50 Years German Basic Law: A Lesson from Weimar

With the German Bundestag and Government moving from Bonn to Berlin, this summer a historic circle will be closed: German politics have returned to where they started in 1871, after the foundation of the Reich by Bismarck. Unlike Bonn, Berlin had been a symbol for some of the worst episodes in German history. But the city that paved the way to disaster was Weimar, the former cultural capital of Goethe and Schiller. In the year 1919 the Assembly of Weimar approved contemporarily the Constitution of Weimar and the opprobrious peace treaty of Versailles, thus laying the grounds for the first unlucky democratic experience in modern Geman history. Fortunately the Germans have learned from the catastrophe of the Weimar Republic and the Basic Law approved in May 1949 has proven a solid ground on which the new democracy in Bonn could establish a stable democratic culture. The achievements of the Basic Law will even guarantee the stability and reliability of the new Berlin Republic.

When the Basic Law of the German Federal Republic was proclaimed in May 1949, confidence in the German people's democratic virtues could not have been at a lower point. The previous experience of the unstable Republic of Weimar, its inglorious end and the subsequent maximum catastrophe of Hitler's Nazi-regime and WWII could be well interpreted as a definite proof that the German national character was irremediably incline towards antidemocratic and totalitarian solutions. Whether Prussian rational militarists or Austrian irrational antisemites, Germans were not to trust.

The further history, however, has shown that a people's character may change, if they are given the right chance and circumstances. Since 1949 these circumstances were given on one hand by the solid integration of Western Germany in the community of Western democracies (NATO 1955 and the European Union 1957) and on the other by the firm legal fundaments of the Basic Law. It is thanks to this constitution that the German democratic virtues had the time and chance to grow and evolve. Today even the 17 million citizens of the former DDR, who had been living under totalitarian rule (first the Nazis, then the Communists) for almost 60 years, are definitely appreciating the liberties of democracy.

German politics is now returning from the tiny and definitely democratic Bonn to the old imperial capital Berlin. In May parliamentarians have already elected in Berlin the new Federal President of the Republic, the Social Democrat Johannes Rau, who took office in the new capital. The German Parliament is also ready in the restored Reichstag and this summer even the most important government departments will follow. The symbolic meaning of this move could well recall some bad memories and cause a certain alarm among the neighbors. But though in some cases the Federal ministers will move even into the old imperial or fascist buildings, nobody seems realistically worried that this could also mean a return to the old militaristic and imperialistic political styles of the Empire. As a neighbor the Federal Republic of Germany has become a reliable and constructive partner.