 when an ad appeared in a number of Berlin newspapers calling for a new right-wing party for "which we suggest the name of German National People's Party". The founding of the DNVP
26937-475: The assassination of the "traitors", which was to be DNVP's main contribution to politics for next several years. The DNVP was well known for outrageous, often childish antics such as mailing a dead dog to the French Ambassador to protest against paying reparations to France and for launching a campaign of mailing parcels containing human excrement to Social Democratic leaders. The campaign against
27156-551: The bail-out. A month later in September 1924 the general Land association passed a resolution calling on Hergt to resign within a month if he could not form a government; as he failed to do this forced him to resign in October 1924. Initially, the change of leadership made little difference. In its platform for the Reichstag election of 7 December 1924 , the party declared the following: ″Our party remains as it was: monarchist and völkisch , Christian and social. Our goals remain
27375-495: The best way of regaining popularity was to use the section of the Weimar constitution that allowed upon collecting a certain number of signatures a referendum to be held, in this case on the Young Plan . Hugenberg successfully collected enough signatures to initiate a referendum on his Freedom Law which called for cancelling the Young Plan together with all reparations. The fact that the Young Plan reduced reparations and committed
27594-463: The blame for the current problems would rest with the parties of the Weimar coalition who were willing to assume the burdens of office. In the summer of 1924, these tensions came out in the open with a vigorous display of party in-fighting over the question of whether the DNVP's MdRs (German MdR: Mitglied des Reichstags —Member of the Reichstag ) should vote for the Dawes Plan or not. Initially,
27813-509: The campaign against the leaders of the Weimar Coalition occurred in February 1922 when Walther Rathenau became Foreign Minister, which led the DNVP to launch an especially vicious anti-Semitic campaign against Rathenau claiming that "German honour" had been sullied by the appointment of "the international Jew" Rathenau as Foreign Minister, which could only be avenged with Rathenau's assassination. In an article by Wilhelm Henning , it
28032-417: The coming of the Great Depression in 1929. By late 1927, it was clear that the increases in agrarian tariffs that the DNVP ministers had forced through had made no impact on the continuing economic decline in the countryside, and as result a mood of palpable anger and resentment had set in the countryside of northern Germany with many DNVP voters damning their own party. The political repercussion of rural rage
28251-471: The decision to adopt unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. None of these had anything to do with the task at hand, namely to write a new constitution. The DNVP made no contribution to the drafting of the new constitution. In June 1919, the Reichstag had to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in the face of a warning from the Allies that World War I would resume if it was not ratified. The DNVP made certain that
28470-430: The development of non-local forms of language and exposed all speakers to forms of German from outside their own area. With Luther's rendering of the Bible in the vernacular, German asserted itself against the dominance of Latin as a legitimate language for courtly, literary, and now ecclesiastical subject-matter. His Bible was ubiquitous in the German states: nearly every household possessed a copy. Nevertheless, even with
28689-456: The dialect so as to make the work as natural and accessible to German speakers as possible. Copies of Luther's Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region, translating words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Luther said the following concerning his translation method: One who would talk German does not ask the Latin how he shall do it; he must ask the mother in
28908-519: The eastern provinces of Banat , Bukovina , and Transylvania (German: Banat, Buchenland, Siebenbürgen ), German was the predominant language not only in the larger towns—like Temeschburg ( Timișoara ), Hermannstadt ( Sibiu ), and Kronstadt ( Brașov )—but also in many smaller localities in the surrounding areas. In 1901, the Second Orthographic Conference ended with a (nearly) complete standardization of
29127-469: The election as a non-party candidate, the DNVP strongly supported the Field Marshal. General Otto von Feldmann of the DNVP worked very closely with Hindenburg during the 1925 election as Hindenburg's "political agent". Despite the move to the center at the level of high politics, at the grass-roots of the party the opposite direction prevailed. Starting in 1924, the DNVP's newsletter for women (which
29346-446: The electoral appeal of the party. According to historian Larry Eugene Jones , the DNVP expressed "deeply ingrained anti-Catholic sentiments", and party officials went as far as proclaiming that DNVP was "bound to Protestant structures" and "did not stand for Catholic interests." German Catholics overwhelmingly refused to participate in the 1929 German referendum , displaying their disapproval of Hugenberg and his party. The Catholic clergy
