In Schwarzburg

One of the lesser-known sites of German constitutional history is the small town of Schwarzburg. Here, in the gorge-rich Schwarza valley on the edge of the Thuringian slate mountains, Reich President Friedrich Ebert stayed with his family for a summer holiday in the summer of 1919. Over in Weimar, the National Assembly, which was to give the nascent republic its name, was meeting, and when it had finished drafting the Reich Constitution, a delegation came over the mountains to Schwarzburg to present it to the head of state. In the Grand Hotel Zum Weißen Hirschen, perhaps in the adjacent bed house Schwarzaburg – this is disputed – he signed Germany’s first democratic constitution on 11 August 1919.

The fact that I and my colleagues Friedrich and Marie were at this historic place last weekend, 104 years to the day after this event, was pure coincidence. We were here for the Schwarzburg Talks, where civically engaged people from the region meet every year at the invitation of the fantastic host Burkhardt Kolbmüller. At the start of our Thuringia project, we wanted to show to them what we want to do and get their input and a sense how it feels on the ground in Thuringia to think about and discuss the embattled democratic constitution.

The venue for the discussions was Schwarzburg Castle, a monstrous ruin that has only recently been made accessible again and is, besides the Ebert episode, the second historical claim to fame of this tranquil little place. The castle was, after all, for centuries the ancestral seat of one of the princely dynasties of which there once were so many in this part of central Germany, sovereign rulers by the grace of God over principalities which, in their diminutive size, would not even survive a minor municipal reform today. The castle, or what is left of it, is quite spectacularly situated on a steep narrow ridge bathed on three sides by the Schwarza river. Its present condition is not the result of war or conflagration, but a wanton act of the Nazi regime. In 1940, the Nazis intended to convert the castle into Adolf Hitler’s guesthouse, kicked out the last princess of the erstwhile princedom Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt and had half the castle torn down, only to lose interest and abandon the ruined building to its fate. Today, the remains of the baroque wall paintings can still be studied for their countless pencil graffiti, with which curious tourists from all over the GDR have immortalised themselves over the decades.

Today there are not many tourists, and those who do come may have a hard time finding accommodation nevertheless. The “Weiße Hirsch” with its turrets and gables has been closed for years and is gradually falling into disrepair; a West German “investor” is said to have bought it many years ago for a ridiculously low sum, but is not investing anything at all, just as he is not investing in the large half-timbered house on the market and in the former Forestry College across the river, which closed in 2012, and all sorts of other properties that he is also said to own. In the Schwarzaburg Hotel there has been no restaurant since 2019; the elderly couple who run it have enough and want to sell. Down in the village there is all kinds of picturesque Fachwerk architecture that was once also built to accommodate summer visitors. In the GDR, holidays in the Schwarza valley were second in popularity only to the Baltic Sea beaches, they say. Today, everything is shuttered, for sale, in decay. On the other hand, the summer resort “Haus Bräutigam” is now being extensively renovated by a bunch of architects from the Weimar Bauhaus University, a showcase project for the whole region. Every now and then, the urban ecologists from Weimar find mail in their letterbox in which anonymous Schwarzburgians inform them about what they think of their presence.

Up on the hill: the castle. Down in the valley: the town. Up in the castle, democracy and communal economy and participation are discussed. Down in the valley, the locals have no part in this, except for a 19-year-old student from Erfurt who works as a neighbourhood manager in Schwarzburg. He grew up here, he knows the locals, he tries every day to keep the youth club in Schwarzburg alive and generally to be a contact person for the Schwarzburgians’ local concerns, beyond the omnipresent AfD. He is the one who points out, towards the end of the event, that there is only one person from Schwarzburg present at the Schwarzburg Talks, and that is him.

The next morning, down in the valley, the AfD has shown up on the market square. Two cars with blue AfD logos are parked at the side, the usual bar table, the usual brochures, the usual party merch. Michael Kaufmann, member of the Bundestag, is on a “summer tour” through his constituency. Sunday morning is far from ideal, say his people, all in AfD-blue fleece jackets and polo shirts with “HEIMAT LIEBE” written on the back. People are staying at home on a Sunday morning, hardly anyone is on the street. But the most important thing, says Michael Kaufmann, is that they see him standing here, right here on their market square, they can’t miss him and his troupe, four men in their 50s and a woman with two small children, also wearing sky-blue T-shirts. He is here.

