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Human Dignity is Violable | |
|---|---|
| Author | Ulrike Meinhof |
| Publisher | konkret |
| First published | 1962 |
| Type | Article |
The Constitution is the only instrument of our federal democracy that was not imposed by the dictates of some interest group or derived from some perfectionist worldview (Weltanschauung). The context in which it was created and its content make it a part of history—postwar history, to be precise.
The parliamentary council that met at the Herrenchiemsee, and that brought together the best among those in the three Western zones who were still around after twelve years of Nazi rule in Germany, set out to devise the fundamentals of a (new German) world that could not be destroyed by any form of barbarism, and to do so in a manner that respected international and national law and was ethical, moral, humane, and in tune with history. Given the intended object and the possibilities it presented, this may already have been excessively optimistic. But it was an emotional moment, and a wide swath of the people took it very seriously. When we look at the expressions on the parliamentarians’ emaciated postwar faces, their plan seems plausible. Few at that time were able to perceive much more than the most external aspects of reality, or see through them.
The text was based on two major ideas:
- Democracy is the only form of statehood that can ensure human dignity; dictatorship is barbaric, inhuman, terrorist, and retrograde.
- War is no longer an option in the twentieth century. War profits or booty do not outweigh the losses: not the material losses, and even less so, the human losses.
These two precepts, arrived at through experience, were the basis upon which the Constitution created a state under the rule of law, a state that was well-defined and complete, carefully planned and guaranteed through diverse means, a state never before known in Germany. And from the very beginning, military service and remilitarization were excluded from the Constitution, banned from the future Federal Republic. In its original form, the Constitution was totally libertarian and totally anti-militaristic. It made no room whatsoever for remilitarization, and ensured that basic rights and freedoms would apply without any limitations, except in the case of criminals, within the federal realm; they were valid for all time, for all people, for all situations, for the fat years and the lean.
These pillars of the Constitution provided not only a legal framework, but also a political program. Henceforth, internal opponents as well as external adversaries were to be countered in accordance with the foundational, and now founding, notions of nonviolence and the full protection of the law. The law in Germany would never again be manipulated through power struggles. The politics of peace in the sense of a permanent state of disarmament would never again be subject to party politics, or decided by majority rule.
But then came 1956, when the two-thirds majority in the Bundestag changed the Constitution by adding the so-called defense articles (Wehrartikel), and basically rubberstamping what had already been put in place politically. In fact, as early as 1949, the Chancellor had offered the Western allies German participation in matters of defense, a move that prompted Gustav Heinemann to resign from Adenauer’s cabinet in 1950. In other words, already seven years earlier, and in utter disregard for the spirit and the letter of the Constitution, Adenauer had set up and pursued his own policies. The Constitution had allowed no room for remilitarization; remilitarization not only betrayed it, but tore it wide open. Or to put it differently: the policies of the federal government could no longer be implemented within the framework of the 1948 Constitution. And since the government was not about to abandon its policies, and since the SPD had no intention of insisting on changes in policy either, it was the Constitution that had to change, to ensure that the actions of the executive remained within the bounds of the legal. Its content was expanded, and its spirit mutilated.
The talk these days of tearing down the second pillar that ensures the current relevance of the Constitution, the talk these days of restricting the total freedom guaranteed by the Constitution—not forever, as in the case of remilitarization, but as an “emergency measure”—this kind of talk means that once again the policies of the federal government cannot be implemented within the framework of the Constitution, or as Robert Jungk put it so succinctly at the student congress against nuclear weapons in 1959, “Nuclear rearmament and democracy are irreconcilable.” The full meaning and relevance of Jungk’s statement are only now becoming evident. The connection he established (between un-democracy and nuclear weapons) has been clearly revealed in the way Social Democratic policy has developed in the three years since. In 1959, Walter Menzel, former president of the “Committee Against Nuclear Death,” could still publish a text in Vorwärts that argued in principle and fundamentally against new German Emergency Laws. That was the year of the Deutschlandplan. That was 1959, and under the protection of the SPD it was still possible to publicly discuss a German confederation and a German peace treaty. That was the year the Rapacki plan was still being given exposure in the press, when talk of negotiations with Pankow were considered shocking and inappropriate, but continued to stimulate responses from those concerned. That was when the phrase “We will not rest while nuclear death threatens our people” was not just a slogan, at least not for a part of the Social Democratic Party machine, nor a reason for immediate exclusion from the party, but a deadly serious reason to take action and develop political will. But the moment the SPD began to support the foreign policy of the federal government, it also joined in the support for an Emergency Laws. When Herbert Wehner said yes to NATO in 1960, federal deputies Arndt and Schäfer began to participate in constructing the discourse on the Emergency Laws. When Schmidt started fantasizing about solid or liquid-fuel rockets, the SPD gave in to talks about the Emergency Laws. Once the SPD and the CDU came to an agreement on nuclear weapons, the SPD also fell into line on the Emergency Laws. Menzel has been silent ever since, and Wolfgang Abendroth, head ideologue of those opposing the Emergency Laws, has been driven out of the party.
Nuclear rearmament and democracy are irreconcilable. The statement can be cast in the negative: nuclear armament and the end of democracy are complementary; weapons of mass destruction and terror go together—in technical, organizational, and factual terms. The political program of the Constitution focused on “peace and freedom” is thus annihilated.
If the Emergency Laws were passed, it would invalidate the conclusions that the emaciated men at Herrenchiemsee felt compelled to draw in 1948, after the collapse of Weimar and twelve years of National Socialism. Such a law would erase the first German attempts to overcome the country’s recent fascist history; it would not erase this history. The realization that only democracy can guarantee human dignity, in the same way that only a complete ban on weapons can guarantee peace, would thus be nullified. The attempts to change course would be crushed, the willingness to face the past destroyed. The only remaining freedom would be the freedom to support the government, and not oppose it—at least not through direct confrontation or strikes or demonstrations. Freedom would, in fact, be abolished before it had even survived its own ordeal by fire. Formally, and in terms of perception, this would mean that, in the future, any crowd expressing oppositional views could be mowed down as in Hungary’s November 1956, and war need not be avoided by deploying intelligent policies; it would just be prepared as a possible “state of emergency,” in line with the Federal Republic’s new self-image.
Human dignity would again be violable, and dictatorship an option. War would become a definite possibility for the second half of the twentieth century.