Commemoration Ceremony for the Fundamental Rights Stele

Yesterday morning, at the start of spring, we gathered on the banks of the Spree behind the Bundestag with several visitors to commemorate the destruction of the stele inscribed with Article 20 of the German Basic Law. Next to Dani Karavan’s artwork featuring Articles 1–19 of the Basic Law, the stele — created by the artist group “Association for the Renewal of the Federal Republic According to Its Own Ideals” — was to stand in gold on beech wood, inscribed with Article 20 of the Basic Law.

After the stele was presented as a gift on the 70th anniversary of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic, it was removed and confiscated by the police on the night of May 23, 2019. Following seven years of legal proceedings that reached the Federal Constitutional Court, it was destroyed by the police in violation of several fundamental rights. The full story is documented on our website and on unsere-verfassung.de.

Of course, this campaign — which commemorates the destruction of our fundamental rights, symbolically at the start of spring — is by no means intended as a capitulation to state authority, but rather to announce that the people will reclaim their fundamental rights. The invitation to yesterday’s event stated the following:

Our response in the realm of art: A motion has long been pending in the Bundestag to supplement the beechwood stele bearing Article 20 in gold with a cherrywood stele bearing Article 1 in platinum, and to erect both in the large plenary hall, so that in the future all proceedings in the Bundestag may take place within the force field of these two articles. (See our motion: https://deine-verfassung.de/akt11/Antrag-Baerbel-Bas.pdf, but see also the Bundestag’s despicable reactions to the motion: https://deine-verfassung.de/akt13/BVerfG.pdf, page 14 ff).

To move closer to this goal and, at the same time, to create a starting point for real human encounters in the spirit of restoring the human rights that have been violated in Germany, we are now carving Article 1 of the Basic Law into cherry wood [3] right next to Dani Karavan’s stele artwork at the Bundestag.

The campaign kicks off on the 77th anniversary of the Basic Law, Saturday, May 23, 2026, at Reichtagufer 2, Berlin.

Ralph Boes, speaking on behalf of the Association for the Renewal of the Federal Republic in Accordance with Its Own Ideals , listed the individual events and violations of fundamental rights over the past seven years in a moving speech at yesterday’s ceremony. We will publish this speech here as soon as it is available to us.

Until then, we are providing links here to a few examples of how the state has been eroding our fundamental rights in recent years — from the right to freedom of expression to the right to physical integrity, and even the right to mere survival.

• Multipolar: Illegal Practice
• Welt: A Threat to All People in the EU
• Berliner Zeitung: Bank Account Frozen for a Berlin Journalist
• Berliner Zeitung: The Rule of Law Is Being Undermined
• Berliner Zeitung: New Criminal Law Without Judges?
• Apolut: The Official End of Freedom of Speech

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Read more https://unsere-verfassung.de/Newsletter/2026-02-11-Ankue-Stele-Artikel1.htm

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