negotiated an agreement with the allied powers.3
However, despite the counsel and advice from American President Woodrow Wilson, both France and Great Britain were determined to exact a heavy price from Germany. The disastrous 1919 Treaty of Versailles basically laid the entire responsibility of the war at the feet of the German Empire. Germany was forbidden to have a large standing army, was to be tightly controlled politically, and was forced to sign an agreement to pay war reparations. The amount Germany was assigned was staggering; certainly any country trying to form a new government after a devastating war would not be able to keep up with such debt.4 This was later to prove significant in the breakdown of Weimar.
3 A.J. Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise of Hitler, (London: Macmillan Press, 1968), 1.
4 Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866 1945, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 424 32.
As with many countries after war, Germany in 1918 was vulnerable to revolutionary activity. During the next few years, Germany was indeed plagued with revolutionary activity, mostly from the communist left. By mid 1919, however, German republican loyalists had brutally murdered many of the socialist leaders, and after the signing of Versailles, Germany found itself a bit more stable. The revolution, unsuccessful as it was, did provide Germany with a Republic and an armistice. In this face of adversity, the new Weimar government promised reform, and looked as if it would be far more egalitarian than its Imperial predecessor.5
The chronology of the Weimar Republic may be broken down into three sections. The first, Weimar's origin and consolidation, lay roughly from 1918/19 to 1923. From 1924 to 1929 there was relative stabiliza
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