On March 27, 1930, the socialist chancellor of Germany, Hermann Müller, tendered his resignation to the president, and a cabinet representing a grand coalition of parties—ranging from the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social Democratic Party, SPD) to the right-liberal Deutsche Volkspartei (German People's Party, DVP)—stepped down.Footnote 1 Soon afterward, the Marxist theoretician and socialist parliamentarian Rudolf Hilferding exasperatedly reflected on the government's demise in the social democratic journal Die Gesellschaft. Hilferding was upset that his party comrades had brought down the government by focusing on the single issue of unemployment insurance rather than considering the “larger picture of the political situation.”Footnote 2 Hilferding worried about the rise of anti-parliamentary sentiment on both the right and the far left, and he particularly fretted about the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People's Party, DNVP) under Alfred Hugenberg turning its back on Weimar's parliamentary system.Footnote 3
In this gloomy article in Die Gesellschaft, Hilferding pointed his readers to one surprising agent of compromise: Heinrich Brüning of the Catholic Center Party. In the final coalition crisis over unemployment benefits, Brüning brokered a compromise that the SPD parliamentary party had rejected. In arguing that Brüning's deal would have been preferable to blowing up the government, Hilferding painted the conservative Catholic as a reasonable negotiating partner.Footnote 4 Historians have not shared Hilferding's view and tend to read Heinrich Brüning's subsequent minority government as the embodiment of antiliberal conservative forces rather than the apex of cooperation with political rivals.Footnote 5 However, contemporaries noticed something that historians have overlooked. One of Brüning's own ministers argued that the Catholic chancellor actually developed a “brand new way of governing” that included consultation with political parties and interest groups to hammer out compromises behind closed doors.Footnote 6 Although Brüning led conservative cabinets that excluded the socialists, one of his key collaborators and confidants was, in fact, the socialist Rudolf Hilferding, who happened to be Brüning's second most common guest in the chancellory in 1931 and 1932.Footnote 7 Although scholars tend to focus on ideology or political and social structures to understand Weimar politics, personal relationships also influenced political decision-making as this article demonstrates through an examination of the long-standing friendship between Heinrich Brüning and Rudolf Hilferding.
The political historiography of the Weimar Republic has undergone waves of interest that were rooted in the moment when scholars were writing. In the wake of the Second World War, political scientists and historians poured time and energy into understanding the structures implicated in Weimar's demise. They needed to ensure that the fledging Federal Republic avoided the same pitfalls.Footnote 8 An immediate postwar fixation on the “functional deficits” in Weimar institutions gave way to Sonderweg-inspired scholarship that dwelt on the supposedly retrograde, anti-democratic, and proto-authoritarian ideas of elite politicians who dominated the first German republic. Particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, scholars worked to pry into the minds of Weimar's politicians to figure out if they were true democrats or secretly authoritarian. In this scholarly environment, a historian's determination of whether President Paul von Hindenburg was a Pickelhaube-bedecked evil mastermind or a senile old man manipulated by a domineering camarilla colored one's reading of every event leading to Hitler's appointment as chancellor.Footnote 9 Perhaps because the political history of the Weimar Republic became the domain of unwinnable debates about the true motivations of political actors, there has been a dramatic “eclipse” in American and British historical interest in this period. Larry Eugene Jones has written that “American scholars have all but abandoned the writing of the political history of the Weimar Republic to their German colleagues.”Footnote 10
The contemporary German historians who are doing new work on the politics of the 1920s and 1930s are, however, not writing in the vein of men like William Sheridan Allen, Henry Ashby Turner, or Thomas Childers.Footnote 11 Instead, European scholarship has turned to new methods in political history that draw on cultural studies, anthropology, and scholarship on gender. Phrases like the “cultural history of politics” and the “cultural history of the political” are bandied about in innovative European dissertations, conference papers, and edited volumes.Footnote 12 One of the forerunners of this trend was the Bielefeld-trained historian Thomas Mergel. His 2002 monograph Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik borrowed from microsociology, discourse analysis, and cultural anthropology to examine how the interwar Reichstag actually functioned. Mergel expanded our understanding of parliamentary history to include not only plenary debates, popular speeches, and newspaper reporting but also fleeting conversations in first-class train cars, routines that brought parliamentarians together in committee rooms, and boozy “parlamentarische Bierabende” that fostered cross-party connections and a common esprit de corps.Footnote 13
Thomas Mergel's emphasis on this larger ecosystem that surrounded Weimar politics has been recently supplemented by the young German historian Volker Köhler's 2018 monograph Genossen—Freunde—Junker: Die Mikropolitik personaler Beziehungen im politischen Handeln während der Weimarer Republik. Instead of riding the cultural wave of political history, Köhler draws on patronage studies and analyses of corruption to understand the “importance of personal relationships in the allocation of state and communal resources,” which Köhler dubs “micropolitics.” Köhler delves into three case studies—socialist ministers in Saxony, the Catholic milieu around the mayor of Cologne, and collaboration between Junkers and bureaucrats in East Prussia—to demonstrate analytical similarities between “lobbying and party patronage, friendships and backroom deals.”Footnote 14 Mergel's insights about the political and social milieux that surrounded the interwar Reichstag, along with Köhler's interest in personal political connections, are applied in this article to the relationship between Heinrich Brüning and Rudolf Hilferding. Brüning, in particular, has remained the historiographical property of scholars working to tell the story of Weimar's demise and Hitler's rise. The new European scholarly energy for rethinking politics and culture has not yet been brought to bear on these actors so deeply associated with the world of high politics. This article changes that.
Brüning and Hilferding made a strange duo. Brüning was a devout, conservative Catholic from the Münsterland. Pressured by his family not to become a priest for financial reasons, Brüning completed a doctorate in economics before shipping off to the front for service in the First World War. In the new republic, he served as Adam Stegerwald's protégé in the Catholic trade union movement. After Brüning was elected to the Reichstag for the Center Party in 1924, he made a name for himself as his party's parliamentary economics expert. When Brüning took over leadership of the German cabinet in March 1930, he struggled to steer the ship of state through the Great Depression, and his right-leaning minority government transitioned to rule by emergency presidential decree rather than relying on shifting parliamentary majorities.Footnote 15
Rudolf Hilferding took an even more circuitous route to land his role on the Wilhelmstraße. Hilferding was born in 1877 in Habsburg Vienna and studied medicine. He was, however, more drawn to political economy and social democratic politics, so he gave up medicine to become an Austro-Marxist economic theorist. From Vienna, he was summoned to the SPD party school in Berlin in 1906 and stayed in Germany until he was called up for wartime service as a physician in the Austrian army during the First World War. After the war, Hilferding returned to Berlin's socialist circles and eventually moved from the Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Independent Social Democratic Party, USPD) back to the majority SPD. Hilferding then served in the SPD's executive, twice was the German finance minister, and sat in the Reichstag from 1924 to 1933.Footnote 16 Hilferding's historiographical legacy among intellectual historians has mainly been as a Marxist thinker, given how his 1910 book Finance Capital shaped the thought of both Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin. Hilferding's pivot from Marxist theory to political practice as the German finance minister, an influential SPD party doyen, and Brüning's confidant has not, however, been explored by historians to the same extent as Hilferding's theoretical work.Footnote 17
Many earlier scholars who have considered Hilferding or Brüning came from the tradition of plumbing individual politicians’ minds to uncover their hidden motives or heartfelt ideologies. These scholars wanted to draw a line between a given politician's ideas and concrete political actions. For instance, the political scientist F. Peter Wagner read all of Hilferding's actions after 1928 as “based on his Weimar theory of organized capitalism,” which was discernable solely through Hilferding's publications.Footnote 18 This approach renders any archival research pointless, if one's true motivations are found only in published works. Some historians, however, have fallen into the related trap of assessing evidence based on whether it advanced a teleological political narrative. For example, in his massive tome Von Brüning zu Hitler, Gerhard Schulz noted a promising behind-the-scenes meeting between Brüning and leading socialists that Hilferding brokered, but Schulz then dismissed it immediately as having “basically yielded nothing whatsoever.”Footnote 19 This encounter did not advance Schulz's narrative or elucidate the complex calculations going on in minds of the political actors, so Schulz disregarded it. A scholarly focus that seeks out only ideas and political results can overlook what cross-party meetings and private contacts can tell us about interwar German politics. This article takes the approach of the new historians of Weimar's political culture in turning toward the practice of politics, rather than the ideologies that underpinned it.