29565-512: The entire nation to both win the election and then restore Germany back as a great power. The ineffectual Hergt had chosen to stay on the sidelines in order to improve his party's chances. Unusually for a DNVP politician, Tirpitz based his campaign in Munich as part of an effort to win Catholic support. In the Reichstag election of 4 May 1924 , the DNVP posted its best showing yet, winning 19% of
29784-495: The foreign minister and the removal of Otto Braun as Prussian minister-president together with the rest of the Social Democrats from the Prussian government. The British historian Edgar Feuchtwanger commented that the demand that the Anglophobic Admiral von Tirpitz be appointed Chancellor at a time when the British government was applying heavy pressure on France to reduce reparations on Germany showed that DNVP had
30003-545: The former Emperor Wilhelm II from returning to Germany, an aspect of the law that greatly offended the DNVP at the time. By 1927, many of the DNVP's supporters, especially the Junkers had concluded the restoration of the monarchy was not possible, and so successfully pressured Westarp into voting for a renewal of the law rather than see the DNVP walk out of the government and thereby lose a chance for higher tariffs on agricultural imports. Westarp attempted to justify his support of
30222-407: The foundation for a strong German state. For that reason we resist the undermining, un-German spirit in all forms, whether it stems from Jewish or other circles. We are emphatically opposed to the prevalence of Judaism in the government and public life, which has emerged ever more ominously since the revolution. The flow of foreigners across our borders is to be prohibited. The same platform called for
30441-452: The fraction of the DNVP mostly closely associated with the Pan-German League had started a major effort to take over the party's grass-roots to prevent another "betrayal", a slow, but steady process that would ultimately prove the undoing of Count von Westarp. During its time in the government, the DNVP made a major push for higher tariffs on agricultural products from abroad, which pleased the party's powerful rural wing, but came to grief over
30660-464: The government to ban organizations that attempted to undermine the constitutionally established republican form of government. Only the DNVP, the Communists and the Bavarian People's Party (BVP) voted against the law, with every other party voting for it. Wirth would have liked to use the new law to ban the DNVP, but was unable to do so because no links could be established between the DNVP and
30879-463: The government, and chose not to run in 1928, claiming very publicly that the DNVP needed more aggressive leaders than Westarp. The man Tirpitz chose to continue his work of winning Bavaria for the DNVP, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck did not have the same mass appeal and in 1928, the DNVP won only half the vote in Bavaria that it managed to do in December 1924. The disastrous showing at the polls in
31098-415: The grounds that Germany should not have to pay any reparations, and that those ministers who signed the Young Plan on behalf of the Reich government and those who voted for the Young Plan in the Reichstag should be prosecuted for high treason. Hugenberg made much of the fact that Young Plan was not scheduled to end until 1988, which he portrayed in stark terms as forcing generations of Germans to live under
31317-435: The home, the children on the streets, the common man in the market-place and note carefully how they talk, then translate accordingly. They will then understand what is said to them because it is German. When Christ says ' ex abundantia cordis os loquitur ,' I would translate, if I followed the papists, aus dem Überflusz des Herzens redet der Mund . But tell me is this talking German? What German understands such stuff? No,
31536-417: The influence of Luther's Bible as an unofficial written standard, a widely accepted standard for written German did not appear until the middle of the eighteenth century. German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire , which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe . Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of
31755-437: The keynote speech, in which he stated "Our new party, in which friendly right-wing parties have united, has no past and rejects any responsibility for the past. We have a present, and God willing, a good future", to which the delegates shouted "But without the Jews!" The task of writing out a common platform acceptable to all fell to a committee headed by Ulrich von Hassell . Reflecting a strong anti-Semitic orientation, right from
31974-413: The landed aristocracy adjusted to its new position in the capitalist 'class' system that had come to replace the precapitalist 'Estate' structure of Prussian society". The German Conservative Party was generally seen as representing the interests of the German nobility , the Junker landowners living east of the Elbe and the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union and had its political stronghold in
