Karl Geiler

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Karl Geiler (born August 10, 1878 in Schönau in the Black Forest , † September 14, 1953 in Heidelberg ) was a German legal scholar and politician . He was Prime Minister of Hesse.

Geiler's grave complex in the Heidelberg mountain cemetery

Life

His parents were the later attorney general in Karlsruhe Karl Geiler the Elder and his wife Anna, née Piristi. He attended the Berthold-Gymnasium Freiburg and, after graduating from high school, served as a one-year volunteer in the 5th Baden Infantry Regiment No. 113 . He began to study law at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and became active in the Corps Rhenania Freiburg in 1897 . On February 26, 1898 recipiert , he was a good Subsenior . As an inactive , he moved to the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . The state examination he was as valedictorian in the Grand Duchy of Baden "good". After he had passed the assessor examination with "good" in 1903 , he was a public prosecutor in Karlsruhe and Heidelberg, at the Wolfach district office and at the Baden Ministry of the Interior.

Mannheim

In 1904 he established himself as a lawyer in Mannheim. In the same year he married Charlotte Hirsch (* 1882). In 1909 he joined the famous law firm of Ernst Bassermann and Anton Lindeck . The Jew Lindeck, a relative and later honorary member of the Corps Hannovera Göttingen , had been a passenger at Rhenania. This relationship caused great difficulties for Geiler during the National Socialist era . In 1910 he did his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg with a commercial law dissertation for Dr. iur. The basis was his collaboration on the 2nd edition of a commentary on the Commercial Code published by Adelbert Düringer . As early as 1907, Geiler had helped found the Mannheim Commercial College . He taught at her for many years.

First World War

According to the rankings of the Prussian Army , Geiler became a lieutenant in his Freiburg regiment in 1903 and first lieutenant in the Prussian Landwehr in 1912 . He went to the First World War with the 55th Landwehr Infantry Brigade in the XIV Army Corps . On the Western Front he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class in September 1914 ; in October 1914 he was promoted to captain . For the corps newspaper he wrote poems and obituaries for fallen corps brothers and patriotic poems ("Germany"). In the summer of 1916 he dealt with the guilt of Germany's opponents for the outbreak of war. In 1917 Geiler became battalion commander in Infantry Regiment No. 469 ( 240th Division ). Up until his departure from military service in the spring of 1918, Geiler had been awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class and the Knight's Cross 2nd Class of the Order of the Zähringer Lion with Oak Leaves and Swords. After he left, he became a lawyer at Schaffhausen's bank association in Cologne .

Heidelberg

Geiler had already moved his residence to Heidelberg during the war. Immediately after the end of the war he resumed his work as a lawyer and lecturer in Mannheim. The commercial college appointed him professor in January 1919 . The University of Heidelberg awarded him his habilitation in 1921 on the basis of his work and appointed him associate professor for finance and business law. A full honorary professor since 1928 , he was unanimously appointed full professor of commercial law by the faculty in 1929 . In contrast to the university, the Baden Ministry of Culture wanted to give up legal practice. Presumably for financial reasons, Geiler rejected this request; because he had become one of the most respected business lawyers in Germany. From 1921 to 1939 he read business law , corporate law and tax law every semester at Heidelberg University . He has authored numerous publications , edited commentaries on commercial law and participated in many international congresses. Fritz Bauer wrote his dissertation with him .

time of the nationalsocialism

During the Weimar Republic , Geiler was a member of the German Democratic Party for several years ; politically, however, he had hardly emerged. Nevertheless, he came after the general election in March 1933 targeted by the Nazis - his father was Jew . Under the pressure of the Aryan paragraph , his corps urged him to put down the tape in 1934 . Against the unanimous recommendation of the faculty, the National Socialist German Lecturer Association Geiler withdrew the honorary professorship and the venia legendi in 1939 . His work as a lawyer in Mannheim remained untouched; however, he had already had to solve the partnership with Lindeck in 1937. Geiler founded a new partnership in Mannheim with the Heidelberg lawyer Wilhelm Zutt - who later refused to be appointed Prime Minister .

