The Stresemann Memoirs Scandal 1932
Gustav Stresemann served as German Foreign Minister from August 1923 until his death
from a stroke in October 1929. Coalition governments came and went, but Stresemann stayed
and came to personify German foreign policy. He was a committed Liberal parliamentarian
and from 1925 worked with his French counterpart, Aristide Briand, to secure FrancoGerman reconciliation and ‘liquidate’ the poisonous legacy of the Great War. His recent
English biographer, Jonathan Wright, dubbed him ‘Weimar’s greatest statesman’ and this
positive assessment is shared by his Alsatian-French biographer, Christian Baechler, who
traces Stresemann’s road from wartime annexationist to advocate of collective security.
It has not always been so. During the decades following 1945 historians debated
Stresemann’s ultimate motives. Was he really a great European who, at the very least,
perceived national interests and European harmony as contingent? Or was he simply a
German nationalist, seeking to restore by stealth Germany’s pre-eminent position on the
European continent? His detractors argue that since Germany had been disarmed by the
Versailles Treaty, he was forced to use the language of reconciliation as a smokescreen
behind which to pursue traditional German great power ambitions. Eminent authorities, such
as the late Fritz Fischer, perceived an essential continuity in the character of German foreign
policy from the days of Kaiser Wilhelm II, through Weimar, and into Hitler’s Third Reich.
Stresemann is left devious and duplicitous, with his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize for
international reconciliation, alongside Briand and the British Foreign Minister Austen
Chamberlain, deeply ironic and ultimately undeserved.
We don’t have time here to examine this historiographical debate in any depth, but during the
later 1920s and early 1930s French political and media opinion became similarly polarised
over the essence and then the legacy of Stresemann’s diplomacy. The French political right
suspected him of duplicity from the outset. He and his colleagues, the right alleged, were
prepared to use peaceful diplomacy, but only as a means of restoring Germany’s great power
status. France, the argument continued, was prepared to explore each and every avenue in
order to secure peace as an end and as the veteran diplomat Jacques Seydoux remarked, ‘an
abyss separated the two conceptions.’ However, the French left – Socialists and RadicalSocialists – were far keener to give the Weimar Republic a fair break and forgive it the sins
of its monarchist fathers. They regarded the close working relationship between Stresemann
and Briand as confirmation of their hopes and proof of the German Republic’s bona fides.
The October 1925 Locarno Agreement, which secured the existing borders in Western
Europe and set in place an even-handed mechanism for the arbitration of any future disputes,
was seen as the definitive step along the road to Franco-German detente.
Shortly before his death Stresemann negotiated a new and more favourable reparations deal
for Germany – the Young Plan – and secured the early military evacuation by the Allies of
the southern Rhineland. Following his death, Stresemann’s fellow Liberal and personal
friend, Julius Curtius, became Foreign Minister but, it is generally agreed, he was either
unable or unwilling to sustain the process of Franco-German rapprochement. The German
official response to the early evacuation of the Rhineland by the French army lacked good
grace. His efforts to create an Austro-German customs union alarmed French opinion, for
Paris perceived this as a first step towards a full political union and the creation of a Germany
of almost 70 million inhabitants. Although Berlin agreed to submit the proposal to
international arbitration which in 1931 saw the scheme blocked, Franco-German relations
cooled perceptibly. Continued German pressure to scale down or abolish reparations, achieve
military parity with the major Allied powers and secure an immediate return of the Saarland
did nothing to lighten the mood in France.
However, Briand remained French Foreign Minister and in spite of these setbacks was still
committed to Franco-German rapprochement. His personal authority was almost unassailable
and he continued to portray his partnership with the late Stresemann as the bedrock of a
Franco-German detente which, he believed, remained salvageable. Furthermore it offered a
practical route towards his dream of a united Europe, to be realised through the good offices
of the League of Nations but organised around a Franco-German axis. Thus after Briand
submitted his proposals to the League in mid-1931 the ensuing general meetings of the
relevant League sub-committee were often preceded by private Franco-German consultations.
That said the domestic political landscape in France remained challenging at a time when
Briand’s health was failing visibly. He served in a Centre-Right government whose members
and backbenchers doubted the wisdom of this rapprochement policy. And although the leftist
opposition parties in parliament were generally supportive of his policy, they detested the
government of which he was part, leaving Briand struggling, time and again, to assemble a
parliamentary majority for his German initiatives.
Matters improved during the spring of 1931 when Pierre Laval became Prime Minister.
Originally a Socialist, Laval had moved towards the political centre, but his longstanding
support for Franco-German reconciliation remained undiminished. Following a successful
German ministerial visit to Chequers, he and Briand were anxious to arrange a comparable
Franco-German event. Berlin was equally keen to mend its fences with Paris and it was
agreed that the German Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, and Foreign Minister Curtius should
visit the French capital on a state visit during July. They were warmly received by the
political community and, since public opinion also responded positively, it was agreed to
reciprocate the German visit to Paris with a French state visit to Berlin. In late September
1931 Laval and Briand duly arrived in the German capital to an enthusiastic public and
official welcome; the Communist and Nazi paramilitary street brawlers who could have
wrecked the dignity of the occasion were notable by their absence.