32193-407: The largest concentrations of German speakers are in the states of Rio Grande do Sul (where Riograndenser Hunsrückisch developed), Santa Catarina , and Espírito Santo . German Conservative Party Defunct The German Conservative Party ( German : Deutschkonservative Partei , DkP ) was a right-wing political party of the German Empire founded in 1876. It largely represented
32412-410: The late 1870s, by which time the German Conservative Party and the Free Conservative Party had brought together the landed Junkers in the East and the rapidly growing industrial leadership in the major cities. They now became the main base of Bismarck's support and successive Chancellors down to 1918. According to Robert M. Berdahl, this redirection illustrated "the slow and painful process by which
32631-408: The late 1920s when it moved back rightward. It was formed in late 1918 after Germany's defeat in World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 that toppled the German Empire and the monarchy. It combined the bulk of the German Conservative Party , Free Conservative Party , and German Fatherland Party , with right-wing elements of the National Liberal Party . The party strongly rejected
32850-415: The late 19th century there had been tension on the German right between traditional conservatives and the more radical populist völkisch elements, saying: "Even the German National People's Party, itself with many fascistic characteristics, could only uneasily accommodate the new strength of the populist forces on the radical Right". At the founding convention in December 1918, Siegfried von Kardorff gave
33069-422: The law he had once opposed by arguing that it was really aimed at the Communists while at the same time claiming the DNVP was opposed in principle to the Law for the Protection of the Republic. A further problem for the DNVP was the rise of rural rage in the late 1920s. By 1927, though Germany itself was overall very prosperous, a steep economic decline had begun in rural areas, which was only to greatly worsen with
33288-449: The leader. In an editorial, the New York World wrote "To any German who wishes his country to enjoy the benefit of an international loan, it must be sufficiently obvious that the mere mention of the bearded hero of the submarine offensive is madness pure and simple" while The Daily Telegraph of London wrote in a leader (editorial) that the prospect of Tirpitz becoming Chancellor was "a masterpiece of folly". The French government issued
33507-461: The local offices "...tended to accept hard-line propaganda literally, but the interest groups which filled the party's coffers insisted on coalition and compromise. Parliamentary leaders schooled in rationalizing varied principles followed the dictates of lobbyists in the Reichstag , but then reverted to an ideological approach when on the stump...Radicals exploited the divergence of principle and practice. Had party leaders instructed their electorate in
33726-425: The main target in the election. The National Socialist newspaper Der Angriff in an editorial written by Joseph Goebbels called for a "Reckoning with the Hugenzwerg " (a portmanteau of Hugenberg and "pygmy"), and dismissively commented that Hugenberg must be a magician since there was no other way that he could hope to "turn an insignificant heap of reactionaries" into a mass movement. DNVP election meetings were
33945-400: The middle class and big business. The DNVP had little appeal to Catholics and almost its entire support came from Protestant areas. The Lutheran character of the party was stressed early on, with DNVP making direct appeals to Lutheran voters. Party campaigners also made anti-Catholic appeals – a DNVP political leaftlet in Berlin read: "No Romish intrigues are going to rob us of our heritage of
34164-402: The mother in the home and the plain man would say, Wesz das Herz voll ist, des gehet der Mund über . Luther's translation of the Bible into High German was also decisive for the German language and its evolution from Early New High German to modern Standard German. The publication of Luther's Bible was a decisive moment in the spread of literacy in early modern Germany , and promoted
34383-412: The neo-paganism of one of its members, Alfred Rosenberg, and urged voters to choose the DNVP. At the same time, the NSDAP ridiculed the DNVP as the party of monarchist reactionaries without a clue as to how to deal with the Great Depression and who cared only for the rich. On 20 July 1932, during the run-up to the Reichstag election of 31 June, the von Papen government carried out the Preußenschlag ,
34602-423: The ninth century, chief among them being the Muspilli , Merseburg charms , and Hildebrandslied , and other religious texts (the Georgslied , Ludwigslied , Evangelienbuch , and translated hymns and prayers). The Muspilli is a Christian poem written in a Bavarian dialect offering an account of the soul after the Last Judgment , and the Merseburg charms are transcriptions of spells and charms from
34821-406: The other parties in the Reichstag were going to vote for the treaty, and then voted against it. The DNVP was secure in the knowledge that its vote would not cause the resumption of the war while the odium of Versailles would be borne by the other parties. Afterwards, the DNVP started a racist campaign against the presence of Senegalese and Vietnamese troops serving in the French army of occupation in