From the Grand Coalition to Tolerating a Presidental Cabinet: Fixated on Divining Brüning's Motives
When the grand coalition collapsed in 1930, the conservative President Hindenburg asked the Catholic Center Party leader Heinrich Brüning to form a more right-wing government without the Social Democrats that, as a minority government, would have his blessing to rule by decree.Footnote 20 Although Article 48 had been used before in times of open rebellion and far-reaching enabling acts had granted previous cabinets special power over the German economy, Brüning's cabinet represented the first time that the government could routinely skip the Reichstag on significant legislation and issue decrees for day-to-day governing.Footnote 21 These emergency decrees bypassed the Reichstag and went into effect immediately after they were approved by the cabinet and promulgated by the president. However, the Reichstag could—by majority vote—reject the decrees. Brüning's cabinet comfortably weathered an initial no-confidence motion, but its first emergency decree was overturned by the Reichstag. The chancellor responded by dissolving parliament and calling fresh elections.Footnote 22
The results of the September 1930 election were sobering for all but the most radical German politicians. The Nazi Party skyrocketed from 12 to 107 seats, becoming the second largest party in the 577-seat Reichstag. The communists also increased their vote share. Together these two radical anti-democratic parties held almost a third of the parliament's seats, and there was no workable majority for Brüning's government without cooperating with one of the two largest blocs—either the Nazis or the socialists.Footnote 23 Governing seemed impossible, but it was at this moment after the election that the SPD elected to tolerate Brüning's government and stop voting to overturn its emergency decrees. The SPD's toleration of the conservative government allowed Brüning to remain in office, but also opened up rifts among SPD parliamentarians and caused the party to hemorrhage support from its working-class base.Footnote 24
Retrospectively, the transition from Chancellor Müller's socialist-led coalition to a conservative government ruling by decree seems like an obvious stepping-stone on the path toward the Nazi seizure of power, so historians have naturally puzzled over this period.Footnote 25 Many have focused their attention on the person and mindset of Heinrich Brüning to evaluate this entire era. Some scholars are so fixated on Brüning that they abandon their standard historical approaches to understand this one man. For example, the social historian Hans Mommsen admitted that he was partial to large structural explanations rather than historical arguments that turned on the actions of individuals:
The final crisis of the Weimar Republic, together with the progressive destruction of its parliamentary system and the political neutralization of the SPD … are not explicable solely by reference to the actions of individual politicians; they merely executed the carefully planned designs of certain dominant social interests.
However, Mommsen included one giant caveat:
In Brüning's case, however, an analysis of his personal motives and aims is important because, as chancellor, he pursued what in many ways was his own independent line and adhered to it with remarkable rigidity.Footnote 26
Mommsen ditches his natural penchant for structural historical explanations just for Brüning!
Historians’ fixation on Brüning stems, in part, from the posthumous publication of his highly problematic memoirs. Brüning's autobiography was not the bestseller his publisher had hoped it would be; his heirs and executor engaged in a pitched legal battle in the West German courts over the authenticity of the book. Historians also scrutinized Brüning's claims, ultimately concluding that his account was riddled with inaccuracies and anachronism. The autobiography's most explosive claim was Brüning's insistence that he was motivated by deeply held monarchist sympathies.Footnote 27 Karl Dietrich Bracher, still one of the doyens of scholarship on the Weimar Republic when Brüning's memoirs were published, reflected on Brüning's recollections in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte in 1971. Bracher pointed to problems with the accuracy of the memoirs, but he believed every single word about Brüning's monarchist affinities, which he read as supporting his own arguments. Bracher understood Brüning holistically as “the first chancellor in the process of this dissolution of German democracy,” and much of Bracher's argument rested on Brüning's cast of mind.Footnote 28 The German historian Detlev Peukert echoed Bracher and read Brüning as a nefarious proto-authoritarian, leading “an undisguisedly anti-parliamentary presidential government.”Footnote 29 In his more recent popular history, Richard Evans joined this chorus calling Brüning “at best a fair-weather friend of Weimar democracy” whose “instincts were authoritarian at heart.”Footnote 30
Since the 1990s, a cottage industry of Brüning biographies have been published to reconsider the Catholic chancellor's image and political legacy, and all of these try to rescue Brüning from being a villain in the older magisterial histories of the rise of the Nazis. William Patch's 1998 Heinrich Brüning and the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic was the first scholarly biography of the chancellor to hit the shelves; it expertly defended Brüning's image contending, “Brüning did intend to restore parliamentary democracy with relatively minor reforms when the economic crisis passed, and … his fall, not his appointment to office, marked the crucial turning point in the dissolution of the Weimar Republic.”Footnote 31 A few years later, the first of a two-volume biography of Brüning was published by Herbert Hömig, who went for comprehensive description rather than provocatively placing himself within older historiographical debates.Footnote 32
Peer Volkmann, Brüning's most recent biographer, has focused on Brüning's wealth of correspondence and materials from after his chancellorship.Footnote 33 Volkmann insisted on reading Brüning through an all-encompassing mindset: “Considering Brüning's résumé, it is surprising that the perception can still exist among historians and journalists that the Catholic Center party politician entered the office of chancellor in 1930 with the intention of preserving the accomplishments of 1919 or of safeguarding the republic and democracy.”Footnote 34 For Volkmann, Brüning's background and intellectual formation, rather than his actions in office, shaped his “pathological” relationship with Germany.Footnote 35 Volkmann concludes that Brüning was a “conservative national Catholic” whose “dearest desire was to accomplish a reconciliation between Prussia [Preußentum] (Protestantism) and Catholicism.”Footnote 36 Volkmann adopts this as an article of faith and shoehorns Brüning's political career into an ideology he sees developing more fully in the former chancellor's later life. Rather than starting from any assumption about Brüning's motives, as Volkmann did, this article first explores the backroom meetings and negotiations that set up toleration on their own terms. Subsequently, the article turns to the role Hilferding played in propping up toleration in the context of his decades-long friendship with Brüning.
