Arnold Kränzlein

Arnold Kränzlein (born March 26, 1921 in Berlin-Charlottenburg , † March 2, 2005 in Graz ) was an Austrian legal scholar .

life and work

Arnold Kränzlein came from a family with Franconian roots. His father Hermann Kränzlein was a graduate engineer and served in the German catering troops during the First World War , where he made the acquaintance of Otto Hahn , who also became the godfather of his eldest son.

Arnold Kränzlein attended the humanistic Mommsen-Gymnasium in Charlottenburg, where he passed his school leaving examination in 1938. During World War II he served as an officer from 1939 to 1945. He received several awards and was dismissed as first lieutenant in the reserve.

After serving in the war, Kränzlein studied law at the University of Erlangen . Under the influence of Erwin Seidl , he turned to legal history in particular. In 1951 he was awarded the title magna cum laude for Dr. jur. PhD ; in his dissertation he dealt with papyrus documents from Roman Egypt.

Kränzlein then worked as an assistant at the University of Erlangen and the University of Würzburg . There he did his habilitation with Erich Berneker , which he achieved in 1959 for the subjects of Roman law, ancient legal history and civil law. In 1961 he was appointed university lecturer and in 1965 as an adjunct professor.

In the same year (1965), Kränzlein followed a call to the chair of Roman law at the University of Graz . He stayed at this university until the end of his life, despite calls from abroad to Marburg (1966) and Cologne (1971, as successor to his teacher Seidl). In 1972/1973 Kränzlein acted as dean of the law faculty, in 1974/1975 as rector of the university. He remained active in teaching and research until after his retirement (1991).

Since his studies, Kränzlein has dealt with wide areas of ancient law, from classical Greek law to Greco-Roman papyri to classical Roman law. One focus was property and property law: In his habilitation thesis he dealt with property and possession in Greek law of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. He used as many literary and epigraphic sources as possible in order to shed light not only on the widely documented situation in Athens, but also in other cities. One result of his studies was the finding that there was no distinct institute of property in Athens, but there was in other cities.

In addition, Kränzlein wrote several individual studies on the right of release from different points of view, especially on the status of the released, the clauses and re-enslavement. He also dealt with the papyrus sources repeatedly, whereby he was primarily interested in contract documents, especially lease and tenant documents.

Kränzlein has been particularly concerned with Roman law since the 1960s. He wrote the articles patrimonium and a patrimonio for the realcyclopedia of classical antiquity (RE) . Further essays and miscommunications were concerned with Roman civil rights and the civil rights of the Italians.

Fonts (selection)

• The papyri Vind. 25824a /, 25824b / and Amh. 65 . Erlangen 1951 (dissertation; also published in: Journal of Juristic Papyrology . Volume 6, 1952, pp. 195–237)
• Property and possession in Greek law of the fifth and fourth centuries BC Chr. Berlin 1963 (habilitation thesis)
• Legal concepts in the ancient Greek and Graeco-Egyptian legal system . Graz 1975
• Johannes Michael Rainer (ed.): Arnold Kränzlein: Writings . Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2008

literature

• Gunter Wesener (Ed.): Festschrift for Arnold Kränzlein. Contributions to ancient legal history . Graz 1986
• Johannes Michael Rainer: In memoriam Arnold Kränzlein . In: Journal of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History. Romance Department . Vol. 123 (2006), pp. 533-541

Web links

• Literature by and about Arnold Kränzlein in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heidemarie Anderlik, Liebe in 2250 Letters , in: Die Welt , online edition from June 29, 2004 ( see here ), accessed on February 20, 2015