Constitution of the German Reich adopted by the National Assembly meeting at Weimar and promulgated on 11 August 1919, establishing Germany's first republic after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It created a popularly elected president with sweeping emergency powers under Article 48, a Reichstag elected by proportional representation, and mechanisms for popular referendum and initiative, among the most democratic features of any constitution of its era. Its emergency powers were repeatedly invoked in the early 1930s and were central to Adolf Hitler's legal seizure of power in 1933, a history political scientists still study as a case of how a democratic constitution's own provisions can be turned against it.
Facts
Key ProvisionAdopted in 1919 for the German Republic that succeeded the fallen empire, it established a parliamentary system with a popularly elected president, proportional representation in the Reichstag, and an extensive bill of civil rights, but also gave the president, under Article 48, power to rule by emergency decree and suspend civil liberties, a provision invoked with increasing frequency in the Republic's final years and used by the Nazi government after 1933 to dismantle the constitutional order itself. 1 Classification
Document Type Original Language Connections
Associated With
Why this is disputed. Whether Germany's Weimar Republic, with its directly elected president and a chancellor separately accountable to the Reichstag, counts as an early instance of semi-presidentialism is disputed among scholars of the type: the constitutional shape matches, but Duverger's category was defined decades after Weimar collapsed and around a different model, France's Fifth Republic, so applying it retroactively to Weimar is a scholarly judgment rather than a settled classification.
The treaty's reparations and territorial burdens shaped the political and economic conditions the Weimar Republic's constitution had to govern under from its first year.
Source Treaty of Versailles (Wikipedia)
Drafted By
Source Weimar Constitution (Wikipedia)
Influenced
Weimar's collapse under its own emergency powers is the case West Germany's 1949 Basic Law drafters cited in creating the Federal Constitutional Court as a dedicated guardian of the constitution.
Source Weimar Constitution (Britannica)
Influenced By
Nazi Party, Institutions The Nazi Party's rise to power culminated in the March 1933 Enabling Act, which stripped the Weimar Constitution of practical effect without formally repealing it.
Shaped
Source Weimar Constitution (Britannica)
Sources
1. Weimar Constitution (Britannica)
Encyclopaedia BritannicaDocument type, description
Constitution of the German Reich adopted by the National Assembly meeting at Weimar and promulgated on 11 August 1919, establishing Germany's first republic after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
- Influenced: Constitutional Court
View the Source 2. Wikidata: Weimar Constitution
- Wikidata Q156003, class allow-list match, case-insensitive label variant (w-bbfill-smallsix2-0926/resolve_ci.ps1)
- Wikidata Q156003 via P407 (w-bbfill-smallsix2-0926/propfill_varchar.ps1)
View the SourceTreaty of Versailles (Wikipedia)
Weimar Constitution (Wikipedia)
Drafted By: Hugo Preuss, Drafting
The initial draft of the constitution was written by the lawyer and liberal politician Hugo Preuss
In Group: Constitutions of 1900 to 1945, Lead paragraph
The constitution contained a number of weaknesses which, under the difficult conditions of the interwar period, failed to prevent Adolf Hitler from setting up a Nazi dictatorship using the constitution as a cover of legitimacy.
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