Otto Mittelstaedt

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Otto Samuel Ludwig Mittelstaedt , also Mittelstädt , (born July 14, 1834 in Schneidemühl , † November 18, 1899 in Rome (suicide)) was a German judge and journalist.

Life

The son of a Prussian judicial commissioner (lawyer) in Poznan was a Protestant. He went to school in Ostrowo and Posen and passed the Abitur in 1853 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Posen . Then he studied until 1855 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Berlin law and put the first state exam with an ex "enough". In 1856 he received his doctorate in Breslau . In addition, he had an editor's position at the Posener Tageblatt . In 1855 he was sworn in to the Prussian sovereign and completed the legal preparatory service in Posen as an auscultator . In 1857 he passed the 2nd state examination. Since he had received a scholarship from the Poznan Province while studying, he had to become a trainee lawyer at the Poznan Court of Appeal .

After he had passed the state examination “good” in 1860, he was employed as an assessor free of charge by the Poznan public prosecutor's office. In 1862 he was appointed public prosecutor at the Berlin City Court and in 1863 he was granted a monthly diet of 40 thalers . In the Polish trials of 1863/64 he was called in to investigate because of his knowledge of the Polish language and represented the indictment at the Berlin City Court. In 1864 he was granted an annual salary of 600 thalers. In 1866 he became a scheduled public prosecutor at the Berlin City Court. In 1866 the Prussian Ministry of Justice sent him to Stuttgart to investigate the background to the assassination attempt by the Hohenheim agricultural student Ferdinand Cohen-Blind on Bismarck. With the annexation of Holstein in 1867, Mittelstaedt was allowed to choose a new place of employment and opted for the newly created public prosecutor's office at the Altona district court . He wrote articles anonymously in the Grenzbote .

In 1869 Mittelstaedt was recruited by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and became head of the public prosecutor's office there as first public prosecutor with an annual salary of 8,000 marks. He oversaw the introduction of the Reich Criminal Code ( 1872) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (1879) in Hamburg. In 1876 he was councilor of the Hamburg Higher Court and in 1879 councilor of the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court . He was a member of Hamburg's citizenship from 1877 to 1881. In Hamburg he continued to cultivate his acquaintances with Gustav Freytag , Wilhelm Raabe , the editors of the Kladderadatsch and the Kreuzzeitung . In addition, he has meanwhile been writing for the Prussian Yearbooks and the German Revue . In 1881 he came to the Imperial Court . His annual salary was now 12,900 marks. He was in the III. Criminal Senate active. At the request of the President of the Reich Court of Justice, he was retired in 1896 for health reasons. Since 1890 he was co-editor of the magazine Dergerichtssaal and has now published essays in Maximilian Hardens Zukunft .

plant

Mittelstaedt became known through his work Kaspar Hauser and his Baden Princehood , published in 1876 , in which he rejected the prince theory.

As a criminal lawyer, he caused a sensation in 1879 with the polemical pamphlet against custodial sentences , arguing that these sentences were not sufficiently dissuasive and should therefore largely be abolished in favor of the fine . For Franz von Liszt, the writing was the immediate cause of his Marburg program . The critics called him “Drako-Mittelstädt” because of his advocacy of corporal punishment: “If only our prisons have been under the regime of hunger and beatings again for a few years, and the feeling, which today has completely disappeared, that punishment is shame and shame, also come back to life. "

As a member of the German minority in the province of Posen, Mittelstaedt had a national character. He was seen as a liberal and Bismarck admirer who couldn't get along with Wilhelminism : "... so today I only know one heroic means that would be capable of tearing the monarchy and the monarchical unitary state out of the democratic swamping: that is war."

family

His son Johannes (1869–1931) was a lawyer at the Imperial Court . The physicist Peter Mittelstaedt (1929–2014) was his great-grandson.

Works (selection)

  • De juris patronatus, quod reale dicitur, Diss. Breslau 1856
  • Kaspar Hauser and his princehood of Baden, Heidelberg 1876
  • Against imprisonment: A contribution to the criticism of today's punishment system, 2 editions, Leipzig 1879 ( digitized ).
  • Speeches by Heinrich von Treitschke in the German Reichstag 1871-1884 (Ed.)
  • The fourth estate and state socialism: on the signature of the German presence by a non-politician, Leipzig 1884
  • Before the flood: Six letters on contemporary German politics, Leipzig 1897
  • The Dreyfus affair: a criminal policy study, 2 editions, Berlin 1899
  • The memoirs of Otto Samuel Ludwig Mittelstädt, (unfinished), Leipzig 1939
  • The German Chancellor and Criminal Justice , Das neue Reich, 1876, p. 8.
  • For and against imprisonment , ZgStW 2 (1882), p. 419.
  • The need for revision of the German jury court verdicts , The Court Room, Volume 37 (1885), p. 557 .
  • On the doctrine of the interpretation of the penal laws , The Courtroom, Volume 43 (1890), p. 1 .
  • Guilt and punishment: on the criticism of today's reform efforts , The Court Room, Volume 46/47 (1892), p. 237 , p. 387 , p.1 .
  • From the diary of a Prussian public prosecutor , Die Zukunft, Volume 2 (1898), p. 321.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Frank-Michael Wiegand : The notables. Studies on the history and elected citizenship in Hamburg 1859-1919, Hamburg 1987, p. 272.