To be inserted as Article 1 before Art. 1 of the draft, which would then become Art. 2:
“The German nation is a nation of freemen and German soil does not tolerate servitude. Alien serfs who reside on it are liberated by it.”

‘Improvement proposed by Jacob Grimm’ for the National Assembly’s consultation of the “Basic Rights of the German Nation” on 11th November 1848 (Grimm-Sammlung der Stadt Kassel, Autogr. 361)

While the position of the handwritten amendment does not tell us where, exactly, it was to be inserted, the amendment itself tells us that Grimm wanted it to be Article 1 of the constitution. What mattered to him was that the ‘Basic Rights of the German Nation’ begin not with a passage of dry legalese but with a clearly worded, forthright assertion.