The Extraordinary Collapse and Revival of German Parliaments

Zusammenfassung

The contrast between the extraordinary collapse of the German parliament in the 1920s and 1930s, despite a strong German parliamentary tradition, and the development of the German Bundestag into the strongest parliament in Europe just 20 years later, is in part due to a series of contingent events that were not path-dependent results of German history. The punitive peace treaty imposed on Germany in 1919 and the worldwide depression of the 1920s and 1930s critically weakened the Weimar Republic. The benign military occupation of Western Germany after 1945, seeking to strengthen German democracy as a bulwark against the USSR, decisively contributed to the revival of parliamentary democracy.