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German politician (1878–1929)

Gustav Ernst Stresemann (; 10 May 1878 – 3 October 1929) was a German statesman who served as chancellor of Germany from August to November 1923, and as foreign minister from 1923 to 1929. His most notable achievement was the reconciliation between Germany and France, for which he and French Prime Minister Aristide Briand received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926. During a period of political instability and fragile, short lived governments, Stresemann was the most influential politician in most of the Weimar Republic's existence. Stresemann attended the University of Berlin and Leipzig University, where he studied political economy, history and international law and developed his vision of liberalism and nationalism, a combination of views that would define his political career. After obtaining his doctorate, Stresemann worked in trade associations before entering politics. In 1907, he was elected to the Reichstag as a deputy for the National Liberal Party. He lost his seat in 1912 but was reelected two years later. During the First World War, he was a vocal advocate for German militarism and expansionism. Exempted from war service due to poor health, he gradually became the National Liberals' de facto leader, before formally taking over the party in 1917. Germany's defeat and the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy came as a significant shock to Stresemann, forcing him to gradually reassess his previous positions. He founded the German People's Party (DVP) and, despite his own monarchist beliefs, came to grudgingly accept Weimar democracy and became open to working with the centre and the left. In August 1923, Stresemann was named chancellor and foreign minister of a grand coalition government. During his brief chancellorship, he abandoned the policy of passive resistance against the French Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, and introduced the Rentenmark in a (relatively successful) attempt to tame hyperinflation in the country. In November, Stresemann's reshuffled government collapsed after the Social Democratics withdrew from the coalition. He resigned as chancellor following a vote of no confidence, but remained as foreign minister in the new government led by Wilhelm Marx. His first major diplomatic success was the 1924 Dawes Plan, which reduced Germany's overall reparations commitment. It was followed by the Locarno Treaties in 1925, which confirmed Germany's postwar western borders, guaranteed peace with France, and provided for Germany's admission to the League of Nations a year later. Stresemann also moved to improve relations with the Soviet Union through the 1926 Treaty of Berlin. In 1928, he oversaw Germany's participation in the Kellogg–Briand Pact, in which signatory states promised not to use war to resolve international conflicts. Amid failing health, Stresemann successfully negotiated the Young Plan which sought to further reduce German reparations payments. He died in October 1929 after a series of strokes at the age of 51.

Stresemann was born on 10 May 1878 in 66 Köpenicker Straße in Southeast Berlin, the youngest of seven children. His father worked as a beer bottler and distributor, and also ran a small bar out of the family home, as well as renting rooms for extra money. The family was lower middle class, but relatively well off for the neighbourhood, and had sufficient funds to provide Gustav with a high quality education. Stresemann was an excellent student, particularly excelling in German literature and poetry. At the age of 16, he joined the Andreas Gymnasium to study. His parents brought him up to have an interest in books — he was especially passionate about history, with his teacher, Mr. Wolff, commenting that he had an "almost sickly taste in history." He took an interest in Napoleon and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom he later wrote about in his work 1924: Goethe und Napoleon: ein Vortrag. His mother, Mathilde, died in 1895. From December 1895, he wrote "Berlin letters" for the Dresdener Volks Zeitung, often talking about politics and targeting Prussian conservatives. In an essay written when he left school, he noted that he would have enjoyed becoming a teacher, but he would only have been qualified to teach languages or the natural sciences, which were not his primary areas of interest. Due to this, he enrolled in university. In April 1897, Stresemann enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he was convinced by a businessman to study political economy instead of literature. During his university years, Stresemann also became active in the Burschenschaften movement of student fraternities, and became editor, in April 1898, of the Allgemeine Deutsche Universitäts Zeitung, a newspaper run by Konrad Kuster, a leader in the liberal portion of the Burschenschaften. His editorials for the paper were often political, and dismissed most of the contemporary political parties as broken in one way or another. In these early writings, he set out views that combined liberalism with strident nationalism, a combination that would dominate his views for the rest of his life. In 1898, Stresemann left the University of Berlin, transferring to the University of Leipzig so that he could pursue a doctorate. In Leipzig, he stayed in the Gottschedstrasse. He studied history and international Law, and took literature courses. Influenced by Martin Kriele, he also took courses in economics. In March 1899, he stopped being an editor for the Allgemeine Deutsche Universitäts Zeitung. He completed his studies in January 1901, submitting a thesis on the bottled beer industry in Berlin, which received a relatively high grade, but was a subject of mockery from colleagues. Stresemann's doctoral supervisor was the economist Karl Bücher. In 1902, Stresemann founded the Saxon Manufacturers' Association. In 1903 he married Käte Kleefeld (1883–1970), daughter of a wealthy Jewish Berlin businessman, and the sister of Kurt von Kleefeld, the last person in Germany to be ennobled (in 1918). At that time he was also a member of Friedrich Naumann's National Social Association. In 1906 he was elected to the Dresden town council. Though he had initially worked in trade associations, Stresemann soon became a leader of the National Liberal Party in Saxony. In 1907, he was elected to the Reichstag, where he soon became a close associate of party chairman Ernst Bassermann. However, his support of expanded social welfare programs did not sit well with some of the party's more conservative members, and he lost his post in the party's executive committee in 1912. Later that year he lost both his Reichstag and town council seats. He returned to business and founded the German American Economic Association. In 1914 he returned to the Reichstag. He was exempted from war service due to poor health. With Bassermann kept away from the Reichstag by either illness or military service, Stresemann soon became the National Liberals' de facto leader. After Bassermann's death in 1917, Stresemann succeeded him as the party leader.