The Practice of Toleration: Negiotiating and Governing Behind the Scenes with the Socialists
The extensive communication between Heinrich Brüning, his new cabinet, and the socialist opposition challenges any belief that the breakdown of the grand coalition in 1930 marked the beginning of something wholly new, authoritarian, and undemocratic. The day before Brüning's new, more conservative cabinet was sworn in, the future chancellor summoned Rudolf Breitscheid, a leader of the SPD parliamentary party, to a private meeting. According to Breitscheid's memo of the encounter, Brüning was frank and answered politically challenging questions about the difficulty of putting together a cabinet; both men tried to understand the position of the other on an upcoming no-confidence vote and the possible dissolution of the Reichstag.Footnote 37 Of course, one could respond that any chancellor-designate would almost certainly meet with the socialists in hopes of preventing them from toppling his government on day one; however, the conversations between the SPD and Brüning went far beyond this first meeting with Breitscheid. The day after voting against Brüning's government in the Reichstag, the socialist parliamentarian Toni Sender met with a state secretary in the finance ministry to report that the SPD would be willing to make “large concessions” in exchange for compromise on social insurance questions.Footnote 38 Rudolf Hilferding also dropped in on his former ministerial colleague Adam Stegerwald, who had become Brüning's labor minister, to point out areas of agreement between the SPD and the cabinet on economic and unemployment issues.Footnote 39 A number of socialists were apparently still eager to negotiate on the social insurance debate that had toppled Müller's government and on which Brüning had earlier crafted a potential compromise.Footnote 40
These back-channel conversations between Brüning's cabinet and the SPD in the early days of the new minority government go so far as to include advance warning from the socialists that they were going to request that the Reichstag lift the first emergency decree “for form's sake.”Footnote 41 This amounts to a courtesy warning from the SPD that they would be attacking Brüning's government in the next few days, something that was far too kind to expect from political opponents. Although the grand coalition was now over, the socialists and Brüning's government continued consulting with each other through the same channels that had been used when the SPD was in the cabinet. The change of government did not tear apart the working relationships that formed and were cultivated under the grand coalition, and these relationships point to “a sustained effort to preserve the Great Coalition on an informal basis” during Brüning's chancellorship.Footnote 42
This behind-the-scenes collegial political world became even more important after the 1930 elections. Just five days after the national election crushed any hopes of a moderate conservative majority in the Reichstag, top-level “secret conversations” were held at Rudolf Hilferding's home between Brüning and the SPD leadership, led by the socialist ex-Chancellor Müller.Footnote 43 Soon thereafter, Hermann Pünder—the top civil servant in the Reich Chancellery who had worked for Müller and then retained his post under Brüning—hosted a dinner at his house with members of the new cabinet and even more leading socialists. All of these private meetings were aimed at coming to some sort of agreement that would permit the SPD to revise the most draconian measures from Brüning's earlier emergency decrees, while guaranteeing the SPD's support for the cabinet's future. In the end, Brüning and the SPD agreed to consult each other about emergency decrees before they were issued. The SPD would oppose motions in the Reichstag aimed at overturning the measures or toppling the government, and the Prussian coalition would remain intact. This complex arrangement provided socialists with enough political cover never actually to vote in favor of the unpopular policies entailed in the government's emergency decrees. Instead, they would only vote against overturning decrees once they were already in place.Footnote 44
The secret backroom meetings that hammered out the details of toleration prove that the socialists had more robust political contact with Brüning's cabinet than many historians have recognized.Footnote 45 Toleration was a political decision by the SPD that was made in concert with and supported by guarantees from Chancellor Brüning. Moreover, the SPD was not simply a passive actor, propping up the government to prevent a more right-wing chancellor from taking over. Instead, socialists were active partners with the conservative cabinet, voicing concerns and influencing decisions. Leading socialist parliamentarians met with Brüning and other members of the cabinet regularly to sort out policy. Sometimes this involved coordinating logistics—determining when and how the budget would come to a vote in the Reichstag's plenary session and what topics would be discussed in committees.Footnote 46 Other times this took the form of SPD leaders going to the chancellory to hammer out political compromises.Footnote 47 By no stretch of the imagination did this mean that the socialists’ concerns or desires always came out on top; one minister in the cabinet specifically highlighted the sacrifices socialists made: “From no other party were greater political sacrifices required than of the Social Democrats.” To illustrate this socialist sacrifice, this politician recalled a meeting between Brüning, a few ministers, and the leaders of trade unions that had been called to discuss cutting social benefits: “An impassioned debate raged for hours. Literally at daybreak we had gotten so far that the social democratic trade union chairman … said ‘Well, if there is no other way …’” and agreed to the compromise that would cut benefits.Footnote 48 Of course, the socialists made many concessions, but they were also at the table, and their presence prevented the conservative government from implementing even more radical measures.Footnote 49
Some historians who have written about toleration see the SPD and its affiliated trade union movement as being compelled by the conservative cabinet to tolerate its decisions. For instance, Wolfram Pyta argued that Brüning threatened the SPD at almost every juncture. Pyta reads interactions between Brüning and the socialists through the implicit or explicit threat that the Center Party might blow up the socialist-led Prussian coalition if the SPD in the Reichstag did not continue tolerating the more conservative Reich cabinet.Footnote 50 Heinrich August Winkler is the historian most sympathetic to the SPD's quandary. He argued that toleration was a “policy of the lesser evil … without responsible alternatives” and, thus, a well-reasoned and rational calculus of the SPD leadership.Footnote 51 Nevertheless, even Winkler pointed to the stick that Brüning wielded in the chancellor's ability to threaten the Prussian coalition's survival to encourage the SPD's support for his more unpopular measures.Footnote 52
Focusing on the stick that Brüning could wield, however, ignores the carrot that was offered to the socialists. Take, for instance, the moment that historians trot out when they highlight Brüning's threats to blow up the Prussian coalition.Footnote 53 In June 1931, Brüning's cabinet had run into opposition surrounding an emergency measure, and there were moves within the Reichstag's leadership to convene the parliament to challenge the decree. If that had happened, Brüning's entire cabinet would have been discredited and might have had to resign. For a politician, the fear of imminently being forced out of office can prompt pulling out all the stops. Naturally, Brüning met with as many political parties as possible, including the Nazis, to convince them not to convene the Reichstag. The chancellery records do indeed reveal that Brüning met with the Center Party to discuss exerting pressure on the SPD by suggesting that the party might leave the Prussian coalition.Footnote 54 Historians have fixated on this threat and read it alongside their belief in Brüning's anti-democratic sentiment. Another reading of this moment, however, is of a politician frantically trying to put out a political fire that could consume the government with all tools at his disposal. At the same time that Brüning indirectly telegraphed a threat about the Prussian coalition to SPD parliamentarians, the party's leadership, including Rudolf Hilferding, were actually working with the cabinet on a compromise to avert the crisis, which ultimately succeeded.Footnote 55 The opportunity to have a seat at the table and to cooperate with the government was the carrot that toleration offered the socialists.
Moreover, Brüning stood by his promises to the socialists that were made in these behind-the-scenes negotiations. For example, when German civil servants came to the chancellor in May 1931 to push for a drastic new financial emergency decree, Brüning expressed concern about taking steps before the socialists’ party conference. He was well informed about the socialists’ political concerns and did not want to jeopardize the position of his allies in the SPD, prompting a bureaucrat at the meeting to write: “In that I had the feeling, that the contacts between Brüning and the socialists were considerably closer than I had thought.”Footnote 56 Indeed, the socialists’ own records prove that Brüning had assured them “that unavoidably the emergency decree would not be published before or during the Leipzig [socialist] party conference.”Footnote 57 In Brüning's discussions with civil servants about the decree, he held firm to an agreement he had made with three leading socialists during late-night budget negotiations not to cut assistance for disabled people.Footnote 58 Various historians have painted Brüning as an antisocialist mastermind, but the SPD leadership trusted him, and he trusted them as legitimate negotiating partners.Footnote 59 This is in keeping with an often-cited personality trait of the chancellor: “His best quality: his reliability … if he agreed to something, there would be no faltering.”Footnote 60 Toleration has wrongly been read as a one-sided decision by the SPD to prop up Brüning's government, but moments like this show that the behind-the-scenes negotiations were understood by both parties to be binding.