During the Second World War , Geiler was repeatedly harassed by the Gestapo and the SS . It is not known whether this changed after the death of his wife (January 1942 in Baden-Baden).

Prime Minister in Greater Hesse

Immediately after the war ended, Geiler was asked by the University of Heidelberg to exercise his old academic rights again. However, Geiler, who immediately took part in events of civil parties, was intended for higher tasks. The US military government had turned to Karl Jaspers in the search for unencumbered personalities . He recommended contacting Alfred Weber and Geiler's partner Zutt in Mannheim. Zutt declined the appointment as prime minister, but recommended - like others - his partner Geiler. The 67-year-old Heidelberg lawyer and professor appeared to have all the qualities required to lead a first all-party cabinet. In addition, he was politically unencumbered and non-party.

Geiler was introduced to his post as Prime Minister of Greater Hesse on October 16, 1945 in Wiesbaden . The search for cabinet members was completed within two weeks . Georg August Zinn became Minister of Justice . The Ministry of Education was taken over by Franz Böhm , a corps brother who had been relieved of his teaching post at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena during the Nazi era and now taught as Vice-Rector at the University of Freiburg. All four parties represented in the government ( SPD , CDU , FDP and KPD ) expressed their support for the interim government; but especially the SPD, which saw itself cheated out of the post of prime minister, was extremely critical of Geiler. After the first local elections in Hesse in 1946 , the Geiler cabinet plunged into a serious crisis by withdrawing its ministers from the government. Under pressure from the Americans, the SPD returned to the government; Ultimately, however, she demanded the replacement of the CDU Minister of Education, Boehm. As a lawyer, he seemed unsuitable for the all-important re-education in schools. The Americans dismissed Böhm. Geiler threatened to resign immediately, should such a case repeat itself. He still succeeded in making Böhm's departure appear as a voluntary renunciation and not as giving in to the SPD; the social democratic ministerial director was dismissed at the same time.

An important step towards democratization was the Advisory State Committee (Greater Hesse) , which Geiler had appointed and opened in the Nassau State Theater on February 26, 1946 . On June 30, 1946, the state assembly advising the constitution (Greater Hesse) was elected. The political parties were demanding their rights, and it was clear that the time of the non-partisan Geiler government was running out. The Hessian constitution , which was adopted in a referendum on December 1, 1946 , was the work of the parties, not the work of Geiler, who disagreed on many issues.

After the state elections in Hesse in 1946 , the SPD pushed to power and wanted to get rid of Geiler, who relied more on the CDU and FDP. Geiler had hoped to remain in office as prime minister of a grand coalition . He resigned on December 20, 1946, disappointed. Christian Stock (SPD) was elected as his successor .

Geiler maintained good contacts in the Soviet occupation zone and met his Thuringian colleague Rudolf Paul several times . He combined his departure in January 1947 with a warning to keep an eye on German unity .

Rector in Heidelberg

Geiler returned to Heidelberg University, which appointed him personal professor of international law at the request of the law faculty . Since he was economically independent, the ministry did not give him any official post. Nevertheless, the Grand Senate elected him rector in June 1948 . In his rector's speech on November 22, 1948, he dealt with power and law . He turned to international law issues, worked in his old field of commercial law, and published a commentary on the D-Mark Accounting Act .

Geiler saw denazification as the worst misfortune for German democracy. The canon lawyer Hans Dombois said:

“If one half of the people tries to judge the other and at the same time tries to wipe out half of the spiritual and political tradition, political jurisdiction must necessarily fail to serve its legitimate purpose; such an enterprise is a sign of political schizophrenia. The party-political blindness of the Germans and the interest of the occupying powers in power politics worked together fatally. "

- Hans Dombois

He refused the resumption of the tape offered by Rhenania in 1948. The Federal Republic of Germany honored Geiler as a pioneer of the democratic new beginning with the award of the Great Federal Cross of Merit , which Federal President Theodor Heuss presented to him in January 1953. One day after returning from the Juristentag in Hamburg, which had made him an honorary member, Geiler died of a heart attack at the age of 75 . At the burial in the Heidelberg Bergfriedhof , Federal Minister of Justice Thomas Dehler gave the first eulogy . He also laid funeral wreaths for the Federal President and the Federal Chancellor. Representatives of Baden-Württemberg , Heidelberg University and its law faculty also honored the deceased.

