Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [311]
The Weimar Republic never recovered from that double burden. The nationalists blithely ignored their own promise not to doubt the patriotism of those who voted for the treaty, and did their best to stigmatize them in the eyes of the German people. In 1921, when he was on holiday in the Black Forest, Erzberger was assassinated by two former army officers. “The man,” said a leading nationalist paper, “whose spirit unhappily still prevails in many of our government offices and laws, has at last secured the punishment suitable for a traitor.” His murderers fled to Hungary but returned to Germany in triumph as “Erzberger’s judges” when Hitler came to power. Both were finally tried after the Second World War. 53
In England, meanwhile, John Maynard Keynes considered his future. He had resigned from the Treasury and left Paris in disgust before the treaty was signed. “I’ve gone on hoping even through these last dreadful weeks,” he wrote to Lloyd George on June 5, “that you’d find some way to make of the Treaty a just and expedient document. But now it’s apparently too late. The battle is lost.” Keynes was in a curious mood. He told Virginia Woolf that Europe, and in particular the governing classes of which he was a part, were doomed, yet he wrote to another friend that he was tremendously happy to be back at Cambridge. In personal terms he was extremely successful, both professionally and socially, but he felt guilty about his part in the war when so many of his Bloomsbury friends had been pacifists. They in turn laughed at his worldly success, his new friends, his experiments in heterosexuality. Perhaps The Economic Consequences of the Peace was something of an act of atonement. Perhaps, too, as Lamont, the American expert on reparations, said, “Keynes got sore because they wouldn’t take his advice, his nerve broke, and he quit.”54
Keynes spent much of the summer writing. In October he met the German banker Melchior again at a conference in Amsterdam. He read him a draft; Melchior was very impressed. This was not surprising, because Keynes echoed much of what the Germans themselves were saying about the Treaty of Versailles. The Economic Consequences of the Peace came out just before Christmas in 1919 and has remained in print ever since. It sold over 100,000 copies and was translated into eleven languages, including German, within a year of its appearance. Extracts were read out in the U.S. Senate by a leading opponent of the treaty. The book was wildly successful in Germany, and in the English-speaking world it helped to turn opinion against the peace settlements and against the French. In 1924, a cabinet minister in the Labour government in Britain referred to the treaty as “a treaty of blood and iron which betrayed every principle for which our soldiers thought they were fighting.”55
Among Germans, as memories faded of the desperate state of affairs in 1919, the belief spread that Germany could have resisted the peace terms if only weak and venal politicians had stood firm. The treaty was, as a popular song put it, “only paper.” In 1921, a French diplomat reported to Paris that “a violent campaign using the press, posters and meetings is underway in Germany to undermine the legal basis of the Versailles treaty: German guilt in the war.” The German Foreign Office set up a special “war guilt” section which poured out critical studies. In the beer halls of Bavaria, the young Hitler drew crowds with his ringing denunciations of the “peace of shame.”56
Public opinion in Britain and the United States increasingly swung round to the view that the peace settlements with Germany were deeply