Germany -- Politics and government -- 1918-1933; Germany. Verfassung (1919)
When the articles relating to the fundamental rights and duties were
being drawn up, the members of the National Assembly of necessity
remained party men, and were guided, even when they voted on
philosophico-legal questions, by party considerations. Also some of these
“fundamental rights” had the appearance of being simply extracts from
programmes or brochures of political parties. On the other hand, the
members who drew them up naturally put in the foreground the problems
which, at the time of the discussions, were the burning questions in both
Parliament and in public opinion. The result is that the second part
of the Constitution regulates questions of the day rather than of the
future, and issues prescriptions for circumstances more than it proclaims
fundamental rights.
However, all this would have been admissible, if there had been one
big party that could have without constraint and without difficulty
incorporated its own principles in the Constitution; or even if there
had been two or more parties with fairly similar conceptions, which were
able to agree on fundamental rights. There would have been at least a
Declaration of Rights that might have corresponded to the conceptions of
the majority. But there was no such majority in the National Assembly.
To be sure, there was an impressive majority that agreed on a democratic
Constitution. But on questions of schools, church, the family, and of
economic and agrarian reforms--questions that had to be dealt with in
the statement of fundamental rights--there was in the National Assembly
and in the parties of the majority such divergence of opinion that it
was impossible to construct of it any logical or coherent edifice. Also,
in reading each provision of the fundamental rights, one can guess which
party has furnished the first part of a phrase and which the second.
When, for example, referring to property one reads, “The right of
property is guaranteed by the Constitution. Its nature and limits are
defined by law”; or, when in Article 152 a phrase declares, “There is
an economic liberty in the measure indicated by the law,” every one, no
matter what may be his personal conceptions, may find himself entirely
satisfied, according to whether the first or the last words of each
provision are emphasized. This evident compromise between the political
parties on political conceptions so widely divergent was emphatically
pointed out by Member of the Assembly Koch, who characterized the
fundamental rights as “an interfractional political programme.”[48]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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