German Democratic Party

A week after the revolution, on 16 November 1918, the Berliner Tageblatt printed an appeal for a “great democratic party” written by its editor Theodor Wolff and signed by sixty notables, Einstein among them. Four days later the Progressive People’s Party and the left wing of the National Liberals joined it, founding the party with Max Weber, Alfred Weber, Hugo Preuss and others. No party identified more fully with parliamentary democracy: Preuss, the drafter of the constitution, and Friedrich Naumann, its first chairman, were among the architects of the Weimar constitution. It stood for a federal unitary state, the League of Nations and a balance between labour and capital through cooperation with the SPD, accepting private enterprise while demanding room for state intervention. From the Weimar Coalition of 1919 it took part in every Reich government until 1932, but its vote fell from 18.5 per cent in the National Assembly election of 1919 to 8.3 per cent in 1920 and kept shrinking. In the Reichstag penal code committee in 1929 it voted with the KPD and SPD to drop the punishment of homosexuality between adult men. When it merged in 1930 with a group tied to the antisemitic Young German Order and renamed itself the German State Party, its left wing, including Ludwig Quidde, left to found the Radical Democratic Party, and others went over to the SPD. It was dissolved on 28 June 1933.