ABSTRACT
The Weimar Republic has been called a ‘makeshift democracy’. This suggestive phrase is intended to convey that the first German democracy was not the achievement of a strong republican movement with its roots in many sections of the population, which strove systematically over a long period to transform the monarchical, authoritarian state and finally succeeded in doing so by a major effort. Rather, it was improvised as an ‘emergency solution’ to mitigate, as far as possible, the effects on the German people of defeat in the First World War. When it failed to produce the desired result, and the victorious Allies imposed an oppressive peace despite the establishment of a democratic republic, the new constitution was thereby discredited in the eyes of a great majority of the population: the Republic, which many had not wanted anyway, had failed to perform the service expected of it. Thus the foundations of the improvised democracy were shaky from the outset.
