Erich Kaufmann

Erich Kaufmann
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Born	(1880-09-21)September 21, 1880 Demmin
Died	(1972-11-11)November 11, 1972 Heidelberg
Occupation	Lawyer

Erich Kaufmann (* 21 September 1880 in Demmin; † 11 November 1972 in Heidelberg), a lawyer, was one of the leading professors of constitutional and international law during the periods of the Weimar Republic and the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the methodology dispute of the Weimar constitutional law theorists, he assumed a position in opposition to positivistic Neokantianism. Kaufmann was a champion of classical natural law and an advocate of the ontological and metaphysical approaches to the law. During the Nazi period, Kaufmann, due to his Jewish heritage, was persecuted as a Jew. Particularly active in doing so was his rival, law professor Carl Schmitt. Kaufmann lost his professional livelihood and had to flee Germany in 1938.

Life and Work

Kaufmann attended the French Gymnasium (academically oriented secondary school) of Berlin and initially pursued literary history and philosophy. However, he switched to the law, spending his university years in Heidelburg and Freiburg, studying with Georg Jellinek, among others. Kaufmann's dissertation work in Halle (1906) was also marked by Jellinek's academic style; the dissertation dealt, primarily, with the work of Friedrich Julius Stahl, and was initially announced as a prelude to a three-volume work which never saw completion.

In 1908, Kaufmann completed his Habilitation in Kiel on a comparative law topic with Albert Hänel. In 1911, Kaufmann followed up this effort with his most misunderstood work on the clausula rebus sic stantibus in international law, which was often interpreted in terms of a cynical positivism of power. Kaufmann first became an associate professor in Kiel in 1912, then a full professor in Königsberg in 1913. In his pocket-dictionary article on administrative law, he opposed the French-influenced understanding of this discipline advocated by Otto Mayer.

During First World War, Kaufmann served as a Bavarian artillery officer at the front and was severely wounded. In 1917, he received an appointment to the university in Berlin, but moved to Bonn in 1920. After he had thoroughly criticized the neo-Kantian philosophy of law in 1921 in an article that was polemical in places, he turned primarily to law practice. Kaufmann served as an advisor to the German Foreign Office, first in its relations with Eastern European countries, then in connection with the Dawes Plan. He also represented the German Empire, the Free City of Danzig, and the Republic of Austria before the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague. In 1927. Kaufmann returned to Berlin and became an honorary professor at the university, becoming a full professor only in 1933.

After their seizure of power in early 1933, the National Socialists began to persecute Kaufmann due to his Jewish origins. In accordance with Nazi racist ideology, the new government deemed Kaufmann and his wife Jews, although both were baptized Protestants. Nazi law professor Carl Schmitt pursued the expulsion of his colleague from Berlin University. Schmitt obtained Kaufmann's "dismissal" as an honorary professor and, with a denunciation letter to the Ministry of Culture, prevented Kaufmann from receiving another teaching position, which he was supposed to have received as a result of a settlement arrangement with the Ministry of Culture:

Prof. Kaufmann is undoubtedly a most unusual example of Jewish adaptation. He is fully Jewish, but he has succeeded with the greatest success in concealing his Jewishness, which is particularly provocative to some, from others, and in concealing it by loudly professing his Germanism ... To German sensibilities, such an existence, designed entirely for concealment of ancestry and camouflage, is difficult to comprehend. It must inevitably lead to morally impossible situations ... Every German student to whom such a man would be placed by the state as a teacher of law for the most important fields would either have to succumb to his art of camouflage, or else, if he saw through the camouflage, would be prone to errors in properly grasping National Socialism ...

Kaufmann was dismissed in 1934 despite fierce opposition with the aid of the Gesetzes zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums. He subsequently succeeded in gathering a circle of students in his house in Berlin-Nikolassee ("Nikolasseer Seminare"). After the Reichspogromnacht in 1938, he fled to Holland, where he remained in hiding during Second World War. The thirties saw the publication of lectures at the Hague Academy of International Law in the summer of 1935, Règles générales du Droit de la Paix, which is considered his probably most systematic work and last major coherent exposition of the problems of state and law..

As early as 1946, Kaufmann returned to Germany and was a full professor in Munich from 1947 until his retirement in 1950. He was also director of the Institute for International Law and dean of the Faculty of Law.

