section_path: History
section_name: History
paragraph_text: History
  
  The first body to be called Bundestag was the legislative body of the German Confederation, which convened in Frankfurt am Main from 1816 to 1866. This Bundestag was a convention of state envoys. During the revolution of 1848/49, the National Assembly, which met in Frankfurt am Main, was the first elected german parliament and served as a constituent assembly for a German state, which ultimately did not come to pass.
  
  The North German Confederation, founded in 1866/67, was the first German nation state with an established elected parliament, however this ended up being called the Reichstag. In 1870/71, the federation was expanded to include the southern German territories and was henceforth called the German Empire. The Reichstag building, where the current Bundestag meets since 1999 (see below), was built in 1888. The German Empire was not yet a parliamentary democracy in the modern sense, but a constitutional monarchy with democratic elements. The Reichstag had to approve all bills, had the right to initiate legislation and, in particular, had budgetary sovereignty. However, the Chancellor and the imperial government were not responsible to parliament, but to the emperor alone. It was not until 1918, a few weeks before the end of the First World War, that the Reichstag was given the right, as part of a constitutional reform, to withdraw its confidence in the Chancellor and thus force him to resign. There was also no universal suffrage for the Reichstag; only men over the age of 25 were entitled to vote in Reichstag elections.
  
  After its defeat in the First World War, Germany became a republic and a parliamentary democracy with the Weimar Constitution of 1919. The voting age was lowered to 21 years and women were given the right to vote for (and serve in) the Reichstag. However, the first German democracy failed for various reasons, some of which were directly related to the Reichstag. The pure proportional representation system in elections did not produce clear majorities and the various parties were not sufficiently willing to compromise to form stable governments. This led to numerous changes of government and snap elections. In the last years of the Weimar Republic, the extreme right and extreme left parties had a destructive majority in the Reichstag, which forced the governments to rule largely by emergency decrees to bypass parliament. In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor and through the Reichstag Fire Decree, the Enabling Act of 1933 and the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, gained unlimited power. After this, the Reichstag, in which only the Nazi Party was represented from November 1933 on, met only rarely, above all to extend the emergency laws on which the Nazi dictatorship was formally based. It last convened on 26 April 1942.
  
  With the Basic Law of 1949, Germany's second democratic constitution, the Bundestag was established as the new parliament. Due to the division of Germany, the Bundestag was de facto a West German parliament until 1990. The socialist GDR in East Germany had its own parliament, the People's Chamber, which, however, did not emerge from democratic elections except for its last electoral term in 1990. Because West Berlin was not officially under the jurisdiction of the Basic Law during the division, the Bundestag met in Bonn in several different buildings, including (provisionally) a former waterworks facility and finally in the Bundeshaus. In addition, owing to the city's legal status, citizens of West Berlin were unable to vote in elections to the Bundestag, and were instead represented by 22 non-voting delegates chosen by the House of Representatives, the city's legislature.
  
  Since German reunification in 1990, the Bundestag has once again been a pan-German parliament. In 1999, the German parliament moved from Bonn to Berlin and sits once again in the Reichstag building.