If the SDP was a centrist party with ties to the left, the German People’s Party (DVP) was a centrist party with ties to the right. Formed at the end of World War I, the DVP was overtly hostile to socialism and uncomfortable with parliamentary democracy. Under Gustav Stresemann’s leadership, however, the DVP cooperated with parties to its left and played an important part in Weimar coalition building. This move toward the center proved temporary. After Stresemann’s death in 1929, the party moved back toward the right, a shift that is clearly evident in this 1931 party program. As you read it, pay particular attention to the party’s sense of German nationalism and its attitude toward democracy. What aspects of the DVP program might have appealed to members of extreme rightist parties like the National Socialists?

1. Fatherland and Freedom

Fatherland. All of our thoughts, our burning desires, and our struggles are dedicated to the greatness and freedom of the fatherland. A people, whose Lebensraum has been brutally cut down, whose freedom to live has been cast into chains through senseless treaties, whose economic power has been crippled by subjection to a system of utterly extravagant tributes, can only wrestle its way back up through the strength of its love for the fatherland and national solidarity. Over many years Marxism has been breeding a sickly international and pacifist romanticism in the place of a resolute will devoted to the fatherland. In its surrender to the fatherland, in the passion of its national will, the German People’s Party stands steadfast at the most advanced front. An unwavering belief in the forces still present in the German people provides it with the foundation of all its effectiveness. The spirit of the national community of the German people is its supreme law.

Freedom. Our faith and our view of life is rooted in the spiritual soil created in the times of Bismarck and [Rudolf von] Bennigsen and before them the great minds of German idealism. The freedom of the individual is for us the point of departure for all political and cultural strivings. Freedom without moral responsibility, however, means the corruption of the community grounded in the state. The freedom of the days of revolution is caprice and destruction. The freedom that we mean is that of the morally responsible individual. All moral responsibility, however, is rooted in faith and religiosity. Revolution and socialism have bred a desolate materialism, the struggle of classes against one another, envy, and ill will, because they have no knowledge of the religious forces in the life of the people. This spiritual and moral pauperization of the people leads those who are mistaken and unsure along the path of desperation. In contrast to mass mania and the herd mentality, we are fighting for the recognition of the rights of the free individual grounded in religion and morality. Only when the moral concept of freedom has regained universal recognition will, as in our great past so forevermore in the future, German national community be able to develop.

2. State, Economy, and Culture

State. We are fighting against the caricature of a dictatorial state that enslaves the free life of national forces. We demand an organically structured state, the essence of which must be the liberation and development of the living forces in the national community. State socialism is an economically utopian system of compulsion that will lead the whole people into financial impoverishment. That is why we are fighting to regain spiritual, economic, and moral freedom for the forces of the national community now fettered by the chains of state power.

It is our task to fill the state of today with the truly free spirit of the fatherland, which will lend the state the inner force it requires and once again make its citizens proud to be members of a healthy state organism. Respect for the symbols of the state is for us an obvious truth.

Constitution. Everything in constitutional life that is un-German and alien to our nature, everything that places the rule of the masses in the place of the rule of achievement, must be overcome. Only that constitution is enduring in which the concept of the rule of the people is juxtaposed on equal terms with the concept of leadership and authority. Mass rule leads to partisan caprice and to the corruption of the civil service.

We are opposed to the exaggeration of parliamentarianism. Therefore we demand: a second chamber. To the Reichstag must be joined an equal chamber, consisting of representatives of the regional states, representatives of the economy, and leading figures in spiritual and public life, who are to be called to service by the president on the basis of nominations of the churches and institutions of higher learning in particular.

Reform of the Reich. The following are bitter necessities: the unified gathering of the national will in the supreme instance; the implementation of this will down through the last and least of the civil service! Economic and financial considerations as well as cultural and political necessities demand that the task of reform be taken in hand without further hesitation. Experts from the German People’s Party have elaborated proposals for a strictly structured, unified German Reich.

We are taking a first, decisive step along the path to reform of the Reich by demanding that the president of the Reich henceforth also become the chief official of the Prussian state. The president of the Reich will appoint, like the chancellor and ministers of the Reich, the Prussian prime minister and the Prussian minister of state. That will simultaneously achieve the strengthening of the power of the president of the Reich and the authority of the state.

The government called by the president of the Reich should not be permanently subject to dismissal by an arbitrary vote of an incidental majority. The national government is obligated to resign only when the majority of the elected members of the Reichstag casts an explicit vote of no confidence. Against the over-hasty resolutions of parliament, the president of the Reich should have a suspensive power of veto.

The question of voting rights is a matter of dispute. The formation of political will in the people does not depend exclusively on the electoral system. Therefore the question of the electoral system must be removed from the Reich constitution. Above all, we demand that the franchise be restricted once again to those 25 years of age and older.

Source: Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 115–116.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER