This is not a review, and I don't hand out stars either. It is part of my annotated reading list. Whatever first comes to mind when I pick up the book. More about it in this blog post.
written on October 26, 2026, read October 2026
I admit it: I am a Grundgesetz ultra – a die-hard fan of the Basic Law, Germany’s constitution. Unreservedly.
No, I don’t constantly insist on my fundamental rights, and I don’t shout at every police officer that he or she isn’t allowed to do this or that. But I do believe that the Basic Law, as the foundation of our lives since the founding of the Federal Republic, has worked wonderfully – even if, through certain additions, it has lost its charm of well-phrased stringency.1 Perhaps an occasional linguistic refactoring of the Basic Law wouldn’t be the worst idea to restore that state. Whatever is too complicated to express in a few sentences should be moved out into a separate constitutional module.
A few days ago I then stumbled across this little book: “Das Grundgesetz”, and beneath it “verständlich erklärt” (“explained in plain terms”). It was published in Reclam’s Universal-Bibliothek, the series of small yellow paperbacks familiar to every German schoolchild. And “in plain terms” doesn’t mean plain in the sense of a legal commentary, for which a great many coins change hands and which then really does put some weight on the scales. It means genuinely written so that even a layperson can read and understand it – as an indirect subject of this law who, given the choice between reading the Basic Law and a root-tip resection, would rather head off to the oral surgeon.2
I would love to have this book in A4 format, hardbound, on nice heavy paper. Because “throwing the Basic Law at someone” with a Reclam booklet in your hand – even a somewhat thicker one – simply doesn’t have the same effect and looks a bit ridiculous. Tapping your finger on a tome that carries some weight has a lot more impact. Stone tablets would be fine too, but for one thing there are more than ten articles, and for another that would be enormously impractical.3
But perhaps even the superficial reader would take in more easily what it actually says if the print were a little larger. For instance, whenever someone once again tries to explain why some interferences with fundamental rights are absolutely peachy, while others mean the end of civilisation as we know it. Sometimes even for the very same fundamental right – depending on who is interfering with whose fundamental right and who is bound towards whom.
And lately you so often get the feeling that some people here could use some tutoring – even those who, as politicians, steer our fate. Not with the printed Basic Law as a physical instrument for conveying conviction, of course.4
As a schoolboy I had a small white book containing the Basic Law (I seem to remember: with a black-red-gold5 border), also roughly the size of a Reclam booklet. I think it was published by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, the Federal Agency for Civic Education. Our civics teacher handed it out at the beginning of the school year, and we then used it in class. As far as I remember, though, it contained hardly any explanations.
A reading tip: because of the way the author refers to the articles of the Basic Law, it pays to have the text of the law open alongside – as a PDF or in print. Both are available free of charge from the Federal Agency for Civic Education (in German). That saves you all the leafing back and forth.6
The best thing about this little book, though, may be the foreword by Jagoda Marinić. For many of us who were born with a German passport, all these fundamental rights are a given. Marinić describes her view of the Basic Law from the perspective of someone who did not have all the rights and duties of the Basic Law from birth, but only received them later in life with a German passport – and who therefore doesn’t regard them as rights that are “just there anyway”.
And that is what makes it worth being a Basic Law ultra.
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The author also writes that the asylum article, for example – which I still know in its four-word version: “Politisch Verfolgte genießen Asylrecht.” (“Persons persecuted on political grounds shall have the right of asylum.”) – now reads more like an administrative regulation (with “just under 280 words”) and is “linguistically botched”. ↩
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An apparently lesser-known fun fact: the fundamental rights bind the state, not the individual. For individuals they apply only indirectly – as this book also explains nicely. ↩
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And I really can’t picture German actors Daniel Brühl or Moritz Bleibtreu standing in for Charlton Heston in a film adaptation. ↩
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Then again … I do think they know. But where would we end up if we let constitutional reality ruin such a nice narrative … ↩
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Although the gold, as usual, was yellow. ↩
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Now that I’m looking at the current version as a PDF: it may also be that it wasn’t a border but the flag beneath the title. ↩