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The end of the First World War and Germany's defeat by the Allies
brought to an end 500 years of Hohenzollern rule and the abdication
of the Kaiser, Wilhelm ll. In November 1918 government control
was assumed by the SPD, the largest party in the Reichstag. As
the SDP were proclaiming the birth of the German Republic from
the Reichstag the left wing Spartacist League were proclaiming
a socialist republic from the palace on the Unter den Linden.
The bitter power struggle had begun. The Marxist-style
socialist movement was quashed in a series of arrests and murder
and in 1919 the Weimar Republic came into being. The Weimar Republic,
which answered the needs of neither communists nor monarchists,
had an uneasy and fraught existence from 1920 until 1933.
The Berlin with which we are familiar today came into being in
the 1920s when the disparate regions of the area were unified
and brought under a single administration. It was suddenly a city
with almost 4 million citizens.
The early years of the decade were marred by social and political
disturbances, high unemployment, scarcity of food, soaring costs
and the attendant diseases of deprivation. As conditions were
brought under control and improved Berlin entered the second half
of that decade on a high of cultural and artistic activity which
rivalled even Paris.
It became a melting pot of experimentation and creative energy
drawing the great names, from the world of the arts, music, literature
and the sciences, to be a part of this great explosion of activity.
The 1929 American stock market crash brought a sudden and dramatic
end to this period. Within weeks unemployment was again soaring,
riots were the order of the day and political activists were increasingly
active. Hitler's time was coming.
In the national elections of 1930 Hitler's NSDAP party gained
18% of the votes. Two years later his party took a staggering
37% of the vote. In January 1933 Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor
and the fate of millions of people worldwide was sealed. A month
later, following a 'mysterious' fire at the Reichstag, Hitler
was granted emergency powers enabling him to 'protect the people
and state'. The following month, March, parliament passed the
'Enabling Law', effectively granting Adolf Hitler the powers of
a dictator who needed no recourse to elected members of a parliament.
The years of terror and persecution had begun.
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