Eberhard Schmidhäuser

Eberhard Schmidhäuser (born October 10, 1920 in Stuttgart ; † March 6, 2002 in Hamburg ) was a German legal scholar and professor of criminal law at the University of Hamburg .

Life

Schmidhäuser was the first of four children of the judge Hermann Schmidhäuser and his wife Hilde Schmidhäuser, nee. Schwab, born in Stuttgart. He came into contact with the matter of state punishment early on when his father took over the management of the youth prison in Heilbronn in 1924 .

In 1938 he left high school and was drafted into Reich Labor Service and then into military service. After training as a reserve officer , he was seriously wounded on the first day of the Russian campaign in 1941 and his left lower leg was amputated . After taking courses in art history and economics at the Technical University of Stuttgart from his bedside , he began studying law in Strasbourg in autumn 1942 . He had to give up the original plan to focus his studies on art history due to a red-green visual impairment . During this time he also met his future wife Elsbeth, whom he married in 1945. After studying in Freiburg and Tübingen , he passed the first state examination there in 1946 . In the period to 1949, he completed then his clerkship in Stuttgart and was at Edward core with the work studies (the offense) to the system of criminal law to the doctor juris doctorate. In 1950 Schmidhäuser entered the judicial service at the Stuttgart Regional Court.

Scientific career

After the Württemberg Ministry of Justice granted his application for a leave of absence in 1953, he took up a position as an assistant at the University of Tübingen . There he completed his habilitation with Eduard Kern and Wilhelm Gallas, among other things with his habilitation thesis on disposition features in criminal law . In 1959 he was appointed to the University of Göttingen , where in 1961 he refused an offer to the University of Basel . In 1963, however, he accepted an appointment at the University of Hamburg , where he taught and worked until his retirement in 1986 and beyond.

In addition to criminal law, Schmidhäuser was also interested in literature. So he published u. a. the book Crime and Punishment - A Foray through World Literature from Sophocles to Dürrenmatt and held seminars on punishment and crimes in literature.

Schmidhäuser died on March 6, 2002 at the age of 81 in Hamburg.

Works (selection)

• Investigations into the system of criminal law (the offense) . Diss. Tübingen 1949
• Attitudes in criminal law . Mohr, Tübingen 1958
• The sense of punishment . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1963
• Crime and punishment - a foray through world literature from Sophocles to Dürrenmatt . Beck, Munich 1995

literature

• Eberhard Schmidhäuser: On the meaning of punishment . Reprint of the 2nd edition from 1971, edited and provided with a new introduction by Eric Hilgendorf , Logos, Berlin 2004
• Winrich Langer:  Schmidhäuser, Eberhard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , p. 157 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Eberhard Schmidhäuser in the catalog of the German National Library
• In memory of Eberhard Schmidhäuser . Speeches given at the academic commemoration of the University of Hamburg on February 6, 2003, Hamburger Universitätsreden, 2004 (PDF; 728 kB)