Elections in the Weimar Republic

[Sibboleth]

I've recently decided to make some new maps of Weimar elections. Before I post any, some useful background and context...



The areas in various shades of blue (and with a separate key) were provinces of the largest state (Prussia) rather than states of their own. The two areas in dark grey were not part of the Republic but were League of Nations territories. The map, I should note, is heavily simplified in certain areas because I'd like to keep whatever shreds of sanity that I still possess...

[Sibboleth]

And the first election map...



On the right are states and provinces, on the left constituencies.* On the top the maps show percentage lead for approximate ideological bloc/camp/whatever (note that this is a way of looking at the electorate, not a comment on relations between the parties: in particular the SPD and KPD hated each other and things weren't always exactly rosy between the two liberal parties), on the bottom the same but just for parties. Party and 'Camp' vote share maps for this election to come later this week.

_{*Don't have a definitive map to work from, and the maps I do have to work from disagree on a few details so errors are absolutely possible regarding the exact boundaries. But that's a fairly minor issue.}

[Pete Whitehead]

There used to be a website with the exact same name of this thread. It was superb - contained a wealth of demographic as well as electoral data. Must have been 20 years or so ago as it's one of the first election sites I remember from when i first went online. I actually printed off large chunks of it as I did with a number of other sites at that time as I wasn't confident they would be around forever. In that particular case my fears were sadly not misplaced

[Sibboleth]

Approximate party camps/blocs/etc - note that o/c half of the parties in each hated each other, but this is about the electorate rather than inter-party relations. The Nazis have their own category (though some other small parties end up in it for earlier elections), the Socialist category is o/c SPD and KPD (USPD to feature in earlier elections), the Catholics Zentrum and BVP, the Liberals DDP/DStp and DVP. The 'Conservative' category is by far the broadest: along with the DNVP it also includes the CSVP (a centre-right splinter of the DNVP for the practicing Protestants), and the various parties of agrarian and middle class protest. There are other ways of grouping the parties, and the patterns these show are not uninteresting or unimportant, but this one is the classic and is used for that reason.

[Sibboleth]

Larger parties.

[Sibboleth]

Smaller parties.

[Sibboleth]

[Devil Wincarnate]

There's a slight electoral curiosity that East Prussia overwhelmingly voted for candidates who pushed the "stab in the back" myth, despite being one of the few German areas to be invaded and overrun by an enemy force.  Indeed, if Max Hoffman had not saved Hindenburg's bacon at Tannenberg, much more of East Prussia would have become a battleground.

[Sibboleth]

Apr 14, 2018 15:49:38 GMT Devil Wincarnate said:

There's a slight electoral curiosity that East Prussia overwhelmingly voted for candidates who pushed the "stab in the back" myth, despite being one of the few German areas to be invaded and overrun by an enemy force.  Indeed, if Max Hoffman had not saved Hindenburg's bacon at Tannenberg, much more of East Prussia would have become a battleground.

Heh. Mostly East Prussia behaved electorally like other predominantly agricultural Protestant areas east of the Elbe o/c. Main local peculiarity was a somewhat higher KPD vote than you'd maybe expect, part of which came from rural areas in the north east of the province.

[Devil Wincarnate]

Apr 15, 2018 17:20:58 GMT Sibboleth said:

Apr 14, 2018 15:49:38 GMT Devil Wincarnate said:

There's a slight electoral curiosity that East Prussia overwhelmingly voted for candidates who pushed the "stab in the back" myth, despite being one of the few German areas to be invaded and overrun by an enemy force.  Indeed, if Max Hoffman had not saved Hindenburg's bacon at Tannenberg, much more of East Prussia would have become a battleground.

Heh. Mostly East Prussia behaved electorally like other predominantly agricultural Protestant areas east of the Elbe o/c. Main local peculiarity was a somewhat higher KPD vote than you'd maybe expect, part of which came from rural areas in the north east of the province.

One of the most interesting phenomena of the era (from around 1880 to the Second World War) was the "Landflucht" (flight from the land) and its related "Ostflucht" (flight from the East).  That ludicrous latifundia-type setup east of the Elbe was under huge pressure as peasants left the land and headed to the Rhineland and Berlin (indeed, in 1900, 25% of all Berliners were actually Silesian).   I wonder if those peasants were sufficiently concentrated in those cities to which they moved to have an electoral impact?  Certainly Bochum was a hotbed of Polish political and social activity.

Lebensraum was obviously a daft concept anyway, but the stats show that it really was bizarre to insist that more land was needed in the East for a populace who had resolutely shown that they didn't want to live there.

[Devil Wincarnate]

Might be of interest.

[Deleted]

Apr 15, 2018 18:06:14 GMT Devil Wincarnate said:

Might be of interest.

Was Berlin enlarged between 1900 and 1910? Nearly doubling the population in a decade seems unrealistic for such a large city unless they extended the city limits.

[Sibboleth]

Apr 15, 2018 18:13:03 GMT @vintris said:

Was Berlin enlarged between 1900 and 1910? Nearly doubling the population in a decade seems unrealistic for such a large city unless they extended the city limits.

