Cuno strikes
Encyclopedia
The Cuno strikes were nation-wide strikes in Germany against the government of Reich chancellor
Reich Chancellery
The Reich Chancellery was the traditional name of the office of the Chancellor of Germany in the period of the German Reich from 1871 to 1945...

 Wilhelm Cuno
Wilhelm Cuno
Wilhelm Carl Josef Cuno was a German politician who was the Chancellor of Germany from 1922 to 1923. He was born in Suhl, Prussian Saxony. Cuno's government is best known for its passive resistance of the French occupation of the Ruhr Area . Cuno's government was also responsible for its poor...

 in August 1923. The wave of strikes demanded and helped bring about the resignation of the Cuno government on August 12, 1923, just nine months after it began. The strikes also buoyed the hopes of the Communist International that a German revolution was imminent.

History

In January 1923, the Cuno government called for passive resistance
Nonviolent resistance
Nonviolent resistance is the practice of achieving goals through symbolic protests, civil disobedience, economic or political noncooperation, and other methods, without using violence. It is largely synonymous with civil resistance...

 of the Belgian and French occupation of the Ruhr
Occupation of the Ruhr
The Occupation of the Ruhr between 1923 and 1925, by troops from France and Belgium, was a response to the failure of the German Weimar Republic under Chancellor Cuno to pay reparations in the aftermath of World War I.-Background:...

 region. At the same time, inflation in the Weimar Republic
Inflation in the Weimar Republic
The hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic was a three year period of hyperinflation in Germany between June 1921 and July 1924.- Analysis :...

 was racing out of control, whether the result of the reparations payments
World War I reparations
World War I reparations refers to the payments and transfers of property and equipment that Germany was forced to make under the Treaty of Versailles following its defeat during World War I...

 alone or from the costs of the passive resistance, in which local authorities and companies boycotted occupation forces while the government paid the wages of those administrations and compensated the coal and steel companies for their losses. The expenses caused the collapse of the Reichsmark, which had already been inflated. At the beginning of 1923, the mark traded at 21,000 to the U.S. dollar; at the end of 1923, it was nearly 6 trillion
Trillion
-Numbers:Either of the two numbers :* 1,000,000,000,000 for all short scale countries...

 (twelve zeroes). For German society, the result was complete disaster, as people rushed out to buy things before their money lost its value and people who had had savings saw them evaporate overnight. Considerable portions of the labor movement were as—or more—opposed to the German government as they were to the French occupying forces. Their motto was "Beat Cuno and Poincaré
Raymond Poincaré
Raymond Poincaré was a French statesman who served as Prime Minister of France on five separate occasions and as President of France from 1913 to 1920. Poincaré was a conservative leader primarily committed to political and social stability...

 at the Ruhr and at the Spree
Spree
The Spree is a river that flows through the Saxony, Brandenburg and Berlin states of Germany, and in the Ústí nad Labem region of the Czech Republic...

!"

A labor dispute in the Berlin printing industry triggered a wildcat strike. Instigated by the Communist Party
Communist Party of Germany
The Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned in 1956...

 (KPD), the Reich printing plant was also affected, causing the banknote
Banknote
A banknote is a kind of negotiable instrument, a promissory note made by a bank payable to the bearer on demand, used as money, and in many jurisdictions is legal tender. In addition to coins, banknotes make up the cash or bearer forms of all modern fiat money...

 presses to be stopped and before long, a noticeable lack of paper money. Workers from power stations, construction and the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe
Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe
The is the main public transport company of Berlin, the capital city of Germany. It manages the city's U-Bahn underground railway, tram, bus and ferry networks, but not the S-Bahn urban rail system....

 joined the strike. The wave of strikes demanded the resignation of the Cuno government. Against the will of KPD party chairwoman Ruth Fischer
Ruth Fischer
Ruth Fischer was a German Communist, a co-founder of the Austrian Communist Party in 1918. According to secret information declassified in 2010, she was a key agent of the American intelligence service known as "The Pond."-Life and work:Born in Leipzig, Ruth Fischer was the daughter of the...

, Otto Wels
Otto Wels
Otto Wels was the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany from 1919 and a member of parliament from 1920 to 1933....

, head of the Social Democratic Party
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a social-democratic political party in Germany...

 (SPD) was able to forestall a general strike
General strike
A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...

.

Pressured by the SPD, a conference of trade union on August 10, 1923 rejected a call for a general strike
General strike
A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...

 favored by the left-wing Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund
Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund
The Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund was a confederation of German trade unions in Germany founded during the Weimar Republic. It was founded in 1919 and was initially powerful enough to organize a general strike in 1920 against a right-wing coup d'état. After the 1929 Wall Street crash,...

