Quick questions on The Weimar Republic 1918-1924: HSC Modern History National Study

The German Spring Offensives (March to July 1918) failed; the Allied counter-offensives broke the Hindenburg Line. On 29 September 1918 the German High Command (Ludendorff, Hindenburg) advised the Kaiser to seek an armistice and to install a parliamentary government, partly to shift the blame for defeat onto the civilian parties. Prince Max von Baden became Chancellor on 3 October 1918.

On the night of 10 November 1918, Ebert agreed by telephone with General Wilhelm Groener that the army would support the new government in return for the government's protection of the officer corps and suppression of revolutionary forces. This Ebert-Groener Pact bound the new Republic to the old elites.

Elections to the National Assembly took place on 19 January 1919. Women voted nationally for the first time. The SPD took 38 per cent, the Catholic Centre 20 per cent, and the liberal DDP 19 per cent. The Assembly met in Weimar (Berlin being unsafe) and produced the Weimar Constitution (signed 11 August 1919).

Germany signed the Treaty under duress on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors. Key clauses: - Article 231 assigned sole German responsibility for the war ("war guilt"). - Reparations were fixed at 132 billion gold marks (London Schedule, 5 May 1921). - Germany lost 13 per cent of its pre-war territory (Alsace-Lorraine, Upper Silesia, the Polish Corridor, Eupen-Malmedy, North Schleswig) and all overseas colonies.

The Kapp Putsch (13 to 17 March 1920) saw Freikorps units under Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Luttwitz briefly seize Berlin. The army, under General Hans von Seeckt, declined to fire on fellow soldiers. A Berlin general strike defeated the putsch within four days; the Republic was saved by the workers, not by the army.

Germany defaulted on reparations deliveries in late 1922. France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr on 11 January 1923. The German government called passive resistance: workers struck and the state paid their wages by printing money. The mark collapsed.

Detlev Peukert (The Weimar Republic, 1987) treats Weimar as a "crisis of classical modernity," in which the structural pressures of mass industrial society overwhelmed the new democratic institutions.

It was not. The Republic stabilised after 1923 and entered the Stresemann era. Doom in 1933 was contingent on the Depression.

Spartacist (January 1919) was a left rising crushed by the Freikorps. Kapp (March 1920) was a right putsch defeated by a general strike.

Peak was November 1923, not 1924. Stabilisation came with the Rentenmark on 15 November 1923.

It is November 1923, the climax of the crisis year, not a separate later episode.