Ernst Forsthoff

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

August Wilhelm Heinrich Ernst Forsthoff (born September 13, 1902 in Laar , today Duisburg , † August 13, 1974 in Heidelberg ) was a German constitutional lawyer .

Life

Ernst Forsthoff's parents were the theologian Heinrich Forsthoff and his wife Emmy, geb. Keep. He grew up as an only child; his brother Heinz Friedrich died a few weeks after his birth in May 1910. In 1906 the family moved to Mülheim an der Ruhr , where Ernst also attended elementary school. He belonged to a white class and was no longer drafted into the First World War. Forsthoff was confirmed in 1917 . After graduating from high school in 1921, Forsthoff studied law and political science at the universities of Freiburg , Marburg and Bonn at the state high school in Mülheim an der Ruhr . In 1924 he passed the first state examination in law. In 1925 he received his doctorate from Carl Schmitt . Forsthoff passed the assessor exam in 1928 and entered the Prussian civil service, but took a leave of absence in order to do his habilitation . His biographer Florian Meinel sees no influence on the youth movement . It is possible that Forsthoff was a member of the German National Protection and Defense Association . According to other information, Forsthoff became a member of both the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund and the Deutschnationalen Jugendbund in 1920, and in 1921 a member of the Hochschulring Deutscher Kind and belonged to the Marburg student corps . Hans-Ulrich Wehler sees Forsthoff as a convinced alliance and a leading member of the German National Youth Association. Forsthoff wrote for the magazine Deutsches Volkstum under Wilhelm Stapel and under pseudonyms for the young conservative magazine Der Ring .

After his habilitation at the University of Freiburg, Forsthoff was appointed to the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1933 as the successor to Hermann Heller , who had emigrated as a result of the Nazi takeover . In 1935 he moved to the University of Hamburg . In 1936 he was offered an appointment at the Albertus University in Königsberg . After the ban on admission was relaxed , he became a member of the NSDAP in 1937 . In 1942 he was appointed to the University of Vienna . After the Gestapo issued a ban on speaking and working , Forsthoff was unable to exercise his teaching post , but was appointed to Heidelberg University in 1943 . In 1942/43 he did military service.

In his 1938 study "Administration as a Service Provider", Forsthoff developed the term “ services of general interest ”, which is still used today .

In addition to Carl Schmitt , Ernst Rudolf Huber , Karl Larenz , Theodor Maunz , Herbert Krüger a . a. Forsthoff was one of the lawyers who endeavored to give National Socialism legal legitimacy through their work . Forsthoff himself said that, like many, he first “ succumbed to Hitler's magic ”. According to the legal historian Bernd Rüthers , Forsthoff later turned away from National Socialism voluntarily and with conviction because of his experience with the regime.

After the war ended in 1945, Forsthoff was dismissed from service by order of the US military government . From 1946 to 1948 he worked as the personal advisor to the Schleswig-Holstein Prime Minister Theodor Steltzer in Kiel. After teaching in Frankfurt from 1950, he was able to return to a chair at Heidelberg University in 1952, where he taught until his retirement in 1967.

After the Second World War , Forsthoff also appeared as a commentator on the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany . He played a special role in the debate over the terms social state and the rule of law and their interaction in the constitutional law. Against this background , the Forsthoff-Abendroth controversy arose between himself and Wolfgang Abendroth , who represented a socialist view of the welfare state . In 1953 Forsthoff was one of the founding editors of the review magazine Das Historisch-Politische Buch . Between 1957 and 1971, Forsthoff organized annual vacation seminars in Ebrach ( Steigerwald ), which had a legendary reputation because of the number of participants.

From 1960 to 1963, Forsthoff was President of the Cyprus Constitutional Court, a circumstance that met with some sharp criticism in Cyprus and Germany.

Forsthoff's students are Karl Doehring , Georg-Christoph von Unruh , Roman Schnur , Wilhelm Grewe , Hans Hugo Klein , Michael Ronellenfitsch , Willi Blümel and Karl Zeidler .

Forsthoff's extensive estate has so far been disorganized and is family-owned.

plant

Front page of: Ernst Forsthoff, Der totale Staat , Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt: Hamburg, 1934.

