High point of political stability
Otto Braun was again elected minister president on 3 April 1925, with 216 of 430 votes in the Landtag. Like Marx, his base was SPD, Centre and DDP. Braun took over the majority of Marx's cabinet and looked to continuity in policy. He blamed the months-long government crisis on what he called the "German national communist bloc", by which he meant all the opposition parties from the DNVP and DVP to the KPD and various small parties, which included the Nazis. Braun said that "they are as incapable of building as they are unanimous in destroying." The new cabinet was a minority government, but it proved remarkably stable.
The question of financial settlements with Germany's former ruling dynasties was, in principle, a matter for the states. In Prussia, negotiations with the Hohenzollerns failed in 1920 because the SPD rejected the proposal in the Landtag, and the former royal house objected to it in 1924. In 1925, the Ministry of Finance under Hermann Höpker-Aschoff (DDP) submitted another draft proposal. It was extraordinarily favorable to the Hohenzollerns and led to fierce criticism from the SPD and DDP. The DDP then introduced a bill in the Reichstag that would authorize the states to find a solution without recourse to the courts. It was the starting point for a political process that led to the failed referendum on princely expropriation at the national level in 1926.
The Braun government subsequently intensified negotiations with the Hohenzollerns over the former royal house's assets. In the end, a compromise was reached that the SPD viewed very critically. The main Hohenzollern line received 250,000 acres of land and 15 million Reichsmarks. The Prussian state also received 250,000 acres, plus the royal palaces, works of art, the coronation regalia, the library of the former royal house, the archives and the theater. In the Landtag, KPD deputies reacted with anger and even violence. The vote went in favor of the agreement. It is noteworthy that not only did the Communists reject the bill, but also that the representatives of the governing SPD either voted against it or did not participate in the vote. Braun was only able to ensure that more SPD deputies did not vote against the bill by threatening to resign.
On 6 October 1926, as had been agreed with Braun some time earlier, Carl Severing resigned as minister of the Interior, leaving Braun the only political heavyweight in the cabinet. Severing was succeeded by Albert Grzesinski (SPD).
There were frequent tensions between the Christian-bourgeois national governments and the center-left government in Prussia. One practical issue was revenue sharing between the federal government and the states. Compensation for the financial harm caused by territorial losses under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles remained a central point of conflict between the national government and Prussia. The disputes over the use of flags on Constitution Day in 1927 fell into the realm of symbolic politics, which was important for the citizens' idea of the state. Braun announced a boycott of those hotels in Berlin that flew the old imperial black-white-red colors instead of the Republic's black-red-gold. When he asked the national government to join in the boycott call, Minister of the Interior Walter von Keudell (DNVP) protested against Prussia's "insolence". The conflict was exacerbated when Prussian Minister of Culture Becker restricted the rights of student self-government at Prussian universities because of the increasing influence of the völkisch movement there. When nationally minded student bodies protested against the move, Keudell openly backed them. Not least because of his work in addressing these and other conflicts with Keudell, Braun became an important integration figure among Social Democrats.
A relic of the feudal past in Prussia was the manorial district. Those living on them had no communal right of residence and were subject to the police power invested in the landlords. Using groundwork laid by Interior Minister Grzesinski, the Braun government abolished the districts in 1927. The change affected 12,000 manorial districts with a combined population of 1.5 million. Some remnants of the old conditions did, however, continue to exist east of the Elbe River (East Elbia). There were many agricultural workers who received part of their wages in kind, such as free housing, food or land use. As late as 1928, 83% of the income of an average farm worker in East Prussia consisted of such wages; the figure was somewhat lower in Silesia and Pomerania. Employers preferred this form of pay because it tied workers more closely to them and made it difficult to verify the accuracy of their wages.
The situation was different in areas with a population made up predominantly of independent farmers. Even so, political misgivings in rural regions remained strong, as is shown by the emergence of rural protest parties such as the Christian-National Peasants' and Farmers' Party (CNBL) in 1928. In Schleswig-Holstein, which was characterized not by large landholdings but by small farmers, an agrarian protest movement developed toward the end of the 1920s with the Rural People's Movement.
The period of the grand coalition saw the beginning of a reform of the educational system that was initially pushed forward by the independent Minister of Education Carl Heinrich Becker. One of its goals was to reduce the educational disparity between urban and rural areas.
According to the Weimar Constitution, the training of elementary school teachers was to be aligned with that of the higher schools. How that was to be done was left a matter for the states. Some, such as Thuringia and Saxony, introduced teacher training at universities or technical universities. Others, including Bavaria and Württemberg, retained the old seminar method. In 1924, Prussia introduced a middle course using denominational pedagogic academies with a shorter training period than in a regular university course.
The government worked to promote secondary educational opportunities for gifted blue- and white-collar workers. In 1928, there were 102 adult education centres with 13,000 students. To support those with limited means who were eager to learn, a broad majority in the Landtag voted in favour of introducing 20,000 Reichsmarks in educational grants in 1928. One year later, the sum had reached 100,000 Reichsmarks, although additional increases were slowed by fiscal considerations, including on the part of the SPD.
The pupil-teacher ratio was reduced from 55 students per teacher in 1911 to 38 in 1928. Personnel costs, which placed a heavy burden on the state budget, led the SPD at times to limit educational expenditures in opposition to its stated goals.
In May 1928, elections were held at both the national and state levels. In the Prussian state election, the SPD made gains while the Centre and DDP both lost seats. In spite of that, the coalition had a parliamentary majority, with 228 of 450 seats. The government remained the same, and Braun promised to continue his work. One of the government's projects was to be a municipal reorganization of the Ruhr region.
As the election campaign of 1918/19 had shown, the memory of imperial Prussia's Kulturkampf ('cultural conflict') against the Catholic Church was still alive, but due in large part to the strong position of the Centre Party in the Landtag and the government, the Catholic population had come to identify relatively strongly with the new Free State of Prussia. Its high point and symbol was the Prussian Concordat with the Vatican, signed on 14 June 1929 by Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII). The treaty superseded an 1821 agreement between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Vatican and eliminated the last remnants of church legislation from the Kulturkampf period. It regulated state contributions to the church and the arrangement of bishoprics, including reestablishing the bishoprics of Aachen and Berlin. School issues were excluded, but they regulated the academic training of clergy. The forms of episcopal elections and similar issues were also clarified.
There was opposition to the Concordat from various sides. The Lutheran Church, supported by the DNVP and DVP, saw it as strengthening Catholicism. Freethinkers in the SPD also rejected the agreement.
While the Catholic population was successfully won over to the new Prussia, the issue was more difficult when it came to Protestants. With the revolution, the Protestants of the Prussian Union of Churches lost the king of Prussia as their leader. He had officially been the head bishop (summus episcopus) of the Union with far-reaching rights, extending even to the shaping of the liturgy. Emperor Wilhelm II had taken the task very seriously, and after the revolution, many Protestants lacked an important figure by which to orient themselves. A considerable percentage of church-going Protestants voted for the anti-democratic and nationalistic DNVP. It was no coincidence that the motto of the Protestant church congress of 1927 was "Volk und Vaterland". Antisemitic influences, especially among theological faculties, also grew in strength.
An ecclesiastical treaty with the Protestant regional churches in Prussia did not come about until 1931. On the state's side, it was promoted by Adolf Grimme (SPD), who had become minister of Culture. A "political clause" that regulated the state's objections to the filling of high church positions, similar to the Concordat with the Catholic Church, met with resistance from the church.