35040-490: The outcome of the libel case was due to a conservative judge who disliked democracy. The judge's bias could be seen in that the judge went out of his way in his ruling to praise Helfferich for his "patriotic motives" in attacking Erzberger. In the run-up to the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, the DNVP leaders were informed by Wolfgang Kapp in February 1920 that a putsch to overthrow the government would soon occur, and asked for their support. Kapp received an equivocal answer, but
35259-400: The pact only served to strengthen the NSDAP by giving it access to funding and political respectability while obscuring the DNVP's own less extreme platform. The Harzburger Front proved to be a failure, and by the end of 1931 the National Socialists were increasingly lashing out against their nominal allies. In February 1932 over the course of long talks, the DNVP and the NSDAP failed to agree on
35478-439: The parties of the Weimar coalition did not have a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag , it was clear that the DNVP would have to vote for the Dawes Plan to have it ratified. The American banks had demanded as one of the conditions of the loan that the Reich government put up the state-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn railroad as collateral , but the 1919 constitution stated the Reichsbahn could not be used as collateral. Thus to receive
35697-403: The party forever if its MdRs voted against the Dawes Plan. The Dawes Plan was a crucial element in the international attempt to stabilise the German economy after hyper-inflation had destroyed the German economy in 1923, and the economic lobbying groups that supported the DNVP were appalled at the party's intention to reject the Dawes Plan, and thereby risk a return to the economic chaos of 1923. As
35916-433: The party from splitting in two, it was announced that the vote on the Dawes Plan would be a free vote with no party discipline and accordingly DNVP MdRs would vote on the Dawes Plan as they saw fit. The vote on the Dawes Plan on 29 August 1924 was described as "one of the most dramatically moving votes ever experienced by the German Reichstag , since the final result remained uncertain until the very last minute". About half of
36135-399: The party in December 1929 to form the more moderate Conservative People's Party . The DNVP rebels objected in particular to the part of the "Freedom Law" which called for the prosecution of President Paul von Hindenburg on charges of high treason for fulfilling his constitutional obligation by signing the Young Plan into law after it been passed by the Reichstag . The rebels also objected to
36354-401: The party moved to the far-right and reclaimed its reactionary nationalist and anti-republican rhetoric and changed its strategy to mass mobilisation, plebiscites, and support of authoritarian rule by the president instead of work by parliamentary means. At the same time, it lost many votes to Adolf Hitler 's rising Nazi Party. Several prominent Nazis began their careers in the DNVP. After 1929,
36573-416: The party's grass-roots ever since the Dawes Plan vote of 1924, and who wanted a return to the politics of the early 1920s. Hugenberg and Heinrich Class , the League's leader had been friends since the 1890s, and Hugenberg was a founding member of the League. Reflecting this background, Hugenberg proved himself to be a consistent champion of German imperialism , and one of the major themes of his time as leader
36792-425: The party's grass-roots, especially the more hardline fraction that disapproved of participation in the government while all the time insisting that he was staying faithful to the party's original platform of relentless opposition to the republic, which made him look both insincere and unprincipled. This was particularly the case because Westarp continued to maintain that he was a monarchist utterly committed to restoring
37011-438: The party's leaders did not inform the government a putsch was being planned. During the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, the DNVP took an ambiguous stance, reflecting a strong sympathy for the aims of the putsch without coming entirely in support out of the fear that the putsch might fail. One of the DNVP leaders, Gottfried Traub served as "Minister of Church and Cultural Affairs" in Kapp's provisional government while Paul Bang of
37230-429: The party, which furthermore lost votes as Germans moved from rural areas to new industrial centers in the west ( Ostflucht ), forged an electoral alliance with the Christian Social Party under Adolf Stoecker , opportunistically embracing antisemitism . Thomas Childers stated that the Conservatives were the first major party in Germany to incorporate antisemitism into its platform. The 1892 party program denounced
37449-419: The political mainstream just as the Great Depression was beginning. Hugenberg had wanted to keep the Reichsausschuß going even after the failure of the Freedom Law referendum, but the Reichsausschuß dissolved in the spring of 1930 when the National Socialists walked out of it. When Hugenberg was forced in April 1930 to temporarily vote for the "presidential government" of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning that he
