Philipp Scheidemann
Philipp Heinrich Scheidemann was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In the first quarter of the 20th century he played a leading role in both his party and in the young Weimar Republic. During the German Revolution of 1918–1919 that broke out after Germany's defeat in World War I, Scheidemann proclaimed a German Republic from a balcony of the Reichstag building. In 1919 he was elected Reich Minister President by the National Assembly meeting in Weimar to write a constitution for the republic. He resigned the office the same year due to a lack of unanimity in the cabinet on whether or not to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
Scheidemann continued to be a member of the Reichstag until 1933 and served as mayor of his native city of Kassel from 1920 to 1925. After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, he went into exile because he was considered one of the "November criminals" held to be responsible for Germany's defeat in the war and the collapse of the German Empire. While in exile he wrote extensively about German politics. He died in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1939.
Life
Early years
Philipp Scheidemann was born in Kassel on 26 July 1865, the son of the upholsterer Friedrich Scheidemann and his wife Wilhelmine. He had two sisters.Scheidemann attended elementary and secondary schools between 1871 and 1879. After the death of his father in 1879, the family fell into poverty. Following his school education, he completed an apprenticeship as a typesetter and letterpress printer from 1879 to 1883. Until he was thirty years old he worked in the book printing trade as a typesetter's assistant and then as master typesetter in the printing shop of the Gotthelft brothers in Kassel, which published the Casseler Tageblatt, a local newspaper.
In 1883 Scheidemann joined the SPD, which had been banned under the Anti-Socialist Laws of Otto von Bismarck, and became a member of the Free Trade Union of Book Printers. Between 1888 and 1895 he was an honorary district chairman of the book printers' association in Marburg. There he also continued his education at the University of Marburg. The philosopher Hermann Cohen, who taught there, is said to have made a lasting impression on him.
In 1889 Scheidemann married Johanna Dibbern in Kassel. They had three daughters: Lina, Liese, and Hedwig.
In 1895 he gave up the profession he had learned and became active for various social democratic newspapers. First he worked as an editor for the Mitteldeutsche Sonntagszeitung in Giessen, from 1900 for the Fränkische Tagespost in Nuremberg, from 1902 for the Offenbacher Abendblatt and finally from 1905 for the Casseler Volksblatt in his home town. In addition to political articles, Scheidemann wrote "Dialect Stories" every Sunday from 1909 under the pseudonym Henner Piffendeckel. He also published several books in the Kassel dialect.
Rise in the party and the Reichstag
In the 1903 Reichstag elections, Scheidemann entered the Reichstag of the German Empire for the constituency Düsseldorf 3, the city and district of Solingen. He was reelected in January 1907 and January 1912. From 1906 to 1911 he also held a seat as a city councilor in his home town of Kassel. When in 1911 he was elected to the SPD's executive committee, of which he remained a member until 1918, he resigned his municipal mandate because the election required that he move to Berlin. After the death in 1913 of August Bebel, the long-time leader of the SPD, Scheidemann took over the chairmanship of the SPD parliamentary group together with Hugo Haase. He held the position until 1918. In 1912 Scheidemann became the first Social Democrat to be elected one of the vice presidents of the Reichstag, but since he refused to make the inaugural visit to the emperor – the "going to court" that the party had always frowned on – he was unable to take office. It was not until June to October 1918 that he actually held the office.Unlike Friedrich Ebert, who became party co-chairman with Hugo Haase in 1913, Scheidemann had rhetorical talent. He could speak convincingly before mass meetings as well as small audiences. Wilhelm Keil, a friend and party comrade of both men, described Ebert as "always serious, dignified and energetic", while Scheidemann was a "brilliant rhetorician with somewhat boisterous manners... which at times allowed doubts to arise as to what percentage of his seemingly holy fire was to be ascribed to theatricality". Scheidemann's down-to-earth manners, his sense of humor and unshakeable cheerfulness earned him recognition outside the party.
His political style was on the pragmatic side. Whenever he could he avoided conflicts in which he saw little hope of resolution. He championed a cause only when it seemed possible that he would be successful in it. Before World War I he was a regular speaker on budgetary and army issues and regarded as a representative of the party's center. When he directed sharp attacks against the imperial Hohenzollern family in the Reichstag in 1912, Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and the members of the Bundesrat who were present left the hall in protest. On several occasions Scheidemann represented German social democracy at congresses abroad. Publicity trips took him to France, Switzerland, and the United States.
