Core Texts: Republicanism

The German Democratic Party Platform

The German Democratic Party arose at the hour of the greatest need in our country. Not following the model of the old parties, but unifying the whole people in the spirit of modern democracy, it will steadfastly pursue the aim of a state in the continuous process of social and cultural development.

The party's permanent principles are freedom and justice.

The whole people, with no differences of class, occupation, or religion—for democracy it means adjustment of interests; it means the removal of ever-permanent obstacles between the rulers and the ruled; it means equal rights for all in the organization of the state as well as of society. Let the individual be free in his spiritual development and economic activity.

I. The State

Domestic Policy

The relation of the individual to the state is determined by the conception of civic duty. The equal rights of all form the cornerstone of this citizen state. For this reason, we advocate the idea of a people's state that must at the same time be a constitutional state.

The German Democratic Party stands for the Weimar Constitution. It finds its highest political task in the protection and execution of this constitution, and in the education of the people to civic consciousness.

We demand, unconditionally, equality of opportunity for all in legislation and administration. The legislation still existing that limits the rights of women must be repealed. The administrative organization must be built up on a free foundation, retaining the specially trained public servants, but also freely granting participation of the lay element of the community in the solution of state problems.

The present standing army of mercenaries imposed on us by the Peace of Versailles is at variance with the nature of a democratic military organization. This demands instead the system of universal military service, which is as adaptable to the defense of national independence as it is unadapted to become a tool for military aggression.

Foreign Policy

The imperial idea, which controls the relations of the individuals within the state, shall also determine the relation of the states one to another within the empire. Not might and power, but right and justice shall determine the relationships of the peoples in the future. The party therefore stands for the self-determination of peoples.

In accordance with this principle, we demand the immediate revision of the peace treaties of Versailles and of St. Germain, for otherwise a lasting peace is impossible. But we will never acknowledge the dictation of force as a permanent legal order.

No German stock shall be denied the possibility of joining its own people. We can never recognize the separation of sections of the German people from the fatherland as the permanent decision of history. We therefore will fight for their return to Germany.

The final realization of our ideas can come only through a unified league of all free states working together. We therefore champion the idea of a league of nations, the first duty of which shall be to maintain the peaceful cooperation of nations.

II. Cultural Questions

The building of the new Germany can be successful only through steady, clear-sighted attention to the intellectual welfare of the people, without suppression of personality, with regard to individual differences, and with respectful consideration for every honorable conviction.

Science, Art, and Literature

Science, art, and literature give comfort and adornment to the structure of the cultural state. They should be unrestricted in life and in the press. Their right and duty to increase the culture and good breeding of the people should be recognized; they should induce intellectual progress, refinement, and recreation.

Religion and the Church

The crowning of the cultural state is the fullest freedom in the cultivation of philosophy and individual conviction. No limitations will be put on existing churches or the establishment of new churches or of free religious communities. After their separation, the church and state will still have historical, intellectual, and practical relations. The separation must be brought about gradually, but thoroughly.

III. Economic Affairs

The German Democratic Party is a party of work; it is a party of the whole people, not of special classes; a party of mutual understanding, neither preserving nor increasing conflicts of interest. Its goal in the sphere of economics is the state of social justice.

The socialization of the means of production in the sense of their general acquisition by the state would be a fatal bureaucratization of industry. We repudiate this and stand firmly for private control as the normal form of industry.

We demand that monopolistic power in the hands of an individual or a small group not be tolerated. For land, that most important monopoly of the people, our policy is to resist land speculation and to divide large estates immediately in order to establish a system of independent peasant families.

We demand that social injustice in the distribution of property and income be done away with.

The specialization of labor threatens to rob labor of its soul. Hence, handwork and small industry shall be protected and encouraged. The industrial serf must become an industrial citizen. In such fashion, the democratic state of social justice will establish the dignity of the individual in industry.

On the German Republic

War is romantic. But today, to deny that it is an utterly debased romanticism, a disgusting distortion of the poetic, is obstinacy. And to prevent national sentiment from falling completely into ill repute, to keep it from becoming nothing but a curse, it will be necessary that, instead of being the epitome of all warmongering and sabre-rattling, it comes to be understood in relationship to its artistic and almost infatuating nature, indispensable as a part of the cult of peace.

I am not a pacifist. Pacifism is not my thing. But my side is peace, for it is the realm of culture, art, and thought, whereas brutality triumphs in war. War is a lie, its results are lies; it is stripped of all honor. Today, the world, the peoples are old and clever, their epic and heroic stage lies far in the past; any attempt to return to it means a wild rebellion against the laws of time, spiritual insincerity.

