In the name of the party

On 15 November 1959, the Bad Godesberg Congress put the SPD’s collective signature to its programme. This document had moved from the arcana of decisions at party HQ to a more public dimension: the meetings of the party’s branches and federations, discussion in the press, debates on the election of delegates, and the deliberations at the Congress itself. In so doing, the programme not only entered a new stage in its production process but underwent a change of status: a bricolage of text had now become a collective document enshrined as the party’s statutory programme. This chapter examines the social operations that this involved.