How the German government sidestepped its constitution and got away with it

Constant references to the constitution tend to be an American thing.

Every hero, every rascal, every super criminal quotes the Constitution and is, of course, an expert in its interpretation. One reason may be that the US Constitution is written in fairly accessible language.
Another reason is that it was somewhat of a gold standard. To some, its fate mirrors that of the gold standard for money, but that's a subject for another day.

The freshly minted West German state after WW II had its own constitution. They called it Basic Law, Gundgesetz, not constitution. The reason?

Given right in it: once re-unified, the German people would hold a referendum on a constitution.

Did you miss the swanky new German constitution and the referendum after East Germany went away?

You did not, because it never happened.

How that never happened is an unreported anecdote of German history, but, lucky for us, an easy one to understand. You do not have to be a constitutional scholar to get it, it is that simple.

It hinges on the definition of re-unification.

The then conservative led German government wanted to avoid two things after East Germany died.

The first issue was to avoid a referendum and the related work on a new or re-vamped constitution. Successive West German governments held the democratic tool of a referendum in about the same esteem as the plague.

The argument was that the Germans had failed to make good use of this tool in the period between World War I and World War II, fostering instability that would help the rise of the evil Austrian born naturalized immigrant.  In reality, much of German history between the wars as handed down in received discourse is the sort of story you'd call a creation myth, neatly making it so that the "middle" of the political spectrum was absolved from responsibility for the Adolf, placing the burden on the uneducated and radio-speech controlled masses.

So, the West German government, which called all the shots once East German citizens had taken down the Wall, decided to  avoid a referendum (including a partly likely abolition of the civil service constructs taken straight from the monarchy) by asking the reconstituted East German states to apply to join the umbrella of the Basic Law.

If you guys apply, it is not technically a re-unification, hence no referendum needed.

And that's how it was done. Each state applied to join the area of application of the Basic Law and was accepted with open arms and brotherly love.

You have to admire this neat feat, and if you criticize the procedure, you are, of course, a wing nut.

A second issue, at the time seen more from a romantic angle, was that of a peace treaty.

The West German government did not want a peace treaty.

That's only strange if you consider a consequence of traditional peace treaties: reparations.

While the Germans did pay out to some countries after the war, or, in the case of the Soviet Union and France, had to simply look on as factories or resources were taken, there were lots of countries that had gone empty handed.

Greece, for example.

Ruthless business men, the Nazis had the habit of first invading a country and then taking out loans. They took out a loan from newly subjugated Greece, set up a repayment schedule - honorable people do that - and went about their genocidal ways.

Had the Allies and Germany made a peace treaty after the Iron Curtain came down, creditors across Europe would have been eligible for reparations.

So, instead of a peace treaty, the Germans got a Four plus Two treaty and saved billions of Deutschmarks in reparations. The topic has come up for Greece in the discussions of the Eurozone bailout, with the Greek saying, hey, wait, you still owe us from you know when, there was a re-payment schedule.

The Germans, smiling at first, not so much after repeated Greek reminders, went, well, you know there never has been peace treaty, and you guys did sign a paper saying you were happy with our re-unification. 

Note that they do use the term re-unification everywhere, just not with regard to their constitution.

And so it is that today, German tabloid Bild Zeitung viciously decries the Bailout of the Greedy Greek but has a convenient blind spot with regard to history. Cynics say that "history" to the Bild Zeitung and some politicians means "anything before yesterday".