37668-436: The powers of the monarchy and opposition to economic liberalism and democratization , the introduction of electoral reform in Prussia, or true parliamentary government in Germany as a whole. Due to universal suffrage , on federal level the DKP had to face strikingly decreased significance. In the 1878 federal election , it gained 13.0% of the votes cast and entered the Reichstag parliament with 59 deputies. Afterwards,
37887-462: The pronunciation of the ending -ig as [ɪk] instead of [ɪç]. In Northern Germany, High German was a foreign language to most inhabitants, whose native dialects were subsets of Low German. It was usually encountered only in writing or formal speech; in fact, most of High German was a written language, not identical to any spoken dialect, throughout the German-speaking area until well into the 19th century. However, wider standardization of pronunciation
38106-417: The proposed restructuring of Germany's reparations payments known as the Dawes Plan , which the DNVP denounced as the "second Versailles". Part of the restructuring was an 800 million Reichsmark loan provided primarily by a consortium of Wall Street banks led by the House of Morgan that would help stabilize the currency after the hyper-inflation of 1923 that had all but destroyed the economy. Helfferich,
38325-440: The prosecution of the entire Cabinet for endorsing the Young Plan and all of the MdRs for voting to ratify the plan, which the rebel faction called the height of demagogy. In the first 15 months of being led by the abrasive Hugenberg the DNVP was to lose 43 out of its 78 MdRs. Many Ruhr industrialists who normally supported the DNVP such as Abraham Frowein , Clemens Lammers , Carl Friedrich von Siemens , and Paul Silverberg signed
38544-418: The realities of politics, the DVNP might have evolved into the dynamic conservative party that some Reichstag delegates belateldly envisioned." In October 1928, Hugenberg, leader of the party's hardliner wing, became chairman. Hugenberg returned the party to a course of fundamental opposition against the Republic with a greater emphasis on nationalism and reluctant co-operation with the Nazi Party . Hugenberg
38763-402: The referendum on the Young Plan, but rather the referendum was intended to be in the modern parlance a wedge issue that would polarize politics and create a situation where one would either be for or against the "national" camp. The American historian John Leopold wrote that "Hugenberg debated political issues in terms of a simplistic, philosophic disjunction—a man was either for the nation or he
38982-410: The republican Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles , which it viewed as a national disgrace, signed by traitors. The party instead aimed at a restoration of monarchy, a repeal of the dictated peace treaty and reacquisition of all lost territories and colonies. During the mid-1920s, the DNVP moderated its profile, accepting republican institutions in practice while still calling for
39201-401: The restoration of the monarchy was no longer possible and that for almost all Germans under the age of thirty the DNVP's incessant talk of bringing back the monarchy was irrelevant at best and downright offputting at worse. Lambach wrote that for conservative Germans President Hindenburg had long since replaced the former Kaiser as the object of their affections and that the DNVP's poor showing in
39420-419: The same as our name: German and national. Our colours remain black, white and red: our resolution is firmer than ever: to create a Germany free of Jewish control and French domination, free from parliamentary intrigue and the populist rule of big capital". Those parties that had voted against the Dawes Plan lost seats while that had voted for the Dawes Plan gained seats, which as half the DNVP caucus had voted for
39639-492: The start Jews were banned from joining the DNVP. In the elections on 19 January 1919 for the National Assembly that was to write the new constitution, the DNVP produced a pamphlet entitled "The Jews—Germany's vampires!" Generally hostile towards the republican Weimar constitution , the DNVP spent most of the inter-war period in opposition. Of the 19 cabinets between 1919 and 1932, the DNVP took part in only two governments and their total period in office over this 13-year period
39858-492: The states of North Dakota and South Dakota , German is the most common language spoken at home after English. As a legacy of significant German immigration to the country , German geographical names can be found throughout the Midwest region , such as New Ulm and Bismarck (North Dakota's state capital), plus many other regions. A number of German varieties have developed in the country and are still spoken today, such as Pennsylvania Dutch and Texas German . In Brazil,
40077-408: The strongest pillars of democracy in Germany. In this way, the DNVP finally achieved its long sought goal of removing the Braun government. In the Reichstag election of 31 July 1932 , the DNVP posted its worst result ever, winning only 5.9% of the vote while the NSDAP won 37%. On 12 September 1932 the DNVP and the DVP were the only parties to vote for the von Papen government when it was defeated on
40296-422: The targets of Nazi stink bombs and heckling while the DNVP politician Countess Helene von Watter was threatened with a beating by Nazis. Another DNVP politician (Theodor Duesterberg) was heckled with shouts of "Jew boy!" while Baron Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven of the DNVP was accused of high treason for having allegedly fought against Germany as an Imperial Russian Army officer in World War I. Goebbels organized
