Gustav Stresemann

Gustav Ernst Stresemann (German pronunciation: [ˈɡʊstaf ˈʃtʁeːzəˌman] ^ⓘ; 10 May 1878 – 3 October 1929) was a German statesman during the Weimar Republic who served as chancellor of Germany from August to November 1923 and as foreign minister from 1923 to 1929. His most notable achievement was the reconciliation between Germany and France, for which he and French Prime Minister Aristide Briand received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926. During a period of political instability and fragile, short-lived governments, Stresemann was seen at his death as "the person who maintained the precarious balance of the political system."

Stresemann attended the University of Berlin and Leipzig University, where he studied political economy, history and international law and developed his vision of liberalism and nationalism, a combination of views that would define his political career. After obtaining his doctorate, Stresemann worked in trade associations before entering politics. In 1907, he was elected to the Reichstag as a deputy for the National Liberal Party. He lost his seat in 1912 but was re-elected two years later. During the First World War, he was a vocal advocate for German militarism and expansionism. Exempted from war service due to poor health, he gradually became the National Liberals' de facto leader before formally taking over the party in 1917. Germany's defeat and the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy came as a significant shock to Stresemann, forcing him to gradually reassess his previous positions. He founded the German People's Party (DVP) and, despite his own monarchist beliefs, came to grudgingly accept Weimar democracy and became open to working with the centre and the left.

In August 1923, Stresemann was named chancellor and foreign minister of a grand coalition government. During his brief chancellorship, he abandoned the policy of passive resistance against the French-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr and introduced the Rentenmark in a (relatively successful) attempt to tame hyperinflation in the country. In November, Stresemann's reshuffled government collapsed after the Social Democrats withdrew from the coalition. He resigned as chancellor following a vote of no confidence but remained as foreign minister in the new government led by Wilhelm Marx. His first major diplomatic success was the 1924 Dawes Plan, which reduced Germany's overall reparations commitment. It was followed by the Locarno Treaties in 1925, which confirmed Germany's postwar western borders, guaranteed peace with France, and led to Germany's admission to the League of Nations a year later. Stresemann also moved to improve relations with the Soviet Union through the 1926 Treaty of Berlin. In 1928, he oversaw Germany's participation in the Kellogg–Briand Pact, in which the signatory states promised not to use war to resolve international conflicts.

Amid failing health, Stresemann successfully negotiated the Young Plan which sought to further reduce German reparations payments. He died in October 1929 after a series of strokes at the age of 51.

Stresemann was born on 10 May 1878 at 66 Köpenicker Straße in southeast Berlin, the youngest of seven children. His father worked as a beer bottler and distributor, and also ran a small bar out of the family home, as well as renting rooms for extra money. The family was lower middle class, but relatively well-off for the neighbourhood, and had sufficient funds to provide Gustav with a high-quality education. Stresemann was an excellent student, particularly excelling in German literature and poetry. At the age of 16, he joined the Andreas Gymnasium to study. His parents brought him up to have an interest in books – he was especially passionate about history, with his teacher, Mr. Wolff, commenting that he had an "almost sickly taste in history". He took an interest in Napoleon and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom he later wrote about in his work Goethe und Napoleon: ein Vortrag ("Goethe and Napoleon: a Discourse"). His mother, Mathilde, died in 1895. From December 1895, he wrote "Berlin letters" for the newspaper Dresdener Volks-Zeitung [de], often talking about politics and targeting Prussian conservatives. In an essay written when he left school, he noted that he would have enjoyed becoming a teacher, but he would only have been qualified to teach languages or the natural sciences, which were not his primary areas of interest. Due to this, he enrolled in university.

In April 1897, Stresemann enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he was convinced by a businessman to study political economy instead of literature. During his university years, Stresemann became active in the Burschenschaften movement of student fraternities and became editor, in April 1898, of the Allgemeine Deutsche Universitäts-Zeitung, a newspaper run by Konrad Kuster, a leader in the liberal portion of the Burschenschaften. His editorials for the paper were often political and dismissed most of the contemporary political parties as broken in one way or another. In his early writings, he set out views that combined liberalism with strident nationalism, a combination that would dominate his views for the rest of his life. In 1898, Stresemann left the University of Berlin, transferring to the University of Leipzig so that he could pursue a doctorate. He studied history and international law and took literature courses. Influenced by Martin Kriele, he also took courses in economics. In March 1899, he stopped being an editor for the Allgemeine Deutsche Universitäts-Zeitung. He completed his studies in January 1901, submitting a thesis on the bottled beer industry in Berlin, which received a relatively high grade but was a subject of mockery from colleagues. Stresemann's doctoral supervisor was the economist Karl Bücher.

In 1902, Stresemann founded the Saxon Manufacturers' Association. In 1903 he married Käte Kleefeld (1883–1970), daughter of a wealthy Jewish Berlin businessman, and the sister of Kurt von Kleefeld, the last person in Germany to be ennobled (in 1918). At that time he was also a member of Friedrich Naumann's National-Social Association. In 1906 he was elected to the Dresden town council. Though he had initially worked in trade associations, Stresemann soon became a leader of the National Liberal Party in Saxony. In 1907, he was elected to the Reichstag, where he soon became a close associate of party chairman Ernst Bassermann. However, his support of expanded social welfare programs did not sit well with some of the party's more conservative members, and he lost his post in the party's executive committee in 1912. Later that year he lost both his Reichstag and town council seats. He returned to business and founded the German-American Economic Association. In 1914 he returned to the Reichstag. He was exempted from war service due to poor health. With Bassermann kept away from the Reichstag by either illness or military service, Stresemann soon became the National Liberals' de facto leader. After Bassermann's death in 1917, Stresemann succeeded him as the party leader.

Prior to the war, Stresemann was associated with the left wing of the National Liberals. He believed in the maintenance of a balance of power between the British Empire, the United States, and Germany, the countries which he believed would be the world's economic superpowers. Yet he also supported the Anglo-German naval arms race, believing that the expansion of the Imperial German Navy was necessary to protect German international trade.