What does he do, I ask Kaufmann, when a Nazi shows up at his stand? Never happens, he says. Is that so? No Nazis at all? Never? I can’t believe it. Kaufmann is silent. Surely there are Nazis in Thuringia, he wouldn’t deny that? When they see him standing there and come to talk to him, what does he say? They don’t, he says. It would hurt the AfD if they did. And they don’t want that. Ah, I say. Okay. I see.

MP Kaufmann has a professor’s title and a doctoral degree, has taught mechanical engineering at a technical college in Jena, but the guy on the market square is a heavy-set, sweaty Thuringian with a beard and glasses and a hedgehog haircut and a local accent, who readily tells us what he finds important: the dilapidated bridges and the closed schools and the shut-down youth hostel at the end of town, which a project developer from Erfurt allegedly wants to turn into a “nature resort” with an infinity pool, an eco-tipi village and up to 800 beds. When a Schwarzburgian approaches the stand and complains that he now fears for his gun licence and his job in the civil service and his reservist status in the Bundeswehr if he declares his support for the AfD, the AfD people are not surprised at all: Yes, yes. Terrible, isn’t it? Just like in the GDR. When the subject of foreigners comes up, they give themselves a thoughtful air. Migration, it’s not nice, but what can you do in these globalized times. But so many? And from such “foreign cultures”? Is it just incompetence? Or is it all a scheme worked out by the “globalists” in Berlin?

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It is quiet and friendly at the AfD stand, while the children of the AfD employee play with the children of the Sunday strollers from Schwarzburg. Anyone who passes by is handed the party newspaper “Kaufmann aktuell”. One headline says: “Forest fires: instrumentalised by climate fanatics”. On the steep forest slopes in the Schwarza Valley, the brown spots and dead spruces cannot be overlooked. Yes, too bad, the bark beetle, says Michael Kaufmann, smiling calmly. The local foresters, they tell the truth if one asks them, he says. Climate change, my ass. It’s all the mismanagement of Thuringia’s forestry administration. If only the AfD were in power.

All is normal. We are the normal ones. That’s what the AfD is conveying on Schwarzburg’s market square. Those in the cities outside, those in the elites above, they’ve gone crazy. They’re all just deranged, out-of-touch persons with all their Energiewende, their Ukraine war, their refugees and their gendered language. But not us here in Thuringia, tucked away in the beautiful Schwarza Valley. We are normal. We are ordinary, nice people, and once we are in power, we will make all those crazy impositions of our time fall away, and if we don’t specify how exactly and at whose expense exactly we will do it, that’s because we aren’t yet. What we do is pointing to the bridge: it’s broken. We are pointing to the school: it’s closed. You disagree? Make our day. You want to ban us? Bring it on.

The summer on Verfassungsblog

As you may have noticed, this editorial has taken a break. In the meantime, I’ve decided to change a few things; I hope you won’t be mad. The “ghost of columnism” (Axel Hacke), I have to admit, has been getting to me lately. I was sitting there every Friday, often until the small hours, working on these texts, which in the meantime became longer and longer and more and more ambitious, and the times when, despite this, I myself was not quite satisfied with the result, became more and more frequent. In the long run, this pressure does neither me nor the column any good. Therefore, if you allow, I will no longer draw such a sharp distinction between editorial and weekly review and will focus more on the actual editorial in the literal sense, i.e. giving an overview of what has been going on on Verfassungsblog during the week. And if I have anything else to tell, like my experiences in Schwarzburg today, then I can still do that.

Before I recap the summer, a quick update on the Thuringia project: Our crowdfunding campaign was successful beyond all expectations, and I want to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributed. We are now putting the team together, have started to make contacts and sharpen our concept, and even though time is very short, I am confident that we will produce something by May/June 2024, which will hopefully make it harder for the authoritarian populists not only to push through their authoritarian plans in case of government participation, but to get into government at all.