40515-449: The third most commonly learned second language in the United States in K-12 education. The language has been influential in the fields of philosophy, theology, science, and technology. It is the second most commonly used language in science and the third most widely used language on websites . The German-speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of annual publication of new books, with one-tenth of all books (including e-books) in
40734-401: The von Papen government was to dissolve the Reichstag two years into its mandate. In a speech on 26 June 1932, Hugenberg designated the Nazis as now being an opponent of the national front . One of the DNVP's members, Count Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin wrote a pamphlet for the election entitled Der Nationalsozialismus – eine Gefahr ("National Socialism—A Menace") that attacked the NSDAP for
40953-598: The vote compared to 30% of the vote won by Hitler while Hindenburg won 49.6% of the vote. In June 1932, the DNVP became the only significant party to support Franz von Papen in his short tenure as Chancellor . Hugenberg wanted to join von Papen's government, but was vetoed by President von Hindenburg who disliked Hugenberg. However, the two DNVP men who did serve in von Papen's government, namely Baron Wilhelm von Gayl as Interior minister and Franz Gürtner as Justice Minister, where both were noted for their hostility to democracy and support for authoritarianism. The first act of
41172-403: The vote. A major problem for the DNVP throughout its entire existence was the tension caused between its tendency towards a policy of total opposition to the Weimar Republic and pressure from many of its supporters for the DNVP to participate in the government. Since the DNVP was unlikely to win the majority of the seats in the Reichstag on account of the proportional representation system, as
41391-497: The wealthy landowning German nobility and the Prussian Junker class. The party was a response to German unification , universal and equal franchise in national elections and rapid industrialization . It changed from a diffuse party of broad ideology into an interest party in Bismarckian Germany. In the early 1870s, Otto von Bismarck formed his majority with the base in the National Liberal Party which emphasized free trade and anti-Catholicism . Bismarck broke with them in
41610-486: The winter of 1928–29 to use as his wedge issue a plan for constitutional reform, but dropped it in favor of a referendum on the Young Plan when he discovered that the idea of constitutional reform was too abstract for most people, and that portraying the Young Plan as a monstrous form of financial "slavery" for our "children's children" was much more visceral, emotional and effective way of appealing to public opinion. The Canadian historian Richard Hamilton wrote that Freedom Law
41829-438: The world being published in German. German is most closely related to other West Germanic languages, namely Afrikaans , Dutch , English , the Frisian languages , and Scots . It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some languages in the North Germanic group , such as Danish , Norwegian , and Swedish . Modern German gradually developed from Old High German , which in turn developed from Proto-Germanic during
42048-415: The written form of German. One of the central events in the development of ENHG was the publication of Luther's translation of the Bible into High German (the New Testament was published in 1522; the Old Testament was published in parts and completed in 1534). Luther based his translation primarily on the Meißner Deutsch of Saxony , spending much time among the population of Saxony researching
42267-409: Was 27 months. The party was largely supported by landowners, especially from the agricultural, conservative and Protestant Prussian east ( East Elbia ), and wealthy industrialists, moreover by monarchist academics, pastors, high-ranking government officials, farmers, craftsmen, small traders, nationalist white-collar and blue-collar workers. Because most of the Protestant aristocracy, high civil servants,
42486-473: Was Hugenberg's attempt to create on a more institutional basis the Reichsausschuß of 1929, and under his leadership, thereby form the "national bloc" that he confidently believed would sweep him into power in the near-future. Wheeler-Bennett called the Harzburg rally "the formal declaration of war by the parties of the Right against the Brüning government-a concentration of all the forces of reaction, both past and present, in one great demonstration of hostility to
42705-429: Was a "neutral" language as there were virtually no English native speakers in Namibia at that time. German, Afrikaans, and several indigenous languages thus became "national languages" by law, identifying them as elements of the cultural heritage of the nation and ensuring that the state acknowledged and supported their presence in the country. Today, Namibia is considered to be the only German-speaking country outside of
