The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (1949)
The Grundgesetz — Germany’s post-war constitution, built around the inviolability of human dignity
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For the complete official English translation, see the German Bundestag’s own text: Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, gesetze-im-internet.de.
Adopted by the Parliamentary Council in Bonn on May 23, 1949 and in force the next day, the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) is the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was deliberately named a “basic law” rather than a “constitution” — a signal, at the time, that it was meant as a provisional charter for West Germany pending eventual reunification. When Germany reunified in 1990, the Basic Law simply extended to the whole country and became, in substance, its permanent constitution.
Article 1 — Human dignity
“Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” Drafted with the crimes of the Nazi era directly in view, Article 1 is the Basic Law’s opening word and its interpretive anchor: every other right in the document is read in light of it.
Article 20 — The structure of the state
Establishes the Federal Republic as a democratic and social federal state, in which all state authority is derived from the people and exercised through elections and through legislative, executive, and judicial bodies bound by law — the separation of powers and the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) as constitutional bedrock.
Article 79(3) — The “eternity clause”
Perhaps the Basic Law’s most distinctive feature: Article 79(3) forbids any constitutional amendment that would touch the federal structure, the states’ participation in legislation, or the principles laid down in Articles 1 and 20. Human dignity, democracy, the rule of law, and the federal and social state are, by the constitution’s own terms, permanently beyond the reach of ordinary amendment — a direct response to how the Weimar Republic’s constitution had been legally dismantled from within in the 1930s.
The basic rights (Articles 1–19)
The Basic Law opens with an extensive catalogue of enforceable basic rights — dignity, free development of personality, equality before the law, freedom of faith and conscience, freedom of expression and the press, freedom of assembly and association, and the right to conscientious objection — before turning, from Article 20 onward, to how the federal state itself is organized: the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, the Federal President, the Federal Government, and the Federal Constitutional Court, which has the power to strike down laws that violate the Basic Law.
Primary source: Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Grundgesetz), official English translation, Deutscher Bundestag.
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