HINDENBURG: Eine Politische Biographie
Werner Maser
Berlin: Moewig, 1989
354 pp.
The long, mostly uneventful life of Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) is remembered primarily for two roles that he played. During the First World War he rose to become a field marshal general in the imperial German army and thereafter, in 1916, commander of all German land forces. Then, between 1925 and his death in 1934, Hindenburg served as president of the ill-fated Weimar Republic. It was he who made the disastrous decision to name Hitler German chancellor in January 1933.
Despite his involvement in momentous events, Hindenburg has come to be seen as the "Wooden Titan,” as John Wheeler Bennett describes him in the subtitle of a biography first published in 1936. Hindenburg, it is argued, merely provided the façade behind which other schemed and acted. His victory over the invading Russian armies that had broken into Eastern Germany, at the Masurian Lakes in August and September 1914, is, for example, now conventionally attributed to his brilliant, controversial major general Erich Ludendorff. Ludendorff, it has been said, devised the winning strategy of enveloping two large Russian armies, but his nominal superior, Hindenburg, was later given the credit. Hindenburg's star continued to rise in wartime Germany, until it eclipsed those of members of the civilian government, including the German emperor.
His career in postwar politics was, in some sense, an extension of his earlier public life. Elected as the second president of the Weimar Republic after the death of the first, moderate socialist Friedrich Ebert, Hindenburg became for many Germans a link to the imperial past. His imposing presence bestowed conservative legitimacy upon the republic the Allies had inflicted on the Germans and then, at Versailles, saddled with a vindictive peace. The diplomatic successes of 1924 to 1929, gained by his greatest chancellor and foreign minister, Gustav Stress Mann, culminated in a rapprochement with France and England and enhanced Hindenburg's reputation. A loyal, imperial field marshal, he helped lay the foundations for a postwar republican Germany through exercise of the presidency. Again, his success can be said to have occurred more by association than by the active, resourceful pursuit of well-defined goals.
Age and infirmity
The same lack of reflection supposedly led to his most catastrophic failure, handing Germany over to Hitler. This Hindenburg did as an enfeebled octogenarian at the prompting of others. An obstructionist majority in the Reichstag, formed after the onset of the Great Depression by the two extremist factions, the Nazis and communists, left the legislature incapable of staving off national financial collapse. Hindenburg was persuaded to rule Germany by emergency decrees. Appealing to Article 48 in the Weimar Constitution, which provided for broad presidential powers in time of crisis, he operated through chancellors from July 1930 onward, none of whom enjoyed majority support in the Reichstag.
But even armed with emergency powers, Hindenburg could not rise to the challenge of events. His age and infirmity left him at the mercy of others particularly once he had discharged as chancellor an
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