July 31- Weimar Constitution

On July 31, 1919, in the small East-German town of Weimar, the German National Assembly, passed the constitution of the first German Republic, which has since become known by the very name of that town, the �Weimar Republic�.
Not in itself an event that shattered the foundations of civilization, you might say, and constitutions are a largely boring affair, and I would agree with you, if it weren�t for two minor points in the small print which, as it became apparent later, nobody had cared to read carefully enough.
Anyway, after Germany�s defeat in WW1, the last Hohenzollern Emperor and King of Prussia, Wilhelm II (1859-1941), the one with the huge mustache, abdicated and went into exile in Holland.
On the same day, November 9, 1918 a leader of the SPD ( the Social-Democratic Party), Phillip Scheidemann, leapt onto a balcony of the Reichstags building in Berlin and proclaimed the first German Republic.
In January 1919 elections to a National assembly were held and the SPD became the largest party and together with other centre parties held the majority in the assembly.
The delegates met in February in a theatre in Weimar to discuss amongst other urgent things, a constitution for the new Republic.
It was modeled after existing democratic systems, it proposed a Federal Democratic Republic with a parliament elected by proportional representation and with two houses, with a �Reichskanzler� (Chancellor) as the head of government and a directly elected �Reichspraesident� as the head of state.
So far, so good!
Unfortunately, the founder-fathers of the Weimar Republic made a couple of mistakes, rather insignificant oversights at first glance but with rather disastrous consequences for the further course of German history.
Firstly, it did not provide for a minimum amount of the percentage of public votes , which a party would need to enter the parliament, and thus allowed smaller, and in fact mostly nationalist, right-wing parties, to send members into the Reichstag. The consequence was that the formation of stable coalition government would become very difficult and sometimes near impossible, and the Weimar Republic stumbled from one government crisis to another, ( The economic catastrophes of the 20s and 30s didn�t help either). Thanks to this little oversight the NSDAP ( Nazis) could slip almost unnoticed into the parliaments of various German federal parliaments and eventually into the Reichstag in 1928.
Secondly, the constitution contained the �� 47� that gave the Reichspraesident the right to govern the country with a number of emergency measures, if the political situation should make it necessary. It therefore gave the President important powers that were potentially open to abuse.
Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934), a former Field Marshall of the Empire, was elected to President for the first time in 1925 as the candidate of the nationalist parties and again in 1932 with the help of the Nazis, made frequent use of these powers and after having installed a series of right-wing governments at the end of the 20s, finally gave Hitler the mandate to form a government in January 1933.
The rest, as they say, is history.


Of course, constitutions can�t be blamed for the failure of a political system, and in the case of the Weimar constitution, not even the authors who conceived this less than perfect work. The majority of the members of the assembly who on July 31, 1919 passed the first democratic constitution in Germany were probably staunch democrats who couldn�t anticipate the disasters that would befall Germany in the coming years. The tragic was that the anti-democratic forces in the Weimar Republic would abuse the loopholes that a democratic constitution had left in order to abolish the first democratic state in Germany.


What else happened on this day?
My personal highlights:

1291 � The Mameluks conquer Acre, the last town held by the Crusaders, therefore ending Christian presence in Palestine after 194 years. (The whole enterprise of the �Crusades against Islam� had been such a complete disaster, that surely nobody in their right mind would ever try such a thing again. Hang on a minute���.)

Full list:
Wikipedia