Background
Friedrich Ebert was born in Heidelberg on February 4,1871, the son of a Catholic tailor.
political leader president of state
Friedrich Ebert was born in Heidelberg on February 4,1871, the son of a Catholic tailor.
Although he wanted to attend university, this proved impossible due to the lack of funds of his family. Instead, he trained as a saddle-maker from 1885 to 1888.
Ebert learned the saddler's trade and in 1891 settled in Bremen; two years later he became an innkeeper as well as editor of a Social Democratic (SPD) newspaper. By the turn of the century, Ebert had entered the Bremen city assembly and become deeply embroiled in party politics in the Hanse city. No Marxist theoretician, he worked his way up in the bureaucracy and in 1905 moved to Berlin as party secretary. In 1912 Ebert entered the Reichstag and as early as September 1913 was elected successor to the venerable August Bebel. Throughout his career Ebert had shunned the radicalism of the party's left wing and had sought close ties to the trade union movement. He basically endorsed the Bismarckian state and repudiated the notion that the general strike was the workers' most potent weapon in the struggle against autocratic regime and capitalist industry.
The Great War only strengthened Ebert's patriotism. During the July crisis in 1914 he had been on holidays, and along with Otto Braun took the party's treasury to Zurich early in August for fear that the government might proscribe the SPD in time of national emergency. When this fear proved groundless, Ebert returned to Berlin on August 6 two days after the SPD had unanimously voted for war credits. Ebert shared the chairmanship of the party with Hugo Haase but left its tactics in the hands of the energetic Philipp Scheidemann. His position within the SPD was enhanced in December 1915 when Haase resigned as cochairman owing to the SPD's continued support of the war; Ebert, for his part, stressed that the SPD present a united front in the Reichstag, but this Lassallean tack failed in March 1916 when Haase and others voted against war credits. At Easter 1917 the Haaseled minority at Gotha convened a new party, the Independent Social Democrats (USPD).
Ebert spoke out against annexations and indemnities, but he staunchly defended the territorial integrity of the Reich, including Alsace-Lorraine, as well as the duty of every German to defend it; two of his sons died in the Great War. Deprived of the sup-port of the USPD, Ebert moved closer to an alliance with the Progressives and the Center, forming in the process the so-called parliamentary majority bent on reform of the outdated Prussian three-class suffrage. In July 1917, he was instrumental in formulating the Reichstag's "peace resolution," which called for an end to the war on the basis of the status quo ante helium. But when Chancellor Georg Michaelis refused to implement it and instead singled out the USPD for attack on the issue of the fleet rebellion, Ebert on October 9 led the successful assault against the former Prussian bureaucrat. Early in 1918 Ebert opposed the projected strikes in munitions plants,
but when overruled by party radicals, he bowed to the will of the majority and placed himself at the head of the strike movement.
In October 1918, Ebert persuaded his colleagues to participate in the government of Prince Max von Baden, and on November 9 the South German handed Ebert the reins of power after the kaiser's abdication and flight to Holland. After half a century in opposition, the erstwhile Reichsfeinde assumed command of the Bismarckian state. Unfortunately, Ebert was unprepared to meet the challenge. He was appalled when Scheidemann on November 9 proclaimed a republic and instead quickly reached a verbal understanding with General Wilhelm Groener to undertake no major reform of the Prussian/German military system, lamely arguing that the time was not ripe for revolution.
On November 10, 1918, Ebert and Haase cochaired the Council of People's Commissars in Berlin; in mid-December Ebert was presented by the First German Congress of Soldiers' and Workers' Councils with a clear mandate to call a constituent national assembly, to reform the officer corps, and to nationalize major industries. Ebert chose to ignore the latter two decisions. Moreover, late in 1918 and early in 1919 he empowered Gustav Noske to hurl regular army units against rebellious sailors and workers in Berlin; Haase quit the council over this brutal suppression of the revolution.
Friedrich Ebert was elected first president of the republic in Weimar on February 11, 1919; the Reichstag, in October 1922, extended his term to June 1925. Ebert served in this capacity with dignity and honor. In March 1920, he maintained order and calm during the reactionary Kapp Putsch, repeating this in the fall of 1923 as Communist revolts rocked Saxony and Thuringia, the French invaded the Ruhr, and the National Socialists attempted a coup in Munich. Ebert did not shy away from using Article 48 to declare a state of national emergency. His refusal to reform the officer corps in November 1918, however, returned to haunt him: General Hans von Seeckt placed himself and the army above the state and refused, as during the Kapp affair, to move against right-wing rebels. In 1924 reactionary fanatics inflicted upon the president of the republic a formal trial at Magdeburg for his participation in the munitions strikes early in 1918; although Ebert won a formal acquittal, the audacity of the legal pro-ceedings deeply shook him and tarnished the reputation of his office. Ebert died in Berlin on February 28, 1925, as a result of an appendix operation.
Ebert obviously was not destined to become the Lenin of the German revolution. A party bureaucrat without intellectual ambitions, he had steered a middle course between Marxism and revisionism, between the trade union movement and party radicals. The events of August 1914 revealed him as a nationalist, of November 1918 as a constitutional monarchist; in the former crisis he feared the spread of tsarism, in the latter the dictatorship of the proletariat. His fateful pact with Groener and the resulting failure to enact his party's reform platform of December 1918 weighed heavily upon future developments in Germany. His eldest living son after the Second World War became a leading figure in the Communist state in East Germany.