Chapter 3 focuses on the history of the DNVP from the elections to the Weimar National Assembly to the Reichstag elections of June 1920. It deals in particular with the way in which the DNVP established itself as a party of “national opposition” at the National Assembly with particular attention to its positions on the Weimar Constitution and the Versailles Peace Treaty. It also examines the success with which hard-line conservatives around Count Westarp were able to assert themselves in the deliberations over the party program and in pushing back against efforts of the young conservatives around Ulrich von Hassell to shape the DNVP into a progressive conservative party free from the follies of the past. The chapter ends with the Kapp putsch in March 1920, the adoption of the party program a month later, and the Reichstag elections of June 1920 in which the DNVP improves upon its performance at the polls in the elections to the National Assembly.

Chapter 8 examines the efforts of Stresemann to stabilize Germany’s republican system by coopting the support of influential special interest organizations like the National Federation of German Industry (RDI) and the National Rural League (RLB) in the hope that they can influence the DNVP to adopt a more responsible posture toward the existing system of government. The fact that the DNVP improved upon its performance in the May 1924 Reichstag elections in a new round of voting in December means that the DNVP can no longer be ignored as a potential coalition partner. The DNVP’s subsequent entry into the first Luther cabinet in January 1925 is to be seen as part of a larger stabilization strategy that also includes the election of retired war hero Paul von Hindenburg as Reich president in April 1925 and changes in the leadership of the RDI and RLB that reflect an increased willingness to work within the framework of the existing system of government.

Chapter 4 explores the ways in which the DNVP tried to reach out to groups that had stood outside the orbit of the prewar conservative parties, namely Catholics, youth, and women at a time when it adopted an increasingly hard line against Germany’s republican system and the foreign policy of the Fehrenbach and Wirth governments. Under Helfferich’s leadership, the DNVP was able to exploit the inflationary spiral of the early 1920s and the distress that this created in diverse sectors of German society, but particularly among the German middle strata. It was also able to solidify its position in the German agricultural community by virtue of its outspoken opposition to the continuation of war-time controls over farm prices and production quotas. The DNVP was thus able to build upon the organizational growth of the previous year and a half and to consolidate its position as the political agent of Germany’s conservative milieu.