Editing Weimar Republic (section)

==== Framework for economic policy ====
An essential basis for the relative stabilization was the restructuring of reparations through the [[Dawes Plan]].{{Sfn|Mommsen|1998|p=230}} Without fixing a final total sum, the plan regulated the scope, composition and the security of transfers for future annual reparations payments. The latter was to be guaranteed by the American financial expert [[Seymour Parker Gilbert|Parker Gilbert]] who, as reparations agent, could directly influence German fiscal and financial policy in order to secure monetary stability. The acceptance of the Dawes Plan in the Reichstag had long been uncertain – parts of the Right spoke of a "new enslavement of the German people" and the KPD of the enslavement of the German proletariat.{{Sfn|Winkler|1998|p=187}} Once the plan had been passed, it brought the Weimar Republic a significant inflow of American loans from state funds as well as private investors. The money served as both start-up financing for reparations and as aid for an economic revival. German railways, the National Bank and many industries were mortgaged as security for the loans.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Kitchen |first=Martin |title=The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |year=1996 |isbn=978-0521453417 |location=Cambridge, England |pages=241}}</ref>

The economic consolidation that occurred after the period of hyperinflation was largely at the expense of wage earners and the economic middle class. The eight-hour day, one of the main social achievements of the 1918/19 revolution, was in many cases watered down or abandoned; the civil service was affected by massive job cuts and salary reductions; and rationalization and concentration in large industries continued and deprived many small and medium-sized enterprises of their livelihoods. Savers and creditors who had been hurt by inflation were effectively left without any significant compensation.{{Sfn|Mommsen|1998|p=234}} Real wages, however, grew faster than the cost of living between 1924 and 1929. One study found that by 1928–29 they "had reached or exceeded their pre-war level".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Schneider |first=Michael |title=A Brief History of the German Trade Unions |publisher=J.H.W. Dietz |year=1991 |isbn=978-3-801-20161-6 |location=Berlin |page=160 |translator-last=Selman |translator-first=Barrie}}</ref>

The declarations of social guarantees contained in the Weimar Constitution<ref>{{Cite wikisource|title=Weimar constitution#Section V: Economic Life}}</ref> had only a limited effect and stood in striking contrast to the many experiences of social decline. From 1924 onwards, small savers who had been impoverished or economically ruined by inflation were at least able to take advantage of the state-organized social welfare system, which replaced the former poor relief. The new system, however, was characterized by "petty means tests under an anonymous social bureaucracy" and by benefits that only secured existence at a subsistence level.{{Sfn|Longerich|1995|pp=174 f.}} In the brief peak phase of overall economic recovery and economic optimism, unemployment insurance was introduced in 1927. In some respects it was the "high point of the Republic's social expansion", although it benefitted only a portion of the workforce and did not cover permanent unemployment.{{Sfn|Mommsen|1998|p=282}} In the meantime, the state had also introduced a new system of social security.
[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 102-00231, Radioansprache von Kanzler Wilhelm Marx.jpg|left|thumb|244x244px|Chancellor [[Wilhelm Marx]]'s Christmas broadcast, December 1923]]
The parliamentary system of Weimar democracy was the expression of a party landscape that was strongly characterized and fragmented by class and social milieus. Reichstag members as representatives of the interests of their respective electorates often had narrow limits to their willingness to compromise. Such class and status consciousness was part of the legacy of the imperial era and continued to have an effect, although it was also partly reshaped by a consumer and leisure-oriented mass culture that emerged in the 1920s and was driven by the new media forms of records, film and radio. People of all classes and strata went to the cinema or sat in front of the radio. Mass culture pointed in the direction of democratisation and was interpreted by conservatives as intellectual flattening and a decline in values. The class fronts were gradually softened by mass culture, marking a "class society in transition".{{Sfn|Winkler|1998|p=296}}