These inter-ministerial visits sought to improve bilateral relations through the simple fact of
having occurred at all, but both sides also wished to lend fresh substance to the process of
Franco-German detente. The European question provided an opening. Briand’s 1931 scheme
for a European Union had originally focused on security issues, but the British proved
sceptical and many other European governments equivocated. Delegated to a League of
Nations sub-committee, Briand’s proposals looked destined for the long grass. The Germans,
whilst supportive in general terms, believed that an initial focus on economic and trade
agreements would prove less controversial and might, if successful, allow political initiatives
to follow later. French officialdom came around to the same way of thinking and both sides
agreed that a Franco-German customs union and structured economic integration could
provide the launching pad for Europe-wide arrangements. And although relatively little of
substance was discussed in Paris during July, the September meeting in Berlin saw tangible
progress. Franco-German joint commissions were set up to regulate private industrial cartels
(including coal and steel), integrate trade, promote cultural links and, finally, facilitate
political collaboration. Cabinet ministers and senior civil servants joined prominent
businessmen and other grandees on these committees, whilst the respective Embassies in
each capital were staffed at the most senior level by diplomats committed to the
rapprochement project. At the end of the day it was hoped to marry Germany’s heavyindustrial and manufacturing capacity with France’s need for new markets for its agricultural
produce and also to underpin the struggling German financial system with injections of
French capital. The Belgians asked if they, too, might not join the process.
The premonitions of post-1949 European integration are clear enough, but this inter-war
effort failed and its very existence remains largely ignored in the wider historical narrative.
The reasons for the failure are complex. A collapse in the French balance of trade and the
subsequent introduction of quotas on German imports, the death in early 1932 of Aristide
Briand, the fall of the Brüning government in May 1932 each delivered a blow, with Hitler’s
appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 rendering the coup de grace. However the steam
had by then long since gone out of the project. During May and June 1932 a major political
and media scandal erupted, which called into question Stresemann’s bona fides and thus the
credibility of France’s rapprochement policy. Its impact was immediate and highly
destructive and it is to this scandal that we shall now turn.
Less than a year after Stresemann’s death his family turned their thoughts to the publication
of his personal papers as a form of memoir. The Ullstein Press in Berlin negotiated a deal to
bring out his writings in three volumes, translation rights were sold on to a French
counterpart and pre-publication rights offered to newspapers in France and Germany.
Stresemann’s former private secretary, Henry Bernhard, took on the task of editing his late
master’s papers. The German Foreign Office took a keen and wary interest in proceedings
from the outset. Bernhard was summoned to a meeting with the Foreign Minister on 22
March 1930 during which it was agreed to return any official papers still in the Stresemann
family’s possession to the Foreign Office. Bernhard would consult with named senior
officials where there was doubt over a document’s status and a prominent academic with
experience in international diplomacy would vet the proofs before publication. One can
understand the reasons for the Foreign Office’s caution. Sensitive official documents are
seldom made public for several decades, but it seems that there was no legal impediment to
the publication of personal papers. Curtius reminded Bernhard on 3 June that official or semiofficial papers had to be surrendered to the Foreign Office, but observed uneasily that the
understanding with Bernhard, such as it was, took the form of a gentleman’s agreement. Time
would prove that Bernhard had precious little understanding of what might be sensitive in the
public domain.
The storm broke shortly after Briand’s death in March 1932 and on the eve of parliamentary
elections in France. Extracts from the second volume of Stresemann’s papers appeared in the
French press during April and May, containing revelations which were anything but ‘private.’
Among other things a letter from Stresemann to the Prussian Crown Prince, written at the
time of Locarno, had the greatest impact, for the Foreign Minister wrote of the need to
‘finesse’ (das Finassieren) Briand in the pursuit of German objectives. The word was
unfortunately ambivalent in both French and German. Stresemann’s defenders noted that he
was merely quoting Metternich (but unhelpfully as Napoleon’s nemesis), his detractors
emphasised the figurative meaning of the word relating to trickery or deceit. Secret talks
between Briand and Stresemann regarding the return of the territories of Eupen and Malmédy
to Germany from Belgium (they had been ceded as part of the Versailles settlement),
Stresemann’s musings on the future of Alsace and the Moselle (the corner of Lorraine ruled
by Germany from 1871 to 1918), and his frank assessment of his French counterparts,
including the alleged description of Herriot, a prominent centre-left politician, as a ‘fat
jellyfish’ (a false accusation it transpired) outraged and dismayed French readers in equal
measure.
The Eupen-Malmédy talks caused uproar in Belgium, but the French response was
particularly damaging. The right seized on these revelations in a vain attempt to avert
electoral defeat at the hands of a left-wing coalition, even if the memoirs scandal merely
confirmed their existing prejudices. Nonetheless, the conservative politician André Tardieu,
Clemenceau’s right-hand man at the Paris Peace Conference and twice Prime Minister during
the early 1930s, no doubt spoke for many when, in an election broadcast he reflected that:
‘Even international agreements, including Locarno, celebrated as honestly negotiated and
freely concluded, now seem to have been burdened with mental reservations which must
force us to reflect.’ He continued that Stresemann’s letter to the Crown Prince and its use of
the word ‘finesse’ was ‘a particularly disturbing contradiction.’
