Ruhr Occupation Sped Weimar Demise

Conan Fischer's new work makes a timely appearance and offers important lessons in the difficulties and long-term costs, both material and human, of military occupation. Within contemporary historiography, the French occupation of the German Ruhr Valley from 1923 to 1925 has generally been given short shrift, often accorded only a few pages within larger treatments of the interwar period.[1] Fischer rightfully restores the centrality of this event to the larger history of Weimar Germany and interwar Europe.[2] In assessing the Ruhr Crisis, Fischer does not view the occupation itself as a symbol of Weimar's endemic weakness. Instead, he stresses that the willingness of the Ruhr population to engage in a passive resistance campaign (January-September 1923) against the occupation highlights the widespread legitimacy that the Weimar Republic actually enjoyed in the eyes of its populace. Popular identification with republican values awakened by the crisis, in fact, held the potential of solidifying the gains of the 1918 Revolution and allowing an "other Germany," based on liberal democratic values, to take root permanently. Additionally, Fischer suggests that the conflict offered the opportunity, given the political will to compromise, of creating a new western European economic order along the lines of the post-World War II European Coal and Steel Community, in which trade and industrial links between Germany and France would be strengthened.

 

Unfortunately, as Fischer emphasizes, hopes for a new Europe were dashed as neither Germany nor France was prepared to reconcile its disputes. The German government under William Cuno was ill-prepared for the occupation and during the crisis vacillated between open defiance and diplomatic pleas for negotiation that were not especially substantive. After assuming power in mid-August 1923, Stresemann's government developed a more coherent strategy designed to forge a compromise. However, new initiatives from Berlin were, if not necessarily too little, then nevertheless much too late. The central government had already lost control of events in the Ruhr by the early summer and, given the meteoric inflation, now held a poor hand with which to bargain--a situation that the French subsequently used to their advantage.

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