The key to Germany’s survival The post-war constitution is increasingly under threat

Against such a backdrop, Article 1 of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) is a moment of enlightenment: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” And on it goes, with the right to “develop one’s personality freely” and not to be “discriminated against or favoured because of one’s sex, descent, race, language, homeland and origin, faith, religious or political views”. Not even five years had passed since the end of Auschwitz, and here were 146 articles detailing a radical departure from the savagery of the brownshirts. Signing this document must have felt like spitting in the faces of the surviving Nazis. As a German, it still makes me teary-eyed.

The document created something new for the defeated, humiliated, morally bankrupt country — at least the western part — to rally around. The Volk had hit rock-bottom, and the constitution was the operating manual for a fresh start. And it’s the glue that holds modern Germany together. It fine-tuned power relations between the Länder (federal states) and the central government better than any previous attempt. The regions and cultures of this country vary wildly — some are practically nations in their own right with their own versions of pork, starch and alcohol. Catholic Bavaria, with its Lederhosen and Dirndls, jovial hospitality, crucifixes in public buildings and impossible-to-understand dialect, has more in common with Austria than the subdued, Lutheran and windswept Schleswig-Holstein, which is culturally closer to Denmark. Many in the former GDR, especially in Saxony, feel an affinity towards Russia and antipathy towards the US and Nato, while most of my family stem from Hesse in the West, a region heavily influenced by American culture, thanks to decades of military presence.

This isn’t to say the federal framework — which also prevents too much power from amassing in a single institution in Berlin — is perfect. Massive redundancies are baked into the system. From tiny city-state Bremen (population 700,000) to North Rhine-Westphalia (18 million), each Bundesland has its own domestic intelligence service (a Verfassungsschutz or Office for Protection of the Constitution), tasked with spying on “anti-constitutional” organisations and individuals. Coordination between these agencies can be woefully inadequate. Better communication might have prevented the deadly 2016 Islamist truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market. Federalism has also been an obstacle to technological progress: poor e-government coordination between Berlin and 16 states has left the digitalisation of German bureaucracy in a sorry state of durchwursteln (muddling through, literally sausaging through), lagging years if not decades behind its European neighbours.

The Grundgesetz has created a shared identity, though. For the Nazis, myths of racial purity and superiority were supposed to be the unifier. In the Federal Republic, more innocuous narratives emerged. There’s the one about German intellectual excellence (“Land of poets and thinkers”), the one about engineering excellence (“Autoland Deutschland”), the one about a shared consumer culture (Haribo, VW, Playmobil etc.), and let’s not downplay Fußball and the accomplishments of the Nationalmannschaft. But perhaps underpinning it all is “constitutional patriotism”, a term promoted by West German thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas. In short, it’s hard to be proud of our country after Nazism, but we can at least be proud of our constitution and the liberal state we built around it.

And yet, constitutional patriotism feels perhaps overly academic, dry, even naive in today’s polarised, fraught environment. Not least because the Grundgesetz and the values it embodies are under constant attack. The most obvious threat comes from those who don’t even recognise it, like the Reichsbürger, a peculiar and somewhat ludicrous Right-wing movement whose leaders went on trial this week for planning a coup. Nostalgic for the pre-Hitlerian Reich, they say the Federal Republic has no sovereignty, refuse to pay their taxes, and print their own passports. Led by the self-declared Prince Heinrich XIII, they argue — correctly, in fact — that the Grundgesetz was intended as a temporary document, valid only until the unification of all the Germans (meaning West and the GDR). A permanent constitution would have to be approved by the entire Volk, even though East Germans did eagerly vote for reunification, accepting the western constitution part and parcel.

The AfD, by contrast, are playing a longer, subtler game. Earlier this year, a purported AfD “remigration” plan was uncovered by journalists: not just immigrants but also non-white German citizens were to be deported. This alarmed the broad centre and millions took to the streets in protest. “Never again is now” stickers appeared in the window of my local ice-cream shop, as if the country was a hair’s breadth from returning to genocidal fascism.

The AfD denies that “remigration” is its official part, knowing that it would certainly violate the Grundgesetz. Turning the issue on its head, the AfD claims it is the true defender of the constitution, pointing to its opposition to the government’s pandemic measures. And yet, the Grundgesetz is at the heart of the issue that has ignited support for the AfD: immigration. The right to political asylum was anchored in article 16, as a reaction to the failure of the international community to take in those who had fled the Nazi regime. Fast forward to last year, and 350,000 migrants claimed asylum in Germany — and each has a constitutional right to have their application fairly assessed. Tens of thousands of those claims will be rejected, but that takes years, while deportation often never happens. In other words, the Geist behind the AfD is paradoxically being enflamed by the Grundgesetz.

Indeed, not a day goes by without the constitution being put to the test. The harsh treatment of pro-Palestinian protestors by German police raises questions about the tension between freedom of speech and freedom from alleged anti-Jewish hate speech. Add to the mix the polarisation fuelled by social media, the uptick in attacks on politicians across the spectrum, and fragmentation of the information space by foreign bots and AI content — and the 75-year-old founding document is heading through a rocky patch.

Faced with these crises, more durchwursteln is to be expected. This is how the centre holds in post-war German democracy. And while it’s not exactly sexy, this is still easily the most peaceful, most prosperous Germany we’ve ever had. All of which is a long way of saying: Let’s pause for a second, raise a glass. Prost!

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Maurice Frank co-founded the English magazine Exberliner and now co-writes the newsletter 20 Percent Berlin. 

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