Karl Joseph Wirth (; 6 September 1879 – 3 January 1956) was a German politician of the Catholic Centre Party who was chancellor of Germany from May 1921 to November 1922, during the early years of the Weimar Republic. He was also minister of four government departments between 1920 and 1931 (Foreign Affairs, Finance, Interior, and Occupied Territories). Wirth was strongly influenced by Christian social teaching throughout his political career.

He was named chancellor in May 1921 when Germany was facing difficult negotiations with the Allies of World War I over German war reparations. Wirth accepted the Allies' conditions and began a policy of fulfilment – an attempt to show that Germany was unable to afford the reparations payments by making the effort to meet them. He resigned after less than six months in protest against the partition of Upper Silesia by the League of Nations and formed a second, minority cabinet a few days later. Following the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by members of a right-wing terrorist group in April 1922, his government attempted to confront political violence with the Law for the Protection of the Republic. Wirth's second government resigned after just over a year when it was unable to expand its political base.

After his two terms as chancellor, Wirth continued to fight right-wing political forces as a Reichstag member and government minister. During the Nazi era, he went into exile and worked with several anti-Nazi groups. Following the end of World War II, he opposed Konrad Adenauer's policy of integration with the West. Although he lived in West Germany, he had contacts with the Soviet Union and East Germany, the latter of which awarded him two prestigious honours. He died in his hometown of Freiburg in 1956.

Early life

Karl Joseph Wirth was born on 6 September 1879 in Freiburg im Breisgau in what was then the Grand Duchy of Baden, a federal state of the German Empire. He was the son of Karl Wirth, a master machinist at a printing company, and his wife Agathe (née Zeller). The involvement of his parents, who were Catholic, in Christian and social causes had a strong influence on him throughout his life.

From 1899 to 1906, he studied mathematics, natural sciences and economics at the University of Freiburg. He obtained his doctorate in mathematics in 1906 with the thesis "On the elementary divisors of a linear homogeneous substitution".

Start of political career

In 1911, Wirth was elected to the Freiburg city council for the Catholic Centre Party. From 1913 to 1921, he was a member of the Baden , the lower house of parliament of the Grand Duchy (after 1918 the Republic) of Baden.

At the start of World War I, Wirth volunteered for military service but, for health reasons, was deemed unfit. He then volunteered with the Red Cross and served on both the Western and Eastern Fronts until 1917, when he left after contracting pneumonia. The London ultimatum issued on 5 May threatened an Allied occupation of the Ruhr if Germany did not accept the terms within six days. The Centre and SPD were in favour of accepting the London Schedule in spite of the anger it had aroused in the German public. Since Wirth was the only candidate for chancellor whom the SPD would accept, and no government could be built without them, Wirth and the Centre Party formed a coalition on 10 May with the SPD and the German Democratic Party (DDP). and Walther Rathenau, then minister of Reconstruction, concluded a comprehensive agreement with France for paying reparations in kind for the reconstruction of the devastated regions of the country. The fulfilment policy was quickly broken off due to the problems of financing it. In December 1921, Germany had to request a postponement of the next payment.

The strife which arose out of the crisis in Bavaria had only just abated when in mid-October the League of Nations' announcement of the partition of Upper Silesia between Germany and Poland aroused considerable anger throughout Germany. Almost sixty per cent of the vote in the March 1921 plebiscite in ethnically mixed Upper Silesia was in favour of staying part of Germany, but the heavily industrialised eastern part of the region was nevertheless awarded to Poland. Wirth believed that its severance from Germany would fatally affect Germany's capacity to pay its reparations.

On 22 October 1921, he resigned in protest over the partition. Three days later, President Friedrich Ebert once again asked him to form a government, which Wirth did on 26 October with the second Wirth cabinet.

Second term

thumb|[[Walther Rathenau, minister of Finance in the second Wirth cabinet, was assassinated by far-right extremists on 24 June 1922.]]

On 16 April 1922, Wirth and Walther Rathenau signed the Treaty of Rapallo, under which Germany and Soviet Russia renounced all war-related territorial and financial claims against each other and opened friendly diplomatic relations, a move which ended Germany's post-war foreign policy isolation. and famously proclaimed:

<blockquote>There stands the enemy, who drips his poison into the wounds of a people. There stands the enemy, and about it there is no doubt: the enemy is on the Right!</blockquote>

On 21 July 1922, the Reichstag passed the Law for the Protection of the Republic on the initiative of the Wirth government. He was also one of the founders of "Democratic Germany" (), a working group with SPD members in exile. It drew up guidelines for the re-establishment of a democratic Germany that they hoped would avoid the mistakes that had brought down the Weimar Republic. The CIA file "The background of Joseph Wirth" states that Wirth was a Soviet agent.

Wirth died of heart failure in 1956, aged 76, in his hometown of Freiburg and was buried in the city's main cemetery.

References

Bibliography

  • KNAPP, THOMAS A. “THE GERMAN CENTER PARTY AND THE REICHSBANNER: A CASE STUDY IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONSENSUS IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC.” International Review of Social History 14, no. 2 (1969): pp. 159–179. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/44583794].