Of course, the drawback for the SPD was that it bled support from both its political base and left-wing parliamentary flank.Footnote 61 Opinion in Germany also ran against Brüning's emergency decrees.Footnote 62 They were technocratic and complicated austerity measures; one politician summed up the attitude among the German people as “I don't understand them [the emergency decrees], but I condemn them.”Footnote 63 As popular support waned, the leftists in the SPD also began pushing back against their leadership and cooperation with Brüning. They published damning letters in the press and publicized private deals.Footnote 64 Toleration and transparency did not go well together. Practically speaking, the government sought to avoid the Reichstag meeting in plenary sessions that could discredit the cabinet or include votes to overturn emergency decrees. Article 24 of the Weimar constitution required only one annual Reichstag session, and the Reichstag itself could determine the date of future meetings.Footnote 65 Time and time again, the SPD added its votes to proposals that stalled and put off future Reichstag sessions as long as possible and deflected attempts within the Reichstag's leadership to force earlier sessions.Footnote 66 Shuttering the parliament to allow a minority government to rule without plenary sessions or committee investigations that might discredit the cabinet ran counter to republican values: “The decision for toleration was a decision against the Reichstag.”Footnote 67 Indeed, toleration survived only because the Reichstag met so infrequently, but democratic decision-making did not disappear, it just moved behind the scenes.Footnote 68 Rudolf Hilferding pointed this out in Die Gesellschaft: “[This government] is not free like a dictatorial regime, since it is still compelled to consider each and every political group on the fence [Grenzgruppe] that [the government] needs for every majority or needs to ensure the government does not fall.” As we will see, Hilferding was the primary link between the cabinet and keeping the socialist “group on the fence” within Brüning's fold.Footnote 69
Rudolf Hilferding as a Pillar of Toleration
Heinrich Brüning's minority government faced a no-confidence vote in the Reichstag on April 3, 1930, only days after it was formed. There was a pitched argument within the SPD parliamentary party about how to vote on this no-confidence motion. Moderate SPD bigwigs argued that socialists should adopt a wait-and-see approach and abstain, but they lost the vote in the parliamentary party.Footnote 70 Traditional SPD discipline then dictated that the minority submit to the majority's will and oppose Brüning's government in the Reichstag vote, but that is not what happened. Twenty-four SPD members did not participate in the no-confidence vote. SPD practice was that “parliamentarians have been allowed to stay away [from a vote] for decades, if they do not believe that they can reconcile a decision with their conscience.”Footnote 71 Reading all of these twenty-four abstentions as opposition to the SPD's course might be a stretch, but the constellation of socialists not voting included ex-Chancellor Hermann Müller, Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun, and a slew of former and current state and Reich ministers. These more moderate socialists, especially those accustomed to compromising across party lines in a cabinet, wanted to keep the door open for future talks with Brüning. One of the SPD members who argued vociferously against the motion of no confidence and was then excused from the April 3 vote was Rudolf Hilferding, who soon took up the cause of SPD toleration of Brüning's cabinet.Footnote 72
When searching for socialist intermediaries to Brüning's government, however, historians have generally overlooked Rudolf Hilferding in favor of politicians such as Otto Braun or Hermann Müller.Footnote 73 Braun was the long-serving socialist Prussian prime minister, called the “Red Czar of Prussia.” In addition to leading the coalition Prussian government, Braun sat in the Reichstag, ran for Reich president in the first round of the 1925 election, and frequently argued in the SPD parliamentary party for a moderate course. Historians have long noticed that Braun enjoyed a fairly cordial relationship with some conservatives, especially President Hindenburg, with whom the socialist bonded over a shared love of hunting.Footnote 74 When Brüning took over the reins of the Reich in 1930, Prussia's “red czar” was the leading socialist still in high government office, which helps explain why historians look to Braun's role in propping up toleration. Scholars have also written about Müller's private negotiations with Brüning after the 1930 election to set up the toleration agreement, but because Müller died in March 1931 and toleration continued through May 1932, he cannot have been the only champion of the policy.Footnote 75 In looking first to Müller or Braun to understand toleration, scholars neglect Hilferding, who wielded more informal power and enjoyed significant clout behind the scenes. Indeed, Pyta overlooked Hilferding so completely that his 817-page monograph Hindenburg: Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler does not even include Hilferding in the index!Footnote 76
However, Rudolf Hilferding would later take credit as the “spiritual father” of toleration, which might not be too grandiose a claim.Footnote 77 It was in his home that the socialist leadership and Brüning first secretly met to sketch out the contours of a toleration pact, and Hilferding remained the SPD's key negotiator with Brüning and his cabinet on policy details for emergency decrees.Footnote 78 As previously mentioned, the 1931 and 1932 Tageszettel—the official daily records of Brüning's appointments kept by State Secretary Pünder—document Hilferding's frequent visits to the chancellory. Using the Tageszettel, William Patch counted all the “significant conversations” they contained and was surprised to discover that Hilferding met with Brüning sixty-one times, the second highest number of anyone, surpassed only by Ludwig Kaas, the Center Party's parliamentary leader. This is striking for a politician who was officially not aligned with the government.Footnote 79
A closer look at the Tageszettel reveals a variety of different reasons that Hilferding met with Brüning, which included private social gatherings either at the chancellery or at Hilferding's home. Hilferding's wife, Rose, often attended these events, unlike the spouses of other ministers and politicians with whom Brüning dined, who are noticeably absent from the Tageszettel.Footnote 80 Brüning's especially close relationship with Hilferding is confirmed in Brüning's own personal pocket calendar for 1930. One of the first handwritten entries for the year was the Hilferding family's private address—Lietzenburger Straße 51 in Berlin; this is remarkable because Brüning includes no other socialists’ and very few political colleagues’ home addresses.Footnote 81 The historian's uncertainty about how to interpret squiggly addresses in a tattered pocket calendar or one-line records from the Tageszettel has prompted many scholars to discount this kind of evidence as ephemeral. Instead, they root their arguments about politics during the waning years of the Weimar Republic in sources like cabinet minutes, parliamentary papers, speeches, and newspaper articles that supposedly shed more light on the motives and actions of politicians.Footnote 82 However, the sheer number of times that Hilferding and Brüning crop up in each other's schedules is telling for how close their relationship really was.
Hilferding's role in propping up toleration was often in serving as the intermediary between the SPD parliamentary party and the minority government. Brüning frequently met with Hilferding in the Reichstag with messages for the SPD, and, on occasion, the chancellor even passed on letters to specific SPD parliamentarians via Hilferding.Footnote 83 Hilferding was also known to invite his socialist colleagues and Brüning together to his house for private meetings.Footnote 84 Hilferding was more than a trusted mailman or simple host, however; he was also a negotiator whose own exertion kept toleration on track. Hilferding's mediating role was on display whenever the Reichstag was in session and Brüning needed SPD support—or, at least, abstentions—for the cabinet to prevail legislatively. The number of private meetings between Brüning and Hilferding skyrocketed during Reichstag sessions. For instance, between February and March 1931, Brüning ducked out of Reichstag sessions to chat with Hilferding several times in the same day.Footnote 85 Similarly, during the Reichstag's plenary sessions in October 1931, Hilferding met with Brüning on the day of a big parliamentary speech and brought along socialist colleagues when the SPD still had to decide how to vote on yet another vote of no confidence.Footnote 86 During short Reichstag sessions in both February and May 1932, Hilferding reprised his role as Brüning's most frequent socialist guest.Footnote 87
Reserving judgment on this mounting circumstantial evidence of Hilferding's meetings with Brüning when the chancellor needed SPD support would seem like willful blindness, but Hilferding's crucial role is crystal clear in the Reichstag session between February and March 1931. In early 1931, the cabinet's voting calculus in the Reichstag was upended because DNVP and Nazi parliamentarians were boycotting parliamentary sessions; this meant that support by the SPD of any government measure was arithmetically necessary.Footnote 88 Starting in late January though the middle of March 1931, delegations of socialist bigwigs—always including Rudolf Hilferding—met with the chancellor nine times. Hilferding also met with the chancellor alone an additional nine times, either for dinner or conversations before or after these larger meetings with the entire SPD leadership. The socialist politicians were trying to reach agreement with the chancellor on budgets, support for eastern Prussia, and a customs duty law. When the topics of Hilferding's private meetings with Brüning were recorded, they were essentially the same as the most recent meeting with a larger group of socialists.Footnote 89
After a series of these private conversations in mid-March 1931, the SPD leadership was deeply concerned about giving Brüning's cabinet another year of free rein to set customs duties. On March 18, members of the SPD met with Brüning to discuss proposed customs legislation, and as their conversation was winding down, the socialist party chairman announced that “the Social Democratic parliamentary group will likely reject the [proposed law]” because of its effect on bread prices. Hilferding then jumped into the conversation with a last-ditch attempt to find a compromise. He listed potential changes that might make the law acceptable to the Social Democrats right before the meeting ended.Footnote 90 Hilferding did not immediately persuade his SPD colleagues to back Brüning, and, after an SPD parliamentary meeting, Brüning was informed that the “chancellor should not expect concessions,” suggesting the customs law was doomed. Nevertheless, after yet another round of one-on-one meetings between Hilferding and Brüning, Hilferding rushed into the chancellory on March 24 with the “newest wording” of the law to make it tolerable for the SPD.Footnote 91 The Reichstag's trade committee reported these negotiated changes out of committee on March 24. The revised law was not the blank check on tariffs Brüning's cabinet had originally proposed; it instead obligated the cabinet not to raise duties in a way that would increase bread prices, thus addressing the SPD's concerns.Footnote 92 The socialists voted in favor of the compromise proposal on March 26, only days after they had threatened to derail the whole project.Footnote 93
This extended legislative example concretely demonstrates that Hilferding was the linchpin in these negotiations and the workhorse in making compromises between the cabinet and SPD possible. The paper trail for these negotiations is possible to re-create only through the Tageszettel, as well as digitized Akten der Reichskanzlei and the draft bills that the Reichstag published. In this particular case, a conscientious bureaucrat recorded the topic of Hilferding's private conversations with the chancellor in the Tageszettel, which was uncommon. It is, however, reasonable to infer that similar situations took place whenever the Reichstag was in session and Hilferding was dashing back and forth between SPD meetings and Brüning's chancellory.
