Here's an interesting one, come up with a plausible way to keep the 1919 Constitution of the German Reich in effect to modern day, both de facto and de jure (so no Nazi 's win and they don't bother to change it) up to 2015.
AHC: Keep the Weimar Constitution to present day.
- Thread starter Nofix
- Start date
Just reinstate it in 1955, with an Amendment of 'No more Enabling Acts'
That Constitution wasn't really that bad.
Actually, some of the Weimar Constitution is still valid now in the Basic Law...(stuff regarding religious matters mostly).
Any POD that will avoid Adolf Hitler becoming Reich Chancellor would do the trick. Either Friedrich Ebert does not die of appendicitis and is reelected for a second term and lives to see the end of it or Paul von Hindenburg either remains intransigent in his position to not make the "bohemian corporal" chancellor or dies of a stroke before those behind the scenes can change his senile mind or Hitler simply meets a premature end, e.g. during the failed 1923 coup or many others. By mid 1933 the economy will start showing clear signs of recovery and the NSDAP will continue and the KPD start to lose votes with each new election. By the mid 1930's centrist parties would have regained a majority in the Reichstag and be able to form stable majority coalition governments once again. Of course a survival of Weimar Germany is no guarantee that the 1919 Constitution would not be replaced by a new instead of amending the existing one. This has happened in several democratic countries even without a crisis, e.g. in Switzerland in 1999.
Not to mention proportional representation, and Article 48, both of which the Nazis used to gain power.
Proportional representation wasn't the problem...Germany still uses that, it's the lack of a threshold...
I mean, I read elsewhere here that the drafters of the Basic Law considered FPTP as undemocratic, despite the "stability" that it gives...
Proportional representation is used today by most parliamentary democracies without too many issues. Sure, it allows small parties a voice in parliament, but unless you have a really strange kingmaker situation they remain small in influence.
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
Hindenburg doesn't run for re-election in 1932; the alternate not-Hitler (likely Hugo Eckner) wins, meaning the Reichprasident of 1932-39 isn't going to die and is cogent enough to take command through his given powers if need be.
This too.
This too.
Molotov in 1947 proposed that with a few amendments--like restricting the president's powers--the Weimar Constitution should be used as the constitution for a united Germany. Just how serious the Soviets were about unification in 1947 is debatable but at least some historians (like Carolyn Woods Eisenberg) think they were serious--*provided* they got reparations from current production. https://books.google.com/books?id=JlRZM_VKzrMC&pg=PA487 Marc Trachtenberg, who is very skeptical that the "Stalin Note" of 1952 was intended seriously, thinks there is a much more plausible case for 1947 as a lost opportunity: "Ulam refers specifically to the 1947 Moscow conference and the Stalin Note business in 1952. Of these two, I personally think the 1947 affair is more puzzling. There is a vast, mostly German language, literature on the 1952 episode, and there is a good deal of evidence bearing on this issue in U.S., British and French archives. Many of the documents to be found in those western sources are quite suggestive, but the piece of evidence that struck me as decisive came from a Soviet source. This new evidence was cited on p. 127 of John Gaddis's WE NOW KNOW: "Soviet diplomat Vladimir Semyonov," Gaddis writes, "recalled Stalin asking: was it certain the Americans would turn the note down? Only when assured that it was did the Soviet leader give his approval, but with the warning that there would be grave consequences for Semyonov if this did not prove to be the case." (Gaddis's source for this is an unpublished 1994 paper by Alexei Filitov.) This, I thought--and if I'm wrong, I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me why--was as close to a smoking gun as we ever get in historical work.
"There are other reasons for not taking the Stalin Note affair too seriously, but the 1947 business is another matter entirely. The puzzle here is that when you read the records of the Moscow conference, Soviet policy does not seem the least bit intransigent. But the Americans, and especially Secretary of State Marshall, had exactly the opposite impression..." http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/comment8.htm
"There are other reasons for not taking the Stalin Note affair too seriously, but the 1947 business is another matter entirely. The puzzle here is that when you read the records of the Moscow conference, Soviet policy does not seem the least bit intransigent. But the Americans, and especially Secretary of State Marshall, had exactly the opposite impression..." http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/comment8.htm
A, say 3% or, like in the FRG's Basic Law, 5% threshold would have been of only limited help, the main problem for the formation of stable governments was that the party landscape of the Weimar Republic as well as of the Second Empire before were about as fragmented as in France or Italy with an average of 6 parties surpassing even the 5% threshold.
But the real issue was that in one point the Weimar Constitution was too democratic for its' own good, it provided no mechanism to outlaw extremist anticonstitutional parties and thus provided opportunities for the enemies of democracy to undermine it. Using FPTP in the 1932 elections might have given the NSDAP an absolute majority in the Reichstag and thus provided for an even easier rise to power for Hitler.
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Several nations have constitutions without mechanisms to outlaw extremist parties, and they've managed to avoid turning into one-party states.
One of the major problems with a unification agreement in 1947 is that in 1947, Germany had barely enough food to feed itself. So it's hard to devise a reparations agreement that wouldn't require the Americans and British to put extra money into Germany solely so that it can repay its reparations to the Soviet Union, something that would have been hard to sell to the American and British publics.
Another major stumbling block is that the Stalin Note demanded "The existence of organizations inimical to democracy and to the maintenance of peace must not be permitted on the territory of Germany". They probably would have insisted on a similar clause in 1947. The question is how the Soviets would have insisted this be interpreted. If we're talking about banning neo-Nazi organizations, fine. If we're talking about banning anti-Nazi groups that also complain about the treatment of ethnic Germans in the USSR, for example, the West is never going to agree to that.
For evidence that not only Beria but Malenkov (and perhaps other Presidium members who later made Beria, and to a lesser extent, Malenkov, the scapegoats) may have been serious about reunification in 1953, see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/Z-eAjLyqJZg/XRJrrtbDsUwJ
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Delayed effects to economic improvement, and as always, the next leader or party tends to get the credit.
And can you please bring me up to speed on the abbreviations. I'm assuming the first one means the Nazis and the second the communists?
NSDAP means the Nazis.
KPD are the communists.
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National Socialist German Workers' Party (German = Deutsche and Worker = Arbeiter) and Communist Party of Germany (Kommunist, Deutsche)
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Thanks.
I think the communists were mainly influential as a bogeyman to conjure fear against.
It was primarily the social democratic parties who couldn't get their act together and get a credible response to the Great Depression (but that was true of much of the world).
I think the communists were mainly influential as a bogeyman to conjure fear against.
It was primarily the social democratic parties who couldn't get their act together and get a credible response to the Great Depression (but that was true of much of the world).
In Germany, there was one Social Democratic Party of importance, the SPD, still exists today. The problem is that the moderate right was fragmented, especially with their responses to the SPD. In part it was due in some sectors to sectarianism.