Making of a German Constitution : a Slow Revolution

220 • The Making of a German Constitutionand following his leadership Social Democrats voted unanimously against the BGB’senactment. 9 In 1887 the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Kommittee was founded in Berlinto agitate for repeal of Paragraph 175 of the Strafgesetzbuch, under which ‘unnaturalfornication’ was punished by imprisonment and/or the loss of competence. 10By 1909, the Bund für Irrenrecht und Irrenfürsorge formed and was ‘largely led bythe “mad” ’ in response to the skyrocketing rates of declarations of incompetence. 11The lofty celebration that was expressed in the popular press was soon tempered bythese voices, which increasingly demanded the redistribution of power and propertyin the years following 1900. Once the legislated realities of the Bürgerliche Revolutionwere etched in black and white, it fueled the political fires that were simmeringon the Left and Right. These groups began to offer an alternative basis of sociopoliti calorganization and the distribution of power in the first republic. This chapter examinesthe rise of gegenpolitische sentiments, and how the redefinition of gender operatedas a metaphor in the agitation against legislated discrimination and demands forequal personality before the law and within the nation. Bachofen’s comments whichopen this chapter aimed at a radical reorganization by displacing the Germanistassumptions of original patriarchy and replacing it with original matriarchy. In thecontext of the German legal world and the history of German constitutional transformation,Bachofen’s insistence on ‘Tacitus’ remarks about the far-reaching implicationsof sisterhood as the basis of the Germanic family’ housed radical politicalimplications.In this chapter, I also hope to offer a sense of how the legal revolution reached intothe lives of ordinary Germans. In addition to the reaction against the consolidationof majority rule that was ushered in by the legislated Bürgerliche Revolution, theBGB produced widespread alienation at the grassroots of German society. For thosethat the BGB excluded from full participation, New Year’s 1900 was not a day forcelebration; the latest transformation of the German constitution and the new sovereignof the legal life were altogether unwelcome. For this reason, the BGB not onlymarked the Bürgerliche Revolution and the exclusive society it inaugurated, but therise of counter-revolutionary action from above and below. The BGB etched in stonethe supremacy of industrial interest over all others and exclusive liberal notions ofdynamic virtue as a prerequisite for civic participation. To achieve the sociopoliticalvalues of the revolution, the BGB jammed exclusive liberalism down the throats ofordinary Germans and, more than any other element, this reality was revealed afterits introduction. In particular, family law touched every German household, sparkingbitter resentment and discontent across gender and class lines. Paragraph 6 of the GeneralPart, effectively, provided a convenient means to get rid of agitators who resistedtoeing the line on the new order. While the political Left was able to fill its ranks withthe discontented, in reality, the Weimar Constitution failed to relieve the stresses ofGerman society at the grassroots because it left the BGB intact, a reality which, whencombined with economic downturn, left German society ripe for Nazism, in a discontentedsociety where the law itself could be made a scapegoat for society’s ills.