These private meetings between Hilferding and Brüning do appear fleetingly in the scholarship, but no one has set them alongside legislative records from the Reichstag to understand these one-on-one negotiations in detail. Instead, most scholars read these meetings as completely unimportant. Gerhard Schulz treats Hilferding like a prop when he rattles off lists of politicians who attended various events, and Hans Mommsen was more focused on Brüning's deference to civil servants than his relationship to socialist parliamentarians.Footnote 94 Rudolf Hilferding's own biographer, William Smaldone, acknowledged that Hilferding was a “key contact with Brüning” and even that “over time they became friends,” but he minimizes the political value of this relationship. Smaldone instead holds up examples of Hilferding's writing in which the socialist “sharply attacked” Brüning or “fulminated against Brüning's intransigence and the paralysis of the Reichstag.”Footnote 95 One of Brüning's biographers, William Patch, writes that he finds it “surprising” that the “chief theoretician of the SPD” was trusted by the leading German Catholic.Footnote 96
Although historians have generally overlooked Hilferding's role as the intermediary ensuring the success of toleration, more scholars have noted that Hilferding was a close adviser to Brüning, especially on fiscal and banking issues.Footnote 97 Hilferding enjoyed a unique position as the one socialist who was at least partially accepted by the academic and professional community of economists and bankers. Hilferding had served first as finance minister for less than a month under Chancellor Gustav Stresemann in 1923 at the height of hyperinflation. He returned to office in Müller's grand coalition in 1928.Footnote 98 When he was not in the ministerial office, Hilferding was the only socialist invited to private meetings of the economics-focused Friedrich List Gesellschaft, mingling with people ranging from the industrialist Fritz Thyssen to the president of Reichsbank at the organization's events.Footnote 99 Similarly, Brüning valued Hilferding's advice on financial and economic issues, seeking him out for thoughts on personnel changes at the highest level of the finance ministry and engaging in “frequent lively discussions with Hilferding about essays in the Economist and the Frankfurter Zeitung” concerning credit expansion, the gold standard, and the worldwide economic crisis.Footnote 100 Even more evidence for Hilferding's role as an adviser to the chancellor on economic issues can be found in the Tageszettel records of meetings in the chancellory that coincided with or explicitly included discussion of economic issues.Footnote 101
Hilferding's role as an economic adviser extended beyond private consultations with Brüning to working for and with the government. Hilferding attended meetings between Brüning and the labor minister to discuss the labor ministry's budget and to give pointers on the minister's speech in the Reichstag.Footnote 102 Hilferding was even formally appointed to the cabinet's expert Economic Commission for Banking Questions—a committee Hilferding had originally suggested creating—and which more hard-line right-wing politicians in the cabinet opposed.Footnote 103 Hilferding was a regular contributor at the meetings of this economic committee, and he was even invited to give his opinion on bank stability at a full meeting of the cabinet with important German bankers in attendance.Footnote 104 Hilferding, thus, had government resources at his fingertips and could easily phone the chancellor, as well as various high-ranking bureaucrats, to put in requests for information.Footnote 105 Hilferding's role in this political setup is almost like a top trusted adviser to Brüning's government, without the title, but perhaps with even more access to the chancellor than the actual cabinet ministers had.
Hilferding was not simply a behind-the-scenes negotiator, the host for countless confidential meetings, and an economic adviser; he also worked hard as the primary cheerleader for toleration within the SPD. On the one hand, Hilferding shot down attempts to end the policy of toleration from his party's left.Footnote 106 After the disastrous elections of 1930 that saw the Nazi vote share skyrocket, Hilferding haughtily chastised the SPD's left wing: “If in the old Reichstag we had tolerated a little more than we actually did, then we would not to have to tolerate quite as much in this new parliament.”Footnote 107 On the other hand, when some of the moderate socialists favored formally reentering the government, Hilferding thwarted them as well.Footnote 108 He also used his position as editor of Die Gesellschaft to defend toleration. Brüning later remembered that he occasionally asked Hilferding to use his influence in the socialist publishing world to tamp down criticism of the cabinet. For instance, in early 1932, Brüning asked Hilferding to use his press connections “to ensure that the emergency decree was not maliciously discussed in the left-wing press.”Footnote 109
Although Hilferding publicly acknowledged that many of the Brüning government's policies were not those that socialists would prefer, he argued that “the [1930] Reichstag is a parliament against parliamentarism, its existence is a danger for democracy, for the workers, for foreign policy.”Footnote 110 Both publicly and privately, Hilferding claimed that toleration was the only reasonable policy to preserve democracy and oppose fascism.Footnote 111 He outlined his position clearly in a private conversation: “It is crucial that [the SPD] does not sully its reputation in the eyes of the working class in such a way that afterwards the masses all walk away. If that happens, the only base would crumble. The right thing would be to participate in things outside the government, then we can give the voters hope for the day on which it will be different.”Footnote 112 Hilferding's logic for toleration and his idea of exerting political influence, while standing just off stage, reflects exactly what took place. Because the SPD's influence was behind the scenes, Hilferding and his party's accomplishments through toleration have been ignored in the scholarship and were eclipsed by the Nazi seizure of power.
Despite throwing himself into the project of supporting Brüning's cabinet in a quasi-official advisory role, Hilferding sometimes doubted himself, as he confided to a friend in 1932: “He [Hilferding] always asks himself, whether it is right for him to still support this government. If he answers the question affirmatively, there are a number of influential reasons—not only Brüning's trusting eyes [zwar nicht nur die treuen Augen Brünings]—to which Hilferding's fellow party members say he succumbs. He sees perfectly … that we are approaching the economic abyss.”Footnote 113 Despite his doubts, Hilferding stuck to toleration. In this, Hilferding's actions between 1930 and 1932 challenge the scholarly theory that Brüning's government was a right-wing hatchet job on democracy. Karl Dietrich Bracher argued that from 1930 on there was a top-down “conscious design” to create “a right-wing regime, independent of parties or parliament.” Bracher saw this new regime as intentionally aiming for the “exclusion of the influence of Social Democrats … without considering bringing them into the politically responsible leadership.”Footnote 114 Hilferding's close relationship to Brüning's government disproves Bracher's understanding of the politics of this period. Hilferding's work to maintain the socialists’ relationship with Brüning preserved the threads tying the conservative chancellor to the SPD, which kept the socialists involved in governmental decisions at the highest level and kept Brüning's minority cabinet tied to leading parliamentarians in the Reichstag.