The impact on the late Briand’s defenders, advocates of Franco-German detente, was far
more serious. As the German Ambassador to Paris, Leopold von Hoesch reported: ‘Well
disposed individuals, who regarded Stresemann’s period in office and in particular the
Locarno Treaties as the cornerstone of post-war Franco-German relations and based their
hopes for the future on this perception have seen their convictions and expectations
destroyed.’ There were other problems, Hoesch continued, which only served to substantiate
his earlier warnings against publication in any shape or form: ‘Any diplomat will find it
impossible to submit a frank, confidential report to the Foreign Office if he believes that these
strictly confidential statements will without ado be released into the public domain during the
lifetimes of the affected parties.’ French politicians and diplomats were very much of the
same opinion and the Liberal German newspaper the Fränkischer Kurier reminded its readers
that even the publication of the final volume of Bismarck’s memoirs, twenty-one years after
his death, had attracted criticism. Stresemann’s memoirs, the paper’s Paris correspondent
observed, ‘have been published when his most important counterparts, his contemporaries,
his diplomatic partners are still alive, or still worse, remain professionally active.’
With the horses well and truly bolted, the Foreign Office in Berlin sought at least to censor
the impending third volume. It emerged that Ullstein and not Bernhard had selected suitable
extracts for release to foreign newspapers and the Secretary of State (Permanent Secretary)
for Foreign Affairs concluded that the publication of extracts out of context had greatly
magnified the scale of the damage inflicted. The right-wing newspapers, of course, had
sensationalised the selected extracts to the best of their ability, either to boost sales or to
reinforce the political appeal of the French right. Many daily papers were actually owned by
serving French politicians who actively sought to advance their personal political agendas
through the medium of the press. Any thought of French disarmament, they argued was now
seen to be madness. Stresemann was a pocket Bismarck, scheming and plotting the reversal
of the verdict of 1919. As the prominent politician Raymond Poincaré declaimed in Le Matin
on 20 May: ‘Stresemann now appears in his true colours. He was not a statesman, dedicated
to the unification of Germany and France. He was brought up on the ideas of Bismarck and
he has not repudiated them.’
Wright and Baechler have argued convincingly that the notorious letter to the Crown Prince
was intended, if anything, to dupe him by enhancing Stresemann’s patriotic credentials and
so enlist vital support for Locarno from more moderate nationalists in the Reichstag.
However, that can be said after the passage of decades and detailed academic reassessment.
At the time French politicians and diplomats who had been committed to the rapprochement
process queued up to protest to the German Ambassador in Paris at the manner of the
memoirs’ publication – ‘which made it impossible to conduct diplomacy in a frank and
confidential manner’ – and to lament the widespread dismay and disillusionment caused by
their contents within French official circles. The final word might be left to the German
Ambassador to Madrid. In early June he visited his cousin, Count Stanislas de Castellane who
was Vice President of the French Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the French
parliament) and the Count’s elder brother Jean who was President of the Municipal Council
of Paris. Both were longstanding proponents of Franco-German rapprochement, but at this
intimate family gathering Ambassador Welczeck was warned that the memoirs scandal had
had so catastrophic an effect on French opinion that the atmosphere would be poisoned for
the foreseeable future. Welczeck saw his cousin, a quiet and measured man, work himself
into an unprecedented fury at the sense of personal betrayal and deception.
So what conclusions can we draw, beyond the obvious dangers of applying the journalistic
mechanism of ‘kiss and tell’ to the innermost secrets of international diplomacy? The naiveté
displayed by key German officials as they failed to get a grip on the process of publication
before the damage was done is telling, although the relatively elderly gentlemen concerned
had cut their professional teeth in an earlier and less media savvy age. The reaction in France
was predictable, but the demoralisation of the pro-rapprochement camp led to fatal drift in
Franco-German relations during mid and later 1932 at a time when the destabilisation of
German domestic politics demanded a firm course be maintained at the French end. Equally
telling, however, was the fact that there was so strong a drive to rapprochement and even a
form of Franco-German, ultimately European, union at all. Its neglect compromises our
understanding of Franco-German relations during the earlier 20C, distorts our assessment of
the forces driving German foreign policy in the years before Hitler (the slick Bismarck via
Weimar to Hitler paradigm scarcely holds water), and hides key precedents for the post-1949
process of European unification. Given the rise of Hitler and the consequences of Nazism it is
perfectly understandable that historians’ interests and perspectives have focused elsewhere,
but it is now time to reconstruct the actual contours of inter-war Franco-German diplomacy
and so reach a fuller and more balanced appreciation of the world from which our own has
emerged.
Conan Fischer
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
A fuller, referenced paper on German-French relations during the Great Depression will be
appearing in Frank McDonough (ed.), The origins of the Second World War: An international
interpretation (Hambledon Continuum, 2010)
I wish to thank the British Academy for their support which made possible my recent
programme of archival research in Berlin.