After Hitler: 1951–1975

Abstract

This chapter explores the German Constitutional Court’s engagement with the memory of Nazism in the first quarter century of the Court’s operation. The chapter shows how the Court came to identify itself, internally and externally, as an overtly anti-Nazi institution. It highlights how the Court construed the postwar German Basic Law as a fundamentally anti-Nazi document and the basis of an anti-Nazi state. The most dramatic case in this regard is the Court’s Civil Servants judgment of 1953, which is discussed at length. The chapter also explores the mnemonic backdrop to the Court’s landmark fundamental rights judgments of the late-1950s. The chapter concludes by discussing the Court’s 1975 abortion judgment, which controversially invoked the memory of Nazism to explain why the right to life had a different valence in Germany than in other democratic states, and why the German Constitution accordingly required the state to protect unborn life throughout the duration of pregnancy.