A Personal and Political Friendship over the Longue Durée
One might be tempted to read an analysis of Hilferding's political role between 1930 and 1932 as a push for a revisionist political history that makes the case that we should study yet one more overlooked politician. If that were all this article did, one might be right to suggest that larger political forces mattered far more, to demand that Hilferding's thought be proven to have influenced members of the German cabinet, or to point out that Hermann Müller or the conservative Gottfried Treviranus have also been overlooked. Hilferding and Brüning's relationship casts light on German politics during this era because their connection did not develop merely out of political expediency during Brüning's chancellorship. Their long-lasting friendship says something about the world of the Reichstag both men inhabited. In 1959, Brüning reflected nostalgically back on the Weimar-era Reichstag: “There were close personal friendships between parties from the right-wing German nationalists to the Social Democrats. These friendships were often crucial for overcoming crises, and they were frequently more important and more decisive than the cabinet's decisions.”Footnote 115 Brüning's close relationship to Hilferding shows that this was not mere nostalgia but is also accurate.
In following Hilferding and Brüning's biographies, one is inclined to label them close friends: they traveled together, trusted each other, and, as we will see, Brüning poured his heart, soul, and paycheck into trying to save Hilferding from the Nazis.Footnote 116 One should note, however, that Brüning rarely used the word friend to describe anyone in archival materials dating to the 1920s or early 1930s.Footnote 117 By 1947, Brüning referred to Hilferding as a friend in an affidavit for a war crimes trial.Footnote 118 Hilferding's own views on friendship are lost because he was forced to destroy his papers while fleeing the Nazis.Footnote 119 However, Hans Schäffer, who considered Hilferding a friend and “valued his judgment,” recalled that Hilferding had a particularly “high opinion of Brüning.”Footnote 120 Although Brüning used the word friend in his memoirs, he more often described close relationships as based on “loyalty” rather than friendship.Footnote 121 For Brüning, loyalty was crucial both for politics and for one's personal life. For instance, when Brüning was consulting with parties on the right and the left as chancellor, and the negotiations progressed in such a way that he would have to leave the leftist parliamentarians out in the cold, he felt that loyalty compelled him to inform these left-wing colleagues that he was siding with the right: “I understood it as a duty of loyalty as old, good friends to let them know that I must ask this of them.”Footnote 122 Interestingly enough, Brüning later used the phrase “characteristic loyalty” in a letter describing Hilferding and his relationship to him.Footnote 123 Although Brüning's longtime secretary wrote that is was “unquestionable” that “there was genuine friendship between the Hilferdings and Dr. B[rüning],” Brüning's own understanding of their relationship was tied inextricably to loyalty and duty.Footnote 124
The origin of the relationship between Hilferding and Brüning is hard to pin down to an exact day or month. In his memoirs, Brüning dated his interest in Hilferding's economic ideas and theories to the beginning of the Weimar Republic, but he admitted that he did not know Hilferding well until the mid-1920s.Footnote 125 A rough start date around 1925 for this deepening personal acquaintance coincides with Hilferding and Brüning's membership at the same time on the Reichstag's financial and economic committees. According to several memoirs, many of the members of these specific committees—regardless of their own political persuasions—became quite close.Footnote 126 Intimate working relationships developed among a group of parliamentarians specializing in economic matters that included the conservatives Reinhold Quaatz and Ernst Oberfohren, as well as the socialists Hilferding and Paul Hertz.Footnote 127 Although the SPD was technically not in the government at the time, for Hertz and Hilferding the actual parties in government were less important than “loyal cooperation and a responsible financial policy.”Footnote 128
The Reichstag's economic committee helped create a special trade committee, which was also characterized by the same “collegial relationship … that was unusual for the members of different parliamentary groups.”Footnote 129 Members from this committee, usually from the Reichstag's largest political parties, represented Germany at the annual Conférence Internationale Parlementaire du Commerce. These inter-parliamentary conferences provided a forum for parliamentarians from around the world to gather and discuss economic and trade issues, and each year the event was held in a different country. The Reichstag dispatched delegates to the conferences in 1926 in London, in 1927 in Rio de Janeiro, in 1928 in Versailles, in 1929 in Berlin, and in 1930 in Prague.Footnote 130 Brüning and Hilferding, along with the same three other Weimar parliamentarians, attended both the 1926 conference in London and the 1927 conference in Rio de Janeiro, where the five attendees formed a particularly close bond. In addition to Brüning and Hilferding, the other German representatives were Oscar Meyer from the left-liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party, DDP), Paul Lejeune-Jung of the German nationalist DNVP, and Hans von Raumer from the right-liberal DVP.Footnote 131 The trip to Brazil left a lasting impression on all of these men. The group embarked on a three-month journey to South America with their spouses, and their time away from Germany included two months on steamers, during which the parliamentarians spent a lot of time with one another, undistracted by the party strategy meetings and antagonistic political gatherings that would have kept them apart in Berlin. Once in Brazil, the parliamentarians were treated as guests of the Brazilian government and stayed in the country for four weeks, spending social time together in the local German club and with other parliamentarians from around the world.Footnote 132
When Oscar Meyer reflected back on this junket to Brazil, he called it “one of the most generous gifts that fate ever gave me,” but he also stressed that the practical impact of these international trade conferences on the diplomatic scene was “not substantial.” Meyer saw that these trips’ real value was in meeting other parliamentarians who were interested in financial issues and, most importantly, in fostering a “closer acquaintance among my fellow [German] delegates.” Quite understandably for colleagues who were destined to spend a lot of time with one another, “we discarded our party blinders while we were en route and afterwards all really liked each other.”Footnote 133 These men and their spouses became close during this trip, which is evident in the photos and postcards that they signed together and sent to family members and friends about the world.Footnote 134 Well into the 1950s and 1960s, Brüning still fondly wrote to Hans von Raumer about this trip to Brazil: “During my illness I often thought about you, as well as your wife, who I specially admired. The memories of our trip to the economic conference in Rio became especially vivid to me.”Footnote 135
In regard to German domestic politics, the importance of international trips that brought together colleagues from different political parties cannot be underestimated. Evident from the same Tageszettel that show Hilferding appearing at the chancellery is Brüning's continued contact with the other parliamentarians who served with him on the Reichstag's trade committee. For example, Chancellor Brüning met Raumer during friendly meetings over breakfast or tea, although Raumer was no longer actually even a DVP member of the Reichstag. Raumer remained in the circles of power he joined when he was an elected politician and maintained the connections he had built through interactions like the conference in Brazil.Footnote 136 These cross-party ties to other politicians, and even former politicians, who inhabited the social and political world surrounding the Reichstag were an important feature of the informal culture in interwar Berlin. Brüning and Hilferding's relationship was forged not only in their common service in parliament but by spending months on end with each other on this particular 1927 Brazil junket.
Brüning's relationship with Hilferding had political implications even before Brüning's ascent to the chancellorship. When Brüning served in the Reichstag's Center Party leadership, he was able to take on the role of an intermediary between the Catholic party and Hilferding, when Hilferding was the German finance minister between 1928 and 1929. Although the exact role this friendship played in helping shape policy in Hilferding's finance ministry is ambiguous, Brüning had Hilferding's ear and could get a personal appointment with no trouble at all. In fact, the Center Party once dispatched Brüning to The Hague to make their case in person to Hilferding, who was attending an international conference.Footnote 137 Brüning also advocated and supported Hilferding's policies within the Center Party. Although Brüning did not always agree with the finance ministry's proposals, he took it upon himself to explain the ministry's reasoning to his parliamentary party and made a point of meeting with Hilferding to explain the Center Party's positions and concerns.Footnote 138 Brüning was an unofficial intermediary and adviser to Finance Minister Hilferding for most of 1929; this prefigured Hilferding's role supporting Brüning's cabinet in the early 1930s.
