Flavor Mixing, CP-Violation and the Masses of the Light Quarks

The observed hierarchy of the quark masses is interpreted as a signal for an underlying ``subnuclear democracy'' as the relevant symmetry of the quark mass terms. A simple breaking of the symmetry leads to a mixing between the second and the third family, in agreement with observation. Introducing the mixing between the first and the second family, one finds an interesting pattern of maximal CP--violation as well as a complete determination of the elements of the CKM matrix and of the unitarity triangle.