Analysing the conflicts within and between organised industrial and agricultural forces in Germany as well as those between capital and labour, the author shows how these conflicts made it impossible for a coherent political force to emerge to hold the democratic republic together and how, after a period of costly cooperation with labour, and faced with unacceptable alternatives, Germany's elites found unity in a dictatorship that removed the working class from politics and obliged the dominant classes to abdicate all but their economic interests.