Heinrich Aloysius Maria Elisabeth Brüning (pronounced [ˈhaɪnʁɪç ˈbʁyːnɪŋ] ⓘ; 26 November 1885 – 30 March 1970) was a German Centre Party politician and academic, who served as the chancellor of Germany during the Weimar Republic from 1930 to 1932.

He returned to Germany in 1951 to teach at the University of Cologne but again moved to the United States in 1955 and lived out his days in retirement in Vermont.

Born in Münster in Westphalia, Brüning lost his father when he was one year old, and thus his elder brother Hermann Joseph played a major part in his upbringing in a devoutly Roman Catholic family.

After graduating from Gymnasium Paulinum he first leaned towards the legal profession but then studied Philosophy, History, German, and Political Science at Strasbourg, the London School of Economics, and Bonn, where in 1915 he received a doctorate for his thesis on the financial, economic, and legal implications of nationalizing the British railway system.

[3] Despite having been elected to a soldiers' council after the armistice of 11 November 1918,[4] Brüning did not approve of the German Revolution of 1918–1919 which ended with the establishment of the Weimar Republic.

[3] In the Reichstag, he quickly made a name for himself as a financial expert and managed to push through the so-called Brüning Law, which restricted the workers' share of income taxes to no more than 1.2 billion Reichsmarks.

At the same time, the 1929 Young Plan had greatly reduced war reparations owed by Germany, but paying the remainder required severe austerity measures.

[5] Hindenburg, already bent on reducing the influence of the Reichstag, saw this event as the "failure of parliament", and with Brüning's consent he called new elections, to be held in September.

In the meantime, Brüning's measures were implemented in the summer by presidential emergency decrees (Notverordnung) under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution.

[8] In the September election, the parties of the grand coalition lost many seats, while the Communists and the National Socialists (Nazis) made major gains.

[citation needed] Nonetheless, he negotiated with Hitler about toleration or a formal coalition, without yielding to the Nazis any position of power or full support by presidential decree.

Because of these reservations the negotiations came to nothing and as street violence rose to new heights in April 1932, Brüning had both the Communist "Rotfrontkämpferbund" and the Nazi Sturmabteilung banned.

[19][20] Brüning agonized over how to stem the growing Nazi tide, especially since Hindenburg could not be expected to survive another full term as president should he choose to run again.

[21] In his posthumously published memoirs Brüning claims, without support of contemporaneous documents, that he hit upon a last-ditch solution to prevent Hitler from taking power: restoring the Hohenzollern monarchy.

The plan floundered, however, when Hindenburg, an old-line monarchist, refused to support restoration of the monarchy unless Kaiser Wilhelm II was recalled from exile in the Netherlands.

When Brüning tried to impress upon him that neither the Social Democrats nor the international community would accept any return of the deposed Kaiser, Hindenburg threw him out of his office.

Brüning responded by issuing an aggressive communique demanding the nullification of the Treaty of Versailles and announcing a unilateral moratorium on German reparations.

France disapproved of the moratorium and delayed ratification long enough to trigger a banking run which led to the collapse of the Danatbank.

Brüning's actions caused the Bank of England to abandon the gold peg of the pound sterling, which severely worsened the Great Depression.

[14] In summer 1932, after Brüning's resignation, his successors reaped the fruits of his policy at the Lausanne conference, which reduced reparations to a final payment of 3 billion marks.

[22] Negotiations over rearmament failed at the 1932 Geneva Conference shortly before his resignation, but in December the "Five powers agreement" accepted Germany's military equality.

In the 1932 presidential election, Brüning vigorously campaigned for Hindenburg along with virtually the entire German left and centre, calling him a "venerated historical personality" and "the keeper of the constitution".

At the same time, he was viciously attacked by the Prussian Junkers, led by Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, who opposed Brüning's policies of distributing land to unemployed workers in the course of the Eastern Aid (Osthilfe) programme and denounced him as an "Agro-bolshevik" to Hindenburg.

[8] The president, having a personal conflict of interest as owner of a highly indebted Junker estate, refused to sign any further emergency decrees.

Prominent members were frequently arrested and beaten, pro-Centre civil servants were fired, and Nazi officials demanded that the party either dissolve or else it would be banned.

Brüning expected that the policy of deflation would temporarily worsen the economic situation before it began to improve, quickly increasing the German economy's competitiveness and then restoring its creditworthiness.

[32] Anton Erkelenz, chairman of the German Democratic Party and a contemporary critic of Brüning, famously said that the policy of deflation was:A rightful attempt to release Germany from the grip of reparation payments, but in reality it meant nothing else than committing suicide because of fearing death.

[38] As David Rieff states, civil society being a uniting force is true to the extent that people will be inherently good in their ideals.

Due to a "lack of any basic consensus about the past, present and future of the German state and society",[40] civic association groups were sheep waiting to be led by a herder.