The evolution of his political ideas appears somewhat erratic. Initially, in the German Empire, Stresemann was associated with the left wing of the National Liberals. He initially believed in the maintenance of a balance of power between the British Empire, the United States, and Germany, whom he believed would be the world's economic superpowers in the future. Yet he also supported the Anglo German naval arms race, believing that the expansion of the Imperial German Navy was necessary to protect German international trade. During World War I, he gradually moved to the right, expressing his support of the Hohenzollern monarchy and Germany's expansionist goals. He believed that Germany would need to annex the Low Countries, Eastern Europe, parts of north east France, and the French protectorate in Morocco in order to economically compete with the United States in the future. He was a vocal proponent of unrestricted submarine warfare. The collapse of the German Empire after its defeat in World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 drove Stresemann into a mental and physical breakdown, which shocked him into totally abandoning his earlier militarism and annexationism. On 26 September 1923, Stresemann announced the end to the passive resistance against the Occupation of the Ruhr by the French and Belgians, in tandem with an Article 48 (of the Weimar Constitution) state of emergency proclamation by President Friedrich Ebert that lasted until February 1924. In October 1923, when the Communist Party of Germany entered the Social Democratic led governments of Saxony and Thuringia with hidden revolutionary intentions, Stresemann used a Reichsexekution to send troops into the two states to remove the Communists from the governments. By this time, Stresemann was convinced that accepting the republic and reaching an understanding with the Allies on the reparations issue was the only way for Germany to gain the breathing room it needed to rebuild its battered economy. He also wished to recover the Allied occupied Rhineland, as he wrote to Wilhelm, the former German Crown Prince on 23 July 1923: "The most important objective of German politics is the liberation of German territory from French and Belgian occupation. First, we must remove the strangler from our throat". Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic reached its peak in November 1923. Since Germany was no longer able to pay the striking workers, more and more money was printed, which finally led to hyperinflation. Stresemann introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, to end hyperinflation. He also persuaded the French to pull back from the Ruhr in return for a promise that reparations payments would resume. That was part of his larger strategy of "fulfillment". Although he, like nearly every other German politician, cursed the Treaty of Versailles as a Diktat, he had come to believe that Germany would never win relief from its terms unless it made a good faith effort to fulfill them. To his mind, this would convince the Allies that the reparations bill was truly beyond Germany's capacity. The effort paid off; the Allies began to take a look at reforming the reparations scheme. In early November 1923, partly because of the reaction to the overthrowing of the SPD/KPD governments in Saxony and Thuringia, the Social Democrats withdrew from his reshuffled government and, after a motion of confidence, he was voted down on 23 November 1923, after which Stresemann and his cabinet resigned.

