ABSTRACT
By the end of the 1920s, the German party system had become so fragmented along social and economic lines that none of the established bourgeois parties were capable of offering effective resistance to the rise of National Socialism. With the resultant radicalization of the German countryside, both the German Peasants' Party (DBP) and the Christian-National Peasants and Farmers' Party (CNBLP) sustained increasingly heavy losses to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and entered a period of rapid decline that was to culminate in their virtual disappearance from the political scene by the middle of 1932. The emergence of agrarian splinter parties in the second half of the 1920s constituted an important chapter in the dissolution of the Weimar party system. Both the DBP and CNBLP were hampered by an unresolved contradiction between the need to work within the framework of the existing political system to promote the welfare of those they claimed to represent and the anti-system bias.
