Heinrich Klang

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heinrich Adalbert Klang (born April 15, 1875 in Vienna ; † January 22, 1954 there ) was an Austrian legal scholar . He was a professor of civil law at the University of Vienna , President of the Senate at the Supreme Court in Vienna and a survivor of the Holocaust . Klang was one of the most important civil law scholars of the 20th century in Austria.

Live and act

Heinrich Klang, son of the general manager James Klang and his wife Karoline, b. Rooz, studied after completing his schooling in 1892 at the University of Vienna Law . He completed his studies in Vienna in 1897 with a doctorate . Then he did military service. Until the outbreak of the First World War , after passing the judge's examination, he worked as a judge at courts in and outside Vienna from 1901 and from 1911 on the main committee of the Austrian Judges' Association.

After the outbreak of war, Klang was deployed as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Eastern Front and from 1916 as a military judge in Vienna. At the end of the war he had the rank of captain auditor and received several war awards.

Between 1918 and 1925 he was a judge for civil law at the Vienna Regional Court . From 1926 to 1938, Klang was at the Higher Regional Court of Vienna, where he headed an Appeals Senate from 1928 and served as Senate President from 1930. Between 1913 and 1938 he was a board member of the Viennese legal society and representative of this society in the advisory board of the Austro-German Volksbund as well as a member of the sub-committees of the Austro-German working group for the harmonization of civil and civil procedure law.

From 1903, Klang published legal articles in specialist journals, a total of 775. From 1923 on, Klang was part of the editorial team of the renowned Austrian specialist journal Juristische Blätter , of which he was editor from 1928 to 1938 and again from 1947 to 1954. After his habilitation in 1922, he worked as a private lecturer and from 1925 as an associate professor for civil law at the University of Vienna. In 1926 he was commissioned to publish a commentary on the General Civil Code, the first edition of which was published between 1931 and 1935. In the 1920s he became politically active in the Austrian bourgeois democratic party - later renamed the Democratic Middle Class Party - which, however, became insignificant due to the lack of electoral success in the early 1930s.

After Austria was " annexed " to the German Reich in March 1938, Klang was retired as a Jew on June 1, 1938 and had to give up all professional activities. For his livelihood, Klang was now forced to sell his large book collections. Several attempts to emigrate legally , for example to the USA , Cuba and China , failed. He was arrested because of an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Hungary . He was then deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto , where he arrived on September 25, 1942. In Theresienstadt, Klang was the so-called prominent prisoner judge at the ghetto court and took over the presidency there in autumn 1944. The items to be discussed at the Ghetto Court of Jewish self-government were essentially probate proceedings , guardianships , tough acts and criminal matters. For the Austrian prisoners, he was a member of the council of elders of the Jewish self-government in Theresienstadt and was committed to his fellow prisoners. He was liberated on May 8, 1945 in Theresienstadt by Red Army soldiers . He reached Vienna again on July 8, 1945 with former Austrian prisoners.

In July 1945 he was assigned to the Supreme Court by the Allied Military Government . From November 25, 1945, he was again President of a civil senate at the Supreme Court and, from 1947, an additional senate under labor law. He was also the chairman of the “Supreme Restitution Commission”, which dealt with reparation issues. He was instrumental in the creation of the legal restitution bases in Austria. Klang retired in late 1949. He also worked as a leader in the Jewish Community in Vienna .

Klang married his brother Fritz's widow in 1952. Another brother, the writer Marcell Klang , was shot while trying to escape in Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942 .

Klang died in Vienna in 1954.

Awards

Fonts

The edited sound commentary on the Civil Code appeared in the first edition between 1931 and 1935. Sound worked itself in the field of property law , the property right (2 to 5 main pieces; §§ 353-446), the lien (6 main pieces , §§ 447 to 471) and the easements (7th main part; §§ 472 to 530). After 1945 he worked on the second edition (1948–1978), although he did not live to see the entire publication. The third edition of the commentary on the ABGB has been published by Attila Fenyves, Ferdinand Kerschner and Andreas Vonkilch since 2000 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Martin Niklas, Günter Gößler: A constructive public servant - a memory of the lawyer Heinrich Klang, who has significantly influenced Austrian case law. In: Wiener Zeitung of January 24, 2009.
  2. ↑ a b c Short biography of Heinrich Klang on ghetto-theresienstadt.info
  3. ^ A b Franz-Stefan Meissel, Thomas Olechowski, Christoph Gnant: Investigations into the practice of the procedure before the restitution commissions. The proceedings before the Austrian restitution commissions . Vienna 2004, p. 34f.
  4. ^ Entry for Marcell Klang In: The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names
  5. ^ The prices of the City of Vienna in 1951
personal data
SURNAME Sound, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Klang, Heinrich Adalbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian legal scholar
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH January 22, 1954
Place of death Vienna