participate in the business of ruling the country.
The difficulties of any party with socialist aspira-
tions joining a coalition were genuinely great.
Coalition meant compromise on policy. In any
coalition with the centre and moderate right the
Social Democrats could not hope to pass socialist
measures and they were afraid that cooperation
with the ‘bourgeois’ parties would discredit them
with their electoral base, which consisted mainly of
urban workers and trade unionists. From an elec-
toral party point of view these tactics appeared to
pay off as their increasing representation in the
Reichstag shows. But the price paid was the dis-
crediting of parliamentary government, for the
exclusion from government of both the Nationa-
lists and the Communists and the absence of the
Socialists meant that the coalitions of the centre
and mainly moderate right were minority govern-
ments at the mercy of the Socialists.
In government there was thus a permanent
sense of crisis, the coalition partners who formed
the governments, especially the smaller parties,
becoming more concerned about how the unpop-
ularity of a particular government policy might
affect their own supporters than about the stabil-
ity of government as a whole. This situation
imperilled the standing of the whole parliamen-
tary democratic system. After 1925 there seemed
to be only one method by which the parties of
the centre and moderate right, saddled with the
responsibility of government, could logically
attain stability and a majority, and that was to
move further to the right. So its right wing came
to predominate the Centre Party, enabling the
conservatives, the Nationalist Party, to join coali-
tion cabinets with them. The coalition cabinets
were also very much cabinets of ‘personalities’
relying on presidential backing and only loosely182 THE CONTINUING WORLD CRISIS, 1929–39
Prussian honour allied to new barbarism at the opening of the Reichstag in the Garrison Church of Potsdam,
21 March 1933. Hitler avoids wearing a uniform whenever appearing with Field Marshal Hindenburg. © Hulton-
Deutsch Collection/Corbis