The German 'Social' Revolution, the Murder of Walther Rathenau, and the Night of Broken Glass: The Association of Political Violence and Economics in Interwar Germany, 1918-1938

In the years leading up to the First World War, Germany's socio-political character was defined by a nationalistic fervor that harkened back to Otto von Bismarck's unification of the Prussian and Austrian nation-states in 1862. At the turn of the twentieth century, Germany was the backbone of European economics. The German economy dictated foreign capital investment, contributed to two-thirds of the continent's output of steel and coal, and represented the emergence of a new European economy built on domestic production and foreign trade. From an imperialistic perspective, the First World War between 1914-1918, was an inevitable development when considering colonial Europe’s complex game of international geo-politics. The conflict exhausted Europe’s previously flourishing industrial market and redefined the social and political ideologies of the masses. For Germany in particular, defeat in the First World War was a disaster. It not only marked the emergence of a divided political spectrum, it also set the scene for an interwar period shaped by economic hardship and domestic insurrection. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Germany descended into chaos. The destruction of the Empire’s old monarchy resulted in a violent political vacuum that pitted Germany’s more ‘moderate’ liberal democrats against the emerging forces of Communism from the east. This was known as the German ‘Social” Revolution and ultimately led to the rise of Germany’s first democratic state: the Weimar Republic. From its inception, the Weimar Republic was plagued by economic weakness. Hyperinflation, a depreciating currency, and depressed real money wages within the German labor market destabilized the country’s postwar economy. Economic weakness laid the groundwork for a crippled middle and lower class and made Germany a breeding ground for politically associated violence. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, Adolf Hitler and his anti-Semitic Nazi party appealed to a deeply troubled citizenry and steered Germany away from the recession by constructing a Third German Reich along Fascist lines. The Nazis created a marketplace that promoted rearmament, national autarky and the extermination of the Jewish domestic influence. The Nazis politicized anti-Semitism by coordinating nation-wide pogroms, organized mass killings, and the ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish property/business. In order to fully understand the association of economics and political violence in Germany between 1918-1938, this paper investigates three historical case studies. The German ‘Social’ Revolution of 1918-1919, the murder of Walther Rathenau in 1922, and Kristallnacht (‘The Night of Broken Glass’) in 1938 function as effective models demonstrating the economic origins of street violence during the interwar period. In turn, this study offers a unique examination of the close interdependence of politics and economics and presents a comparative analysis of Weimar Germany and Hitler's Third Reich.