Gerhard Jahn

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Gerhard Jahn, 1970

Gerhard Jahn (born September 10, 1927 in Kassel , † October 20, 1998 in Marburg ) was a German politician ( SPD ). From 1967 to 1969 he was Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs and from 1969 to 1974 Federal Minister of Justice .

Life

family

Gerhard Jahn was born in 1927 as the eldest son of the Protestant doctor Ernst Jahn and the Jewish doctor Dr. med. Lilli Jahn born; Gerhard had four sisters. The children grew up in the small town of Immenhausen , where their parents ran a family doctor 's practice together. The father divorced his Jewish wife in 1942 in order to marry his non-Jewish lover, who was expecting a child. The children from the “privileged mixed marriage ”, who were “half-Jewish” in the sense of the National Socialists , but were baptized as Protestants, faced increasing threats from the Gestapo after their parents' divorce . Ernst Jahn himself was later not drafted into the Wehrmacht and during the last months of the Second World War he hid in the woods around Immenhausen for a time. The mother was initially interned in the Breitenau labor education camp. The extensive correspondence with her children, which was later to be found in Jahn's estate, dates from this time. In 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz , where she was murdered a short time later. For a long time, Jahn's sisters did not know that the more than 200 letters in their correspondence with their mother had survived the post-war confusion. Gerhard Jahn's nephew, Spiegel editor Martin Doerry , woven Lilli Jahn's correspondence with her children into a biography of his grandmother and published the testimonies in 2002 under the title My wounded heart .

Gerhard Jahn was married twice and had three children in his first marriage.

education and profession

Jahn attended the humanistic Friedrichsgymnasium in Kassel, but had been called up as an air force helper in 1943/44 . After the end of the war he worked from 1945 to 1946 first as a farm worker and then as an administrative clerk in Immenhausen . He was refused the secondary school diploma after 1945, but was able to finish his degree in 1947. He then completed a law degree in Marburg , which he completed in 1950 with the legal traineeship. After his internship, he passed the Great State Examination in 1956. He was admitted to the bar in 1957 . In 1969, he and Johann Baptist Gradl and others helped found the Berlin Science Center .

Political party

In 1948 Jahn joined the SDS (Socialist German Student Union) at his University of Marburg and in 1950 became chairman of the university group. In 1949 he had also become a member of the SPD. From 1950 to 1954 he was sub-district secretary of the SPD-Marburg / Frankenberg . In 1956 he was elected district chairman of the Marburg SPD and was elected to the Marburg city council for the first time. The following year he also moved into the Bundestag as a member of the Marburg parliament, to which he was to remain a member of the Bundestag until 1990. During this period he was u. a. several times member of the executive board of the SPD parliamentary group. In the 1960s, Jahn, together with Adolf Arndt and Gustav Heinemann , initiated the “SPD Legal Policy Congresses”, which attracted a great deal of attention from experts and the general public. After the death of his mentor and spiritus rectors Adolf Arndt, Jahn became crown lawyer and leading head of legal policy of the SPD. Among other things, he represented Willy Brandt and Herbert Wehner in numerous legal proceedings. In 1969 he played a key role in the creation of Brandt's first government statement.

MP

From 1956 to 1978 Jahn was a city councilor for the city of Marburg and temporarily chairman of the SPD parliamentary group.

From 1957 to 1990 he was a member of the German Bundestag . From 1960 he was a member of the executive committee of the SPD parliamentary group from 1961 to 1963, from 1965 to 1967 and from 1974 to 1990 as deputy parliamentary manager. In 1963 he resigned from this post because of his involvement in the so-called Spiegel affair . From 1960 to 1961 he was chairman of the reparation committee. In this capacity, he openly spoke out against the concept of reparation and instead spoke of “compensation”. During his time as chairman, he tried particularly to speed up compensation in cases that were already regulated by law. In addition, in association with other MPs from all parties, he called for a relentless reappraisal of the Nazi past and measures against the persistence of anti-Semitism in German society. From 1974 to 1975 he was chairman of the Committee on Electoral Examination, Immunity and Rules of Procedure.

Public offices

Gerhard Jahn 1983 with Karl Carstens and Willy Brandt

On April 12, 1967 Jahn was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs, Willy Brandt, in that of German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger -led government appointed. Jahn supported the minister, who had just come from Berlin to Bonn, in communicating with the Bundestag.

