EIt took more than a political crisis to put the German Basic Law back in bookstore windows. It needed a state of emergency. Quoting from the catalog of fundamental rights had become a kind of pathos formula during the fight against the pandemic. For many, the restrictions on freedom rights imposed by curfews, school closures or mask requirements went too far. For them, compulsory vaccination, which was later discussed, was not just an unpronounceable word in which two pf sounds were forced together like two positively charged magnets. It was also a betrayal of everything the Basic Law had provided for in terms of defensive rights against the state itself at the end of the 1940s.
Experiences with a deadly encroaching state had prompted the founding authors of the Basic Law (61 men and four women) to be extremely cautious. Never again should it be possible in this country to trample on human dignity, which was declared “inviolable” in Article 1 of the Fundamental Rights. Should this holy seriousness now be erased in the course of an infectious disease by a history-blind pragmatism?
The second part of the “Basic” series in the Literaturhaus Berlin on Thursday was dedicated to the Basic Law from the perspective of its defenders under corona conditions. Three weeks ago, the writer-lawyer Juli Zeh had already described Article 2 as her favorite article, the first sentence of which deals with the free development of the person and the second sentence with the right to integrity. This time, too, the discussion was guided by the idea that not only people must be protected from the fury of development of other people (“as long as they do not violate the rights of others”), but also the citizen from his state: “These rights may only be intervened on the basis of a law.”
Not a mask skeptic, but a mask duty opponent
Daniel Kehlmann, who publicly complained about the disproportionality of curfews and compulsory masks in schools during the pandemic, once again made it clear in Berlin that vaccinations can be approved (“I was thrilled by this vaccination!”) and still have nothing to do with compulsory vaccinations . Here the physical integrity that Article 2 guarantees no longer exists. It does mean something that no state would have done it, said Kehlmann.
The lawyer Tristan Wißgott, co-author of the anthology “The Basic Law – A Literary Commentary”, which is the key for the evening, saw it more calmly. He too had questioned the constitutionality of some measures to combat the pandemic. Ironically, he saw a compatibility with fundamental rights when it came to compulsory vaccination. The state protects life. In doing so, he places his duty to protect above the granting of civil liberties.
Naturally, the questions the writer Kehlmann asked about the Basic Law were more pragmatic than those of the lawyer Wißgott. One could agree on the statement that a legal text that claims political validity and was deliberately drawn up by non-lawyers is and remains in need of implementation. Many of his statements are formulated to be universally valid – and always in the wake of the zeitgeist.
What kind of poem is the Basic Law?
That’s why Juli Zeh had already identified the democratic negotiation process par excellence when interpreting the Basic Law. She had compared the Basic Law as a text genre with a poem that repeatedly asked for its interpretation. Daniel Kehlmann gave the genre “poem” another direction: the Basic Law is most similar to the didactic poem “De rerum natura” by Lucretius. He had promised himself that his six-volume science would give people “peace of mind” and “serenity”. In a way, the Basic Law has been doing this for 75 years. No document of political culture is more reliable for the Germans – despite conceptual vagueness, especially in the heroic formulas of inviolable human dignity and the development of personality.
The last article of the Basic Law provides for the transposition of the Basic Law in the event of a corresponding free majority finding. A constitution that thinks about its own abolition is nothing more than a perpetuum mobile that has become a text. An infinitely dynamic document of democratic self-renewal.