ABSTRACT
In the western zones of Germany occupied by the victorious forces, the reconstruction of liberal democratic structures began at the municipal level accompanied by the constitutional debates of the states.1 Here, as two years later, in the constitutional debates for the foundation of a western state which was conceived as provisional, the question of the protection of democracy was of central importance. The new German democracy was not to suffer the fate of the old one. The traumatic experience of National Socialism and the events in the Soviet-occupied zone, which accompanied the negotiations, allowed for an anti-totalitarian consensus to spread among all the parties, which only the representatives of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) withdrew from. Speaking of a ‘consensus’ is only possible with the exclusion of the communist minority, which, in the first few postwar years, benefited from the vitality of ‘anti-fascism’.2 It was therefore represented in many state parliaments and state governments (mostly all-party coalitions) but had lost influence – particularly because of its connection to East Berlin and Moscow and the events in the Soviet-occupied zone – already at the beginning of the banning proceedings (1951).3
