Bachofen's mother's right has long been a classic. With his thesis of matriarchy as the original form of society, Bachofen was the first to dare to speculate about the historical conditionality of gender roles and that patriarchy could be a temporary phenomenon. In doing so, he helped to deal with the crisis of masculinity, which came to a head in the 1920s after the lost war. Generations of authors have been influenced by him; they have read the text in the Kröner edition. On the occasion of the 200th birthday of the Basel antiquarian and jurist, the selection of his most powerful texts, which appeared in several annotated editions from 1925 onwards in the Kröner-Verlag, is being reissued. In addition to Mutterrecht (1861), it contains the Versuch über die Grabsymbolik der Alten (1859) and Die Sage von Tanaquil (1870), newly and extensively introduced.