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East Germany Table of Contents

East Germany

CONSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK

The constitution of 1949, promulgated on October 7 of that year to coincide with the founding of the republic, was based on a parliamentary-democratic model. In fact, however, the various parliamentary-democratic provisions of the 1949 constitution did not hinder the emergence of a centralized and authoritarian political order under the hegemony of the SED. The original intentions of the constitution, framed under the specific historical conditions of the "antifascist democratic order" of 1945-49 (as SED historians refer to it), were simply altered over the years to incorporate changing realities. Thus, while many of the rights and guarantees of the original document were retained, a number of subsequent legal additions were made at the initiative of the SED with the concurrence of the People's Chamber.

Data as of July 1987