Geiler was president of the “European Health Care” working group founded on June 10, 1949 in Schlüchterner Schlösschen (section within a “European Academy” striving to “create the foundations for a unification of the peoples of Europe on a federal basis”; the general secretary was the lawyer Maximilian Karl Graf zu Trauttmansdorff ).

Honorary positions

Honors

swell

literature

  • Baden biography. VI. Part (1901–1910), Heidelberg 1935.
  • Baden biography. New series, Vol. III, Stuttgart 1990.
  • Karl E. Demandt: History of the State of Hesse. Kassel 1972.
  • Dagmar Drüll: Heidelberger Gelehrtenlexikon 1803-1932. Edited by Rectorate of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität-Heidelberg. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg / Tokyo 2012, ISBN 978-3-642-70761-2 .
  • Konrad Duden :  Geiler, Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 151 ( digitized version ).
  • Entry Prof. Dr. Karl Hermann Friedrich Geiler In: Norbert Giovannini; Claudia Rink; Frank Moraw: Remember, preserve, commemorate: the Jewish residents of Heidelberg and their relatives 1933-1945 . Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-88423-353-5 , p. 127 .
  • The cabinet minutes of the Hessian state government. Geiler's cabinet 1945–1946. Edited by Andreas Hedwig in collaboration with Jutta Scholl-Seibert. Historical commission for Nassau  : Wiesbaden 2000. ISBN 978-3-930221-07-3 .
  • Jochen Lengemann : The Hessen Parliament 1946–1986 . Biographical handbook of the advisory state committee, the state assembly advising the constitution and the Hessian state parliament (1st – 11th electoral period). Ed .: President of the Hessian State Parliament. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-458-14330-0 , p. 260–261 ( hessen.de [PDF; 12.4 MB ]).
  • Jochen Lengemann: MdL Hessen. 1808-1996. Biographical index (= political and parliamentary history of the state of Hesse. Vol. 14 = publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse. Vol. 48, 7). Elwert, Marburg 1996, ISBN 3-7708-1071-6 , p. 141.
  • Walter Mühlhausen: Karl Geiler and Christian Stock. Hessian Prime Minister in reconstruction. Marburg 1999.
  • Reinhard Pöllath , Ingo Saenger (Eds.): 200 years of business lawyers in Germany. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2009. ISBN 978-3-8329-4446-9 .
  • Klaus-Peter Schroeder : “A university for and by lawyers”. The Heidelberg Faculty of Law in the 19th and 20th centuries. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-16-150326-9 , pp. 584-601.
  • Geiler, Karl, Hermann, Friedrich. In: Robert Volz: Reich manual of the German society . The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. Volume 1: A-K. Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1930, DNB 453960286 , p. 529.
  • Stefanie Weis: Life and work of the lawyer Karl Hermann Friederich Julius Geiler. Hamburg 2013.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 35 , 629
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Hans-Jörg Volkmann: Karl Geiler to the memory . The messenger from the Upper Rhine (Corps newspaper of the Rhenania Freiburg)
  3. ↑ Dissertation: The legal structure of the trust
  4. ↑ Rector's speeches (HKM)
  5. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 311.
personal data
SURNAME Geiler, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Geiler, Karl Hermann Friedrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German legal scholar, Prime Minister in Hesse, Rector in Heidelberg
DATE OF BIRTH August 10, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Schönau in the Black Forest
DATE OF DEATH September 14, 1953
Place of death Heidelberg