ABSTRACT
Following the momentous Constitutional Court decision of December 1983, Minister Zimmermann's staff returned to the drawing board. Within a year, a new draft law was ready, but a tangle of political issues would need to be resolved. The changes embodied in the new census law certainly represented a plausible response to the 1983 Constitutional Court decision; but of course the issue of whether they constituted an adequate response would be answered in dramatically different ways by supporters and opponents. The subsequent assertion that the census law ruled out the sharing of such data with other state agencies, like the invocation of the approval of Data Protection Commissioners, signalled a continuing reliance on some of the failed argumentative strategies of 1983. In 1987, too, wide swathes of the West German public would not be content to hear that some distant authority had approved the law, nor that the law itself ruled out mischief in principle.
