Friedrich Daniel Bassermann was elected to the National Assembly in the Franconian constituency of Stadtprozelten. The 37-year-old Mannheim publisher’s bookseller had considerable parliamentary experience. He had been a member of the Citizens’ Committee of his native town since 1838 and of the Baden state parliament since 1841, and in the initial phase of the revolution he was involved in all political decisions: a participant in the Heidelberg Assembly, a member of the preliminary parliament and a representative of Baden in the Committee of 17, which was formed from the Bundestag to the Reform of the Federal Constitution was used.
In the Paulskirche, he joined the right-wing liberal “Casino” faction and was one of the key figures there from the start. Although his friend Heinrich von Gagern, who was politically sympathetic, had a greater external impact as President of the Parliament, Bassermann had enormous weight for internal processes as Chairman of the Constitutional Committee.
Bassermann also played an important role as a debate speaker. He not only defended the majority positions of the constitutional committee on controversial issues such as the right to vote in the Reichstag or the head of the Reich, but also took to the rostrum to defend the position of his parliamentary group on other controversial issues such as the establishment of a provisional central authority or the armistice in the Schleswig War.
He did this, as the journalist Robert Heller put it, “preferably when the opponents have already fired all their arrows from the same one, to the cheers of the galleries”. In his “taking up every attack, in this relaxed weapon test, the strength of his oratory talent is revealed, which, in addition to the awareness of the law, is all the prudence of the most moderate expression at his command”.
At the end of July 1848, when the appointment of the Reich Minister to be appointed by the Reich Regent was being negotiated, Bassermann was an obvious candidate. With regard to faction and regional proportional representation, the post of undersecretary of state in the Ministry of the Interior ultimately remained for him, where he formed a pro-Prussian counterweight to the Austrian Minister Anton von Schmerling.
In this office, for which he resigned as chairman of the constitutional committee, Bassermann made himself indispensable. He survived the change of government in September and December 1848 and in November, as Reich Commissioner, took on the difficult task of negotiating options for solving the national question with the Prussian king in Berlin.
After a second mission to Berlin failed in early May 1849, during which he explored whether the Prussian government could still be persuaded to cooperate, Bassermann, disappointed, resigned his seat with other “Casino” liberals. In 1850 he was still involved in the attempts to bring about a conservative version of the small German empire in the Erfurt Union, but in 1851 he also withdrew from the Baden state parliament. Bassermann committed suicide in 1855.
Author: Prof. Dr. Frank Engelhausen