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So, now to the summer review, or rather a subjective selection of texts that I particularly recommend you not to miss:

Speaking of Thuringia: LORENZ WIELENGA examines the question of whether the procedure for banning a party under Article 21 (2) of the Basic Law would also permit the banning of just one regional association of that party. Yes, it would, he says, and in the case of the Thuringian AfD it would not be a walk in the park, but it would not be inconceivable either. LEONIE DE JONGE and ANNA-SOPHIE HEINZE provide a European context for the AfD’s surge in the polls: They explain where this surge, which can be observed all over Europe, comes from and which strategies appear successful to contain it.

KILIAN WEGNER’s reflections on the term “clan criminality“, which the current German Home Secretary seems to find just as attractive as her predecessors as a way to highlight whom Germans should fear more than other criminals, has made a big splash. Wegner warns of the enormous damage that such a criminal policy linked to ethnic characteristics or “ancestry” can cause.

This summer has been, even if it has not always felt like it in Germany, continuously breaking global heat records. In LANDO KIRCHMAIR’s view, constitutional dogma in Germany must change along with the climate: According to Kirchmair, Article 20a of the Basic Law, binding the state to the objective of environmental protection, not only sets an objective for the legislature, but also provides it with a legal standard against which every law that is harmful to the climate must be measured.

Our series of articles on climate protests has continued with fascinating insights from the UK by ADAM WAGNER and from Australia by LIZ HICKS, both of whom show how blatantly the freedom of assembly and expression of climate activists is now being curtailed in their respective countries.

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The question of whether the German government can pass on the bill for the damages of the evidently illegal car toll to the man who caused the whole mess, namely ex-Federal Minister of Transport Andi Scheuer of the CSU, has sparked an intense debate. He is liable, thinks JOACHIM WIELAND. He is not, finds PATRICK HEINEMANN. He is presumably liable, and so is his state secretary at the time, finds WOLFGANG BADER, who nevertheless recommends a legislative clarification. And KILIAN HERZBERG explores the surprisingly interesting historical question of how it came about that there is nothing in the ministerial law on official liability, and whether it follows that ministers, unlike civil servants, judges and the like, are not liable for their breaches of official duty (spoiler: it doesn’t).

PÄIVI LEINO SANDBERG and PETER LINDSETH land a real scoop in their article on the creeping increase in importance that EU cohesion policy has gone through in recent years and on the consequences that this has for the EU’s ability to interfere with the economic and fiscal policies of the member states.

Will it be possible to achieve sufficiently muscular regulation of artificial intelligence in the EU? The resistance of the big tech lobby is gigantic. In a long-read, FILIP KONOPCZYNSKI gives a thorough overview of the state of affairs regarding the AI Act.

MICHAL BOBEK and DAVID KOSAR turn their analytical spotlights on a little-noticed ruling of the European Court of Human Rights: A chamber of the Strasbourg Court had to be brought in line by the Grand Chamber because it had declared an actually inadmissible complaint admissible in a Czech case in order to enforce certain extremely far-reaching ideas about judicial independence.

In India, the authoritarian-populist restructuring of democratic institutions is making further headway. Now the Modi government wants to bring the Election Commission under its control. ANMOL JAIN explains how this came about and what it may lead to.

Right-wing populists in Europe, left-wing populists in Latin America – this distinction is apparently no longer true: In Argentina, a right-wing populist of Donald Trump’s ilk is about to push his way into power. DEMIAN IGLESIAS SEIFERT explains where this comes from.

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Among the articles from earlier in the summer, I found these particularly interesting: ISABEL FEICHTNER’s report on the supposedly failed International Maritime Authority negotiations on seabed mining and the beginnings of new planetary thinking they reveal. THOMAS BIEBERICHER’s analysis of the libertarianisation of the CDU and the fatal consequences of vacating conservative positions for the struggle against authoritarian populism. And ROMY KLIMKE’s critical look at the EU’s plans to tackle deforestation.

Oh, and if you have been following the developments in Israel, I also recommend the latest articles by RIVKA WEILL and AEYAL GROSS, which I think make many things a lot more transparent.

There would be much, much more, which undeservedly has to be left unmentioned here. It was an eventful summer indeed. It’s not quite over yet, but almost. And what lies ahead will be trying.

All the more reason to wish you all the best in the meantime!

Yours

Max Steinbeis

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