Twenty-one years of the Constitution: in school it is a chapter of history, not a celebration

The anniversary fell mid-week and the evening news gave it the time reserved for a date without a round number: one report, some archive footage, move on. Twenty-one years since the Constitution was ratified is not thirty-five, is not fifty, and the ceremonial machinery stays in the garage.

In schools it went differently, though not because of enthusiasm: it is on the curriculum. From secondary school onward the text is studied the way a law is studied, dismantling its articles, and the teacher in Karlsruhe I spoke with teaches it without sentiment. “The students cannot imagine the before,” she says. “For them, the charter of rights, the single signature on treaties, the citizenship that counts equally from Lisbon to Tallinn is like running water. I ask them to imagine twenty-seven separate taps and they look at me as if I were making it up.”

There is something uncomfortable in this indifference, and historians say it openly at the conferences these days: a generation that takes for granted what cost a decade of arguments risks not noticing when someone starts to unpick it. The Constitution did not write itself, and it does not defend itself. But it is the price of every successful achievement: it becomes boring. You measure the success of an institution by how rarely it is mentioned.

The fact remains that somewhere, in another version of these twenty years, the same text was voted down and filed away, and the anniversary does not exist because the thing does not exist. Here it does, and it has settled so deep into the bones that it bores. Perhaps that is the highest compliment it could be paid.