Item: i101432

Authentic Coin of:

Germany – Centennial – Birth of Gustav Stresemann
1978 D Proof Silver 5 Marks 28mm (11.10 grams) 0.625 Silver (0.2251 oz. ASW) Karlsruhe Mint.
Reference: KM# 147
BUNDESREPUBLIK DEUTSCHLAND 1978 D 5 DEUTSCHE MARK, Portrait of Gustav 3/4 left.
1878 – 1929 GUSTAV STRESEMANN, Eagle.
Edge Lettering: 

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Gustav Ernst Stresemann (10 May 1878 – 3 October 1929) was a German statesman who served as Chancellor in 1923 (for a brief period of 102 days) and Foreign Minister 1923-1929, during the Weimar Republic. He was co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.

His most notable achievement was the reconciliation between Germany and France, for which he and Aristide Briand received the Nobel Peace Prize. During a period of political instability and fragile, short-lived governments, he was generally seen as the most influential cabinet member in most of the Weimar Republic’s existence. During his political career, he represented three successive liberal parties; he was the dominant figure of the German People’s Party during the Weimar Republic.

Stresemann was born on 10 May 1878 in the Köpenicker Straße area of 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. 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. During his university years, Stresemann also became active in 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 these 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 completed his studies in January 1901, submitting a thesis on the bottled beer industry in Berlin, which received a relatively high grade. Stresemann’s doctoral supervisor was the economist Karl Bücher.

In 1902 he 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.

The evolution of his political ideas appears somewhat erratic. Initially, in the German Empire, Stresemann was associated with the left wing of the National Liberals. During World War I, he gradually moved to the right, expressing his support of the monarchy and Germany’s expansionist goals. He was a vocal proponent of unrestricted submarine warfare. However, he still favoured an expansion of the social welfare programme, and also supported an end to the restrictive Prussian franchise.

When the Allies’ peace terms became known, including a crushing burden of paying reparations for the war, Constantin Fehrenbach denounced them and claimed “the will to break the chains of slavery would be implanted” into a generation of Germans. Stresemann said of this speech: “He was inspired in that hour by God to say what was felt by the German people. His words, spoken under Fichte’s portrait, the final words of which merged into “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles“, made it an unforgettably solemn hour. There was in that sense a kind of uplifting grandeur. The impression left on all was tremendous”.

Stresemann briefly joined the German Democratic Party after the war, but was expelled for his association with the right wing. He then gathered the main body of the old National Liberal Party-including most of its centre and right factions-into the German People’s Party (German: Deutsche Volkspartei, DVP), with himself as chairman. Most of its support came from middle class and upper class Protestants. The DVP platform promoted Christian family values, secular education, lower tariffs, opposition to welfare spending and agrarian subsidies and hostility to “Marxism” (that is, the Communists, and also the Social Democrats).

The DVP was initially seen, along with the German National People’s Party, as part of the “national opposition” to the Weimar Republic, particularly for its grudging acceptance of democracy and its ambivalent attitude towards the Freikorps and the Kapp Putsch in 1920. By late 1920, Stresemann gradually moved to cooperation with the parties of the left and centre – possibly in reaction to political murders like that of Walther Rathenau. However, he remained a monarchist at heart.

Chancellor 1923

On 13 August 1923, Stresemann was appointed Chancellor and Foreign Minister of a grand coalition government in the so-called year of crises (1923). In social policy, a new system of binding arbitration was introduced in October 1923 in which an outside arbitrator had the final say in industrial disputes.

On 26 (or 27) September 1923, Stresemann announced the end to the resistance against the Occupation of the Ruhr by the French and Belgians, in tandem with an Article 48 (of the Weimar Constitution) state of emergency proclamation by President Ebert that lasted until February 1924. By this time, Stresemann was convinced that accepting the republic and reaching an understanding with the Allies on the reparations issue was the only way for Germany to gain the breathing room it needed to rebuild its battered economy. He also wished to recover the Rhineland, as he wrote to the Crown Prince on 23 July 1923: “The most important objective of German politics is the liberation of German territory from French and Belgian occupation. First, we must remove the strangler from our throat”.

Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic would reach its peak in November 1923. Since Germany was no longer able to pay the striking workers, more and more money was printed, which finally led to hyperinflation. Stresemann introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, to end hyperinflation. He also persuaded the French to pull back from the Ruhr in return for a promise that reparations payments would resume. This was part of his larger strategy of “fulfillment.” He had come to believe that as harsh as the Treaty of Versailles was, Germany would never win relief from its terms unless it made a good-faith effort to fulfill them. To his mind, this would convince the Allies that the reparations bill was truly beyond Germany’s capacity. The effort paid off; the Allies began to take a look at reforming the reparations scheme.

In early November 1923, the Social Democrats withdrew from his reshuffled government and after a motion of confidence was voted down on 23 November 1923 Stresemann and his cabinet resigned.

Stresemann was not willing to conclude a similar treaty with Poland: “There will be no Locarno of the east” he said. Moreover, he never excluded the use of force to regain the eastern territories of former German Empire which had come under Polish control as a consequence of the Treaty of Versailles.

After this reconciliation with the Versailles powers, Stresemann moved to allay the growing suspicion of the Soviet Union. He said to Nikolay Krestinsky in June 1925, as recorded in his diary: “I had said I would not come to conclude a treaty with Russia so long as our political situation in the other direction was not cleared up, as I wanted to answer the question whether we had a treaty with Russia in the negative”. The Treaty of Berlin signed in April 1926 reaffirmed and strengthened the Rapallo Treaty of 1922. In September 1926, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations as permanent member of the Security Council. This was a sign that Germany was quickly becoming a normal state, and assured the Soviet Union of Germany’s sincerity in the Treaty of Berlin.

