Hermann Müller (18 May 1876 – 20 March 1931; ) was a German Social Democratic politician who served as foreign minister (1919–1920) and was twice chancellor of Germany (1920, 1928–1930) during the Weimar Republic.
Müller rose quickly through the ranks of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) after joining it in 1893. He was elected to the Reichstag of the German Empire in 1916 and to the Weimar National Assembly in 1919. In his capacity as foreign minister, he was one of the German signatories of the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919).
During the three months Müller was chancellor in 1920, his government passed a number of progressive social reforms before it had to resign due to the SPD's poor showing in the 1920 election. In his second term as chancellor, from June 1928 to 1930, he led a grand coalition through a period marked by budgetary and international relations issues. The coalition broke apart after the onset of the Great Depression, and Müller, already suffering from poor health, died a year after leaving office.
Early life
Hermann Müller was born on 18 May 1876 in Mannheim in the Grand Duchy of Baden, the son of Georg Jakob Müller (born 1843), a producer of sparkling wine and wine dealer from Güdingen near Saarbrücken, and his wife Karoline (née Vogt, born 1849, died after 1931), originally from Frankfurt am Main. Müller attended grammar school at Mannheim and, after his father moved to Niederlößnitz in 1888, at Dresden. After his father died in 1892, Müller had to leave school due to financial difficulties and began an apprenticeship at Frankfurt. He worked in Frankfurt and Breslau, and in 1893 joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Heavily influenced by his father's interest in the philosophy of the critic of Christianity Ludwig Feuerbach, Hermann Müller was the only German chancellor who was not a member of any religion.
Political career
Before 1918: entry into the SPD and Reichstag
thumb|left|The [[SPD Party Executive Committee in 1909. Müller stands second from right.]]
From 1899 to 1906, Müller worked as an editor at the socialist newspaper . He was a member of the Görlitz city council from 1903 to 1906 and party functionary (). August Bebel, the SPD chairman, nominated him in 1905 (without success) and 1906 (successfully) for membership of the board of the national SPD. At that time, Müller changed from a left-wing Social Democrat to a centrist, who argued against both the Marxist reformists such as Eduard Bernstein and the radical Left around Rosa Luxemburg. Together with Friedrich Ebert, Müller in 1909 created a party executive committee that was to deal with internal arguments between party conventions. Known for his calm, industriousness, integrity and rationality, Müller lacked charisma. In 1909, he tried but failed to prevent Otto Braun's election to the board, laying the foundation for a long-running animosity between the two.
During World War I, Müller supported the political truce between Germany's political parties known as the Burgfrieden.
1918 to 1919: revolution and National Assembly
During the German Revolution of 1918–1919, Müller was a member of the Greater Berlin Executive Council of Workers and Soldiers () where he represented the position of the SPD leadership arguing in favor of elections to a constituent national assembly instead of the creation of a council republic as the more radical members of the Council wanted. He later published a book on his experience during the revolution. while the Law on the Employment of the Disabled of April 1920 stipulated that all public and private employers with more than 20 employees were obligated to hire Germans disabled by accident or war and with at least a 50% reduction in their ability to work. The Basic School Law (passed on 28 April 1920) introduced a common four-year course in primary schools for all German children. Benefits for the unemployed were improved, with the maximum benefit for single males over the age of 21 increasing from 5 to 8 marks in May 1920. Maximum wage scales that were established in April 1919 were also increased.
On 29 March 1920 the Reichstag passed a Reich income-tax law, together with a law on corporate tax and a capital-yield tax. The Salary Reform Act, passed in April 1920, greatly improved the pay of civil servants. In May 1920, the Reich Office for Labour Allocation was set up as the first Reich-wide institution "to allocate labor, administer unemployment insurance and generally manage labor concerns". The Reich Insurance Code of May 1920 provided war-wounded persons and dependent survivors with therapeutic treatment and social welfare with the objective of reintegrating handicapped persons into working life. The Cripples' Welfare Act, passed that same month, made it a duty of the public welfare system to assist cripples under the age of 18 to obtain the capacity to earn an income. The Reich Homestead Act, passed in May 1920, sought to encourage homesteading as a means of helping economically vulnerable groups. During Müller's last year in office, a number of orders were introduced that "confirmed and defined the protective measures taken in connection with the employment of women in certain work of a particularly dangerous or arduous nature", which included glass-works, rolling mills, and iron foundries (through orders of 26 March 1930).
