Johannes Heckel

John Heckel (* 24. November 1889 in Kammerstein in Schwabach , † 15. December 1963 in Tübingen ) was a Protestant state and canon lawyer .

Life

Johannes Heckel, son of a pastor and brother of Theodor Heckel , studied law in Munich on a scholarship from the Maximilianeum Foundation , where he received his doctorate in 1922. He completed his habilitation in 1923 with the canon lawyer Ulrich Stutz with a thesis on the Protestant cathedral and collegiate donors in Prussia. In the same year he received a private lectureship for canon law in Berlin and was appointed adjunct professor there in 1926. On April 1, 1928, he was appointed to an ordinariate for public law, especially church law, in Bonn . In 1934 he went to Munich , where he stayed until his retirement in 1957.

In 1931 the Theological Faculty of the University of Berlin awarded him an honorary doctorate, and in 1940 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

Heckel gained importance through his on the legal relations between state and church as well as the history of Protestant church law. The essay The State Church Law Literature of 1930 and 1931 , published in 1932, is still cited today. Here Heckel defended the limited separation model of the Weimar constitution as a successful solution to the state-church problem, which was unusual for a Lutheran during the Weimar period. With his formula of the "general law" as a barrier to church autonomy, he established a demarcation between state and church, which was used up until the early Federal Republic, especially in jurisprudence (see Church self-determination ).

While Heckel was still loyal to the republic in the final phase of Weimar (see Dieter Grimm: Constitutional fulfillment - preservation of the constitution - dissolution of the constitution ), just one year later - like his scientific antipode Carl Schmitt - he switched to the side of the new ruler. As legal advisor to Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller and the German Christians , he was on the DC circuit of the Protestant Churches and the internal church enforcement of the leader principle involved. In 1933, Heckel was one of the founding members of the National Socialist Academy for German Law by Hans Frank . In autumn 1934 Heckel was appointed to Munich. Both are evidence of his adjustment to the new rulers. In 1937 he joined the NSDAP and the NS Lecturer Association .

In Heckel's work, anti-Semitism, which occurs in various contexts, especially in questions of canon law, raises problems. Heckel personally discredited himself through his membership in the advisory board of the “Research Department Jewish Question” in the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany .

After the collapse of National Socialism, Heckel mainly worked on questions of canon law and, with "Lex charitatis", completed one of the three major drafts of Protestant canon law from the post-war period (alongside Erik Wolf and Hans Dombois ). In his draft, Heckel examines Luther's work for statements on canon law and finally comes to a dualistic understanding of canon law, ie state and church law are essentially different.

From 1951 Heckel was President of the Constitutional and Administrative Court of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany, despite his Nazi past .

Publications

• Article budget law ; in: Handbuch des Deutschen Staatsrechts, ed. v. Gerhard Anschütz and Richard Thoma, II, 1932
• Dictatorship, emergency ordinance law, constitutional emergency ; in: Archives of Public Law, new series 22, 1932; Pp. 257-338
• The judgment of the State Court of 25 October 1932 in the constitutional dispute between Reich and Prussia ; in: Archive of Public Law, 1933, new series, vol. 23, pp. 183ff.
• The intrusion of the Jewish spirit into German constitutional and church law by Friedrich Julius Stahl ; in: Historische Zeitschrift 155, 1937, pp. 506-541
• Cura religionis, ius in sacra, ius circa sacra ; KRA 117/118 Festschrift for Ulrich Stutz; 1938; Pp. 224–298 (= Darmstadt 1962)
• Military constitution and military law of the Greater German Reich ; 1939
• Initia iuris ecclesiastici Protestantium ; SAM 5, 1949; 1950
• Melanchthon and the German State Church Law ; in: About law and justice. Ceremony for Erich Kaufmann on his 70th birthday, 1950
• Church property and state authority ; in: legal problems in state u. Church. Festschrift for Rudolf Smend on his 70th birthday, 1952; Pp. 103-143
• Lex charitatis. A legal study of law in Martin Luther's theology ; AAM 36, 1953; 1953 (1973, revised and expanded, edited by Martin Heckel)
• The blind, indistinct word "church". Collected essays ; ed. v. Siegfried Grundmann, 1964; List of the writings of Johannes Heckel: pp. 725–734

Secondary literature

• Dieter Grimm : Constitutional fulfillment - constitutional preservation - constitutional dissolution. Positions of the doctrine of constitutional law in the state crisis of the Weimar Republic , in: Heinrich August Winkler (Ed.): The German State Crisis 1930-1933 - Spaces of Action and Alternatives , 1992, pp. 183ff.
• Hermann Krause: Heckel, Johannes Wilhelm Otto . In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , p. 180 ( digitized version ).
• Hermann Krause: Johannes Heckel , in: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, 1964, p. 173 ff.
• Willibald Plöchl: Johannes Heckel , in: Austrian Archive for Church Law 15, 1964, 138 f.
• Rudolf Smend : Johannes Heckel 70 years old , in: Zeitschrift für Evangelisches Kirchenrecht 7, 1959/60, p. 187.

Web links

• Literature by and about Johannes Heckel in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Yearbook of the Academy for German Law, 1st year 1933/34. Edited by Hans Frank. (Munich, Berlin, Leipzig: Schweitzer Verlag), p. 254