Federal Constitutional Court celebrates its 75th birthday with a reserved ceremony

In the ZEIT newsletter The Politics section we sort out the world, politically and personally, from Monday to Thursday. Today our author Heinrich Wefing writes about the Federal Constitutional Court's attempts to celebrate one's own birthday.

This morning I was in Karlsruhe, at the birthday party of the Federal Constitutional Court. A business trip of a bearable kind, the weather was wonderful. The Federal President was there, the Chancellor, ministers, ambassadors and all the dignitaries and eminences of the Republic, a thousand people in total, a lot of dark suits.

The mass demonstration shows that the court is important and powerful, it has made the country more open and free, it has transformed the legal poetry of fundamental rights into practical politics. At some point it may have to decide whether to ban the AfD.

But celebrate? No, celebrations are apparently more of a challenge for the court. The ceremony took place in the Stadthalle Karlsruhe, and the two words “ceremonial” and “Stadthalle” might give you a feeling of what it was like. Throughout the year, the court's judges had traveled around the country with cakes to delight school classes, and so it continued.

The speeches remained well composed and free of criticism, just as the court largely managed to immunize itself against criticism. The Federal President unsurprisingly called the Federal Constitutional Court a “stroke of luck” for our country and said that the Basic Law “applies to everyone and in all German states.” But that was about it in terms of the political program.

The wonderful Freiburg Baroque Orchestra played Bach, that's always possible, four actors recited two judgments of the court in a "scenic reading", and finally Meret Becker sang in a glittering, material-poor dress A Day Like Gold by Max Raabe and threw sparkling glitter into the air.

Nothing against Meret Becker, really, she tried her best to get a room full of lawyers excited just before lunch, but the atmosphere varied somewhat indecisively between a graduation ceremony, a first-semester lecture and a Protestant church conference. The French Cour Constitutionnelle is only half as influential as Karlsruhe, but I would easily believe that a 75th anniversary celebration there would have twice as much republican grandeur.

But this manifest aversion to pathos doesn't have to be bad, on the contrary, it even has something calming about it. The old Federal Republic, which is currently being hospiced by the media everywhere, is obviously far from finished. In the Stadthalle Karlsruhe she was once again completely with herself. Like no other institution, the Federal Constitutional Court stands for moderation, which is currently out of fashion in Berlin, and the somehow cute, effortful, low-key nature of the ceremony stands in pleasant contrast to the lack of boundaries in the political mood in the country.