Britain guarantee the post-Versailles frontiers in
the east as it had done in the west. Although
Germany also signed arbitration treaties at the
same time with Poland and Czechoslovakia, they
did not form part of the Locarno security system.
Stresemann’s hardly realistic long-term aim was to
revise the eastern frontier peacefully making use
of Germany’s economic preponderance.
In return for renouncing territorial changes
Stresemann won concessions from the Allies.
Reparations were scaled down in 1924 and 1929.
Stresemann aimed to get rid of them altogether.
Germany was admitted to the League of Nations
in 1926 and given a permanent seat on the
Council. Stresemann joined on condition that
Germany, too, need never fight to back up the
League if it chose not to do so. The Allied com-
mission supervising German disarmament was
withdrawn. Stresemann never lived to see the ful-
filment of one of his most cherished objectives –
the complete Allied evacuation of all German ter-
ritory – but before his death he had secured
agreement that the Rhineland would be evacu-
ated in 1930. With his French opposite number,
Aristide Briand, Stresemann gave publicity to the
new Franco-German friendship, the essence of
the so-called ‘spirit of Locarno’, even though in
private Stresemann was continually demanding
more concessions than France would grant. As for
Briand, he believed the French had no alternative
but to make the best of German protestations and
promises.
At home, too, the years from 1924 to 1927
were a brief golden period for the republic. The
currency was stabilised. The promise of peace at
home and abroad enabled the hardworking
Germans to attract large American loans which
covered the cost of reparations. American effi-
ciency and methods of manufacture were success-
fully adopted by German industry. Business
concerns combined and formed themselves into
huge cartels in steel, chemicals and the electrical
goods industries. Export flourished. Trade unions,
too, enjoyed freedom and for the first time the
positive protection of the state. These were the
brief years of prosperity and had they continued
the German people might well have come to value
more their new republican democracy. Instead, as
the economic crisis, which began among the farm-
ers and spread to industry, hit Germany, a major-
ity of the electorate in the early 1930s turned to
parties that sought totalitarian solutions.