The Failure of Weimar and the Origins of the “Militant Democracy” in West-Germany

This paper examines the intellectual roots of the concept of streitbare Demokratie (“militant democracy”) to which the mechanism of self-defense incorporated in the German 1949 constitution is usually referred. The survey mainly focuses on how the concept has emerged and how it has consolidated itself against the background of the failure of the Weimar Republic. It reconstructs the context of the notion’s very first occurrence in the mid-1930s within the work of the jurist Karl Loewenstein, and then analyzes its successive appropriations by the members of the Parliamentary Committee in 1949 and by the constitutional theory. While streitbare Demokratie was first conceived as a radical break from the subsequent views on democracy’s self-protection, a closer examination reveals its close connection with (and dependency on) the Weimar constitutional debates in spite of the aspirations expressed by the actors engaged in the German democratic reconstruction process.