Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

138 • The Making of a German Constitutionhumble fisherman back to the sea to wish for a little hut. Reluctantly returning to thesea, the fisherman called:Flounder, flounder in the seaCome, I pray thee, here to me.For my wife, good Isabel,Wills not as I’d have her will. 44‘Well what does she want, then,’ the flounder said. He listened to the fisherman andgraciously granted the woman’s wish. Oh, but this wasn’t enough for the woman,and she sent the fisherman back to the sea five more times. Each time the fishermancalled to the flounder, flounder in the sea and each time the increasingly frustratedflounder asked: ‘Well, what does she want, now.’ 45 The second time, the womanasked for a ‘great stone castle’, and her next three wishes were to be king, emperorand then pope. 46 When this was not enough, the power-hungry woman sent the humblefisherman back to wish that she be made ‘God’. ‘Flounder, flounder in the sea’ hecalled and once more the flounder swam up and asked: ‘Well, what does she want,now.’ 47 Hearing the woman’s most recent wish, the flounder replied: ‘Go to her, andyou will find her back again in the pigsty.’ 48‘The Fisherman and His Wife’ is a simple and colourful fairy tale, but it was atthe same time loaded with subliminal, sociopolitical symbolism. In a society wherehunting and fishing rights remained in the exclusive hands of noble landowners, theordinary man fishing and fishing everyday, according to his own desires, underminedexclusive conceptions of fishing and hunting by showing the exercise of that privilegeby a pigsty dweller. The fisherman returned again and again to the sea without objectionfrom the enchanted flounder prince. Flounder prince and fisherman were equalin the nobility of their character. The woman was the problem, and the tale encouragedthe denigration of women in authority. The greedy woman usurped and gobbledup more and more authority until finally she had to be put back in her original place.Again, in ‘The Fisherman’ the sociopolitical pairing of male commoner rights withthe need for female exclusion was subliminally and symbolically confirmed.It cannot be emphasized enough that this gender dimension of constitutionaltransformation, which was already present in the systems of Eichhorn, Mittermaier,Grimm and others was brought into existence with the introduction of every majorlaw code. Even if not in the immediate state-level reforms, procedural reform, whichwas a major pillar of legislative revolution, was no exception. Germanist legalthought and the demands for the legal consolidation of German law that they representedwere important expressions of liberal nationalism. As Karen Hagemann hasshown, anxiety over women and the fear of feminization was a strong element in theidea of the nation. 49 The preoccupation with the place of women in society infectedevery dimension of liberal legal politics. Thus, even as we move forward into a discussionof the progressive advance of constitutional transformation, one must keep