The Collapse of the Weimar Republic1) Explain why the Weimar Republic collapsed.1) In January 1919, German voters elected a national assembly to write a constitution. The assembly met in Weimar, and in August 1919 the constitution established a democratic republic known as the Weimar Republic. It envisaged a parliament made up of two chambers: the Reichstag and the Reichsrat, and a popularly elected president. The chancellor and cabinet members were appointed by the president, but could be removed from office by the Reichstag. However, the Weimar Republic, like many new parliaments, was weak from the beginning and faced many problems that ultimately caused its downfall. failure. First, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were harsher than the Germans had thought. They did not expect to be treated badly as they expected the treaty to follow the same lines as Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Some of the treaty's clauses included the infamous war guilt clause, the reparations clause, and the reduction of the German army to such small numbers that it could hardly control itself. The German navy scuttled its ships at Scapa Flow in protest. All of Germany felt betrayed by its allies and its own politicians. Those who had signed the armistice were now dubbed the November criminals who had “stabbed Germany in the back.” Second, the parliamentary system envisaged by the new Weimar constitution had weaknesses. The most serious is that, being a democracy, a system of proportional representation was introduced so that all political groups had fair representation. Unfortunately, there were so many different groups that no one party could ever win a majority; this inevitably resulted in serious successions of coalition governments. The other weakness was that political parties had very little experience of how to govern a democratic parliamentary system. This led to disagreements and each party organized its own private army