42924-461: Was a response to the November Revolution of 1918 and the sense of extreme crisis it had engendered amongst the German right, where there were widespread fears that society was on the verge of destruction. As a result of the crisis atmosphere of late 1918, a very wide assortment of different parties came together to form the DNVP. This proved to be as much weakness as a strength as the DNVP had strong fissiparous tendencies throughout its existence, which
43143-416: Was a weak leader who let republican elements into the party. Hugenberg was helped by the fact that only 15% of DVNP voters were party members, and the local party offices were dominated by members of the local aristocracy, retired civil servants from the Wilhelmine era and professional lobbyists, making the membership of the DVNP far more right-wing than its voters. The American historian John Leopold noted that
43362-448: Was against it". This was especially the case because the "Grand Coalition" government of the Social Democratic Chancellor Hermann Müller was composed of the left-wing SPD, the right of center Catholic Zentrum , the liberal DDP and the moderate conservative DVP—in short all of the parties that Hugenberg was seeking to destroy by forcing them to defend the Young Plan, and therefore making it seem they were in favor of paying reparations and
43581-407: Was an artificial standard that did not correspond to any traditional spoken dialect. Rather, it was based on the pronunciation of German in Northern Germany, although it was subsequently regarded often as a general prescriptive norm, despite differing pronunciation traditions especially in the Upper-German-speaking regions that still characterise the dialect of the area today – especially
43800-451: Was claimed Rathenau was somehow involved with the assassination of Count Wilhelm von Mirbach , the German ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1918, and that the fact that Rathenau did not mention Mirbach's assassination during his visit to the Soviet Union in April 1922 being presented as proof that Rathenau had a hand in Mirbach's death. When Rathenau was assassinated on 24 June 1922, the Zentrum Chancellor Joseph Wirth angrily turned towards
44019-469: Was critical of the German Right and was hostile towards the DNVP; the party was openly denounced and attacked by members of the Catholic clergy, such as the Archbishop of Breslau Adolf Bertram or Bishop of Trier Franz Rudolf Bornewasser . German Catholics were also prohibited from joining right-wing paramilitary organizations such as the Young German Order and DNVP-affiliated Stahlhelm , and Catholic bishops barred Catholics and clergymen from sitting in
44238-427: Was established on the basis of public speaking in theatres and the media during the 20th century and documented in pronouncing dictionaries. Official revisions of some of the rules from 1901 were not issued until the controversial German orthography reform of 1996 was made the official standard by governments of all German-speaking countries. Media and written works are now almost all produced in Standard German which
44457-408: Was held, the NSDAP, DNVP and the KPD failed in their effort to force an early election in Prussia with yes side winning 37% of the vote. In its September 1931 platform adopted at a convention in Stettin laying out the party's principles, it was stated as follows: Only a strong German nationality that consciously preserves its nature and essence and keeps itself free of foreign influence can provide
44676-448: Was needed a "bloc" of like-minded people that would be solid as stone in upholding its values. About Hugenberg, British historian Edgar Feuchtwanger wrote: Hugenberg was an abrasive, stubborn, difficult personality, opinionated and confrontational. His emergence into a central position in right-wing politics had a very divisive effect which in the end benefited only Hitler. Many on the right, from Hindenburg downwards, including members of
44895-462: Was otherwise opposed to, in order to prevent the entire rural wing of the DNVP from seceding over the issue of tariffs, Hitler accused Hugenberg of weakness, and terminated the NSDAP's co-operation with the DNVP. Reflecting the changed political dynamics caused by the Young Plan referendum, in the election of 14 September 1930 the DNVP's share of the vote dropped dramatically to 7% while the NSDAP's share rose up equally dramatically to 18% (compared to
45114-415: Was pure demagoguery since rejection of the Young Plan would not mean the end of reparations as Hugenberg claimed, but rather Germany would continue to pay higher reparations under the Dawes Plan. As part of his polarizing gambit, Hugenberg created the Reichsausschuß (committee) for the People's Rebellion Against the Young Plan in the summer of 1929, which was intended to be a sort of counter-parliament to
45333-420: Was recruited as the DNVP presidential candidate more by default as he was the only one willing to run for the DNVP. In the first round of the presidential election on 13 March 1932, the DNVP supported Theodor Duesterberg , and after he withdrew from the race following his dreadful showing, endorsed no candidate for the second round on 10 April 1932. In the first round of the election, Duesterberg won only 6.8% of