He served the Federal Chancellery and the Foreign Office as a consultant from 1950 to 1958, and was a guest professor in Bonn. From 1949 to 1955, he was a member of the "Heidelberg Lawyers' Circle "Heidelberger Juristenkreises", a lobby group advocating amnesty for Nazi criminals. He spent his last decade in Heidelberg.

Kaufmann received numerous honors, including two honorary doctorates from Kiel and Munich. He was a member of the Pour le Mérite for Science and the Arts order, of which he was chancellor from 1959 to 1963, and a recipient of the Grosses Verdienstkreuz des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublik Deutschland mit Stern und Schulterband. In 1960 he received the Harnack Medal of the Max Planck Society. Beginning in 1951, he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. From 1960 onward, Kaufmann belonged to the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences as a full member.

Erich Kaufmann is buried in the family plot of the Pankok family in the Auberg cemetery of the Saarn Protestant parish in Mülheim an der Ruhr. He was married to Hedwig ("Hede") Kaufmann, the sister of Adolf Pankok and Otto Pankok. The marriage remained childless. Das Grab von Erich Kaufmann und Ehefrau Hedwig geborene Pankok im Familiengrab Pankok auf dem Friedhof am Auberg in Mülheim an der Ruhr..

Literature

• Emanuele Castrucci: Tra organicismo e „Rechtsidee“. Il pensiero giuridico di Erich Kaufmann. Giuffrè Verlag, Mailand 1984.
• Frank Degenhardt: Zwischen Machtstaat und Völkerbund. Erich Kaufmann (1880–1972). Nomos, Baden-Baden 2008.
• Manfred Friedrich: Erich Kaufmann. In: Der Staat. Band 27, 1987, S. 231–249.
• Stefan Hanke, Daniel Kachel: Erich Kaufmann. In: Mathias Schmoeckel (Hrsg.): Die Juristen der Universität Bonn im „Dritten Reich“. (= Rechtsgeschichtliche Schriften. 18). Köln u. a. 2004, S. 387–424.
• Tilmann Krach: Max Alsberg (1877–1933). Der Kritizismus des Verteidigers als schöpferisches Prinzip der Wahrheitsfindung. In: Helmut Heinrichs u. a. (Hrsg.): Deutsche Juristen jüdischer Herkunft. München 1993.
• Peter Lerche: Erich Kaufmann †. In: AöR. Band 98, 1973, S. 115–118.
• Anna-Maria Gräfin von Lösch: Der nackte Geist. Die Juristische Fakultät der Berliner Universität im Umbruch von 1933. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-16-147245-4.
• Hermann Mosler: Erich Kaufmann zum Gedächtnis. In: ZaöRV. Band 32, 1972, S. 235 ff.
• Karl Josef Partsch: Der Rechtsberater der Auswärtigen Amtes 1950–1958. In: ZaöRV. Band 30, 1970, S. 223 ff.
• Klaus Rennert: Die „geisteswissenschaftliche Richtung“ in der Staatsrechtslehre der Weimarer Republik. Untersuchungen zu Erich Kaufmann, Günther Holstein und Rudolf Smend. Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-428-06229-9. (zugl. Diss., Univ. Freiburg, 1986)
• Jochen Rozek: Erich Kaufmann (1880–1972). In: Peter Häberle, Michael Kilian, Heinrich Wolff (Hrsg.): Staatsrechtslehrer des 20. Jahrhunderts. Deutschland – Österreich – Schweiz. de Gruyter, Berlin/ Boston 2015, S. 201–217.
• Rudolf Smend: Zu Erich Kaufmanns wissenschaftlichem Werk. In: Festgabe für Erich Kaufmann. 1950, S. 391 ff.
• Um Recht und Gerechtigkeit. Festgabe für Erich Kaufmann zu seinem 70. Geburtstage, 21. September 1950. Stuttgart 1950.
• Philipp Glahé: The Heidelberg Circle of Jurists and Its Struggle against Allied Jurisdiction: Amnesty-Lobbyism and Impunity-Demands for National Socialist War Criminals (1949–1955). In: Journal of the History of International Law. Band 21, 2019, S. 1–44.

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