My aim, which I state quite openly, is to win you, as far as that is necessary, to the Republic and to what is called democracy and what I call humanity.

Our students, our student fraternities by no means lack democratic tradition. There have been times when the national idea was at odds with the monarchical and dynastic; when patriotism and republic, far from being opposed, appeared much more frequently as one and the same thing.

Today youth, or at least considerable sections of youth, seem to have sworn eternal hatred against the Republic without being reminded about what might have been once—for such a reminder would have to quietly diminish the unconditionally of this hate.

The Republic is a fate, and indeed one to which amor fati is the only proper stance. Fate is not a trivial thing; so-called liberty is no fun and games. Its other name is responsibility.

The state has become the business of everyone; we are the state. This situation is profoundly hated by considerable sections of youth. They want nothing to do with it. They deny it at every opportunity, because it emerged not on the path of victory, but in defeat and collapse.

But it is also true that "a man can ennoble everything, make it worthy of himself, by dint of willing it." And it is not true that the Republic is a creature of defeat and shame. It is one of exaltation and honor.

Youth and citizens, your resistance to the Republic, to democracy, is a fear of words. You buck and shy at these words like restive horses. But they are words: relativities, temporally contextual forms, necessary tools. To think they must refer to some foreign humbug is mere childishness. The Republic—as though that were not always still Germany!

Democracy—as though one could not be more at home in the homeland than in any shining, rattling, brandishing empire!

I will rather answer you that I am indeed a conservative, that my natural task in this world is not of a revolutionary but of a sustaining kind.

On Spengler's Decline of the West:

His Decline is the product of enormous potency and willpower, scientific and rich in insights. Nevertheless, we have our democratic opinion about it, find its attitude wrong, presumptuous, and "convenient" to the point of extreme inhumanity. When I found out that this man wanted to have his calcified prophecy taken seriously and instructed youth in its spirit—that is, told them not to waste their hearts and passions on things of culture, art, poetry, and education, but to stick to what is the only future, namely mechanics, technology, economics, or at most politics—when I became aware that he actually clenched a devilish fist of cold "natural law" against the will and longing of man, then I turned away from so much hostility.

Between aesthetic isolation and undignified downfall of the individual in general; between mysticism and ethics; private and public—it is truly the German mean, the beautiful and human, of which our best have dreamed. And we pay homage to its positive legal form, whose meaning and aim we understand to be the unification of our political and national life, as we form our as yet unguided tongues to the cry: "Long live the Republic!"

Rudolf Hilferding: The Tasks of Social Democracy in the Republic

Viewed historically, democracy has always been the cause of the proletariat. It is historically false and misleading to speak of "bourgeois democracy." Democracy was our cause. We had to wage a stubborn campaign to wring democracy out of the bourgeoisie. What a lot of proletarian blood has flowed to attain universal and equal suffrage!

The moment an attempt is made to destroy the foundations of democracy, not only every Social Democrat but every republican will employ every means available to maintain those foundations.

If the foundations of democracy are destroyed, we are defending ourselves and we have no choice but to employ all methods of defense. We want to defend democracy, and for that reason we are grateful to the Reichsbanner for its work.

If you haven't understood that the preservation of democracy and the Republic are in the highest interests of the party, you have not grasped the ABC of political thinking.

There are people who go around saying: beware of democratic illusions! I am of a very different opinion. The real danger is rather that there have been proletarian strata in other countries who have failed to recognize the importance of freedom, of democracy. In Italy Mussolini achieved power because the Italian proletariat did not know how good it was to have freedom and democracy.

Thanks to Otto Braun and Karl Severing, the waves of both Bolshevism and fascism have been broken in Prussia. That has been a world-historical achievement. Prussia is a proud stronghold in the camp of the Republic, and our only task is to make it a proud stronghold in the camp of socialism.

The most important task of the class struggle is the overthrow of the right-wing government of the German Reich.

Siegfried Aufhäuser: Reply to Hilferding

Hilferding stated that the confrontation today is not mainly monarchy against republic but capitalism against social democracy. Why should we not be permitted to express this in a resolution?

Why have we been excluded from the new government? It is not our fault. It happened for economic reasons. If we want to conquer these positions in our Republic, we must be ready to take up the struggle against the opponents of the Republic and its false friends who rule it.

