Friedrich Ebert

Friedrich Ebert (born February 4, 1871, Heidelberg, Germany—died February 28, 1925, Berlin) was a leader of the Social Democratic movement in Germany and a moderate socialist, who was a leader in bringing about the constitution of the Weimar Republic, which attempted to unite Germany after its defeat in World War I. He was president of the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1925.

Ebert was the son of a master tailor. He learned the saddler’s trade and traveled through Germany as a journeyman saddler. He soon became a Social Democrat and trade unionist, representing so-called revisionist—gradualist, liberal—“trade-union” socialism, without, however, displaying a deep interest in the ideological struggles of Marxism. His attention was always directed toward practical improvement in the living conditions of the German working class and, above all, its social and moral betterment.

In 1905 Ebert became secretary general of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The party had steadily increased in membership and electoral support and had accumulated physical assets and property. He updated party administration, introducing typewriters and filing systems that the party had lacked until that time due to its fear of house searches.

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Ebert succeeded August Bebel as party chairman in 1913. Under his leadership, the SPD gained increasing influence in German national politics. It was Ebert, in particular, who on August 3, 1914, prevailed upon German Social Democrats to support the war appropriations. The action of the German SPD did not differ from that of the other socialist parties of Europe, in which nationalist feelings remained stronger than internationalist convictions. To its own detriment, Ebert’s party gave the “Fatherland” its unconditional support without requiring that Germany adopt a genuine peace policy. In consequence, it lacked the power to force the government to adopt a policy through which Germany might have escaped the crushing defeat that was to destroy the empire and also eventually Ebert’s postwar policy.

Ebert could not hold the entire party to his course for long. In March 1917 a left-wing faction left the party to become the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), strenuously rejecting war appropriations and Germany’s war policy. Another group split from the SPD to form the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The leftists who had withdrawn from the SPD sought a social revolution, while Ebert and his party wanted to establish a German parliamentary democracy. Even in the midst of the war, the Catholic Centre Party, the Democratic Party (previously the Progressive Party), and the Social Democrats had formed the so-called Black–Red–Gold (Weimar) coalition, named after the colours of the flag of the liberal revolution of 1848.

With Ebert’s active cooperation, a new government, headed by Maximilian, the Prince of Baden, and supported by the three parties of the Black–Red–Gold coalition, was organized in October 1918 through a sweeping constitutional reform that in essential respects foreshadowed the Weimar Constitution. Because Ebert was convinced that Germany did not need a revolution to achieve parliamentary democratic reform, he did everything he could to prevent such a revolution from occurring. “I hate the revolution like sin,” he later said to Chancellor Maximilian. But the revolution of November 1918 was not made by Germans to bring about the advent of the republic, democracy, or even socialism. For nearly all Germans, the revolution had only one aim: peace. Rightly or wrongly, the German people believed that Emperor William II (Kaiser Wilhelm II) would not secure peace for Germany.

The revolution, winning its race with peace, came three days before the armistice. It triumphed in Berlin on November 9, and on the same day Maximilian, acting on his own authority, asked Ebert to replace him as chancellor. Ebert, who still hoped to establish a regency for the emperor, actually held office as chancellor for one day. On November 10 he yielded to the fait accompli of the revolution and set up an entirely socialist government, with representatives from the SPD and USPD. Calling itself the Council of People’s Representatives, the government derived its authority from the Workers and Soldiers Council, which claimed to speak for Germany and the German Republic but in truth had been elected rather arbitrarily by the factories and regiments of Berlin alone. Ebert was determined to place the power of the Council of People’s Representatives and the Workers and Soldiers Council in the hands of a freely elected German parliament as soon as possible. He wished to see a moderate coalition government rather than a socialist regime in power.

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The elections of January 1919 gave the Black–Red–Gold coalition a majority of 85 percent. The republic’s first government, under Ebert’s fellow party member Philipp Scheidemann, was based on this tripartite coalition, and the new German constitution, the Weimar Constitution, so called after the town in which it was drawn up, was the work of the coalition. By the votes of the three parties forming the coalition, Ebert was elected the first president of the republic.

