Before, during, and after the First World War, German liberalism was divided into right- and left-wing camps, the Right led by the National Liberals before and during the War and the German People's Party (DVP) afterwards, and the Left led by the Progressive People's Party before and during the war and the German Democratic Party (DDP) afterwards. In late 1918 there had been much sentiment in both camps for unity, but this was not to be. Was there a real possibility of such a party, and would it have lasted? There is a very interesting discussion of these questions in Jonathan Wright, *Gustav Stresemann: Weimar's Greatest Statesman* (Oxford UP 2002), pp. 124-5:
"The continued division of German liberalism into two camps and the arguably serious consequences of this division in weakening the Weimar Republic, gave rise to the question then and later of whose fault it had been that unity failed in 1918-19. The Democrats were quick to blame Stresemann, and Stresemann counter-attacked, accusing the *Berliner Tageblatt* intellectuals of 'brutality' and aiming not at unity but at excluding the core ofthe National Liberals.42 The truth was that neither wanted an all-Liberal union. Stresemann, partly because he saw the threat to his leadership and partly because he believed there were fundamental differences between the National Liberals and the left-wing Democrats, was more than content for the division to continue. Even if a temporary unity had been reached for the 1919 elections, he expected it to break down later. He also thought that the DDP in Berlin vastly overestimated the strength of the Party in the country at large. He expected old voting habits to reassert themselves once the shock of defeat had receded.43
"Naturally there was in this view a considerable degree of wish-fulfilment. Stresemann had no desire to deny his own past and he expected the majority of National Liberal voters to feel the same. But the fact that Stresemann's prediction came broadly true in the elections of June 1920, when the DVP polled as well as the National Liberals had in 1912 and the DDP was cut to below the Progressive equivalent, shows that it was not mere wishful thinking. The reaction against the treaty of Versailles no doubt helped, but that showed that the loyalty of National Liberal voters who had switched to the DDP in 1919 was insecure, particularly since the DDP itself refused to vote for the treaty and resigned from the government. Stresemann's argument that without the DVP many National Liberals might have defected further to the right--or as has recently been suggested into abstention--deserves to be taken seriously.44 [Wright adds in a footnote that in one district of Saxony, Plauen, right-wing National Liberals defected in any case to the DNVP, declaring that Stresemann was 'also inwardly a Democrat'...]
"The return of Liberal voters to their traditional ways by June 1920 does not, however, show that Liberal unity was bound to fail. On the contrary, had the National Liberals been offered a common plafform and adequate representation in November or December 1918, there is good reason to suppose that union would have been achieved. The question would then have been whether a united Liberal Party with the *Berliner Tageblatt* group as its extreme left wing (as it had previously stood on the left of the Progressives) could have adjusted to the changed circumstances of 1919-2O. Could it have followed the drift back to the right among the Liberal electorate as a whole without breaking up again? This is debatable. The *Berliner Tugeblatt* rapidly lost influence within the DDP, and in July 1919 Stresemann's former mentor Neumann was elected chairman.45 The DDP programme for the elections to the National Assembly in January 1919 was revised to be almost identical with that of the DVP. There was therefore more truth in Stresemann's claim that it was the radical intellectuals, such as Weber [Alfred Weber, brother of the sociologist Max] and Wolff [Theodor Wolff, editor of the *Berliner Tageblatt*], who had prevented unity than was comfortable for his other view that the natural divisions hetween right and left Liberals were bound to resurface.
"However, in the longer term Stresemann was probably right. There remained important differences between the DVP and the DDP in their attitudes to the Republic and in their willingness to form electoral alliances or government coalitions with the parties to their left and right. The divisions were not caused simply by a clash of personalities in Berlin: they had deep roots in the provincial parties. Indeed the division between left arid right in the German party system can be seen as running between the DDP and the DVP. The dividing line was not rigid and efforts continued from both sides to achieve Liberal union. Stresemann remained sceptical of a one-sided union with the DDP. His goal became instead to make the DVP the natural party of the Protestant middle class--a Protestant equivalent of the Centre Party--by drawing in both the right wing of the DDP and the pragmatic elements of the former Conservative Party and its allies, now organized in the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartie; DNVP)."
https://books.google.com/books?id=ne3S9ibdfi8C&pg=PP191
I might add that in 1918-19 it was perfectly plausible for the Democrats to take a hard line on the role that the core of the old National Liberals---people like Stresemann--should play in a unified liberal party. Stresemann after all had been an annexationist and an advocate of unlimited submarine warfare during the War. The Democrats thought that to allow people who took such positions a major role in a united liberal party would limit its appeal, and that may well have been true given the leftish mood of Germany in late 1918 and early 1919. The problem of course was that this mood would not last. At the time, though, things looked so bleak for right-wing liberals that some National Liberals were wiling to accept unity on Democratic terms which involved "only marginal concessions on representation and none on policy." (Wright, p. 122) Stresemann opposed such "capitulationists" and won a narrow 33-28 majority of the National Liberal national executive (or rather of the sixty-one members of the executive out of 229 who were able to attend the meeting on December 15, 1918) to reject unity on such terms and to proceed with the formation of the new DVP. What if he had lost that vote? Wright thinks it would have made little difference: "This was a symbolic victory providing a thread of continuity from the most important national committee of the old party to the DVP. But Stresemann was obviously prepared to go ahead in any case on the basis of the provincial organizations loyal to him." (p. 123)
A couple of possibilities:
(1) Is it conceivable that with an even temporarily unified liberal party, Hindenburg would never have been elected president? As I noted at
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/c97a2f7426ccc5ed Stresemann blocked the DVP from backing the DDP's Gessler for Reich President in 1925. Would he have been able to block a unified liberal party from doing so? If Gessler were a candidate, could he win in 1925, and could he defeat Hitler in 1932?
(2) Even if Hindenburg is elected, a united liberal party could still make a difference: with a unified liberal party, the Mueller government might not have been brought down in 1930. (In OTL what brought it down was the uncompromising stand of the DVP on the issue of unemployment insurance.) Admittedly the knowledge that Hindenburg was prepared to grant emergency powers to a bourgeois government headed by Bruening would have made it attractive for even a liberal party somewhat to the left of the DVP to rid itself of coalition with the SPD...
Any thoughts?