Hugo Preuss

Origins and early life

Hugo Preuss was born in Berlin on 28 October 1860 into a Jewish merchant family of the city, and remained a Jew — not observant, the Leo Baeck Institute notes, but never baptized — which in imperial Germany decided his career: a brilliant scholar of public law, a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin from 1889, he was passed over for a professorship for twenty years, as a Jew and as a left-liberal, and taught instead from 1906 at the Berlin Commercial College.

Work and career

He was the theorist of self-government, the author of Gemeinde, Staat, Reich als Gebietskörperschaften of 1889, which built the state from the municipality upward, and a Berlin city councillor who put the theory to work; in November 1918, four days after the Kaiser's fall, he published the article that named the task — 'People's State or Inverted Authoritarian State?' — and Friedrich Ebert, who had read it, called him to the Ministry of the Interior the next week and charged him with writing a constitution for the Republic.

He wrote it in weeks: the draft that the National Assembly at Weimar debated from February 1919, a parliamentary democracy with a directly elected president, universal suffrage for women and men, proportional representation, a catalogue of basic rights and a referendum — the first democratic constitution Germany had, which came into force on 11 August 1919.

Later years

He had resigned in June rather than sign the Treaty of Versailles, and sat in the Prussian Landtag for the Democratic Party until his death; the right called it 'the Jew Preuss's constitution' and the constitution's own article 48, the emergency powers, would help to bury it in 1933. He died in Berlin on 9 October 1925, and the Federal Republic's Basic Law of 1949 is, in most of its architecture, his.