Ebert and Hugo Preuss, a professor of constitutional law whom he had charged with the task of drafting the constitution, wished to alter the organic structure of the Reich. But the old German states (the Länder, or territories) successfully resisted the “unitary state” (Einheitsstaat) of Ebert and Preuss. Prussia in particular continued to exist as a state. The groups and forces that had until then been the pillars of the old Germany also remained intact, for the first years of the Weimar Republic were taken up by the bloody civil war which the government, under Ebert’s presidency, waged against the leftist socialists and communists, who had been Ebert’s former comrades. The republic exhausted itself in the civil war against communism and lacked the strength to carry out the basic changes in the Reich that might have placed the republic on a lasting foundation. The workers did not want to make an armed defense of the democratic republic. So Ebert and his friend Gustav Noske, the defense minister, had recourse to volunteer groups, the Freikorps, which were principally composed of officers of the old army, and suppressed the communist uprising out of hatred of communism rather than love of the republic. The old officer corps formed the backbone of the Reichswehr, the republic’s army. Together with the officer class and the old officialdom, the Junkers—the landed gentry east of the Elbe River—with their great estates and influence in social and political life, also survived the revolution.

With the elections to the republic’s first parliament on June 6, 1920, the Black–Red–Gold coalition lost its majority and was never to regain it. The Social Democratic Party thereby lost its commanding position in the Reich, and the political constellation on which Ebert’s leadership had been based dissolved. The electoral defeat was a direct result of the Treaty of Versailles. At that time many Germans, including Ebert, were convinced that the peace of Versailles aimed at the destruction of Germany. The resulting loss of confidence in the Black–Red–Gold coalition was the deathblow of the Weimar Republic, although in fact the country’s strength and stability had remained untouched.

Nevertheless, the first consequence of the Treaty of Versailles was the Kapp Putsch, a coup d’état against the republic by radical nationalists, a part of the Reichswehr, and the Freikorps, which were to be disbanded under the provisions of the peace treaty. The coup of March 13, 1920, led by Wolfgang Kapp, a provincial bureaucrat who planned a restoration of the monarchy, collapsed after a few days, but Ebert’s dream of a reconciliation between the army and the Social Democrats was shattered.

Soon thereafter, the government was confronted by a near-fatal crisis. In January 1923 Germany was declared in default of coal deliveries under the reparations provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, prompting France to settle the reparations question decisively by occupying the Ruhr territory. Ebert, as did nearly all Germans at that time, supported national resistance and the general strike in the Ruhr, which was directed toward ending foreign military control. But Germany suffered as a result of the strike, in which eventually millions became idle. Inflation assumed staggering proportions, and the country experienced its most severe social and political crisis. Adolf Hitler nearly succeeded in seizing power in Bavaria. Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno, an independent, appointed on the eve of the Ruhr struggle as a man whom Ebert particularly trusted, was helpless in the face of the crisis. Gustav Stresemann, of the right-of-centre People’s Party, succeeded Cuno and brought the crisis under control. Ebert initially appointed him only with hesitation and treated him with reserve but finally gave him his full support. He bitterly rebuked his own party when, protesting Stresemann’s move to a more rightist position, it dropped out of the governing coalition and thus brought about the chancellor’s resignation in November 1923. In point of fact, Ebert’s party had thereby eliminated itself from active participation in German national politics for many years to come.

The unity of the Reich was preserved. Inflation was ended through monetary reform, and a means for resolving the reparations question was partially resolved in an American proposal providing for their reduction. The evacuation of the Ruhr district was in sight. Yet much of the German right persisted in its defamation of Friedrich Ebert. The judgment of a German court, which ruled that Ebert had committed high treason, at least in the legal sense, during the war by his support of a munition workers’ strike, contributed to his early death.

Ebert’s writings, speeches, and notes may be found in Friedrich Ebert: Schriften, Aufzeichnungen, Reden, with previously unpublished material from his estate, compiled by Friedrick Ebert, Jr., with a brief biography by Paul Kampffmeyer, 2 vol. (1926).