We could be more liberal if we had no social democrats.” This was one axiom of German electoral politics with which the overwhelming mass of non-socialist (bürgerlich) German voters agreed unrservedly, wrote Lothar Schücking, a liberal critic of Prussian officialdom, in 1908. Nevertheless, continued Schücking, the aims and ideals of the social democratic movement were completely unfamiliar to most educated Germans. “One knows a few slogans,” wrote Schucking: “‘free love,’ ‘religion a private matter,’ ‘impoverishment of the masses,’… ‘republic.’” Everything else was subsumed under the specter of the “red international.” Disapprovingly, Schucking concluded that “the burgerlich parties have gradually come to recognize only ‘national questions.’”

Given the Weimar Republic's collapse into dictatorship, its political historiography has stressed its many failures. To that pattern the Catholic Center Party, or Zentrum, which participated in all of the Republic's cabinets but one, has been no exception. Programmatically vague, the party was subject to bitter divisions between an authoritarian monarchist right and a vocal republican left. This trend was already obvious after the June 1920 Reichstag elections in which the party lost four million votes, mostly from the Catholic working class. Thereafter the Center remained unable to extend its appeal beyond a fixed, socially conservative base. Accordingly, the Center's record, culminating in the controversial chancellorship of Heinrich Brüning, has been presented as one replete with failure, if not desperation.