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Book Review
| Jack Beatson and Reinhard Zimmermann, editors, Jurists Uprooted: German-Speaking Émigré Lawyers in Twentieth-Century Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi + 850. $150 (ISBN 0-19-927058-9).
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Among the thousands driven into exile by the National Socialist
regime in Germany, judges, lawyers, and law professors were singled
out rather early on. Their flight opens inquiry into how the receiving
countries responded, of how the exiles coped, and of the impact
they had in terms of the host's legal and academic culture. Several
studies have been published of the United States, but less has been
done of Great Britain. Jack Beatson and Reinhard Zimmermann have
collected (and contributed) papers rich in the texture of that
experience. It is a thick book, and not in length alone.
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In "Aliens, Enemy Aliens, and Friendly
Enemy Aliens," Jack Beatson explains the British reaction, doubtless
shared by most civilized nations, to the refugees: they have our
deepest sympathy and we wish them well—somewhere else. Nevertheless,
from Beatson's essay, from the personal recollections of Peter Stein,
Barry Nicholas, and Kurt Lipstein (the last of the group still alive),
and from the secondary accounts of all those discussed in this book
(save for Lassa Oppenheim and Hersch Lauterpacht who immigrated
voluntarily well before the rise of National Socialism), Britain
seems to have muddled through as best it could with the limited
resources it had available, raised and disbursed privately. The
spirit is captured in a letter from Kenneth Sisam of the Oxford
University Press (whose small advances kept several scholars alive)
seeking assistance for Fritz Schulz from the Warden of All Souls
at Oxford: "Probably neither you nor I have any natural affection
for aliens, but we can't stand by and see good scholars starve"
(164).
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The stage is set by Reinhard Zimmermann's meticulous introductory, "'Was Heimat heiß, nun heißt es Hölle'"—What was once home, is now called hell, a quote from the Austrian writer B. Viertel. As most of the exiles were excluded because of their Jewish origin, Zimmermann outlines the status of Jews in post-emancipation Germany: for the haute bourgeoisie, their love of German Kultur, their intense desire to assimilate, and their struggle to secure academic recognition. He details the various measures the Nazi regime deployed systematically to eliminate the politically and racially undesirable elements from the faculties of law, the bench, and the profession beginning with the cynically captioned "Act for the Restoration (Wiederstellung) of the Professional Civil Service" of 7 April 1933. He adverts as well to the ease with which not only the ministries but the academy and the bar accommodated the regime, readily filling the positions so forcibly vacated. |
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Unlike the sciences and the arts, law is not portable: unlike a chemist or a sculptor, a lawyer, judge, or law professor has to struggle to find a role in a foreign country—in a foreign language and in a foreign system. "In many cases," Zimmermann observes, "they [the lawyers] were reduced to the poverty line and had to take on menial jobs. Their wives often became the real breadwinners of the family" (45). Even so, does it say something more that not one judge, lawyer, or law professor not otherwise the object of the purge chose to emigrate in protest? |
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Zimmermann has, it seems, read and
distilled all the literature on academic refugees. He gives the
numbers of those affected (as best they can be ascertained), of
where they went and when, of what happened to them, and, of an aspect
less discussed, what they did after the fall of the régime.
Some returned and, in some cases, Gerhard Leibholz, for example,
with extraordinary success, becoming later a member of the Supreme
Constitutional Court. But even Leibholz, who emerges as the most
thoroughly assimilated of those of Jewish "origin," who was least
affected by—and had least effect on—his host country,
accepted only the status of visiting professor at Göttingen
and disparaged the persistence of the Nazi element. Nor was he alone
in finding the law faculties of post-war Germany a morally vexed
and vexing place. A similar ambivalence is evidenced in various
of the biographical studies: some refused to return; others returned
sporadically, to lecture from time to time; only a few attempted
reintegration.
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The bulk of the book consists of
chapters devoted to the family history, education, professional
experience, and professional contributions of Fritz Schulz (by Wolfgang
Ernst), Fritz Pringsheim (by Tony Honoré), David Daube (by
Alan Roger), Hermann Kantorowicz and Walter Ulmann (by David Ibbetsen),
Otto Kahn-Freund, who became more British than the British (in an
essay by Mark Freedland at once dispassionate and loving), Ernst
Cohn (by Werner Lorenz), Clive Schmitthoff (by John Adams), F.A.
Mann (by Lawrence Collins), Martin Wolff (by Gerhard Dannemann),
Kurt Lipstein (by Christopher Forsyth), Wolfgang Friedmann (who
was later to be murdered in New York) with an "excursus" on Gustav
Radbruch (who did not long remain in Britain) (by John Bell), Gerhard
Leibholz (by Manfred Wiegandt), Lassa Oppenheim (by Mathais Schmoeckel),
Hersh Lauterpacht (by Matte Koskenniemi), George Schwartzenberger
(by Stephanie Steinle), and Hermann Mannheim and Max Grünhut
(by Roger Hood). Few had any Jewish identification and some were
professing Christians. They also diverged significantly in age—the
younger being more readily adaptable than the older—and in
legal sub-discipline, which affected their ability to adapt and
to be adopted, and in political outlook. But all were drenched in
the rigor of German legal thought. Nor is the verb too strong. In
the German system, it was common for students to travel from one
institution to another and the best students could avail themselves
of that experience to sit at the feet of the most prominent figures.
It was necessary to secure a sponsor for one's doctorate if one
were to seek judicial appointment or even to practice law at any
level of sophistication. It was necessary as well to find a sponsor
for one's Habilitation in order to secure a professorship.
A shared cast (and caste) of doctoral and Habilitation supervisors
and referents is interwoven in lives of almost all of those treated,
many of whom became refugees along with their students.
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Four chapters discuss the impact upon British law and the legal academy of having German thought, physically embodied in these scholars, brought to bear. The results are mixed. Peter Birks treats Roman law where the émigré scholars and those who studied with them in Britain rejuvenated a largely moribund field—for a while, but could not stave off a secular decline in curricular importance. Peter North treats Private International Law where their legacy is "substantial" (515). James Crawford discusses Public International Law where only three of those treated—Oppenheim, Lauterpacht, and Schwartzenberger—were concentrated. He points out that only two were German, only one was a refugee, and two (Lauterpacht and Schwartzenberger) were bitter enemies. To speak of collective impact here is to "compare the incommensurable" (695). J. A. Jolowicz's treatment of Comparative Law starts with the "'positively shocking'" state of comparative legal study in the '30s (354) and limns the "indefatigable efforts" of H. C. Gutteridge as a lonely missionary prior to the émigré arrival. The vastly altered European legal landscape of the late twentieth century is attributed to a sea change in British attitude, a sea change to which émigré scholars contributed significantly. In hindsight, this would have occurred without them, but it would have been much slower in coming (365). Consequently, the book is important apart from the trenchant accounts of the refugee experience and apart from glimpses it affords of the persons and politics of the British academy of the time, for those interested in the dialectic of discourse between alien legal systems. |
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| Matthew W. Finkin
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| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
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