Stresemann wrote to the Crown Prince: “All the questions which to-day preoccupy the German people can be transformed into as many vexations for the Entente by a skilful orator before the League of Nations”. As Germany now had a veto on League resolutions, she could gain concessions from other countries on modifications on the Polish border or Anschluss with Austria, as other countries needed her vote. Germany could now act as “the spokesman of the whole German cultural community” and thereby provoke the German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Stresemann was co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926 for these achievements.

Germany signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact in August 1928. It renounced the use of violence to resolve international conflicts. Although Stresemann did not propose the pact, Germany’s adherence convinced many people that Weimar Germany was a Germany that could be reasoned with. This new insight was instrumental in the Young Plan of February 1929 which led to more reductions in German reparations payment.

Gustav Stresemann’s success owed much to his friendly personal character and his willingness to be pragmatic. He was close personal friends with many influential foreigners. The most noted was Briand, with whom he shared the Peace Prize.

Stresemann was not, however, in any sense pro-French. His main preoccupation was how to free Germany from the burden of reparations payments to Britain and France, imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. His strategy for this was to forge an economic alliance with the United States. The U.S. was Germany’s main source of food and raw materials, and one of Germany’s largest export markets for manufactured goods. Germany’s economic recovery was thus in the interests of the U.S., and gave the U.S. an incentive to help Germany escape from the reparations burden. The Dawes and Young plans were the result of this strategy. Stresemann had a close relationship with Herbert Hoover, who was Secretary of Commerce in 1921-28 and President from 1929. This strategy worked remarkably well until it was derailed by the Great Depression after Stresemann’s death.

During his period in the foreign ministry, Stresemann came more and more to accept the Republic, which he had at first rejected. By the mid-1920s, having contributed much to a (temporary) consolidation of the feeble democratic order, Stresemann was regarded as a Vernunftrepublikaner (republican by reason) – someone who accepted the Republic as the least of all evils, but was in his heart still loyal to the monarchy. The conservative opposition criticized him for his supporting the republic and fulfilling too willingly the demands of the Western powers. Along with Matthias Erzberger and others, he was attacked as a Erfüllungspolitiker (“fulfillment politician”). Indeed, some of the more conservative members of his own People’s Party never really trusted him.

In 1925, when he first proposed an agreement with France, he made it clear that in doing so he intended to “gain a free hand to secure a peaceful change of the borders in the East and […] concentrate on a later incorporation of German territories in the East”. In the same year, while Poland was in a state of political and economic crisis, Stresemann began a trade war against the country. Stresemann hoped for an escalation of the Polish crisis, which would enable Germany to regain territories ceded to Poland after World War I, and he wanted Germany to gain a larger market for its products there. So Stresemann refused to engage in any international cooperation that would have “prematurely” restabilized the Polish economy. In response to a British proposal, Stresemann wrote to the German ambassador in London: “[A] final and lasting recapitalization of Poland must be delayed until the country is ripe for a settlement of the border according to our wishes and until our own position is sufficiently strong”. According to Stresemann’s letter, there should be no settlement “until [Poland’s] economic and financial distress has reached an extreme stage and reduced the entire Polish body politic to a state of powerlessness”. Stresseman hoped to annex Polish territories in Greater Poland, take over whole eastern Upper Silesia and parts of Central Silesia and the entire so called Polish Corridor. Besides waging economic war on Poland, Streseman funded extensive propaganda efforts and plotted to collaborate with Soviet Union against Polish statehood.

Gustav Stresemann died of a stroke on 3 October 1929 at the age of 51. His gravesite is situated in the Luisenstadt Cemetery at Südstern in Berlin Kreuzberg, and includes work by the German sculptor Hugo Lederer. Stresemann’s sudden and premature death, as well as the death of his “pragmatic moderate” French counterpart Aristide Briand in 1932, and the assassination of Briand’s successor Louis Barthou in 1934, left a vacuum in European statesmanship that did not decelerate the movement towards renewed conflict, and ultimately World War II…..^{[speculation?]}.

Gustav and Käte had two sons, Wolfgang, who later became intendant of the Berliner Philharmoniker, and Joachim Stresemann.

Gustav Stresemann was a freemason initiated in the masonic lodge Frederick the Great (in German, Friedrich der Große) in Berlin in 1923. His masonic membership was generally known to his contemporaries and he was criticized by German nationalists as a “lodge politician”.

Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany is a federal parliamentary republic in western-central Europe. It includes 16 constituent states and covers an area of 357,021 square kilometres (137,847 sq mi) with a largely temperate seasonal climate. Its capital and largest city is Berlin. With 81 million inhabitants, Germany is the most populous member state in the European Union. After the United States, it is the second most popular migration destination in the world.

Various Germanic tribes have occupied northern Germany since classical antiquity. A region named Germania was documented before 100 CE. During the Migration Period the Germanic tribes expanded southward. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation.

The rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states in 1871 into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the German Revolution of 1918-1919, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic. The establishment of the Third Reich in 1933 led to World War II and the Holocaust. After 1945, Germany split into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990, the country was reunified.

In the 21st century, Germany is a great power and has the world’s fourth-largest economy by nominal GDP, as well as the fifth-largest by PPP. As a global leader in several industrial and technological sectors, it is both the world’s third-largest exporter and importer of goods. Germany is a developed country with a very high standard of living sustained by a skilled and productive society. It upholds a social security and universal health care system, environmental protection and a tuition free university education.

Germany was a founding member of the European Union in 1993. It is part of the Schengen Area, and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999. Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G8, the G20, and the OECD. The national military expenditure is the 9th highest in the world. Known for its rich cultural history, Germany has been continuously the home of influential artists, philosophers, musicians, sportsmen, entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors.