The Scheidemann cabinet, headed by Minister President Philipp Scheidemann of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was Germany's first democratically elected national government. It took office on 13 February 1919, three months after the collapse of the German Empire following Germany's defeat in World War I. Although the Weimar Constitution was not in force yet, it is generally counted as the first government of the Weimar Republic.
It was formed from members elected in January 1919 to the Weimar National Assembly, which was to act as Germany's interim parliament and adopt a constitution for the new republic. The cabinet was based on the Weimar Coalition of three centre-left parties: the SPD, the Centre Party and the German Democratic Party.
During its time in office, Scheidemann's cabinet had to deal with leftist uprisings, most notably in Berlin, the Ruhr and Bavaria, and with separatist movements in the occupied Rhineland and in eastern provinces of Prussia such as Posen and Silesia. By far its biggest challenge, however, was responding to the Armistice of 1918 and the Paris Peace Conference. The tension between the outrage at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the potential repercussions of rejecting the treaty led to the breakup of the cabinet. Scheidemann, who had called the treaty "intolerable", resigned in protest against it on 20 June 1919.
Gustav Bauer, also of the SPD, headed the Bauer cabinet that replaced Scheidemann's.
Election and establishment
Following the collapse of the German Empire and the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Germans voted in elections for the Weimar National Assembly on 19 January 1919. At the time, the country was governed by the Council of the People's Deputies, a revolutionary government made up of members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which had been the largest party in the Imperial Reichstag following the last elections in 1912. The January elections returned a smaller than expected share of the vote for the socialists (38% for the SPD and 7% for the more radical Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD); the German Communist Party (KPD) boycotted the elections.
The National Assembly, meeting in Weimar because conditions in the capital Berlin were deemed too chaotic for the deliberations and because Weimar was associated with Weimar Classicism, acted as a unicameral legislature and the constituent assembly for the new republic. After its inaugural session on 6 February, it passed a provisional constitution called the Law on Provisional Reich Power. Friedrich Ebert (SPD), chairman of the Council of the People's Deputies, was elected as temporary president, or head of state, on 11 February. That same day, Ebert asked his fellow deputy Philipp Scheidemann (SPD) to form the new government, referred to in the law as the Reich Ministry.
At that point, coalition negotiations had been going on for some time. The SPD was talking to the DDP and the Centre Party. It was making cooperation conditional on the acceptance by the "bourgeois" parties of a republican form of state, a fiscal policy that would "severely" target wealth, and a socialisation of "suitable" industries. Although the SPD did approach the USPD, Ebert reportedly said that he had conducted talks with the extreme left only so that they would bear the responsibility for the talks' failure. For their part, the DDP would not have accepted a coalition with the USPD.
The negotiations were difficult and lengthy. The presidency of the National Assembly was, in particular, hotly contested and almost caused the talks to fail. It was finally agreed that Eduard David (SPD), who was the Assembly's first president, would resign and, in compensation, join the cabinet, making way for the former president of the Imperial Reichstag, Constantin Fehrenbach (Centre Party) to head the Assembly.
Apart from Ebert himself – who said that he preferred the more representative office of head of state – Scheidemann was the clear favourite to become head of government. With the exception of Ebert, all the other people's deputies from the Council joined the new cabinet. Gustav Noske had previously been in charge of Army and Navy affairs, and he became Reichswehr (armed forces) minister. Otto Landsberg, the leading thinker on law on the Council, became Minister of Justice. Rudolf Wissell had been in charge of economic affairs and kept the portfolio. Gustav Bauer had been a member of the Baden cabinet in charge of the newly formed Labour Ministry, a position he continued to hold through the revolution. Robert Schmidt (minister for Food and Agriculture) and Eduard David, with no portfolio but charged with looking into the question of what responsibility Germany had in bringing about the Great War, completed the SPD members of the cabinet.
Against seven members from the SPD, there were three from the DDP (Hugo Preuß, Georg Gothein and Eugen Schiffer) and three from the Centre Party (Johannes Giesberts, Johannes Bell and Matthias Erzberger). Schiffer had been a member of the National Liberal Party and served as state secretary for the Treasury Department in the Empire, but had joined the DDP after the November revolution. Erzberger had been a member of the Baden cabinet, had negotiated the Armistice in November 1918 and remained in charge of negotiations with the Allies.
In the coalition talks, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau was treated as a member of the DDP, although he did not belong to the party. He was a career diplomat, and in January 1919, Ebert and Scheidemann asked him to take over the Foreign Office.
In addition to these fourteen politicians, there were three members of the military who had an ex officio seat at the cabinet table but no right to vote in its decisions. They were the Prussian minister of war, since early January 1919, Colonel Walther Reinhardt, Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Koeth, who headed the Ministry for Economic Demobilisation (i.e. was in charge of the transition from a war economy to a peacetime economy), and the head of the Navy. Initially, the latter position was held by the acting state secretary for the Navy, who had no official standing in the cabinet at all. After the Imperial Navy Office was dissolved and replaced with the Admiralty in March 1919, Head of the Admiralty Adolf von Trotha became a non-voting member of the cabinet.
Two features of the cabinet are conspicuous: the balance of power between seven SPD members and seven representatives (if Brockdorff-Rantzau is counted as DDP) from the "bourgeois" parties, and the strong continuity in the personnel of government, especially considering the fact that the country had just gone through a revolution. Seven members of the Scheidemann cabinet had been state secretary or undersecretary under the final imperial government of Max von Baden (Scheidemann himself, Schiffer, Bauer, Schmidt, Giesberts, David and Erzberger). Another six had held offices under the Council of the People's Deputies (Brockdorff-Rantzau, Preuß, Wissell, Noske, Landsberg and Koeth). Among the Social Democrats, the moderates or conservative "reformists" predominated. This configuration enabled the government to draw on considerable experience in government and administration, but it underscored the distance between the government and some of the driving forces behind the revolution, notably the unions, the far left and many common workers. The Scheidemann cabinet was nevertheless based on parties representing more than 75% of all voters. No other government of the Weimar Republic would ever have a larger majority in Parliament (the Reichstag).
Members The members of the cabinet (known collectively as the Reich ministry) were as follows:
Legal position and differences with other cabinets of the German Reich The legal position of the Scheidemann cabinet was different from both its predecessors under the Empire and those that followed it. Since it was set up to operate only as a transitional government until the new constitution came into force, it was provisional and improvised in nature. The Law on Provisional Reich Power that established it was quite vague in many respects. The cabinet's role was mentioned only as follows: §2: For bringing government proposals to the National Assembly, the assent of the States Committee, the chamber in which the individual states were represented, was needed. If no consensus could be found between the cabinet and the States Committee, both versions would be submitted. §3: Members of the government had the right to attend sessions of the National Assembly and to speak there at any time. §8: For the purpose of governance, the president was to appoint a governmental ministry which would be in charge of all government agencies, including the Army High Command (OHL). The ministers were required to possess the confidence of the National Assembly. §9: All decrees and executive orders of the president required the counter-signature of a minister. The ministers were accountable to the National Assembly for the conduct of their affairs.
It remained unclear what the consequences would be if a minister lost the confidence of the National Assembly. The most obvious difference between the system under the old Empire and with future cabinets under the Weimar Constitution was that the government was based on the principle of equality between all its members (a collegial cabinet). Since the minister president (equivalent to the chancellor under the Weimar Constitution) was not mentioned in the law, he lacked any special powers and real standing. In fact, he was not much more than a moderator. By contrast, under the old system, all the state secretaries had reported directly to the chancellor. He was the only "minister" and accountable to the emperor and, after the change in the constitution in October 1918, to the Reichstag.
The Transition Act of 4 March 1919 clarified the legal position of the existing body of law and its relation to those laws passed by the National Assembly. It also stipulated that the old imperial constitution was still valid unless it was in contradiction to a newer law. The constitutional position of the Reichstag was taken over by the National Assembly, that of the Bundesrat by the States Committee, the emperor was replaced by the president and the ministry replaced the chancellor. The powers previously vested in the centralised position of the chancellor were distributed to all members of the cabinet, who were independently responsible for their portfolios. This played a crucial role in the quarrels and the lack of cooperation that were to become a defining feature of the Scheidemann cabinet.
Finally, the Decree of the Reich President Concerning the Establishment and Designation of the Supreme Reich Authorities of 21 March 1919 established the various portfolios within the government. It also added a confusing new contradiction by allocating the responsibility for "conducting the affairs of the Reich" to the Reich ministry, whilst the original Transition Act had allocated the task to the president. The decree also mentioned the minister president for the first time.
Internal and external security As the Spartacist uprising in Berlin had amply demonstrated, the domestic security situation in Germany remained highly volatile in early 1919. Shortly after the cabinet took office, what became known as the Berlin March Battles erupted in the capital. In addition to these civil-war-like challenges to the parliamentary government by the leftist workers' councils that wanted to establish a dictatorship of the councils (), there were separatist movements at work in several parts of the country. One of the government's primary tasks thus was to restore law and order and to ensure that the population throughout Germany accepted it as the legitimate authority.
Left-wing uprisings