Verfassungsgefühle

Die Deutschen und ihre Staatsgrundgesetze

75 years after its adoption, Germany’s Basic Law is more popular than ever. But how did these feelings come to be, and what is their power to bind us?

Frevert, U. (2024). Verfassungsgefühle. Die Deutschen und ihre Staatsgrundgesetze. Göttingen: Wallstein.

A journalist who grew up in Saxony-Anhalt recalls the defiance with which he greeted the East German constitution of 1968. The same year, tens of thousands of people west of the Elbe protested the introduction of Emergency Acts, which they saw as an attack on the spirit of the Basic Law. The reunified country disappointend many of its citizens by not giving them the opportunity to discuss or vote on a constitution for the whole of Germany. Three decades later, people are posting ‘declarations of love’ for the Basic Law online.

Constitutions inspire emotions, and they did so already and above all in the nineteenth century and during the Weimar Republic. West Germans, post-1949, took some time to warm to their constitution; the citizens of East Germany, meanwhile, displayed the requisite optimism for their own founding law.

In this book, Ute Frevert examines constitutional feelings: what they were, when they arose, and what they did.