His most notable achievement was the reconciliation between Germany and France, for which he and French Prime Minister Aristide Briand received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.

Exempted from war service due to poor health, he gradually became the National Liberals' de facto leader before formally taking over the party in 1917.

Germany's defeat and the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy came as a significant shock to Stresemann, forcing him to gradually reassess his previous positions.

He founded the German People's Party (DVP) and, despite his own monarchist beliefs, came to grudgingly accept Weimar democracy and became open to working with the centre and the left.

During his brief chancellorship, he abandoned the policy of passive resistance against the French-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr and introduced the Rentenmark in a (relatively successful) attempt to tame hyperinflation in the country.

Amid failing health, Stresemann successfully negotiated the Young Plan which sought to further reduce German reparations payments.

His father worked as a beer bottler and distributor, and also ran a small bar out of the family home, as well as renting rooms for extra money.

In an essay written when he left school, he noted that he would have enjoyed becoming a teacher, but he would only have been qualified to teach languages or the natural sciences, which were not his primary areas of interest.

He completed his studies in January 1901, submitting a thesis on the bottled beer industry in Berlin, which received a relatively high grade but was a subject of mockery from colleagues.

He believed that Germany would need to annex Belgium, parts of north-east France, "extensive" lands in Eastern Europe and the French protectorate in Morocco in order to economically compete with the United States in the future.

Stresemann nevertheless agreed to the Turks' demand to recall of the German ambassador, Paul Wolff Metternich, and accused him of being too sympathetic to Armenians.

[11] When the Allied powers' peace terms became known, which included a crushing burden of reparations for the war, Constantin Fehrenbach, president of the Weimar National Assembly, denounced them and claimed "the will to break the chains of slavery would be implanted" into a generation of Germans.

The DVP platform promoted Christian family values, secular education, lower tariffs, opposition to welfare spending and agrarian subsidies, and hostility to communism and the Social Democrats.

[11] By late 1920, Stresemann gradually moved to cooperation with the parties of the left and centre — possibly in reaction to political murders like that of Walther Rathenau.

[19][page needed] On 26 September 1923, Stresemann announced the end to the passive resistance against the occupation of the Ruhr by the French and Belgians, in tandem with an Article 48 (of the Weimar Constitution) state of emergency proclamation by President Friedrich Ebert that lasted until February 1924.

[22] By this time, Stresemann was convinced that accepting the Republic and reaching an understanding with the Allies on the reparations issue was the only way for Germany to gain the breathing room it needed to rebuild its battered economy.

Although Stresemann, like nearly every other German politician, cursed the Treaty of Versailles as a dictated peace, he had come to believe that Germany would never win relief from its terms unless it made a good-faith effort to fulfil them.

His first notable achievement was the Dawes Plan of 1924, which reduced Germany's overall reparations commitment, reorganized the Reichsbank and ended the occupation of the Ruhr.

Schacht implemented the Dawes Plan and managed the successful effort to end hyperinflation, despite his reservations about Germany's growing foreign debt under Stresemann's economic policies.

On the third day of negotiations, Stresemann told French Foreign Secretary Aristide Briand of the concessions Germany wanted in order to be able to have something concrete to show the sceptical German public in exchange for the Locarno Pact.

Germany officially recognized its post-World War I western border for the first time, guaranteed peace with France and Belgium and pledged to observe the demilitarization of the Rhineland.

In September 1926, as planned during the negotiations for the Locarno Treaties, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations as permanent member of the Executive Council.

By the mid-1920s, having contributed much to a (temporary) consolidation of the feeble democratic order, Stresemann was regarded as a Vernunftrepublikaner, (republican by reason), someone who accepted the Republic as the least of all evils but was in his heart still loyal to the monarchy.

In response to a British proposal, Stresemann wrote to the German ambassador in London: "[A] final and lasting recapitalization of Poland must be delayed until the country is ripe for a settlement of the border according to our wishes and until our own position is sufficiently strong."

According to Stresemann's letter, there should be no settlement "until [Poland's] economic and financial distress has reached an extreme stage and reduced the entire Polish body politic to a state of powerlessness".

According to historian Gordon Craig: No German statesman since Bismarck's time had demonstrated, as brilliantly as he was to do, the ability to sense danger and to avoid it by seizing and retaining the initiative, the gift of maintaining perspective and a sense of relative values in the midst of a changing diplomatic situation, and the talent for being more stubborn than his partners in negotiation and for refusing to allow their importunities to force him to accept second-best solutions.

[41]In 1928, Stresemann's poor health worsened after the mainstream national conservative parties lost seats to the SPD in the 1928 German federal election.

He successfully negotiated a grand coalition government led by Chancellor Hermann Müller in which he remained foreign secretary, but he was weakened in doing so.

[42] Discontent with the Young Plan led to the growth of far-right movements rejecting liberal democracy such as the Nazi Party, with Stresemann weakening himself further by keeping the right wing of the DVP under control.

[42] His gravesite is situated in the Luisenstadt Cemetery at Südstern in Berlin Kreuzberg, and includes work by the German sculptor Hugo Lederer.