. The KPD, not accepting this defeat, the next day held a meeting of all the revolutionary works council
Works council
A works council is a "shop-floor" organization representing workers, which functions as local/firm-level complement to national labour negotiations...

s in greater Berlin. They called a general strike to bring down the Cuno government, but were hindered from publicizing the call widely because Die Rote Fahne
Die Rote Fahne
The German newspaper Die Rote Fahne was created on 9 November 1918 by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin, first as organ of the left wing revolutionary Spartakusbund. After the founding of the Communist Party of Germany on 1 January 1919 it became the central publication of the party,...

had been banned. Nevertheless, the strikes, supported by some in the SPD, spread out from Berlin to other cities and regions, such as Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

, Lusatia
Lusatia
Lusatia is a historical region in Central Europe. It stretches from the Bóbr and Kwisa rivers in the east to the Elbe valley in the west, today located within the German states of Saxony and Brandenburg as well as in the Lower Silesian and Lubusz voivodeships of western Poland...

, Saxony Province, as well as the states of Saxony
Saxony
The Free State of Saxony is a landlocked state of Germany, contingent with Brandenburg, Saxony Anhalt, Thuringia, Bavaria, the Czech Republic and Poland. It is the tenth-largest German state in area, with of Germany's sixteen states....

 and Thuringia
Thuringia
The Free State of Thuringia is a state of Germany, located in the central part of the country.It has an area of and 2.29 million inhabitants, making it the sixth smallest by area and the fifth smallest by population of Germany's sixteen states....

. Factories were occupied by Communist workers and factory managements sent fleeing. In the Ruhr region
Ruhr
The Ruhr is a medium-size river in western Germany , a right tributary of the Rhine.-Description:The source of the Ruhr is near the town of Winterberg in the mountainous Sauerland region, at an elevation of approximately 2,200 feet...

, there was passive resistance rather than strikes. The response to the strike surpassed even the expectations of the leadership of the KPD. In total, three and a half million workers went on strike forcing Cuno and his entire cabinet to resign the next day.

With the Cuno resignation on August 12, 1923, the strikes soon ended. Workers began to returning to work in the days following the dissolution of the Cuno government. In addition to pressure from the strikes, on August 10, the KPD faction in the Reichstag
Reichstag (Weimar Republic)
The Reichstag was the parliament of Weimar Republic .German constitution commentators consider only the Reichstag and now the Bundestag the German parliament. Another organ deals with legislation too: in 1867-1918 the Bundesrat, in 1919–1933 the Reichsrat and from 1949 on the Bundesrat...

 had moved to censure
Censure
A censure is an expression of strong disapproval or harsh criticism. Among the forms that it can take are a stern rebuke by a legislature, a spiritual penalty imposed by a church, and a negative judgment pronounced on a theological proposition.-Politics:...

 the Cuno government. The SPD, pushed by its base and looking to avert worse social unrest or possibly revolution, saw no other political alternative than to form a grand coalition
Grand coalition
A grand coalition is an arrangement in a multi-party parliamentary system in which the two largest political parties of opposing political ideologies unite in a coalition government...

. Rudolf Hilferding
Rudolf Hilferding
Rudolf Hilferding was an Austrian-born Marxist economist, leading socialist theorist, politician and chief theoretician for the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic, almost universally recognized as the SPD's foremost theoretician of his century, and a...

, in contrast to leftists aligned with Paul Levi
Paul Levi
Paul Levi was a German Jewish Communist political leader. He was the head of the Communist Party of Germany following the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919.-Early years:...

, advocated such a move and urged Gustav Stresemann
Gustav Stresemann
was a German politician and statesman who served as Chancellor and Foreign Minister during the Weimar Republic. He was co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.Stresemann's politics defy easy categorization...

 to take over the government, resolving the crisis within the framework of the parliamentary system and leaving the KPD unable to turn it into a revolutionary upheaval.

Nonetheless, the Cuno strikes nurtured in Moscow the hope of a German revolution. There had been clashes with police in several cities and dozens of workers had been killed. Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....

 and other Influential members of the Soviet Politburo and the Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...

 believed Germany was ready for revolution, but Heinrich Brandler
Heinrich Brandler
Heinrich Brandler was a German communist trade unionist, politician, revolutionary activist, and writer. Brandler is best remember as the head of the Communist Party of Germany during the party's ill-fated "March Action" of 1921 and aborted uprising of 1923, for which he was held responsible by...

, head of the KPD, felt the timing was premature. Despite Brandler's misgivings, on August 23, 1923, the Soviet Politburo adopted a plan for a "German October
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

", but the attempted coup was cancelled at the last minute. Word of the cancellation did not reach Hamburg in time (or was possibly ignored by the local KPD leadership) and the local insurrection
Hamburg Uprising
The Hamburg Uprising was an insurrection during the Weimar Republic in Germany. It was begun on October 23, 1923 by the one of the most militant sections of the Hamburg district Communist Party , the KP Wasserkante. From a military point of view, the attempt was futile and it was over within 24...

took place, as planned.

Further reading

  • Heinrich August Winkler: Germany: The Long Road West. Vol. 1: 1789-1933. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2006) ISBN 978-0199265978
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