Hermann Müller (18 May 1876 – 20 March 1931; pronunciationⓘ) was a German Social Democratic politician who served as foreign minister (1919–1920) and was twice chancellor of Germany (1920, 1928–1930) during the Weimar Republic.

During the three months Müller was chancellor in 1920, his government passed a number of progressive social reforms before it had to resign due to the SPD's poor showing in the 1920 election.

[1][2] Heavily influenced by his father's interest in the philosophy of the critic of Christianity Ludwig Feuerbach, Hermann Müller was the only German chancellor who was not a member of any religion.

At that time, Müller changed from a left-wing Social Democrat to a centrist, who argued against both the Marxist reformists such as Eduard Bernstein and the radical Left around Rosa Luxemburg.

After he was elected to the Reichstag in a 1916 by-election,[2] he supported both the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia and the entry of the SPD into the government of Max von Baden in October 1918.

[1][2] After Scheidemann resigned in June 1919 because he could not accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Müller was asked to succeed him as head of government but declined.

Under his leadership, the government suppressed the left-wing insurgencies such as the Ruhr uprising and urged the disarmament of the paramilitary Einwohnerwehren (Citizens' Defence) demanded by the Allies.

[15] Müller was chancellor only until June 1920, when the outcome of the first regular election to the Reichstag resulted in the formation of a new government led by Constantin Fehrenbach of the Centre Party.

On the other side of the political spectrum, Müller was opposed to working with Gustav Stresemann's German People's Party (DVP), considering them a mouthpiece for corporate interests and doubting their loyalty to the republican constitution.

[1] Initially, Müller favoured diplomatic relations with the Soviets only as far as they would help in preventing the integration of Upper Silesia into the new Polish state.

Recognizing a national emergency when the French seized the Ruhr and inflation spiraled out of control in 1923, Müller brought the SPD into a grand coalition led by Gustav Stresemann of the DVP (August to November 1923).

When the fourth cabinet of Wilhelm Marx (Centre Party) resigned on 12 June over its failure to come to an agreement on a national school law, the Social Democrats put Müller forward as their candidate for chancellor.

Reich President Paul von Hindenburg would have preferred DVP chairman Ernst Scholz as chancellor but was persuaded to accept Müller by his inner circle, which expected a Social Democratic chancellorship to erode SPD support in the medium term.

Müller's cabinet, a grand coalition of Social Democrats, Centre Party, DDP, DVP and BVP managed to settle only on a written agreement on the government's policies in the spring of 1929.

Its continued existence was mainly due to the mutual personal esteem between Müller and Foreign Minister Stresemann, who died on 3 October 1929.

Relations between the parties were strained by the arguments over construction of the pocket battleship Panzerkreuzer A, in which the SPD forced its ministers to vote against the allocation of funds to the project in the Reichstag even though they had endorsed it in cabinet meetings in order to keep the coalition intact.

In addition, the Ruhr iron dispute (Ruhreisenstreit), the "largest and longest lockout Germany had ever experienced",[20] was a bone of contention, as the DVP voted against the Reichstag motion that approved state support for the estimated 200,000 to 260,000 locked out workers.

Financing the budget for 1929 and the external liabilities of the Reich were a huge problem, and reaching an agreement involved negotiating more lenient reparations conditions with the Allies.

Müller had been the leader of the delegation to the League of Nations in the summer of 1928 where he – despite a heated argument with French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand over German rearmament – had laid the groundwork for concessions by the Allies.

By January 1930, the government had succeeded in negotiating a reduction in reparation payments (the Young Plan, signed in August 1929) and a promise by the Allies to completely withdraw the occupation forces from the Rhineland by May 1930.

After the onset of the Great Depression, the unemployment insurance system required frequent injections of taxpayer money by the Reich, but the parties could not agree on how to raise the funds.

Müller was willing to accept a compromise offer by Heinrich Brüning of the Centre Party, but he was overruled by the SPD parliamentary group, which refused to make any further concessions.

Following the elections in September 1930, which saw massive gains for Adolf Hitler's NSDAP, Müller called on his party to support Heinrich Brüning's government even without being part of the coalition.