Martin Beradt

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Martin Beradt (born August 26, 1881 in Magdeburg , † November 26, 1949 in New York City ) was a German writer and lawyer .

Life

Martin Beradt was born in Magdeburg as the son of a Jewish leather merchant. From 1892 the family lived in Berlin, where Beradt attended high school. After high school he studied in Berlin , Munich and Heidelberg Law , completed a clerkship in Bitterfeld and doctorate finally 1906 in Freiburg .

While still a student, Beradt wrote his first essays and short stories for literary magazines; his first novel Go was published in 1909 by the S. Fischer publishing house . From that year he worked as a lawyer at the Berlin Higher Regional Court . After the critical studies in his essay The Judge made a career as a judge unlikely, he settled as a lawyer in 1911.

After the outbreak of the First World War , Martin Beradt was transferred to the Western Front as an armored soldier in 1915 , but was retired after a few months due to an eye problem. He then processed these experiences in earthworkers. Records of an entrenchment soldier . In the years after the war he turned increasingly to his legal work and became involved as a co-founder and syndic of the Association of German Writers . Martin Beradt was one of the lawyers and notaries who took care of Heinrich Mann's copyright matters.

With the elaboration of his early essay on the book "Der deutsche Richter" (1930), he presented a comprehensive, friendly analysis of the Weimar judiciary, which followed the character requirements of the judges in terms of demands and reality with an eye for the subtle differences. These judges are not corrupt, and yet they feel so about the state that they only very rarely grant the right against it. It provides more of a dense description of a milieu than just economic-sociological statistical data. These representations were controversial in specialist circles, but Beradt was also broader in the 1920s and was also valued as a lawyer.

After the transfer of power in 1933 Beradt was a Jew from the Bar Association ruled out, but remained in Germany to care for his sick mother. His wife, the also Jewish political journalist Charlotte Beradt , b. Aron, with whom he had been married since 1938, was also unable to practice her profession in Nazi Germany. She financed life together through her work as a hairdresser . After their mother's death in 1939 , the couple emigrated via London to New York, where Martin Beradt obtained American citizenship in 1946 , went blind and initially continued to live on his wife's income as a hairdresser until she was able to publish again in West Germany after the end of the war. His attempt to find an American publisher for his novels failed.

Martin Beradt's works were banned in the German Reich and all occupied territories during the Nazi era . Charlotte Beradt arranged his estate, which is in the Center for Jewish History in New York and partly in the German Literature Archive in Marbach . She later found publishers in the Federal Republic of Germany who republished some of his work.

reception

After the Second World War , Martin Beradt's legal position also experienced a certain renaissance in the western part of Germany, including constitutional law and court organization, especially when it comes to the desired step from official anonymity to open personal responsibility of the judiciary. In 1947, Attorney General Karl Siegfried Bader in Freiburg im Breisgau took up Martin Beradt's characterization of the German judge who was hiding in conscious and deliberate anonymity behind the impersonal “court”. He does not judge as a responsible individual, but as a "good servant of his state". The constitutional lawyer Rudolf Wassermann supported this call for more independent judges and now also female judges . With this line of reasoning, dissenting judges - right down to the higher regional courts - have increasingly been granted the right to express their dissenting opinion . So far, however, this has only been legitimized for the Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfGG amendment of December 21, 1970, Federal Law Gazette I p. 1765 ).

Works (selection)

  • Go (novel), Berlin 1909
  • The judge (essay), Berlin 1909 ( as PDF ).
  • Married couple (novel), Berlin 1910
  • The child (novel), Berlin 1911
  • The persecuted (novellas), Berlin 1919
  • Earthworkers. Notes of a Schanzsoldaten (autobiography), Berlin 1919. Later also under the title Schipper an der Front , Berlin 1929
  • Passion and cunning (novel), Berlin 1928
  • The German judge . Frankfurt am Main 1930 ( Google extract ).
  • Both sides of the street (novel), 1940.
    • Posthumous edition: The street of small eternity , Frankfurt am Main 1965.
    • Full edition: Both sides of the street. Edited by Joachim Mackensen. Berlin 1993.
    • New edition: The Road of Little Eternity. With an essay The Scheunenviertel. Description of Zenotaphs and obituary lifetime of Eike Geisel , series Die Andere Bibliothek , Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-8218-4190-7 .

literature

  • Kirsten Steffen: “Did you hate me?” Answers for Martin Beradt (1881-1949). Writer, lawyer, Berlin Jewish faith . Igel Verlag Wissenschaft, Oldenburg 1999, ISBN 3-89621-091-2 .
  • Lehner, Beate Margarete: Martin Beradt - lawyer and poet in Berlin. Frankfurter Buntbücher, Frankfurt (Oder) 2000, ISBN 3-9806758-3-1 .
  • Elisabeth Willnath: Beradt, Martin . In: Walther Killy (Ed.): Literaturlexikon. Authors and works in German . Gütersloh, Munich 1988, vol. 1, p. 431f.
  • Elena Barnert: Schipper into the fire. Martin Beradt (1881-1949). In: Myops. Reports from the world of law 3 (2008), pp. 35–39.
  • Beradt, Martin. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 2: Bend Bins. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-598-22682-9 , pp. 108-114.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christine Fischer-Defoy (ed.), Heinrich Mann: the private address book 1926-1940, Leipzig 2006, p. 103.
  2. ↑ Brief discussion in Menorah, Heft 1–2, 1931, p. 95 ( UB Frankfurt ). There the text is read more in the class struggle tradition, as described by Tucholsky (as Ignaz Wrobel) in the glossary of German judges (online at www.textlog.de, accessed on March 22, 2013) in the Weltbühne (from 12, 19 and April 26, 1927, No. 15/16/17, pp. 581, 618, 663).
  3. ↑ Guide to the Papers of Martin Beradt , Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewisch History, New York
  4. ^ Charlotte Beradt: Martin Beradt - Collection 1902-1988 , four parts. Center for Jewish History, New York, catalog.
  5. ↑ W. Schmidt-Hieber / R. Wassermann (Ed.), Justice and Law, Festschrift on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the German Judges Academy. Heidelberg: Juristischer Verlag CF Müller 1983. ( from this Wassermann's contribution of interest here )
  6. ↑ legalize (Austrian / Swiss German) - anchored in law . At universal_lexikon.deacademic.com. Retrieved March 22, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Beradt, Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 26, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH November 26, 1949
Place of death new York