Gustav Eduard Kafka

Gustav Eduard Kafka (born February 4, 1907 in Munich , † January 17, 1974 in Graz ) was a German-Austrian legal and political scientist.

Life

Kafka was the son of the Vienna- born psychologist Gustav Kafka and a distant relative of the poet Franz Kafka . After attending grammar school, he studied law and economics at the universities of Munich , Kiel and Leipzig . He passed the legal traineeship exam in 1929 and completed his legal training after completing his preparatory service in 1933 with the Saxon assessor exam .

In 1934, Kafka received his doctorate in Leipzig with the dissertation “On the concept of guidelines in social insurance law”. Because he had a Jewish grandparent and for political reasons he was not accepted into the civil service. He was therefore initially active as an auditor from 1933 to 1934 and then until 1938 as in-house counsel and export manager of a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Dresden.

In 1938 Kafka fled first to France and then to the Netherlands in 1939; There he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and soon afterwards sentenced to five years in prison by the People's Court . He was subsequently imprisoned in 18 different prisons, from 1943 in Karlau ( Styria ).

In 1945 Kafka managed to escape from prison. He then worked as a translator for the British army and the police in Graz. From 1948 to 1952 Kafka worked as a department head at the security department in Graz, then from 1953 to 1955 at Styria Verlag , also in Graz.

In 1955, Kafka received his habilitation for political science and Austrian constitutional law at the University of Graz on the basis of the paper “Constitutional crises as a constitutional problem” . However, he initially did not receive a professorship, but worked from 1956 to 1961 as head of the department for civic affairs at the Central Committee of German Catholics in Bonn-Bad Godesberg . At the same time he taught - after a rehabilitation - at the University of Mainz . It was not until 1961 that Kafka was initially appointed to an extraordinary professorship at the Vienna Commercial College . In 1965 he became a full professor for general political theory and Austrian constitutional law at the University of Graz. He held this chair until his retirement one year before his death.

Kafka worked in the field of constitutional law and political science . He was particularly concerned with the role of political parties in modern democracies. He also dealt critically with the political theology of Carl Schmitt . He is seen as a founding father of Austrian political science.

The Graz university professor Wolfgang Mantl is a student of Gustav E. Kafka.

Kafka was married to Elisabeth born in 1930. Menzel, with whom he had four children.

Works (selection)

• On the concept of guidelines in social security law, Diss. Jur., 1934.
• Constitutional crises as a constitutional problem, 1955.
• The Catholics Before Politics, (ed.), 1958.
• The constitutional position of political parties in the modern state, in: Publications of the Association of German Constitutional Law Teachers, Issue 17, 1959, pp. 53-102.
• Liberal socialism in Germany. The Godesberg basic program of the SPD from a Catholic perspective, 1960.
• Civil theology today ?, in: Gustav E. Kafka and Ulrich Matz, On the Critique of Political Theology, pp. 25–46, 1973.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wolfgang Mantl, Political Parties: prospective view and political power, in: ders: Politikanalysen. Studies on pluralistic democracy, 2007, p. 89 ff., P. 89.
2. ↑ Norbert readers, cross-border commuters. Austrian Intellectual History in Necromancy, 1981, p. 38; see. The biographical information on Kafka's curriculum vitae on p. 200.
3. ^ Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation Dresden eV, Working Group Memorial Book (ed.), Book of Remembrance - Jews deported, murdered, missing in Dresden, p. 171, on the Internet at [1] (PDF; 435 kB).
4. ↑ Alexander Hollerbach, Katholizismus und Jurisprudenz, 2004, p. 134.
5. ↑ See the biography of Reinhard Müller under Biography Gustav E. Kafka , on, accessed on February 6, 2019

Web links

• Literature by and about Gustav Eduard Kafka in the catalog of the German National Library