Forsthoff's best-known work from the time of National Socialism is Der totale Staat , published in 1933 . In it he tried to raise some reservations about the political self-image of the Nazi movement, which he nevertheless recognized as having revolutionary legitimacy, and in which he saw the young conservative struggle against Weimar democracy victorious. Forsthoff bundled the conservative-revolutionary theses as they had been developed by the group around Stapel and Schmitt before 1933. The text is therefore both a definition of the position of the Conservative Revolution vis-à-vis National Socialism ( Armin Mohler ) and an expression of Schmitt's constitutional theory until 1933. It met with criticism from Alfred Rosenberg and Roland Freisler , who saw it as a statism that contradicts the National Socialist worldview. Forsthoff reworked The Total State for a second edition in 1934 and withdrew his reservations. He now accepted the unity of party and state as "superior statecraft" and also justified the murders in the course of the so-called Röhm putsch . Regarding the discrimination and persecution of the Jews , Forsthoff wrote: "That is why the Jew ... became an enemy and as such had to be rendered harmless".

The term “total state” was later taken up by political theory in the term “ totalitarianism ”.

Forsthoff particularly coined the term “ services of general interest ” ( The administration as service providers , 1938), which he defined as “those events that were taken to satisfy the need for appropriation”. In his generation he was “the most important representative of public law in Germany”. His textbook on administrative law , which has been published in ten editions since 1950 and was known simply as “der Forsthoff” among lawyers , achieved great importance . Florian Meinel sees the “dissolution of the bourgeois distance between the individual and the state” as a fundamental problem in Forsthoff's work.

Awards

Publications (excerpt)

  • The total state , 1st edition Hamburg 1933, 2nd edition 1934.
  • German history since 1918 in documents , 1st edition Leipzig 1935, 2nd edition 1938, 3rd edition 1943.
  • The administration as a service provider , Stuttgart 1938.
  • German constitutional history in modern times , 1st edition Berlin 1940, 4th edition 1972.
  • Textbook of administrative law. Vol. 1: General part , 1st edition Munich / Berlin 1950, 10th edition 1973.
  • Constitutional problems of the welfare state , 1954, 2nd edition, Münster 1961.
  • Rule of law in transition. Constitutional treatises 1950–1964 , Munich 1964.
  • (Ed.): Rule of law and welfare state , Darmstadt 1968.
  • The State of Industrial Society , Munich 1971.
  • Rule of law in transition. Constitutional treatises 1954–1973. Edited by Klaus Frey, Munich 1976.

literature

  • Moritz Assall: German CVs. How Nazi legal scholars continued to teach and write after 1945 . In: Forum Recht (FoR) , year 2007, p. 44 f.
  • Willi Blümel (Ed.): Ernst Forsthoff. Colloquium on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Prof. Dr. Dr. hc Ernst Forsthoff , Berlin 2003 (= scientific treatises and speeches on philosophy, politics and intellectual history , vol. 30).
  • Karl Doehring (Hrsg.): Festgabe for Ernst Forsthoff on the 65th birthday . (with bibliography) CH Beck Verlag , Munich 1967.
  • Ewald Grothe : Between History and Law. German constitutional historiography 1900–1970 , Oldenbourg, Munich 2005 (= Ordnungssysteme , Vol. 16), ISBN 3-486-57784-0 .
  • Frieder Günther: Thinking from the state. The Federal German constitutional law theory between decision and integration 1949-1970 , Oldenbourg, Munich 2003 (= Ordnungssysteme , Vol. 15), ISBN 3-486-56818-3 .
  • Dirk van Laak : Conversations in the security of silence: Carl Schmitt in the political intellectual history of the early Federal Republic , Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-05-002444-5 .
  • Gerhard Mauz : Ernst Forsthoff and others ... In: Karl Corino (Ed.): Intellectuals under the spell of National Socialism. Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3-455-01020-2 , pp. 193-203.
  • Florian Meinel : The lawyer in industrial society. Ernst Forsthoff and his time . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2011, 2nd edition 2012, ISBN 978-3-05-005101-7 . ( Review on H-Soz-u-Kult )
  • Ders .: The annoying lawyer. About the constitutional lawyer and industrial company analyst Ernst Forsthoff. In: On the online portal of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , August 17, 2011. Accessed on August 23, 2017.
  • Martin Otto (Ed.): “Duodezparlamentarismus” in the “barbaric Kiel winter.” Ernst Forsthoff's first year in Kiel as reflected in his letters to Walter Mallmann in 1947 . In: Yearbook Political Thinking Vol. 25, 2015, Berlin 2016, ISSN  0942-2307 , pp. 15–47.
  • Angela Reinthal, Reinhard Mußgnug , Dorothee Mußgnug (eds.): Correspondence between Ernst Forsthoff and Carl Schmitt (1926–1974) . Edited with the collaboration of Gerd Giesler and Jürgen Tröger, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-05-003535-2 . ( limited preview on Google Books )
  • Bernd Rüthers : Survivors and survived pasts. Two star lawyers of a dictatorship among themselves. In: Myops , Reports from the World of Law , Volume 2008, Issue 4, pp. 67–75.
  • Richard Saage : Conservatism and Fascism. Comments on Ernst Forsthoff's development from the “total state” to the “state of industrial society”. In: Politische Vierteljahrsschrift 19 (1978), pp. 254–268.
  • Roman Schnur (Ed.): Festschrift for Ernst Forsthoff on his 70th birthday . CH Beck Verlag, Munich 1972, 2nd edition, 1974. ISBN 3-406-05661-X .
  • Christian Schütte: Progressive administrative law on a conservative basis. On Ernst Forsthoff's theory of administrative law . Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-428-11913-4 .
  • Ulrich Storost : State and Constitution with Ernst Forsthoff . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1978, ISBN 3-8204-6477-8 .

