Friedrich Ebert (1871 – 1925) |
Friedrich Ebert (4. February 1871 – 28. February 1925) was a German politician (SPD), who served as the 9th
Chancellor of Germany and its first president during the
Weimar period.
Born in Heidelberg as the son of a tailor, he himself was trained as a saddlemaker. He became involved in politics
as a trade unionist and Social Democrat, and soon became a leader of the more moderate "revisionist" wing of the
Social Democratic Party, becoming Secretary-General of the party in 1905, and party chairman in 1913. He also was
a politician in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal), too.
In August 1914, Ebert led the party to vote almost unanimously in favor of war appropriations, accepting that a war
was a necessary patriotic, defensive measure. This refuted the belief of the
German Emperor who, on 31. December 1905, had written to chancellor
Bülow that an "external war" was only possibly if the socialists were "shot, decapitated and defanged".
The party's stance, under the leadership of Ebert and other revisionists like Philipp Scheidemann, in favor of the
war eventually led to a split, with the more left wing elements in the party leaving in early 1917 to form the
Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD).
Ebert's political career
When it became clear that the Great War was lost, a new government
was formed by Prince Maximilian of Baden which included Ebert and other members of the Social Democratic party in
October 1918. Following the outbreak of the German Revolution,
Prince Max resigned on 9. November and Ebert was appointed Imperial Chancellor. The next day, however, in response
to the unrest in Berlin, Ebert's associate Scheidemann declared the Kaiser had abdicated, ending the German Monarchy
and proclaimed the German Republic, and an entirely Socialist provisional government took power under Ebert's leadership.
Ebert led the new government for the next several months, notably using the army to suppress an uprising by the
leftist Spartacist movement, commonly identified with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, even though many of its
members were centrist SPD supporters. (Ironically, years later, Ebert's son, Friedrich "Fritz" Ebert, became a
Communist, served as Mayor of East Berlin, and briefly acted as East German interim head of state.) When the
Constituent Assembly met in Weimar in February 1919, Ebert was chosen to be the first president of the German Republic.
In spite of Ebert's support for the violent suppression of revolutionary uprisings, the German workers protected
his government from the Kapp Putsch in 1920 by means of a nation-wide general strike. After the strike was over,
however, Ebert's government again recruited the Freikorps and the soldiers who had wanted to overthrow him in
order to quell remaining uprisings in western Germany.
While hundreds of civilians were killed (including many who had nothing to do with the uprising), most of the
putschists were treated leniently. Some of the Freikorps already used the swastika as their symbol of resistance
against the "red pack" at the time, and many of them as well as right-wing members of the Reichswehr would later
become influential national socialists. In November 1923, Ebert rebuked his own party for leaving the coalition
government of Gustav Stresemann.
Legacy of Friedrich Ebert
Ebert remains a highly controversial figure to this day. While the SPD recognizes him as one of the founders and
keepers of German democracy whose death in office in February 1925 was a great loss, socialists and communists
argue that he paved the way for fascism by supporting the ultra-right Freikorps and their violent suppression of
workers' urprisings.
Those were the same people who spread the Dolchstoßlegende, the idea that the socialists were responsible for
Germany's defeat in World War I. This was a particularly perfidious claim, as the socialists had entered the
ceasefire negotiations on request of the military leadership, after the generals had decided that the war could
no longer be won. To the generals, the Weimar Republic was a temporary, necessary evil to divert blame from
themselves and prepare for the next war, and Ebert is viewed by his critics as playing exactly the role that the
military wanted him to play.
The creation of elected workers' councils, which Ebert had tolerated in the early days of the republic, was viewed
by moderate workers as a legitimate centrist instrument to oversee the democratic government, when many government
officials were reactionaries who yearned for a return of the monarchy, and when workers still enjoyed little
protection from exploitation, so that strikes were frequently ended with machine guns.
Ebert's critics view
him as a knowing or unknowing agent of the reaction who made the wrong decisions in shaping post-war Germany
by giving power and influence to those who had already sought German world domination in World War I and preventing
the creation of a united, progressive political party. Even his
defenders acknowledge that with his death, the end of the Weimar Republic became inevitable. His successor, Paul von
Hindenburg, had been one of the military leaders of World War I.
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