ABSTRACT
The installation of von Kahr as Minister-President in March 1920 inaugurated the political ascendancy in Bavaria of the Bavarian People’s Party, the self-proclaimed standard-bearer in Munich’s resistance to Berlin’s “centralism.” Identifying itself to a very great extent as the “party of the Bavarian state” 1 epitomizing Bavarian interests, the staunchly Catholic BVP commanded an unusually stable electoral plurality that proved highly resistant to the appeal of other parties. Its “high-clerical” right wing dominated the governing coalitions from von Kahr’s advent until the National Socialist coup in Munich in March 1933. In the “Kahr Era” from March 1920 to the collapse of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, the BVP-led Bavarian Government sought to “encapsulize” the state from the rest of the crisis-ridden Reich in an aggressive-but-abortive bid to wrest from Berlin a privileged status for Bavaria in the German Republic comparable as far as possible to that which she had held in the Empire. With the same ultimate objective, BVP Minister-President Dr. Heinrich Held’s ministries in the “Held era” from July 1924 to mid-1932 concentrated without notable success on parliamentary and juridical reform of the Weimar Constitution in the direction of a looser federalisn) The disastrous impact of the Great Depression and the Reich Government’s attempts to cope with it through rule by emergency decree finally forced Munich in 1932 and early 1933 to stand on that embattled Constitution as the last guarantor against Berlin of the few Bavarian prerogatives left, again to no lasting avail. The Hitler regime’s Gleichschaltung and one-party rule from 1933 virtually sounded the death knell for “Bavarian federalism” in its traditional form.
