Compromise Solutions Through Careful Consideration: The Development of the Legal Status of National Minorities in Germany, 1918–1919 (Studia Historica Septentrionalia, 62)

The development of the minority articles of the Weimar Constitution and in other laws affecting the legal status of minorities has not yet been thoroughly explored. The objective this study is to provide a comprehensive explanation as to why the legal status of minorities was enacted in the way it was. In the same way, we will also analyze the development of other relevant social solutions during the development of new minority legislation in 1918-1919.

Considered as a whole, the legal status of national minorities in Germany during the years 1918-1919 clearly changed. The majority of the German political elite gradually accepted the idea that minorities should be guaranteed fundamental rights that were seen to be reasonable in legislation. Then necessary decisions were made at a national as well as an individual state level by the end of the summer of 1919.

In the background these changes were influenced by a group of various cosmopolitan-moral, domestic and foreign policy factors, with their combined effect resulting in this change. Of the acceptance of this change, it was essential that legislative compromise solutions were eventually found through careful consideration and discussion that was estimated to not only bring justice to national minorities, but equivalent benefits to Germany and Germanness.