Friedrich Ebert

Friedrich Ebert
1st President of the German Reich
In office 11 February 1919 – 28 February 1925
Chancellor	Philipp Scheidemann, Gustav Bauer, Hermann Müller, Konstantin Fehrenbach, Joseph Wirth, Wilhelm Cuno, Gustav Stresemann, Wilhelm Marx, Hans Luther
Preceded by	Position created William II (as ruler of the German Empire)
Succeeded by	Paul von Hindenburg Hans Luther (acting)
9th Chancellor of the German Reich 9th Chancellor of the German Empire 1st Chancellor of the Weimar Republic
In office 9 November 1918 – 11 February 1919
Monarch	William II (November 1918 only)
Preceded by	Prince Maximilian of Baden
Succeeded by	Philipp Scheidemann
Minister President of Prussia
In office 9 November – 11 November 1918
Monarch	William II
Preceded by	Prince Maximilian of Baden
Succeeded by	Paul Hirsch
Born	4 February 1871(1871-02-04)
Died	28 February 1925 (aged 54)
Political party	SPD

Friedrich Ebert (4 February 1871 – 28 February 1925) was a German politician (SPD), who served as Chancellor of Germany and its first president during the Weimar period.

Background

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 moderate revisionist wing of the Social Democratic Party, becoming Secretary-General in 1905, and party chairman in 1913. He was also a politician in Elberfeld (now part of Wuppertal).

In August 1914, Ebert led the party to vote almost unanimously in favour of war appropriations, accepting that a war was a necessary patriotic, defensive measure. The party's stance, under the leadership of Ebert and other revisionists like Scheidemann, in favour of the war eventually led to a split, with the more left wing elements in the party leaving in early 1917 to form the USPD.

When it became clear that the war was lost, a new government was formed by Prince Maximilian of Baden which included Ebert and other members of the SPD in October 1918. Following the outbreak of the German Revolution, Prince Max resigned on 9 November, and handed his office over to Ebert. Though the Kaiser was declared to have abdicated, Ebert favoured retaining the monarchy under a different ruler. On the same day, however, Scheidemann proclaimed the German Republic, in response to the unrest in Berlin and in order to counter a declaration of the "Free Socialist Republic" by Karl Liebknecht later that day. This proclamation ended the German Monarchy and an entirely Socialist provisional government took power under Ebert's leadership.

Ebert, right, with Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno (1923)

Ebert accepted this position only reluctantly. He was a supporter of the monarchy until the abdication of the Kaiser ("If the Kaiser abdicates, the social revolution is inevitable. But I do not want it, I hate it like sin", he said to Max von Baden on 7 November), and when Scheidemann proclaimed the Republic he responded: "Is that true? You have no right to proclaim the Republic!" By this he meant that the decision was to be made by an elected national assembly, even if that decision would be the restoration of the monarchy.

Ebert led the new government for the next several months, notably using the army under support of Minister of Defense Gustav Noske to suppress the Spartacist uprising, commonly identified with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. When the Constituent Assembly met in Weimar in February, 1919, Ebert was chosen to be the first president of the German Republic.

The German workers protected his government from the Kapp Putsch in 1920 by means of a nationwide 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.

Controversy

Ebert remains a somewhat 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, communists and others on the left argue that he paved the way for fascism by supporting the ultra-right Freikorps and their violent suppression of Marxist uprisings.

The Freikorps, a loose association of German WWI veterans organizations that created and maintained independent support throughout Germany after World War I, had been disseminating the view that what they described as radical leftists of the German socialists, tacitly supported by the SPD, were responsible for Germany's defeat in World War I, a statement referred to by its deniers as the Dolchstoßlegende. The claim, was supported by the alleged evidence of socialist support for the activities of the Spartacus leadership, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, in organizing hundreds of strikes which they claimed were to disrupt war production in the Imperial German armaments industry during 1917 and 1918, while allegedly seeking to replace Imperial Germany with a number of soviet socialist republics. Socialist leaning historians claim that this activity was not responsible for the collapse of the Imperial German defense economy on the homefront, the military collapse. They claim instead that the mainstream socialists had entered the ceasefire negotiations at the request of the military leadership after the generals had decided that the war could no longer be won. Ebert aided the generals who, they claim, considered the Weimar Republic only a temporary, necessary evil to divert blame from themselves and prepare for the next war. Ebert is thus viewed by his leftist critics as having playing exactly the role that the military wanted him to play. These claims misrepresent the request of the generals for what it was, namely a requirement of the allies for the military leadership to remove itself from civil power in order to permit Germany to enter into the Versailles peace talks.

Some historians have defended Ebert's actions as unfortunate but inevitable to prevent the creation of a socialist state on the model that had been promoted by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and the membership of the Spartacus Group. Leftist historians like Bernt Engelmann have argued that many of the workers were in fact centrist SPD supporters, and that the communist party was not yet politically relevant (in part because of the assassination of Liebknecht and Luxemburg). However, the actions of Ebert and his Minister of Defense, Gustav Noske, against the workers contributed to their radicalization and to increasing support for communist ideas. During his five years as President he issued 134 emergency decrees, amongst them a number that dealt with the socialist-led overthrow of the Government of Bavaria, and its short-lived replacement by a soviet-style republican regime.

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, socialists claim, workers still enjoyed little protection from exploitation, so that strikes were frequently ended with machine guns. Opponents of these claims claim that Bismarkian Imperial Germany was the leading western nation in promoting protection of workers from exploitation and introducing such programs as publicly supported health care and pensions.

Ebert's far left critics view him as a knowing or unknowing agent of the far right who made the wrong decisions in shaping post-World War I Germany by giving power and influence to those who, they claim, had already sought German world domination in World War I; thus preventing (they claim) the creation of a united, progressive political party. Anti-SPD slogans such as "Wer hat uns verraten? Sozialdemokraten!" ("Who betrayed us? Social democrats!") were born out of the experiences of Ebert's era and his suppression of the far left; it is claimed by supporters of Luxemburg, Liebknecht and others that such suppression amounted to a tacit (and, when employing the Freikorps against uprisings, explicit) support of the far right, against the public. Ebert's supporters claim that a united, progressive political party was not possible given the simultaneous existence of a revolutionary left encouraged by Lenin's early successes, and the bulk of socialist-leaning support, which (it is claimed) sought a return and enhancement of stable growth from the earlier Bismarkian style social programs as a foundation for democratic socialism in Germany.

Ebert's supporters understood his leadership to be headed towards democratic rather than revolutionary socialism and he is honored for that stance in Germany today.

Today, the SPD-associated Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Germany's largest and oldest party-associated foundation and an organisation to promote students of outstanding intellectual abilities and personality, is named after Ebert. A German Grammar School located in Hamburg (Friedrich-Ebert-Gymnasium) was also named after Friedrich-Ebert.

See also

• Friedrich Ebert Foundation
• Ebert-Groener pact

Notes

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External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Friedrich Ebert

• (German) President Friedrich Ebert Memorial in Heidelberg
• The Battle for Berlin 1918-1919

v • d • e Presidents of Germany Weimar Republic Friedrich Ebert · Walter Simons (acting) · Hans Luther (acting) · Paul von Hindenburg Federal Republic Theodor Heuss · Heinrich Lübke · Gustav Heinemann · Walter Scheel · Karl Carstens · Richard von Weizsäcker · Roman Herzog · Johannes Rau · Horst Köhler

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