When Germany's foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, died at the age of 51 in October 1929, 200,000 Berliners came out to watch the funeral procession, writes Enda O'Doherty
As leader of the small, liberal DVP party, Stresemann had been a constant, and to many reassuring, presence in the series of short-lived governments which had been the stewards of German democracy in the 1920s. Colleagues and opponents alike paid tribute to his ability, perseverance and courage. Even the political extremes gave grudging recognition: the communists emphasised his key role in what they chose to call "the consolidation of German imperialism", while the national socialist newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter saw his influence as decisive in keeping together the various moderate coalitions which had till then governed Weimar Germany.
That decisive influence, however, was now gone. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary: "A stone has been removed from the road to German freedom." The republican, democratic and proportional system of government which Germany adopted in 1919 threw up a complex political landscape featuring a number of parties ranging in a full spectrum from far left to far right. It was a spectrum, moreover, in which the extremes, which were to become increasingly preponderant towards the end of the Weimar period, never accepted the legitimacy of the democratic parliamentary process they tactically engaged in.
In such circumstances, with a political dramatis personae extending from the communists (KPD), through the social democrats (SPD), the left-liberal democrats (DDP), the Catholic centre party (Zentrum), the right-liberal DVP, the nationalist-conservative DNVP and eventually, the Nazis (NSDAP), the trick was always to bring together in government some group of parties of the centre who might be united, however temporarily, in support of a defined - even loosely defined - set of foreign and domestic policies.
Given Germany's parlous economic state and shattered national psyche after military defeat and the punitive victors' settlement of Versailles and the widely divergent demands of each of the parties' constituencies, such an accommodation was a far from easy trick to pull off. It was one however which was admirably suited to the gifts of Gustav Stresemann.
From his brief period as Chancellor in 1923, through his successive stints as foreign minister in a wide variety of cabinets until his death in 1929, Stresemann's acute intelligence, tactical cunning, determination, powers of persuasion and political vision and understanding were essential to the survival of German democracy. In his task he had the co-operation of many others, decent and honourable men from the social democrats, the democrats and the Catholic centre whose names and reputations were to be buried under the wave of barbarism that engulfed Germany after 1933.
Stresemann's political pedigree, though "liberal" in the sense of anti-absolutist, was firmly on the right. In 1914 and after he fully endorsed Germany's expansionist war aims. Domestically, his party represented the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie and the Protestant entrepreneurial and professional classes.
What distinguished him chiefly from more typical representatives of these classes and of the German right was his high intelligence and ability to accept reality, principally the reality that post-war Germany was without military power and without friends. In such circumstances, its essential national aims, the removal of occupation armies, the settlement of the reparations question and a revision of borders in the east (at the expense of Poland), could be pursued only by peaceful diplomatic means which would he hoped lead to Germany's eventual rehabilitation as a trusted equal among the European powers.
Enemies on his right, in his own party, in the DNVP, in the army, might rail against this policy of conciliation - which they called treason - but it did, slowly, achieve some of the results Stresemann had hoped for. And what, he demanded, was their policy and where would it lead? He was, happily perhaps, not to live to find out.
Stresemann's understanding of German party politics led him always to seek allies on his left, an unavoidable choice, he argued, since the right had lost its reason. Whether he would have been able, had he lived, to keep a moderate coalition together after the economic crash of 1929 is a tough question. There is evidence to suggest, however, that he envisaged running for the Reich presidency in 1932. Had he, rather than the aged Hindenburg, been the candidate of the democratic parties in that election things might well have proved more difficult for Hitler.
Jonathan Wright's biography is an impressively detailed, soundly argued and clearly written study of an important figure in 20th-century history. His concluding summary chapter in particular is a fitting tribute to his subject, a model of the old-fashioned virtues of clarity, wisdom and balance.
Gustav Stresemann: Weimar's Greatest Statesman. By Jonathan Wright. Oxford University Press, 569pp. £30
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist