Was the weimer republic doomed from the start?.
3 months after the First World War ended, 30 million Germans voted in 3 parties.
The social democrats, the centre party and the democrats, they met in Weimar, south Germany, because of the fighting in Berlin, and their first action was to elect Friedrich Ebert as President of Germany. .
The Weimar republic had good points and bad points, some of the good points were that the public was allowed to vote, a right that did not exist before, another was they had freedom of speech. I believe that because of these good points the Weimar republic was not doomed from the start.
The new parliament meant that Germany had a lot more say in how Germany was run, there were two parliaments the Reichsrat, and the Reichstag.
The Reichstag was the bigger of the two and was elected directly by all people.
The new president, Ebert made many changes he gave the right to vote to all Germans over twenty. He made plans for big companies to be nationalized and introduced welfare benefits for workers, e.g. a new eight hour day and unemployment benefits.
As the war had ended not long ago, most Germans were living in poor conditions and there were big shortages of food; people were living on as little as 1000 calories a day, which was starvation level. Ebert made plans to bring in more food and improve conditions.
But things did not go to plan, because As Germany had surrendered to the allies of Britain, France and the USA, it was up to them as to what Germany had to do in terms of reparations. The allies made them sign the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty made Germany admit it was their fault for the war, which made Germany feel a lot of resent.
They were ordered to pay 132million gold marks and tens of thousands of square miles of land were taken away from them, This caused economic problems, as Germany could not afford to pay these fines in the short time that the allies gave them.