Un the Basic Law it had long since become silent. Generations X through Y paid little tribute to it. Many felt like the young fish who is asked by the old fish “How is the water today?” and which asks back: “What is water?”
As a non-lawyer, you at least knew that the German Basic Law was supposed to be one of the best constitutions in the world. In 1948/49 his fathers and a few mothers had worked it out at an impressively complex level of reflection – which can be seen in the minutes of the Parliamentary Council. The debris of war was still clearly visible everywhere on the streets when the catchy sentence was invented: “Human dignity is inviolable.”
Decades later, Germans had got used to the quiet presence of their business basis like a fish to water. Then came the pandemic. And suddenly the fish discovered its element. Some set the pandemic state of emergency as absolute. The others saw civil liberties in danger.
It has been 75 years since 65 members of parliament fought over the German constitution. A good reason for the lawyer and writer Georg M. Oswald to commission a “literary commentary” on the Basic Law. The result is a book in which authors such as Julia Franck, Jochen Schmidt and Eva Menasse reflect on individual articles. The Literaturhaus Berlin opened a series of events on this bold book project on Thursday. Not only the publisher was present, but also the writer-lawyer Juli Zeh and the moderator René Schlott from the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam, who conceived the series. The expert on GDR history and Holocaust research has emerged as a harsh critic of the legislative measures taken during the pandemic and has now bridged the gap between artistic expression and political text. That interested so many that the Literature House was sold out.
Where the Basic Law becomes literary
Where is the Basic Law in literary terms? From today’s perspective, Georg M. Oswald found the “holy seriousness” in the formulations of the fundamental rights part impressive. At the same time, a sentence like “Human dignity is inviolable” is also problematic, as it leaves room for misunderstandings in interpretation.
Here Juli Zeh was in top form for the first time that evening. One could speak of a misunderstanding, but of course also of interpretation, i.e. of that social negotiation process without which there would be no democracy. If you have to assign the Basic Law to a literary genre, then it is clear: “It should always strive to be poetry and not prose.” Because today (also in constitutional texts) a tendency is becoming clear: the fear of misunderstanding is great, why more and more individual cases would be regulated by law. Certain reflexes, which are now known from the discourse-reducing effects of social media, have also arrived in state institutions. According to Zeh, the new literalism, which always only sees the individual case and no longer the collective, leads to bad justice, because one cannot absolutely grasp everything that is the case.
The authors of the Basic Law could not imagine that one day there would be social processes that restrict freedom of expression to a comparable extent as state censorship, which they had exclusively thought of when formulating Article 5. What to do? In any case, dare to use more poetry when writing legal texts and then, according to Zeh, trust “that the course of things can also do something with it”.
Juli Zeh had described himself as conservative several times during the evening. When Schlott interjected that her positions were rather liberal, she countered quick-wittedly: “Yes, but liberalism is becoming conservative.” The next edition of this liberal-conservative evening event on the Basic Law will take place on February 9 in the Literaturhaus with Daniel Kehlmann.