Stresemann remained as foreign minister in the government of his successor, Wilhelm Marx from the Centre Party. He remained foreign minister for the rest of his life in eight successive governments ranging from the centre right to the centre left. As foreign minister, Stresemann had numerous achievements. His first notable achievement was the Dawes Plan of 1924, which reduced Germany's overall reparations commitment and reorganized the Reichsbank. With president Friedrich Ebert, he secured the appointment of Hjalmar Schacht as the new president of the Reichsbank. Schacht implemented the Dawes Plan and managed the successful effort to end Weimar hyperinflation, despite his reservations about Germany's growing foreign debt under Stresemann's economic policies. was guaranteed peace with France, and was promised admission to the League of Nations and evacuation of the last Allied occupation troops from the Rhineland. Stresemann was not willing to conclude a similar treaty with the Second Polish Republic: "There will be no Locarno of the east" he said in 1925. However, in 1925 he did sign arbitration agreements with both Poland and the First Czechoslovak Republic to ensure that any future conflict would be settled by impartial arbitration, rather than by the use of force. By 1929 his policy was “detente with Poland,” and strengthening good economic relationships. After this reconciliation with the Versailles powers, Stresemann moved to improve relations with the Soviet Union. He said to Nikolay Krestinsky in June 1925, as recorded in his diary: "I had said I would not come to conclude a treaty with Russia so long as our political situation in the other direction was not cleared up, as I wanted to answer the question whether we had a treaty with Russia in the negative". The Treaty of Berlin signed in April 1926 reaffirmed and strengthened the Treaty of Rapallo signed in 1922. In September 1926, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations as permanent member of the Security Council. This was a sign that Germany was quickly becoming a normal state, and assured the Soviet Union of Germany's sincerity in the Treaty of Berlin. Stresemann was co winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926 for these achievements. Gustav Stresemann's success owed much to his friendly personal character and his willingness to be pragmatic. He was close personal friends with many influential foreigners. The most noted was Briand, with whom he shared the Peace Prize. Stresemann wrote to the Crown Prince: "All the questions which to day preoccupy the German people can be transformed into as many vexations for the Entente by a skilful orator before the League of Nations". As Germany now had a veto on League resolutions, she could gain concessions from other countries on modifications on the Polish border or Anschluss with Austria, as other countries needed her vote. Germany could now act as "the spokesman of the whole German cultural community" and thereby provoke the German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Germany signed the Kellogg Briand Pact in August 1928. It renounced the use of violence to resolve international conflicts. Although Stresemann did not propose the pact, Germany's adherence convinced many people that Weimar Germany was a Germany that could be reasoned with. This new insight was instrumental in the Young Plan of February 1929, which led to more reductions in German reparations payment. Stresemann was not, however, in any sense pro French. His main preoccupation was to free Germany from the burden of reparations payments to France, imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. His strategy for this was to forge close economic ties with the United States. The U. S. was Germany's main source of capital and raw materials, and one of Germany's largest export markets for manufactured goods. Germany's economic recovery was thus in the interests of the U. S., and gave the U. S. an incentive to help Germany resolve the reparations burden. The Dawes and Young plans were the result of this strategy. New York bankers loaned large sums to Germany, which used the dollars to pay reparations to France and Britain, which in turn paid their war loans they owed to Washington. Stresemann also hoped to use the United States' new financial involvement in the German economy to incentivize the nation's financial and political institutions to support reform of reparations. This paid off in 1928 when Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Strong supported the development of the Young Plan. In the same year, while Poland was in a state of political and economic crisis, Stresemann began a trade war against the country. Stresemann hoped for an escalation of the Polish crisis, which would enable Germany to regain territories ceded to Poland after World War I, and he wanted Germany to gain a larger market for its products there. So Stresemann refused to engage in any international cooperation that would have "prematurely" restabilized the Polish economy. In response to a British proposal, Stresemann wrote to the German ambassador in London: "[A] final and lasting recapitalization of Poland must be delayed until the country is ripe for a settlement of the border according to our wishes and until our own position is sufficiently strong". According to Stresemann's letter, there should be no settlement "until [Poland's] economic and financial distress has reached an extreme stage and reduced the entire Polish body politic to a state of powerlessness". Stresemann hoped to annex Polish territories in Greater Poland, take over whole eastern Upper Silesia and parts of Central Silesia and the entire so called Polish Corridor. Besides waging economic war on Poland, Streseman funded extensive propaganda efforts and plotted to collaborate with the Soviet Union against Polish statehood. According to historian Gordon Craig: No German statesman since Bismarck's time had demonstrated, as brilliantly as he was to do, the ability to sense danger and to avoid it by seizing and retaining the initiative, the gift of maintaining perspective and a sense of relative values in the midst of a changing diplomatic situation, and the talent for being more stubborn than his partners in negotiation and for refusing to allow their importunities to force him to accept second best solutions.

In 1928, Stresemann's poor health worsened after the mainstream national conservative parties lost seats to the SPD in the 1928 German federal election. He successfully negotiated a Grand Coalition government led by Chancellor Hermann Müller in which he remained Foreign Secretary, but was weakened in doing so. Stresemann's Atlanticist foreign policy also began to show fractures after the Young Plan failed to reduce reparations annuities as far as hoped and refused to establish a linkage between Allied war debts to the United States and German reparations payments. He seemed to win a victory when his friend Hoover won the 1928 United States presidential election, but Hoover's administration enacted a protectionist trade policy to assist U. S. agriculture and signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act. The new trade barriers lessened U. S. credit to Germany.

Stresemann popularized the style of substituting a short dark lounge suit jacket for a morning coat but otherwise wearing morning dress for men's day wear. The look became so identified with Stresemann that such outfits are often called "Stresemanns."