Constitutional Feelings

A journalist who grew up in Saxony-Anhalt remembers the defiance with which he met the Constitution of the GDR in 1968. The same year, tens of thousands protested to the west of river Elbe against the introduction of an emergency Constitution, which they regarded as an attack on the good spirit of the Basic Law. In 1990, reunified Germany disappointed many of its citizens when a pan-German Constitution was not discussed and voted for. Three decades later, celebrities and schoolchildren alike are posting their »declarations of love« for the Basic Law online.

Constitutions trigger emotions, not only since 1949 and not only in Germany. The nature of these feelings determines their binding force. But how do feelings about the Constitution arise? What hopes and expectations, what experiences and threats characterise them? Who has them and who lacks them?
In this book, Ute Frevert begins with the Constitution of the German Empire of 1848/49 and the dedication that democrats and liberals put into it. She examines the assertion of a contemporary constitutional lawyer that the Constitution of 1871 was dear to the people’s »national sentiment« and describes the efforts of the Weimar Republic to awaken the people’s pride in the »freest constitution in the world«. And she analyses the changing feelings about the Constitution after 1949: the transformation of disinterest into acceptance and love in the West, the after-effects of plebiscitary approval in the East.


Ute Frevert, born in 1954, is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where she has been head of the research on the ›History of Emotions‹ since 2008.