Margarete Berent

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Margarete Berent (far right) among the founders of the German Association of Women Academics (1926)
Memorial plaque on Goltzstrasse 34, Berlin-Schöneberg

Margarete Berent (born July 9, 1887 in Berlin , † June 23, 1965 in New York ), also known as Margareth Berent , was the first female lawyer in Prussia . As a Jew , she was persecuted by the Nazi regime .

resume

Margarete Berent grew up as the daughter of Natalie, née Gabriel, and the businessman Max Berent in Berlin. Her brother Hans later became a victim of the Holocaust . After high school at King Municipal grammar school she first taught at the Social School for Women Berlin before in Berlin and Erlangen jurisprudence studied. She received her doctorate in 1914 with her dissertation on the community of gains for spouses , which received the title magna cum laude . Since women in the German Empire did not have access to the traditional legal professions ( judges , lawyers), Berent initially only worked as an assistant in law offices, in legal protection offices and in the private sector, etc. a. also at AEG .

She was a co-founder of the German Association of Women Lawyers and, together with other members of this association, actively ensured admission to the legal exams for women (1919). In December 1919 she passed the trainee examination with the grade “good”. At the beginning of 1925 the assessor exam followed . On March 7, 1925, Berent was admitted to the bar at the Mitte district court and the Berlin district court , making her one of the first female lawyers in Prussia.

Together with Marie Munk , Berent developed reform demands on marriage, matrimonial property, family and non-marital law in the Weimar Republic . During this phase of her career, Berent specialized in matrimonial property law and was active in the Jewish community in Berlin and in the regional association of Prussian synagogue communities. In 1926 she co-founded the German Association of Women Academics and in 1928 co-founded the International Federation of Female Lawyers and Judges .

On June 19, 1933, she was excluded from the bar as a Jew because, like all female Jewish members, she was unable to meet the few exceptional criteria (work before 1914, combatant privilege ) of the law on admission to the bar of April 7, 1933. Berent became a board member in the Jewish Women's Association and worked for the next few years for the Central Welfare Office for Jews in Germany in Berlin. She did not leave Germany until November 1939, after the outbreak of the war, first traveling to Chile , where she fought as a housekeeper before she received a visa for the USA in the summer of 1940 .

After another law degree from 1942 at New York University - her training in Germany was not recognized in the USA - and her admission to the Bar Association in 1949, she became a lawyer in New York at the age of 62. From 1956 to 1965 she worked in the legal department of the New York City Council. Her dissertation from 1914 had a strong influence on the reorganization of matrimonial property law in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1958.

Since her brother and his family were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp , Berent did not return to Germany. Margarete Berent was not married and had no children.

literature

  • Oda Cordes: Women as pioneers of the law: the first German women lawyers and their demands for reform in the Weimar Republic. Diplomica, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8366-9240-3 .
  • Oda Cordes: Marie Munk (1885–1978). Life and work. Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2015, ISBN 978-3-412-22455-4 , pp. 797-802.
  • Jutta Dick, Marina Sassenberg: Jewish women in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lexicon on life and work. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-499-16344-6 .
  • Hiltrud Häntzschel : “A new form of attachment and freedom.” The lawyer MB In: dies. & Hadumod Bußmann (ed.): Menacingly clever. A century of women and science in Bavaria . Beck, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-406-41857-0 , pp. 231-236.
  • Hiltrud Häntzschel: MB In: Hans Erler u. a. (Ed.): “The world was created for my sake.” The intellectual legacy of German-speaking Jewry. 58 portraits. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-593-35842-5 , pp. 191-197.
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Vol. 1: Politics, economy, public life . Saur, Munich 1980, p. 53.
  • Peter Reinicke : An early lawyer in Germany: Margarete Berent 1887–1965 . In: Sabine Hering (ed.): Jewish welfare in the mirror of biographies (= writings of the working group History of Jewish welfare in Germany . Volume 2). Fachhochschulverlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-936065-80-2 , pp. 74-83.

Web links

Commons : Margarete Berent  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Elizabeth Loentz: Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist . Hebrew Union College Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-87820-460-1 ( google.com [accessed November 18, 2017]).
personal data
SURNAME Berent, Margarete
BRIEF DESCRIPTION first female lawyer in Prussia
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 23, 1965
Place of death New York City