Brüning's loyalty to Hilferding was also on display when he came to Hilferding's aid in the political controversy that led to Hilferding's resignation as finance minister. In late 1929, Germany was buffeted by economic turmoil and war reparation obligations, and the Reich government needed to secure a loan from an American bank. Hilferding negotiated the loan's terms as finance minister; however, the lender required guarantees from the central bank, whose director, Hjalmar Schacht, decided to play hardball with the socialist finance minister. Schacht refused to meet with US bankers about the loan until “the Reichstag had sorted out covering the Reich's pending obligations in the amount of 500 million Reichsmark.”Footnote 139 This standoff forced Hilferding to propose drastic financial reforms that cost him allies on all sides.Footnote 140 Although Hilferding's own SPD colleagues in the Reichstag were skeptical about his work, Brüning ventured out on a political limb and prevented the Center Party from moving to topple the finance minister.Footnote 141 When Center Party parliamentarians proposed a motion of no confidence, Brüning steered the debate to kill that proposal and had the party give him the power to decide whether the Center Party would sign onto other similar motions.Footnote 142 Brüning mused about this moment in his memoirs: “The low point of the parliamentary system was abandoning Hilferding and everything that happened through intrigue at his ministry and within the other parties.”Footnote 143 Brüning was obviously proud that he had remained loyal to his longtime trusted colleague. Brüning could not have known that his loyalty would be reciprocated by Hilferding many times over when Brüning was chancellor.
Brüning and Hilferding's relationship might have been forged in the halls of the Reichstag and on intercontinental steamships traveling across the Atlantic, but it was never only about politics. The personal closeness between the two men meant that Brüning understood something about Hilferding's financial woes during the 1930s, and the chancellor tried to find Hilferding a well-paid sinecure to help him shore up his income.Footnote 144 Although evidence from memoirs should be taken with a grain of salt, according to several later accounts, after the Nazi seizure of power when Brüning got word that the Nazis were planning to arrest the SPD's leaders, he passed along a warning to Hilferding to encourage him and the rest of the Social Democratic leadership to flee the country as soon as possible. Hilferding then fled Germany via Denmark, just missing the stormtrooper contingent that ransacked his Berlin apartment. Brüning was thus allegedly instrumental in helping Hilferding escape.Footnote 145
Brüning was himself forced to flee Germany in May 1934, having gotten word that he would likely be killed, but even exile did not keep Brüning and Hilferding separate. After 1934, Brüning traveled around Europe visiting other German émigrés and former Weimar-era politicians. He and Hilferding kept in touch; when Brüning passed through Zurich, he visited Hilferding, and the socialist introduced Brüning to his émigré SPD friends.Footnote 146 In fact, Brüning remembered going through excerpts of the manuscript of his memoirs with Hilferding during one of these visits.Footnote 147
Although Hilferding dedicated himself to the socialist community in exile and to writing new revisionist socialist theory, Brüning spent time networking with politicians and leaders across the Europe and the United States, many of whom he had met as chancellor.Footnote 148 For instance, when Brüning was based in London, he stopped by Downing Street to call on Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.Footnote 149 Winston Churchill met with Brüning in London, and Churchill asked Brüning for his thoughts on articles that the British politician had written on German political figures.Footnote 150 After Brüning came to the United States as a professor at Harvard, he met privately in the White House with Franklin Roosevelt, and this meeting was brokered by an American diplomat who had been stationed in Berlin during Brüning's chancellorship.Footnote 151 Brüning was amassing a political rolodex in exile, so when war broke out in 1939, the British Foreign Office was actually leery of Brüning's influence in the United States. At first, British diplomats feared that Brüning was “acting as a German patriot and, in fact, trying to win the war for Nazi Germany!” The British Foreign Office actually debated starting a campaign in the American press to discredit the former chancellor, and this was only abandoned after one of Brüning's Harvard colleagues argued that the chancellor would not work against their interests.Footnote 152 However, Brüning still understood himself to be a political actor and networker in exile who was taken seriously by foreign governments.
Heinrich Brüning naturally turned to these networks when Hilferding, Rudolf Breitscheid, their wives, and the daughter of the former Chancellor Hermann Müller were trapped in Vichy France in 1940.Footnote 153 Fleeing occupied Paris, these five German socialists ended up under house arrest in Arles, and the Nazi government had expressed an interest in having the party turned over to them.Footnote 154 Hilferding knew that the outlook was grim, and he wrote letters to friends abroad that only “special intervention” could help them escape France. In October 1940, Hilferding turned directly to Brüning with his financial problems: “Just one more thing that is somewhat embarrassing for me to bring up. My means are exhausted; all previous ties have been cut. Therefore, I would be very grateful to you, if you could place some money at my disposal.”Footnote 155 Hilferding's letter anticipated money coming from rich émigré friends, but Brüning immediately wrote a personal check, and his contributions to Hilferding ultimately totaled $300, more than any of the other three major donors aiding Hilferding and his socialist colleagues.Footnote 156
In order to mask his role in the rescue attempt, Brüning asked an American banker in New York to take the public lead in pushing for Hilferding's release. This banker repeatedly spoke to officials at the US State Department, the French embassy, the French delegation to the International Refugee Committee, and even the chargé d'affaires at the German embassy canvassing support. Brüning had this banker send a confidential appeal in a sealed US diplomatic bag to one of Hilferding's former colleagues at the finance ministry who still held a bureaucratic post in Nazi Germany.Footnote 157 Brüning also directly reached out to his former political acquaintances in France. He contacted Josée Laval, the daughter of Pierre Laval, a former Third Republic prime minister who was serving in the new Vichy government. He asked her “to write to her father and recall that he met [me] at the Chancellery when I was in office.” Laval's daughter did contact her father, and Brüning later thanked her and her father for their efforts, but this did not lead to Vichy French actions to help Hilferding and his colleagues.Footnote 158
Brüning's appeals to people in high places eventually led to steamships, cars, and hotels being booked for a journey to the United States for Hilferding's group, but the socialists opted not to flee without all their bureaucratic ducks in a row. When French exit visas were granted in late January 1941, Vichy canceled them only days later. In February 1941, Hilferding and Breitscheid were arrested by French officers, and a few days later were taken to the demarcation line and handed over to German police. The fate of both men was in doubt for a while, but Breitscheid turned up in a Gestapo prison in Berlin. Breitscheid's wife moved to Germany to be close to him, but Hilferding's wife and Müller's daughter decided in May 1941 to flee France with the help of the resources Brüning had assembled.Footnote 159 Only later would news of Hilferding's suicide in a French prison reach his wife and friends in the United States.Footnote 160 This marked a tragic end to this unsung friendship forged within the committee rooms of the Reichstag.Footnote 161 Even then, however, Brüning's trust, loyalty, and affection for the Hilferdings continued throughout the war and into the postwar period, during which he arranged financial help for Rose Hilferding, found her a job at a hospital in Boston, and then spearheaded the effort in 1952 to convince the government of the new Federal Republic of Germany to grant her Rudolf Hilferding's ministerial pension.Footnote 162
One of Heinrich Brüning's most recent biographers, Peer Volkmann, recounted this attempted rescue of Hilferding's party, but his narrative limits itself to Brüning's personal papers. Volkmann then juxtaposes Brüning's attempt to save Hilferding with Brüning's work to help the dissenting National Socialist Otto Strasser escape Europe. This contrast intentionally minimizes Brüning's support of the socialist group, and Volkmann explicitly argues that there were “political limits to Brüning's willingness to help,” reminding his readers of his overarching hypothesis that Brüning was a “conservative national expatriate” who did not spring to the rescue of all other needy left-wing former members of the Reichstag.Footnote 163 However, Volkmann's account misses any long-term understanding of Brüning's relationship with Hilferding. It minimizes the fact that Brüning reassembled a network of friends and acquaintances from his period in office to save these socialists. The American banker who was the public face of the rescue attempt had met with Brüning and the Hilferding family together in the Reich chancellory during the early 1930s. Brüning also called on exiled German socialists who also were figures in Brüning's political past for help.Footnote 164 These friends were loyal to one another during the Weimar years and later worked to save Hilferding's party. This rescue attempt illustrates the resilience of cross-party political friendships that started in interwar Berlin and continued into exile. One cannot shoehorn Brüning's efforts to save Hilferding into any ideological reading. It reflected the natural evolution of a good personal relationship: one that began between two colleagues in the Reichstag, progressed to their becoming advisers and confidants when the other was in political office, and one that ended, tragically, with Brüning's unsuccessful attempt to save Hilferding's life.