A speech given by Scheidemann in Paris in 1912 caused a great public stir and was published in Germany in a distorted form to defame him specifically and the Social Democrats in general as "traitors to the fatherland". In a Reichstag debate on 3 December 1912, Scheidemann's party colleague Eduard David felt compelled to reproduce the true wording of Scheidemann's disputed statements:
"Against those who try to push us down into the bestiality of a European war, we will defend ourselves with the courage of despair. The German workers and socialists also respect and love the French proletarians and socialists like brothers.... Our enemy is... in another place. It is where yours also is. That is capitalism. Let us wage the struggle together, comrades, for the progress of humanity, for the freedom of labor, for world peace."
World War I
During World War I Scheidemann represented a middle line between the right and left wings of the SPD. In principle he supported the approval of war credits, but he opposed a victorious peace and advocated a negotiated peace without annexations. His statement "What is French shall remain French, what is Belgian shall remain Belgian, what is German shall remain German" was called high treason in militarist-nationalist circles. Representatives of the German Fatherland Party in particular declared that they wanted to "hang" Scheidemann.In January 1915 Scheidemann expressed his anger at elements in the SPD who could not bear to hear the word "fatherland". His statement was preceded by Karl Liebknecht's breach of party discipline when in December 1914 he voted against a war loan bill. Hugo Haase defended Liebknecht at the time, and he received numerous expressions of sympathy from within the SPD. The idea of a negotiated peace, however, could no longer prevent a split within the SPD on the issue of continued funding for the war. In April 1917 the party's antiwar left wing formed the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, while the SPD itself was renamed the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany. In Scheidemann's constituency of Solingen, the SPD organization joined the USPD and called on Scheidemann – without success – to resign his Reichstag seat. From October 1917, with the Würzburg Party Congress, Scheidemann was MSPD party chairman alongside Friedrich Ebert.
In view of the worsening social hardships of the working class caused by the war, the SPD had been pressing since the beginning of 1917 to fulfill its promise of a political reorganization of Germany. Negotiations began between Scheidemann, Conrad Haussmann of the center-left German Democratic Party and Gustav Stresemann of the National Liberal Party to form a left-wing parliamentary majority with the goal of giving the Reich a true parliamentary form of government with ministers responsible to it rather than the emperor. Scheidemann accommodated the bourgeois parties to the point of saying that he believed he could if necessary envision a parliamentary system with a monarch at its head. One result of the negotiations was the passage of the Reichstag Peace Resolution of 19 July 1917 by 212 votes to 126. It called for peace negotiations without demands for annexations.
To prevent radicalization at home, Scheidemann, Friedrich Ebert and Otto Braun joined the leadership of the January strikes of 1918 in which over a million workers demanded better living and working conditions, an end to the war and a democratization of the constitution. Their action earned the three men the hatred of the political right.
As parliamentary group chairman and leading figure of his party in the inter-party committee, Scheidemann played a significant role in ousting the government of Reich Chancellor Georg von Hertling in September 1918. Scheidemann and Ebert, however, had differing opinions about how to proceed. When politicians from the Progressive People's Party brought Prince Maximilian von Baden into the discussion as Reich chancellor, Scheidemann said that the Social Democrats could not be expected to put a prince at the head of the government. On 3 October 1918, "at the moment when the circumstances were the worst possible", Scheidemann opposed Social Democratic participation in the government. Friedrich Ebert finally persuaded the majority of the parliamentary group to agree to the MSPD's entry into von Baden's cabinet. It was the first time members of the SPD had served in the imperial government, although since 1912 the party had had the most seats in the Reichstag of any party.
Despite his reservations, Scheidemann and other leading politicians in the parliamentary majority became state secretaries without portfolio in the von Baden cabinet. Scheidemann was chosen for the position instead of Friedrich Ebert due to his greater popularity. The ministers were the true political decision-makers; Max von Baden was primarily representative to the outside world. Scheidemann as a member of the government initiated an amnesty for political prisoners. In particular, he personally pushed through the release of Karl Liebknecht in the face of opposition from the War Ministry and military courts, as well as objections from the Reich chancellor.