GCSE History - Germany Key Words

Here are a list of some of the key phrases that you may need to know if you are revising your German History. The full list is available by clicking on the link below



Germany Key Words

Kaiser

The title of the monarch of Germany (derived from the Roman word ‘Caesar’).   The last Kaiser of Germany was Wilhelm II (1859 - 1941), who in 1918 fled to the village of Doom in the Netherlands after Germany’s defeat and his abdication.

Republic

A country NOT ruled by a monarch.   The ‘Weimar Republic’ in Germany (1919-1933) took its name from the town where in February 1919 a constituent assembly met to draw up a democratic constitution.

Reichstag

The German Parliament – also the name for the building.   Under the Weimar republic the Reichstag was elected by all men and women over the age of 20 – a far more democratic government than Britain, where only women over the age for 30 were allowed to vote.

Novemberverbrecher

November Criminals: the name given by the right-wing and nationalist parties in Germany to the government ministers who made the Armistice and then signed the Treaty of Versailles. Also called Volksverräter (‘People-traitors’).

Dolchstosslegende

Literally, ‘Dagger-blow legend’ – the belief (invented by general Hindenburg in 1919) of the right-wing politicians that the Germany Army had only lost the First World War because it had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the ‘November criminals’ – the politicians who had signed the Armistice.

Ebert

Friedrich Ebert: the first president of the Weimar Republic.   He had started life as a saddler, but had formed a saddlers’ Trade Union, and got involved in politics.   He was a moderate Socialist (SPD).

Constitution

The Hutchinson Encyclopaedia defines a constitution as: ‘Body of fundamental laws of a state, laying down the system of government and defining the relations of the legislature, executive, and judiciary to each other and to the citizens.’    The constitution of the Weimar Republic was a representative democracy with an elected president, and the rights of the citizens defined by a Bill of Rights guaranteeing equality before the law and political and religious freedom.

Article 48

The first great flaw in the Weimar Constitution – it gave the President the right to make laws by decree in an emergency.   Since the voting system of proportional voting never gave any Weimar government a sufficient majority to pass the laws it wanted, the President ruled increasingly by decree to pass ANY law – thus abusing the system as it was intended.   It was this flaw in the Constitution that gave Hitler the opportunity to seize power after 1933.

Proportional representation

A system of voting that does  not – as we have in Britain today – elect representatives for individual ‘constituencies’ by a ‘first past the post’ system, but where people in a large region vote for the PARTY they want, and then a number of representatives are returned to the parliament in proportion to the number of votes cast for each party.   Although it sounds much fairer, in fact, the system of PR in the Weimar republic led to a succession of weak, coalition governments, where no one party was ever big enough to have a majority.   Thus, after 14 years of political impotence, many moderate politicians were HAPPY to support Hitler, who offered at least a decisive government.