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The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XII, 2020

70 Years Old and Still Going Strong -

A Look at Germany’s Constitution 30 Years After the Fall
of the Berlin Wall

H.E. Georg Schmidt

Germany’s constitution, the “Grundgesetz”, celebrated its 70 birthday
th
in 2019. Born as a compromise in 1949 until Germany could reunite it grew into a
‘peoples’ constitution”. When the hour of reunification finally arrived in 1990,
the Grundgesetz was kept. How could a provisional text born under provisional
circumstances become the best constitution Germany has ever had? Let us begin
by looking back.

Historical context

In 1948, the wounds of the war were very visible in Germany. Most of its
cities had been bombed, millions had died and the country was full of German
refugees from the territories in the East which are part of Poland and Russia
today. German soldiers had devastated so many countries in Europe during the
war - now Germany itself was devastated.

But the wounds of the war went far beyond physical destruction.
Unlike the First World War, 1933-1945 had seen not only a World War, but also
the murdering of millions of Jews in the name of German or “Aryan” superiority.
Agents of Nazi Germany had also killed thousands of others deemed
“unworthy” to live. As a result, Germany had not only lost a war but was morally
an outcast after the crimes of the Holocaust.

The horrors of the twelve years of Nazi Dictatorship were very much
on the minds of the drafters of the new constitution. They also remembered
very clearly the sense of humiliation after the Versailles Peace Treaty at the end
of the First World War, when Germany’s first democratic constitution was
written in Weimar. This treaty had not brought peace, but fermented hatred
and resentment – a difficult legacy for the first German democracy, the Weimar

Republic. They had also lived through the hard-hitting results of the world
economic crisis in the 1920s and 1930s with mass unemployment and
wide-spread poverty. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, a majority of

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