Conclusion: Friendship, Sachlichkeit, and “A New Way of Governing”
Heinrich Brüning's posthumously published memoirs were deeply flawed as an accurate day-to-day retelling of the final years of the Weimar Republic, but in the preface the former chancellor advanced a bold claim about the nature of political decision-making:
Perhaps this publication can contribute to show a younger generation in what an “unplanned” way decisive political events unfold, how personal friendships and antagonisms as well as unpredictable events more strongly determine the course of history than well-considered constitutional provisions and parliamentary rules of procedure, theories of economics and finance, party doctrines and historical-philosophical constructs.Footnote 165
Despite having received a doctorate in economics, Brüning provocatively argues that historians’ strong desire to find economic, structural, ideological, and constitutional causes for all political outcomes might be misplaced.Footnote 166 In reconstructing the relationship between Hilferding and Brüning during the era of toleration and placing it into a larger context—not of competing Marxist or Catholic thought, but that of a long-term friendship between two German politicians—this article has taken seriously Brüning's insight that personal relationships can shape politics.
However, Karl Dietrich Bracher savagely attacked Brüning for this underlying belief in the importance of “personal friendships and antagonisms” as the simplistic “reduction of many explanations to the failings or betrayal of individual people.” Even more damning, Bracher argued that Brüning's approach to politics rested on a fundamentally conservative “apolitical notion of the political.” Thomas Mann's reactionary Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Non-Political Man, 1918) and the political ceasefire of Burgfrieden during the First World War were allegedly forerunners of Brüning's approach. “This is a notion of the political … that denies the conditions and possibilities of political strategy and agency in modern mass society.” For Bracher, the “separation of party politics and state policy” was a retrograde idea with roots in the backward Kaiserreich. Democracies should see party politics as a battle of ideologies led by statesmen advancing their ideas about the future.Footnote 167 Bracher's attack was echoed by Hans Mommsen, who saw Brüning presiding over a technocratic “‘depoliticization’ of governmental work” that was dangerous in such a politically fraught moment.Footnote 168
However, one must read Brüning's belief in “personal friendships and antagonisms” next to his own experiences having worked successfully with colleagues across the political spectrum. Serving on committees and traveling brought Weimar's politicians together across party lines. Wolfram Pyta admitted that Brüning amassed a “political network of confidants,” but Pyta thought this was a conservative network “that stretched into all of the political parties right of the DDP.”Footnote 169 Political networkers such as Brüning and Hilferding were, however, often more ecumenical in who they befriended. Brüning once wrote of a DNVP colleague: “When you entered the Reichstag in 1924, the whole atmosphere changed. You sought out and found folks in all political parties who were willing to engage with you.… Historians usually overlook just how important this skill is in politics.”Footnote 170 Not all politicians were part of this friendly world, and some actively resisted befriending their fellow politicians. For instance, the Nazi parliamentarian Joseph Goebbels wholly rejected the Reichstag's “sweet and alluring” informal culture, and the Reichstag, in turn, rejected him.Footnote 171 However, Brüning, Hilferding, and many of their colleagues actively participated in these networks.
For Brüning, friendship was tied to political compromise through “objective cooperation” on policy, which Mommsen and Bracher both challenge as unpolitical.Footnote 172 If an issue was seen as “sachlich” or objective, politicians could reach agreement and compromise, in part through backroom connections. Brüning and Hilferding had this experience while on Germany's economic and trade committees, which were shaped by cross-party agreement. Because the political spotlight was not on trade to the extent that it was on Weimar's hot-button issues such as unemployment benefits, politicians were able to craft technocratic compromises. A DVP colleague once reflected on why collaborating with his political rival Rudolf Hilferding was fruitful: “We were of the same opinion in all objective aspects [in allem Sachlichen].”Footnote 173 One of Brüning's ministers was praised for his “purely objective way of making decisions.”Footnote 174 Weimar's politicians could compromise when an issue was “sachlich,” but it was harder if it was politically fraught. Mommsen was actually right that Brüning tried to depoliticize issues and frame them as technocratic tweaks. In was only in this “sachlich,” objective space that Hilferding, Brüning, and their parties could find common ground to hold policies such as toleration together.
Some of the Weimar Republic's contemporary conservative skeptics saw Brüning's depoliticization of issues and the related limits on parliamentary debate as the “philosophers’ stone” that would finally stop the “frenzied parliamentary excesses” of the era. This “brand new method of governing” was understood to be the political elite coming together and making decisions that were presented to parliament as a fait accompli. This “new way of governing” might seem more like a trip back to the Bismarckian past with the executive lording it over the people's representatives. This is definitely what Mommsen and Bracher saw in Brüning's government. However, even this contemporary conservative reading of Brüning's government still acknowledges that “it was a new way of governing, in which one first attempted to persuade the leaders of the various factions with prudent reasons of the important issues so that afterwards parliament … was already on the right track.”Footnote 175 Socialists and left-wing trade unions were at the negotiating table with Brüning and his cabinet, and they were active in shaping legislation and government policy. Any true return to the illiberalism of the Kaiserreich would not have offered Hilferding and the SPD a seat at the table.
Detractors will undoubtedly point out that relying on backroom negotiations while shuttering the parliament was not in keeping with democratic practice, but it was similar to strategies for combating threats to democracy that other European countries employed during the interwar years. The political scientist Giovanni Capoccia analyzed democratic survival in this turbulent period in his 2005 book Defending Democracy: Reactions to Extremism in Interwar Europe. Capoccia looks at the “strategies of democratic incumbents” to preserve democracy, which generally required excluding antisystem parties from political participation.Footnote 176 Brüning's “new way of governing” excluded radicals like the Nazis, the communists, and the DNVP under Alfred Hugenberg but tied the democratically minded SPD to the minority cabinet through Hilferding. One cannot simply judge interwar German democracy against some ahistorical ideal; Capoccia's “democratic survivors” of the interwar years—Czechoslovakia, Finland, and Belgium—employed similar techniques of exclusion and illiberal repression to preserve their democracies.Footnote 177
Because of the compromise and connections between right and left, Brüning's cabinet was not the anti-parliamentary government of conservative fantasies or historiographical fears. The government's emergency decrees turn out not to have been the embodiment of the desires of a would-be dictatorial cabinet, but the product of behind-the-scenes negotiations among cabinet members, the socialists, and party leaders from the Reichstag. All of their viewpoints were discussed and mulled over in the halls of power before emergency decrees were issued. This replacement political process incorporated politicians representing a majority of the Reichstag's seats, but it excluded radical parliamentarians whose goal was to topple the system rather than to govern. “Toleration is always the lesser evil if it serves the purpose of warding off fascism, preventing the complete elimination of the parliament, and beating back the threat of a coup.”Footnote 178 This was Hilferding's assessment of a process that showed the resilience of Weimar parliamentary system under stress, rallying for one final opportunity to bounce back and preserve the republic. As this article has shown, toleration itself was underpinned by an unlikely close relationship between a devout right-wing Catholic and a Marxist theoretician.
