It was confronted with the resumption of war reparations payments following the end of passive resistance to the occupation of the Ruhr and faced down potentially separatist state governments in Saxony, Thuringia and Bavaria.

Stresemann's second cabinet resigned on 23 November 1923 after the Social Democrats (SPD) withdrew from the coalition over the government's handling of the separatist movements.

The first Stresemann cabinet resigned late on 3 October 1923 due to disagreement between the political parties over the extent to which the planned enabling act should give the government the power to change the length of the working day by decree.

Finally, on 22 October, Gerhard von Kanitz, another independent who was close to the DVP and to landed interests within the DNVP, was appointed to Food and Agriculture.

Due to a lack of gold reserves, the new currency was backed by a special forced mortgage placed on all land in Germany used for business or agricultural purposes.

The most pressing was the occupation of the Ruhr, which was closely connected to the issue of war reparations and a major cause of the economic collapse and hyperinflation brought on by the policy of passive resistance against the French and Belgian intervention.

[7] During the occupation of the Ruhr, the French actively encouraged separatism in the Rhineland, which resulted in the establishment of two short-lived separatist and pro-French entities, the Rhenish Republic and the Autonomous Palatinate [de].

The British government also resolutely opposed France's attempt to extend its sphere of influence permanently to all of Germany west of the Rhine.

On the left, the Social Democrats under Minister Presidents Erich Zeigner in Saxony and August Frölich [de] in Thuringia allied with the Communist Party (KPD) and made use of the economic crisis and the threat of right-wing counter-revolution in Bavaria (see below) to set up armed militia called the Proletarian Hundreds that soon numbered around 100,000 men.

[12][11] On 8/9 November, Hitler launched his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, but von Kahr failed to side with him and had the attempted government takeover put down by local troops and police.

The cause was the toppling and arrest in late October of the Social Democratic-Communist state government of Saxony, which had been executed by former vice-chancellor and minister of justice Rudolf Heinze of the DVP.

[11] With the move of the SPD into opposition to the cabinet in early November, the government's period in office was limited to the time before the Reichstag was next in session.