No: Berlin wasn't enlarged until the Greater Berlin Act of 1920 (which established the boundaries that it still has). The 1910 figures seem to refer to the post 1920 city (or an approximation of) because Alt Berlin* had a population of around 2.1 million in 1910.

_{*As in: before 1920. Not as in old core of the city, which is tiny.}

[Devil Wincarnate]

A lengthy but interesting piece if you have German.


www.digitalis.uni-koeln.de/JWG/jwg_37_41-51.pdf

Basically, Ostflucht continued during the Nazi era.

[Sibboleth]

Meant to add: the Zentrum and the BVP ran a joint list in the Pfalz (Palatinate) constituency at all elections from 1928.

[Rose Tinted Lane]

Apr 15, 2018 18:47:08 GMT Devil Wincarnate said:

A lengthy but interesting piece if you have German.


www.digitalis.uni-koeln.de/JWG/jwg_37_41-51.pdf

Basically, Ostflucht continued during the Nazi era.

So much for the 'necessity of lebensraum'.

[mazuz]

Sibboleth, do you know how Jews voted at the time? I assume it'd be more fragmented than perhaps expected (because one Jew, two opinions) + SPD plurality or majority?

[Sibboleth]

Apr 18, 2018 12:40:04 GMT mazuz said:

Sibboleth, do you know how Jews voted at the time? I assume it'd be more fragmented than perhaps expected (because one Jew, two opinions) + SPD plurality or majority?

Remember that the Jewish community in Germany at the time was not working class and immigrant-heavy (though there was an element that was, particularly in Berlin) but ancient, culturally assimilated to a unique degree and prosperous. The general assumption¹ is that Jewish votes in the Weimar era were pretty much exclusively cast for parties in the Liberal² and Socialist camps with a heavy majority in the former. There was probably a pragmatic leftwards shift from 1930 as the Liberal camp collapsed and got a little too close to parties/social forces with völkische elements in a desperate attempt to stay alive. For instance, the disastrous decision of the DDP to merge with the political wing of the Jungdo movement³ to form the DstP cost the party most of its Jewish support and contributed to its collapse. The DVPs movement into the orbit of the DNVP can't have gone down well either. Still, by 1932 in some cities with large and established Jewish communities (Frankfurt, say) its likely that a majority of at least the DVP support came from Jewish voters because everyone else who had done so before had moved... elsewhere...

<sub>1. We don't have data, but we do have the massive accumulation of personal anecdote that over this sort of thing, as you know, actually can be.
2. O/c the DVP would have been termed and regarded as a conservative party in most other countries at the time...
3. Young German Order: nationalist paramilitary group cum youth organisation.</sub>

[Sibboleth]

As an aside, the DVPs elevated results amidst general electoral collapse in 1932 in the Dresden-Bautzen constituency was apparently due to the Sorbs.

[Devil Wincarnate]

Apr 18, 2018 14:06:17 GMT Sibboleth said:

Apr 18, 2018 12:40:04 GMT mazuz said:

Sibboleth , do you know how Jews voted at the time? I assume it'd be more fragmented than perhaps expected (because one Jew, two opinions) + SPD plurality or majority?

Remember that the Jewish community in Germany at the time was not working class and immigrant-heavy (though there was an element that was, particularly in Berlin) but ancient, culturally assimilated to a unique degree and prosperous. The general assumption¹ is that Jewish votes in the Weimar era were pretty much exclusively cast for parties in the Liberal² and Socialist camps with a heavy majority in the former. There was probably a pragmatic leftwards shift from 1930 as the Liberal camp collapsed and got a little too close to parties/social forces with völkische elements in a desperate attempt to stay alive. For instance, the disastrous decision of the DDP to merge with the political wing of the Jungdo movement³ to form the DstP cost the party most of its Jewish support and contributed to its collapse. The DVPs movement into the orbit of the DNVP can't have gone down well either. Still, by 1932 in some cities with large and established Jewish communities (Frankfurt, say) its likely that a majority of at least the DVP support came from Jewish voters because everyone else who had done so before had moved... elsewhere...

<sub>1. We don't have data, but we do have the massive accumulation of personal anecdote that over this sort of thing, as you know, actually can be.
2. O/c the DVP would have been termed and regarded as a conservative party in most other countries at the time...
3. Young German Order: nationalist paramilitary group cum youth organisation.</sub>

I remember a while back that I speculated on Breslau's reputation as a relative citadel of liberalism, before it turned Nazi.  Linking that to your general comment about Jews voting for the liberal parties, I had a think and dug out this (p.178-179) that seems to join the two ideas and come up with some quite interesting thoughts:

books.google.co.uk/books?id=3dBW6XeitEoC&pg=PA178&lpg=PA178&dq=breslau+liberalism&source=bl&ots=82og48F-Nv&sig=Y6H4AP2WIcUPH1h-6OdOEvTvJRU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiZwPL6r8TaAhXFJcAKHYalCuIQ6AEILDAB#v=onepage&q=breslau%20liberalism&f=false