45552-413: Was replaced by Count Kuno von Westarp . In the bitter aftermath of the Dawes Plan vote, the influential Land associations of Pomerania , East Prussia and Schleswig-Holstein all passed resolutions attacking Hergt for his "betrayal" of the party's principles by allowing a free vote on the "second Versailles" of the Dawes Plan, instead of imposing party discipline to force the entire caucus to vote against
45771-441: Was rooted in the attitudes and traditions of the nineteenth century. It comprised men of property and education who patronized inferiors while scorning democratic idealism and loathing socialistic egalitarianism. Older men raised in the prewar era of peace and prosperity, the German Nationals identified their superiority as social, intellectual and racial. Hugenberg himself typified their Pan-German idealism and expansionism. Hitler and
45990-411: Was so enraged by the passage of the Dawes Plan that he screamed on the floor of the Reichstag that those DNVP MdRs who voted for the Dawes Plan should be expelled from the party. The National Socialist MP General Erich Ludendorff shouted at the pro-Dawes Plan DNVP MdRs that "This is a shame for Germany! Ten years ago I won the battle of Tannenberg . Today you have made a Tannenberg victory possible for
46209-431: Was such an inept speaker that he almost never spoke before the Reichstag because his speeches induced laughter amongst those who listened to them. The fact that Admiral Tirpitz of the DNVP appeared alongside and spoke with Hitler at the anti-Young Plan rallies was taken by many of the DNVP voters as a sign that Hitler was now a respectable figure who was rubbing shoulders with war heroes. The referendum of 1929 brought about
46428-418: Was that the supporters of the radical right-wing DNVP had abandoned it for the even more radical right-wing NSDAP. Hugenberg had decided to use as his next wedge issue to destroy the middle-of-the-road parties that supported the Weimar Republic the theme of anti-Marxism (in the Weimar Republic the term Marxism was to describe both the SPD and the KPD). The media mogul Hugenberg used his vast press empire to wage
46647-541: Was the call for Germany to resume overseas expansion and to regain the lost colonies in Africa. The other theme that he first set out in an article in the autumn of 1928 entitled "Party Bloc or Mush" (Block oder Brei) was that the DNVP should transform from a broad but heterogeneous and divided party of notables (in Hugenberg's words "mush") into a coherent and clear-cut force with a hierarchical leadership ( Führerprinzip ) and mass appeal, stressing plebiscitary action rather than parliamentarianism. Hugenberg declared that what
46866-429: Was the product of the various different streams of conservatism that found themselves flowing uneasily together in one party. There was much disagreement about who was to lead the new party, and Oskar Hergt was chosen as leader on 19 December 1918 very much as the compromise candidate, being a little-known civil servant who was thereforth acceptable to all the factions. British historian Ian Kershaw wrote that ever since
47085-528: Was the rise of a number of small parties representing rural voters in northern Germany such as the Agricultural League , German Farmers' Party and the Christian-National Peasants' and Farmers' Party , which all took away traditional DNVP voters, a development that contributed significantly to DNVP's poor showing in the 1928 elections. Finally, Admiral Tirpitz who had done so much for the DNVP's good showing in elections in 1924, had often come into conflict with Westarp over his policy of half-hearted participation in
47304-498: Was totally against the idea of expropriating the property of royalty, but many of its voters, especially small farmers, were not and voted yes on 20 June 1926, a development that strongly suggested that many DNVP voters were starting to feel that the party leadership was not representing them effectively. Westarp's efforts to include the DNVP within the government tied himself and the party in many knots since he had to engage in compromises with his coalition partners that offended much of
47523-433: Was utterly devoid of personal charisma or charm, but he was a successful industrialist and media magnate, a fabulously wealthy man whose talents at devising business strategies which had made him a millionaire many times over were felt to be equally applicable to the arena of politics. Hugenberg was elected leader largely through the support of the faction associated with the Pan-German League who had been steadily taking over
47742-482: Was written entirely by female volunteers) started to vehemently insist that German women only marry a "Nordic man" and raise their children to be racists. From the mid-1920s onwards, the women party activists started to draft plans calling for the end of all "Jewish cultural influence" in Germany, banning Jews from working as teachers and writers, making eugenics into state policy with a new class of bureaucrats to be called "racial guardians" to be created in order to assess
47961-407: Was written in a distinctly Protestant language". The DNVP opposed establishing relations with the Vatican and rejected the Prussian Concordat of 1929, arguing that Germany should not make formal agreements with the Catholic Church. The party refused to court Catholic voters, and Alfred Hugenberg rejected ideas to establish local Catholic committees of the DNVP, even when advised that this may damage
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