Alfred Bertram

Alfred Bertram (born September 30, 1890 in Hamburg , † March 19, 1937 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German administrative officer, judge , lawyer at the University of Hamburg and legal historian .

Live and act

Alfred Bertram was the son of Daniel Eduard Gustrav Bertram, who worked as a businessman in Hamburg, and his wife Marthe, who was a daughter of the businessman August Friedrich Röding. Alfred Bertram first attended the Johanneum secondary school . He showed particular talents in language, history and geography classes. He then studied law at the universities in Freiburg , Leipzig and Geneva . After taking his first legal exam at Leipzig University in 1913, he completed a legal clerkship in his hometown. In the spring of 1914 he received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig. The subject of his doctoral thesis was The Cinematograph in its Relationship to Copyright . During the First World War , Bertram had to do military service. After a kidney operation, he finished his legal clerkship with the Great State Examination in the summer of 1918 at the University of Hamburg .

Bertram received a job offer from a private insurance company, but opted for a civil service career. From 1922 he was senior government councilor and from 1931 to 1934 government director in the Hamburg justice administration. He worked at the Hamburg Higher Regional Court from 1927 to 1931 and later from 1934 as a judge. Bertram preferred to prepare expert reports and worked as a company lawyer for Hamburg University several times (1919/20, 1924/25 and 1928 to 1930). On the founding day of the Reich in 1931, he was awarded honorary membership of the university. In the same year the teaching institution appointed him honorary professor. The reason for this was the long teaching activity in the field of Hanseatic city law and the legal history of Hamburg.

From October 1923 to June 1933, when the party dissolved itself, Bertram belonged to the German Democratic Party . Since he did not want to leave the civil service, he declared in September 1933 that he was not associated with "communist or social democratic parties". Bertram did not become a member of the NSDAP , but entered the BNSDJ . Whether and to what extent he adapted to the National Socialists is difficult to assess. Since he became a commissioner for the first state examination in the spring of 1934, he must have received a very positive assessment from his superiors.

From 1931 until the end of his life, Bertram was a member of the board of the Association for Hamburg History . In this function he introduced the Führer principle in August 1933 . However, Bertram was the only member of the board who expressed sympathy for Jewish members after the seizure of power. He no longer experienced the exclusion of all Jews from the association.

Alfred Bertram died in March 1937.

Works

In 1929 Bertram described the administration of civil justice in the nineteenth century on behalf of the Hamburg State Justice Administration . The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the Reich Justice Act . The script is liberal and written in clear language. In it, Bertram presented the backwardness of the administration of justice until the beginning of the Hamburg French era.

As a permanent contributor to the “Hanseatic Legal and Court Journal”, Bertram wrote several articles that emphasized that the state must ensure “full freedom of religion and conscience” for members of all faiths. For fellow citizens of the Jewish faith, he showed how they could best use their civil rights. The text The Codification of the Hamburg Nexus Relationships, which appeared in the journal in 1931, deserves special mention, with particular emphasis on the dismissal ex nexu . In it Bertram gave a historical overview of the various forms of citizenship in Hamburg.

Curt Rothenberger and Carl Vincent Krogmann urged Bartels in August 1933 to write an article for the BNSDJ magazine. The work had the title changes in Hamburg's constitution and administration since the national survey . Bartels spoke out in favor of a national constitutional state. With reference to Johann Heinrich Bartels , he recommended that constitutional reforms be approached with caution. The article was never printed in the newspaper.

literature

• Manfred Asendorf: Bertram, Alfred . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 4 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0229-7 , pp. 47-49 .