I protest against the claim that those who want to conduct the struggle mercilessly are inferior republicans to those who don't want to express themselves so plainly.

We are all equally ready to defend and to extend the People's State. But we do not therefore need to awaken any kind of democratic illusions.

Where does it lead, when Hilferding says he refuses to describe present-day democracy as bourgeois? We have learned from Hilferding himself what a difference there is between social and bourgeois democracy.

What use is a purely abstract democracy when one doesn't think about the human beings who have to be prepared for a given goal? We shall not win over new strata if we reject responsibility for things Social Democracy cannot tolerate. We find ourselves in an oppositional position, and the more plainly the party congress proclaims this fact to the whole working population, the sooner we shall arrive at the great victories Hilferding desires.

National Political Manifesto

Large circles of the German Volk have followed the political and parliamentary developments of the last weeks with growing disconcert. Public opinion is no longer able to make sense of the rancor and conflict of the parties. They want to see a clear path and trustworthy leadership. Both can be won only if we direct our political actions toward a higher goal.

Republican Constitution

Since the day of the collapse, the Centre Party has known its political message well and has remained consistently loyal to it in the years of heavy responsibility. All of our efforts were about saving the German Volk and the construction of the German state.

The foundations of our new German state were laid out in Weimar. A new political will broke through in the work on the Weimar Constitution, one that strives in international affairs for national validation on the path of understanding with the other nations, and in domestic affairs for the achievement of a deeper consciousness of the Volk via a comprehensive social regeneration of our national life.

For us, there is no other civil reality except those of the German Republic and its symbols, which saved the unity of the German Volk during desperate times. It remains into the distant future the only promising path.

The German Centre Party helped to create this constitution. We stand by it, in that we protect, develop, and cultivate its meaning and constantly attempt to maintain this constitution in an organic connection to the broader Volk and its living energies.

The German Republic should liberate us in foreign affairs, and in domestic affairs unleash the energies that make the German state into a true state of the Volk. The energies of science, art, education of the Volk, the family, and other communities must arise from the root soil of our German spirit and flow into the higher unity of the state.

The spirit of German heritage and identity must be constantly rejuvenated on the basis of Christian faith. On this must be built the moral education of our Volk, especially the education of our youth.

Social Policy

The social restructuring in our Volk since the World War has been powerful and deep reaching. It has increased the number of dependent and dispossessed masses and made palpable the necessity to be aware of domestic cohesion in our Volk.

The German future demands that West and East, South and North, city and country, entrepreneur and worker come to a greater understanding in the common task of economic, social, and cultural development.

Our state social policy must expand to become social state policy. Yet not laws alone, but rather a true social regeneration in spirit and will is necessary if we are to earn new hope and trust from the oppressed and desperate masses.

Foreign Affairs

All of the construction work in domestic affairs and all the social reform work will be successful only if there is success in including the German Volk once again as an entirety in a European interstate system of laws.

Foreign policy and the relationships of Germany to the nations of the world must be fulfilled in a new spirit of commitment to treaties, of a willingness to reach consensus, of loyal cooperation in the creation of the solidarity of nations. Germany is a member of the League of Nations.

No civilized nation can live without secure borders, can tolerate that its territory remains occupied by a foreign power. With tenacious persistence regarding the methods of the policy, every German policy will work toward a final evacuation of the Rhineland as soon as possible.

Germany has entered into international obligations in London and Geneva. We stand by these obligations and recognize in the legal validity of the Treaties of Locarno the essential preconditions of any potentially auspicious foreign policy.

The next task for a greater understanding between Germany and France can succeed only if both sides work at all times in the spirit of European solidarity and put aside naked power considerations. We renew this dedication to peaceful development precisely now, where fears must be repressed.

Economic and Social Matters

The economic policy of our party was never the one-sided promotion of one estate or one occupational group. Precisely in the equalization of overlapping interests in the framework of the common good, we recognize the only correct path for economic advancement.

We consider the retention of as many independently owned enterprises in the crafts, trades, and commerce to be a national economic, social, and state necessity.

A top priority is the realization of a condition wherein the legal recognition of the equal status of the employee and the employer finds its real impact. The expansion of our labor legislation should serve this urgent commandment of the day.

The Centre sees in social insurance the indispensable means for the maintenance of the health of the labor force. Here, it is not a matter of social costs but of social responsibilities.

We consider it the pressing task for all of our social welfare activity to cooperate in the effort to combat unemployment through the promotion and improvement of employment agencies, through public work projects, and through financial support.