Germany was already experiencing an economic recession when the US stock market crashed and new, higher reparations payments under the Young Plan came into effect.
Struggling American banks called in their German loans, further squeezing the German economy. The government chose to respond with tight austerity measures that deepened the suffering of the German people.
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A couple of interesting choices of words. German President, Friedrich Ebert “He was a Social Democrat, but a democrat first and a socialist second.” As if they are mutually exclusive.
“The new Brüning government, no longer beholden to socialists, pressed ahead with its centrist solution to
the economic crisis: an austerity budget of spending cuts and tax increases.” To describe this as centrist is stretching the meaning a fair bit, to say the least.
With regard to the first, I don’t see how the wording implies they are mutually exclusive. What it implies is that they are not synonymous and that one might sometimes have to choose between them. With regard to the second, my dictionary defines “centrist” as “a member of a political party of the center,” which is a perfectly accurate description. I don’t see that there’s anything especially remarkable about the word choices in either case.
He may have been a member of a party with the word ‘Centre’ in it’s name but that does not necessarily mean they were a centre party, just has having the word ‘socialist’ in a party’s name does not mean it is a socialist party. The coalition Bruning led was certainly more right wing than the previous one and the austerity budget was certainly not centrist, it reminds me of the UK government of 2010, nominally a coalition containing the ‘centrist’ Liberal-Democrats, who turned out to be quite right-wing in their policies.
What is centrist means different things at different places and times. A centrist in the soviet union will not be the same thing as a centrist in Germany or Britain. And having Nazis on one side and Communists on the other gives a wide berth for any “centrist” positions.