After the Bundestag election in 1969 , he was appointed Federal Minister of Justice on October 21, 1969 in the federal government led by Willy Brandt . Thanks to Jahn's years of commitment to the upgrading of judicial policy, legal policy was given a chapter of its own for the first time in a government declaration in 1969. In line with Chancellor Brandt's slogan, “Dare to dare more democracy”, the social-liberal coalition understood legal policy as an instrument for modern social policy. Building on the ideas of the legal philosophical discourse - further developed by social democratic and liberal legal scholars over the last few decades - a modern understanding of law primarily envisaged the redesign of the triangle of citizens, rights and states. The “responsible citizen”, it was hoped, should in future be able to develop more freely and responsibly within socially acceptable limits. The criminal law should be purged of all moral ideas that are no longer capable of a majority and the principle of penalties should be abolished. Instead, according to the ideas, the state should protect its citizens - possibly also against attacks by itself or one of its authorities. This view should u. a. in the new marriage law, but also in the new regulation of the "abortion paragraphs", those two reforms that can be understood as the most important but controversial reforms of Justice Minister Jahn.

In the years 1969 to 1974 the Ministry of Justice worked on numerous major reforms, such as the reform of the criminal law on demonstrations, a regulation on compensation in the event of criminal prosecution, the long-sought reform of legal training (“Citizens in the gown”), the improvement of tenancy law and tenant protection, the introduction protection against dismissal for tenancy agreements for living space, changes in adoptive law, the ratification of the UN package on civil and political rights, the modernization of cooperative law, the lowering of the age of majority to 18 years, the streamlining and acceleration of criminal proceedings while at the same time harmonizing the courts and last but not least the introduction of the concept of rehabilitation in the penal system, to name just a few. Jahn's main projects, however, the reform of marriage law and abortion law, he was unable to complete in the course of his tenure because of the considerable opposition in politics and society. His successor in office, Hans-Jochen Vogel , implemented the new marriage and divorce law as early as 1974/75, which corresponded to the ideas of Gerhard Jahn and, in addition to the introduction of the breakdown clause instead of the previously applicable guilt principle, primarily provided for a more progressive image of women inside and outside of marriage . The abortion law, which - contrary to Jahn's wishes - provided for a time limit solution, was rejected by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1975 and reformulated in 1976 on the basis of an expanded solution of indications, as Jahn had sought.

After Willy Brandt's resignation, Jahn also left the government on May 7, 1974, presumably because his person was too closely connected to the controversial reforms of recent years.

From 1975 to 1977 and from 1979 to 1982 he was a representative of the Federal Republic of Germany in the UN Human Rights Commission .

After German reunification, Jahn left the Bundestag. Manfred Stolpe appointed him to his advisory board in Brandenburg.

Grave of Gerhard Jahn in the main cemetery in Marburg (2017)

Social offices

From 1979 to 1995 he was President of the German Tenants' Association . During his tenure, Jahn built the tenants' association into a powerful lobby group. The association had expanded tremendously and now had more than twice as many tenants' associations in its organization as at the beginning of Jahn's tenure. In the eastern federal states a solid structure had been built up after reunification and now had more than 500 advice centers nationwide.

Gerhard Jahn was also the founding president of the German-Israeli Society in 1966 . The society was founded one year after the establishment of diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel . Together with the AvS (Working Group of Persecuted Social Democrats) Jahn supported the establishment of a “reparation foundation”, which should also take into account the political victims of the Nazi era .

Awards

See also

literature

  • Walter Henkels : 99 Bonn heads , reviewed and supplemented edition, Fischer-Bücherei, Frankfurt am Main 1965, pp. 135f.
  • Sonja Profittlich: Dare to be more mature. Gerhard Jahn (1927–1998) - judicial reformer of the social-liberal coalition , Bonn: JHW Dietz Nachf. 2010, ISBN 978-3-8012-4196-4

Web links

Commons : Gerhard Jahn  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Doerry: "My Wounded Heart". The life of Lilli Jahn 1900–1944. Stuttgart 2002.
  2. ^ Gerhard Gronauer: The State of Israel in West German Protestantism. Perceptions in church and journalism from 1948 to 1972. Göttingen 2013. S. 192 u. 496
  3. ↑ Announcement of awards of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Federal Gazette . Vol. 25, No. 43, March 9, 1973.
personal data
SURNAME Jahn, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD), Member of the Bundestag
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH kassel
DATE OF DEATH October 20, 1998
Place of death Marburg