Parliamentary Row

June 17, 1921. Berlin, Germany. Hunger! For the first time in Germany's parliamentary history, a row occurs in the then one-year-old Reichstag Parliament.

Background

• Fifth Chancellor of the Republic, founded 1918-1919
• Two years into the Versailles order, an unprecedented diktat

As the "League of Versailles" (Swiss wording) in Geneva, having had its first plenary half a year before, is apparently not leading to mitigation of Germany's 1919 ordeal, as some of the executing Allies, e.g. Jan Christiaan Smuts, had hoped, the event symbolises the creeping brutalisation on all levels of society. On the contrary, the 1919 "chèque en blanc", as the left the amount of reparations to be fulfilled by the German republic open, had just been filled out by the Reparations Commission. In May 1921, this commission of the thirty-one remaining signatories (25 Allied Powers plus five British colonies versus Germany) burdened this two-and-a-halve year old democracy with 132 billion gold marks (33 billion dollars).

Two months later, one of Weimar's top politicians would be assassinated by radical nationalists. According to Christopher Dowe, "Versailles" was the murderers' argument.

What if the Armistice Agreement would not have been overturned at the colonised conference of Paris?

A detailed account of the Schlägerei is failing.

Thanks to Philipp Austermann, Cicero Magazine, June 24, 2020.