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The Social Democratic-led government called elections on 19 January 1919 for a National Assembly that would give Germany a new constitution. On 11 August 1919, the democratic Weimar Constitution was promulgated. It provided for a Reich president whose powers were similar to those of the former emperor as limited by the October constitutional ...
On 28 October, the Reichstag passed constitutional reforms that changed Germany into a parliamentary monarchy. The chancellor and his ministers were made dependent on the confidence of the parliamentary majority rather than the emperor, and peace treaties and declarations of war required the Reichstag's approval. [ 36 ]
The term "constitution" (Verfassung) was avoided as the drafters regarded the Grundgesetz as an interim arrangement for a provisional West German state, expecting that an eventual reunified Germany would adopt a proper constitution, enacted under the provisions of Article 146 of the Basic Law, which stipulates that such a constitution must be ...
The Weimar Republic, [d] officially known as the German Reich, [e] was a historical period of Germany from 9 November 1918 to 23 March 1933, during which it was a constitutional republic for the first time in history; hence it is also referred to, and unofficially proclaimed itself, as the German Republic.
The leadership of the MSPD had seen its long-standing demands for a democratization of the Reich addressed by the October 1918 constitutional reforms. [2] The amendment to Constitution of the German Empire turned the German Reich into a parliamentary monarchy in which the government was no longer answerable to the emperor but to the majority in the Reichstag.
The leadership of the largest party in the Reichstag, the Majority Social Democrats (MSPD), and especially its chairman Friedrich Ebert, saw the party's main goal as already having been achieved by the constitutional reforms and believed that the Empire's elites would come to terms with democratisation if Germany remained a monarchy. [4]
Germany's dominance in physics and chemistry was such that one-third of all Nobel Prizes went to German inventors and researchers. The German cartel system (known as Konzerne), being significantly concentrated, was able to make more efficient use of capital. Germany was not weighted down with an expensive worldwide empire that needed defense.
The Prussian Reform Movement was a series of constitutional, administrative, social, and economic reforms early in 19th-century Prussia. They are sometimes known as the Stein–Hardenberg Reforms , for Karl Freiherr vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg , their main initiators.