Else Koffka

Else Koffka (born June 22, 1901 in Wronke ; † February 18, 1994 in Hanover ) was a German lawyer and judge at the 5th Criminal Senate of the Federal Court of Justice in Berlin .

Life

The Protestant Else Koffka in 1901 in the Prussian province of Posen was born, where her father Otto Koffka as Gerichtsassessor held an auxiliary judgeship. His marriage to Carla Koffka, born Franke , had three daughters and two sons, three of whom were studying. Else was the second oldest. Otto Koffka was transferred to Berlin in July 1906, where he last held the position of district court director.

Initially, Else attended Miss Keyenberg's private school in Berlin for several years , but eventually switched to the city's Dorotheen Lyceum and, in 1914, to the first city university, an institute with a high school orientation. There she also passed her Abitur on February 25, 1920 , but did not start studying straight away, but stayed at home for six months to support her parents. In the winter semester 1920/1921 she then matriculated at the law and political science faculty of the Humboldt University in Berlin , which she attended only interrupted by a one-semester stay at the University of Tübingen (summer semester 1922) until the summer semester 1923. During her studies in Berlin, she continued to live with her parents. Having her on February 13, 1924 state examination had taken with the overall grade of "good", she joined 10 March 1924 their preparatory service in the Berlin Court of Appeal one, at the same time she took over the criminal Seminar their university a job ( cataloging the library ). In August of the same year, Else Koffka asked for admission to the doctorate with the legal scholar Martin Wolff . She was one of the first women to receive a doctorate from the law faculty of Humboldt University (May 26, 1925 Dr. jur. Utriusque with “cum laude” ). Until her assessor exam , which she also passed on May 31, 1928 with the grade “good”, she was one of the first at the side of Professors Eduard Kohlrausch , James Goldschmidt and WH Karl Klee (born March 1, 1876 in Berlin) Women who held a faculty assistant position at a university in Germany. As a result, she was released from work until May 1929 in order to take a teaching position for criminal law at the University of Rostock in the summer semester of 1928 , with the aim of a later habilitation . Through this teaching assignment, she became the first German lecturer in criminal law to receive a legal teaching assignment without a previous habilitation. With the end of her teaching position, Koffka returned to the Supreme Court in June 1929, where she was entrusted with paid and unpaid assistant judges. According to her testimonials, she was well above average, competent, knowledgeable, lively, quick to speak and especially "mastered difficult cases". Until the autumn of 1934 she was a member of the 6th Civil Chamber of the not yet unified Berlin Regional Court , where she dealt with legal disputes in which the Deutsche Reichsbahn was the plaintiff or defendant.

At the request of the legal faculty of the Humboldt University to the Prussian Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs , several lawyers who were already in professional life were commissioned to hold practical exercises for the summer semester of 1931. Else Koffka was the first woman to be entrusted with a temporary teaching position for a criminal law exercise since the faculty was founded. With 99 students, she accompanied the highest number, her five male colleagues came to 31 to 85 students. She also taught in the winter semester of 1931, but had to give up her intention to do her habilitation because of the political changes that began in 1933. In the spring of 1935 - allegedly for health reasons - Else Koffka resigned from the judicial service. In fact, by denouncing a relative , the Race Office had established that she had a Jewish grandfather . By voluntarily resigning - she probably would not have been able to escape dismissal - she was at least able to protect her brother, the lawyer Otto Koffka. However, she subsequently received no further employment and, with low pay, hired herself as an unskilled worker in the brother's office. At the beginning of the Second World War , in September 1939, through the courtesy of a colleague and against the express request of the Court of Appeal, she was appointed as a lawyer for her brother, who had immediately been drafted into military service. However, because of her "allegedly non-Aryan descent and her quality as a woman", Else Koffka was not admitted to the bar. While her brother did not return from the war, in 1941 she took on the position of managing director of Sulphitspiritus-GmbH, an amalgamation of all pulp mills that produced sulphite alcohol . However, decisions of political significance were made there exclusively by the Executive Board.

Two years after the end of the Second World War, Else Koffka was only provisionally and finally in June 1947, at the same time as her appointment as a notary , she was admitted to the bar in Berlin. In contrast to the majority of other Berlin lawyers, however, because of her disadvantages during the Third Reich (non-Aryan descent), she was not temporarily appointed to a judge's office after 1946 to remedy the shortage of judges. At Eugen Schiffer's request , Koffka also worked from November 1947 to July 1948 as a consultant in the training department of the German Central Administration of Justice in the Soviet zone of occupation . The lesson letters she wrote were part of the training of trainee lawyers and people's judges . She was also a lecturer at the Humboldt University for civil law and civil procedural law . However, she left the East German justice administration for political and health reasons before, after a six-month recovery period, she gave up her own law firm due to a lack of clients and in view of the economic situation and moved to the West. She applied to the West German judicial administration and got a job as a judge in the Berlin Court District. Her appointment as district judge followed in November 1949, before she was appointed as a federal judge to the 5th criminal senate in Berlin on January 2, 1952. On September 30, 1967, she retired from this position.

Else Koffka belonged since the early 1920s in numerous professional organizations and associations, including from 1921 until its dissolution in 1936 the German Academic Women's Federation and took place from 1921 until the early as 1933 resolution the German Women Lawyers Association , on the Law Society Berlin , 1924 the German Juristentag and from 1925 the International Criminological Association . In the German Association of Women Academics , of which she was a member of the board for many years after the war, she dedicated herself to advising young female academics and students. She was a member of the German Association of Women Lawyers (since 1961) and active in the German Women's Association, which she advised on issues such as divorce law and Section 218 of the Criminal Code . She was also a member of the board of trustees of the Viktoria Studienhaus association .

Fonts

• On the doctrine of copyright in film. (= Dissertation, University of Berlin), Ebering, Berlin 1925.
• with Georg Bodenstein , Otto Koffka: Commentary on the Air Traffic Act and Warsaw Agreement. (1st agreement for the standardization of private aviation law) together with the most important ancillary provisions; Publishing house for social policy, economics and statistics, Berlin 1937.
• with Eduard Kohlrausch (Ed.): New legal index for Berlin and Brandenburg. (Contains all legal provisions of the Allies, the Berlin Magistrate and the Brandenburg Provincial Administration), de Gruyter, Berlin 1946–1948 (loose-leaf collection)
• with Paul Bockelmann : Is it advisable that the legislature regulate the questions of medical information? (Presentation as well as contributions to the discussion and resolution), Mohr, Tübingen 1964.

as well as from 1926 to 1932 various articles in the journal for criminal law science.

literature

• Marion Röwekamp: Elsa Koffka. In: Lawyers. Lexicon on life and work. Edited by Deutscher Juristinnenbund eV Nomos Verlag , Baden-Baden 2005, ISBN 3-8329-1597-4 , pp. 187-189.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Marion Röwekamp: Elsa Koffka. In: Lawyers. Lexicon on life and work. Published by Deutscher Juristinnenbund eV Nomos Verlag, Baden-Baden 2005, ISBN 3-8329-1597-4 .
2. ↑ Gerhard Strate : The 5th (Berlin) Criminal Senate HRRS 2017, pp. 496–500