In March 1948, the second German People’s Congress elected the German People’s Council, a consultative and decision-making body that was to function in the periods between People’s Congresses.
The first of these congresses took place in December 1947 and was designed to be a cross-party assembly representing the entire people of post-war Germany. The People’s Chamber was the fruit of People’s Congresses. The process of creating the People’s Chamber ran parallel to the creation of the German Bundestag, and it was conceived as an alternative model to that of the Bundestag, although it was unable to dispense entirely with the conventions of liberal constitutional parliamentary practice. The representative assembly of the GDR, the Volkskammer or People’s Chamber, however, remained an exceptional phenomenon in the development of German parliamentary democracy. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) regarded itself as the first Socialist state on German soil, the governmental structure of which was to be based on the principles of ‘democratic centralism’, in other words on the principles established by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for the leadership of Communist parties.
