Arthur Baumgarten

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Arthur Edwin Paul Baumgarten (born March 31, 1884 in Königsberg ; † November 27, 1966 in East Berlin ) was a German-Swiss lawyer who devoted himself in particular to legal philosophy , and a communist.

Life

Baumgarten was the son of the anatomist, pathologist and bacteriologist Paul Baumgarten . He attended the humanistic grammar school in Tübingen and received his Abitur there in 1902. He studied law in Tübingen , Geneva and Leipzig . In 1907 he passed his first state examination in law.

He received his doctorate in 1909 in Berlin under Franz von Liszt on the competition of the ideal and the law. In the same year he received an appointment as an associate professor at the University of Geneva, where he taught criminal law. In 1920 he was offered an appointment at the University of Cologne , this time for criminal law and legal philosophy. In the years that followed, his interest was to focus more and more on the philosophy of law.

From 1923 to 1930 he taught in Basel . In 1930 he went to Frankfurt am Main . In the summer of 1933, when the Nazis came to power, he decided to leave Germany and go back to Basel. From 1934 to 1946 he taught legal philosophy and general political theory in Basel. In 1935 he went on a study trip to the Soviet Union and made contact with the KPD . In 1935 he was an expert witness in the Bern trial of the forged " Protocols of the Elders of Zion ". In 1944 he was a founding member of the Swiss Labor Party . At the same time he worked in the Free Germany movement in Switzerland.

In 1946 he took over a visiting professorship in Leipzig . In 1948 he was finally appointed full professor at Berlin University. From 1949 to 1952 he was the first rector of the newly founded Brandenburg State University in Potsdam, the forerunner of today's University of Potsdam . From 1952 to 1960 he was President of the German Academy for Political Science and Law.

Although he was a Swiss citizen, he remained in the GDR until his death.

Aljoscha Rompe is his daughter's son.

Honors

plant

Baumgarten was above all a legal philosopher. He only ever understood law in a philosophical context. He believed that philosophy could change social realities. At first he rejected Marxism. In his later work, however, he tries to combine socialism with the ideals of the Enlightenment. He advocates that socialism is the best form of society to realize the values ​​of freedom and equality. With this view he deviates from the prevailing interpretations of Marxism. However, he is more likely to go unnoticed than to be attacked. His work is therefore difficult to assign to a certain trend.

Fonts (selection)

  • Legal philosophy on the way. Lectures and essays from five decades. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1972.
  • Logic as empirical science: studies on the reform of logic. Publisher Pribacis, Leipzig & Kaunas 1939.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Leonie Breunung, Manfred Walther: Western European states, Turkey, Palestine / Israel, Latin American states, South African Union. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin / Boston 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-220470-2 , p. 65.
  2. ↑ a b c Baumgarten, Arthur. In: Federal Ministry for All-German Issues (ed.): SBZ biography. Deutscher Bundes-Verlag, Berlin 1964, p. 27.
  3. ↑ New Germany . October 7, 1954, p. 4.
  4. ^ A b c Leonie Breunung, Manfred Walther: Western European States, Turkey, Palestine / Israel, Latin American States, South African Union. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin / Boston 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-220470-2 , p. 70.
personal data
SURNAME Baumgarten, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baumgarten, Arthur Edwin Paul (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Swiss lawyer and legal philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Königsberg (Prussia)
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1966
Place of death East Berlin