By abdicating shortly before the culmination of the First World War, Kaiser Wilhelm II left a dangerous legacy for any successive government hoping to create a prosperous Germany. By leaving a nation reliant on his autocratic rule, the Kaiser kick started the chaos that would become the German Revolution, a rise in support for extremists promising to bring Germany back to a level of opulence, and the eventual establishment of a provisional government that few Germans supported. In addition to all this, Germany was still waging a war that would prove to have a vast impact on the new republic eager to implement a democratic constitution. In accepting armistice, all blame for the war and its end was pushed onto the government, who had little …show more content…
These sweeping statements were heavily based upon Ebert’s opinion that the allies’ armistice conditions put a huge financial burden on the new government, as they requiring a total sum of 132 billion gold marks to be paid in reparation to the victors. In Source 1, the former German president presents the interpretation that the Britain, France and the United States, by enforcing these demands were annexing the direction of Germany’s political course. Ebert suggests that they permit the annihilation of our hopeful beginnings [1]: the extreme language used to describe the implications of Versailles of the establishment of democracy displays the intensity of his negative feelings towards the allies, and their impact of the Weimar Republic’s reputation. He also questions the justification for the allies’ actions, or rather whether there is a justification at all, which would imply that Ebert believed the war guilt clause to lack necessity as equally. Furthermore, Source 1 clearly demonstrates the attitude that the government had inherited these difficulties, rather than having earned them. Ebert presses the conception that the Weimar Republic had done everything to set economic life into