Other sources

  • City archive Mülheim an der Ruhr, holdings 1550 (Mülheim personalities).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Florian Meinel : The lawyer in industrial society. Ernst Forsthoff and his time. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-05-005101-7 , p. 15.
  2. ↑ Florian Meinel : The lawyer in industrial society. Ernst Forsthoff and his time. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2011, p. 15.
  3. ↑ Florian Meinel: The lawyer in industrial society. Ernst Forsthoff and his time . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2011, p. 15 f.
  4. ↑ Christian Tilitzki : From the Grenzland University to the center of the National Socialist "reorganization of the eastern region"? Aspects of the Königsberg university history in the Third Reich . In: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 46 (2000), p. 246, note 56; Jerry Z. Muller: The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism . Princeton UP, Princeton 1987, p. 211; Hans-Ulrich Wehler: German history of society , Vol. 4, 1914-1949 . CH Beck, 2nd edition, Munich 2003, p. 492.
  5. ↑ a b Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 159.
  6. ↑ Grothe, Between History and Law , pp. 188 f.
  7. ↑ Bernd Rüthers: Survivors and survived pasts - two star lawyers of a dictatorship among themselves , in: myops - reports from the world of law , issue 4 (2008), pp. 67-70.
  8. ^ Cyprus / Forsthoff. Danger for everyone , in: Der Spiegel , No. 41 of October 5, 1960 (accessed on July 29, 2012).
  9. ↑ Florian Meinel: The lawyer in industrial society. Ernst Forsthoff and his time . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2011, pp. 87–91.
  10. ^ Quote from Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Fischer Taschenbuch, 2005, p. 159.
  11. ↑ Arnhelm Neusüss: Introduction. Difficulties in a sociology of utopian thinking . In: ders. (Ed.): Utopia. Concept and phenomenon of the utopian . Campus, Frankfurt, New York, 3rd revised. u. exp. 1986. p. 37 ff.
  12. ↑ Florian Meinel : The lawyer in industrial society. Ernst Forsthoff and his time. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2011, p. 5.
  13. ↑ Florian Meinel : The lawyer in industrial society. Ernst Forsthoff and his time. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2011, p. 5.
  14. ↑ Klaus Taschwer : The scandalous honorary doctorate of Dr. Forsthoff. In: DerStandard.at . October 30, 2019, accessed October 31, 2019 .
  15. ↑ therein No. 302: about the mutual friend Ernst Woermann .
personal data
SURNAME Forsthoff, Ernst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Forsthoff, August Wilhelm Heinrich Ernst (full name); Holthausen, Georg (pseudonym); Grüter, Friedrich (pseudonym); Langenbach, Rudolf (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German constitutional lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH August 13, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Laar near Duisburg
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1974
Place of death Heidelberg