Müller was chancellor only until June 1920, when the outcome of the first regular election to the Reichstag resulted in the formation of a new government led by Constantin Fehrenbach of the Centre Party. The SPD suffered a significant defeat at the polls, with the number of people voting for them dropping almost by half compared to the January 1919 election. Discouraged, Müller only half-heartedly negotiated with the USPD about a coalition. He was turned down because the USPD was unwilling to join any coalition including non-socialist parties and one in which the USPD was not the majority party. On the other side of the political spectrum, Müller was opposed to working with Gustav Stresemann's German People's Party (DVP), considering them a mouthpiece for corporate interests and doubting their loyalty to the republican constitution. The SPD did not participate in the following government of Wilhelm Cuno, an independent, which lasted until August 1923.
Recognizing a national emergency when the French seized the Ruhr and inflation spiraled out of control in 1923, Müller brought the SPD into a grand coalition led by Gustav Stresemann of the DVP (August to November 1923). Differences in economic and social policies strained relations between the SPD and the other members of the coalition. Müller supported the emergency measures taken after the passage of the October 1923 enabling act, which allowed the government to enact extra-constitutional financial, economic and social measures without approval by the Reichstag. The Reich government was lenient in its handling of the right-wing leader of Bavaria, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who was plotting a march on Berlin to overthrow the government, but it dealt harshly with the governments in Thuringia and Saxony, where the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was brought into SPD-led governments as part of a USSR-backed plan to foment a communist revolution in Germany (the "German October"). The contrast in the Reich government's responses led the SPD to leave the coalition in November 1923. On 12 June 1928, Hindenburg entrusted Müller with forming the government. The other parties proved reluctant to compromise, and it took a personal intervention by Gustav Stresemann for a government to be formed on 28 June 1928. Müller's cabinet, a grand coalition of Social Democrats, Centre Party, DDP, DVP and BVP managed to settle only on a written agreement on the government's policies in the spring of 1929. In particular, domestic policy differences between the SPD and DVP dominated the government's work. Its continued existence was mainly due to the mutual personal esteem between Müller and Foreign Minister Stresemann, who died on 3 October 1929. Relations between the parties were strained by the arguments over the construction of the pocket battleship Panzerkreuzer A, in which the SPD forced its ministers to vote against the allocation of funds to the project in the Reichstag even though they had endorsed it in cabinet meetings in order to keep the coalition intact. In addition, the Ruhr iron dispute (), the "largest and longest lockout Germany had ever experienced", was a bone of contention, as the DVP voted against the Reichstag motion that approved state support for the estimated 200,000 to 260,000 locked out workers.
Financing the budget for 1929 and the external liabilities of the Reich were huge problems, and reaching an agreement involved negotiating more lenient reparations conditions with the Allies. Müller had been the leader of the delegation to the League of Nations in the summer of 1928, where he – despite a heated argument with French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand over German rearmament – had laid the groundwork for concessions by the Allies. By January 1930, the government had succeeded in negotiating a reduction in reparation payments (the Young Plan, signed in August 1929) and a promise by the Allies to completely withdraw the occupation forces from the Rhineland by May 1930. and midwives and people in the music profession became compulsorily insured under a pension scheme for non-manual workers in 1929. In February 1929, accident insurance coverage was extended to include 22 occupationally induced diseases. That same year, a special pension for unemployed persons at the age of 60 was introduced.
Death
thumb|upright|Müller's grave
After resigning as chancellor, Müller retired from public life. Following the elections in September 1930, which saw massive gains for Adolf Hitler's NSDAP, Müller called on his party to support Heinrich Brüning's government even without being part of the coalition.
Works
Literature
- Prager, Eugen: "Hermann Müller und die Presse". In: Mitteilungen des Vereins Arbeiterpresse. Heft 312 (April 1931), pp. 1–2.
- Behring, Rainer: "Wegbereiter sozialdemokratischer Außenpolitik. Hermann Müller" [Trailblazer of Social Democratic Foreign Policy. Hermann Müller]. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 April 2006, p. 8.
- Braun, Bernd: Die Reichskanzler der Weimarer Republik. Zwölf Lebensläufe in Bildern [The Reich Chancellors of the Weimar Republic. Twelve Biographies in Pictures]. Düsseldorf, 2011, , pp. 134–167.