Simon Hayum

Simon Hayum (born January 27, 1867 in Hechingen , † August 13, 1948 in Cleveland ( Ohio )) was a Tübingen lawyer and councilor.

Life

Simon Hayum came from a Jewish family who lived in simple circumstances. His father, Heinrich Hayum (1824–1888), was a peddler , his mother from Rexingen , Auguste b. Freiburger (1830–1916), was busy raising six children. After attending the Jewish elementary school and the secondary school in Hechingen, he went to the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart in 1880 , from which he graduated in 1885 with the Abitur. The financial support of his aunt enabled him to study law. He studied in Berlin (1885–1886 and 1886–1887), in between (1887–1888) in Leipzig and in Tübingen (1886 and 1888–1889), where he took the exam in 1889. He then continued his training by doing his legal clerkship at the Cannstatt District Court and the Stuttgart lawyer Steiner as well as doing his doctorate in Tübingen. In 1892 he completed his training with a dissertation on the arbitration contract and the second state examination.

In the same year, Hayum opened a law firm in Tübingen - on the corner of Kirchgasse and Kronenstrasse . “He made a conscious decision in favor of Tübingen, because he wanted to be independent as quickly as possible and was convinced that it would be easier and earlier to achieve this at a relatively small regional court. At that time Tübingen had around 20,000 inhabitants. Seven lawyers practiced in the city at that time, Hayum was soon one of the most prominent. ”On May 3, 1897, he married Hermine Weil (* February 8, 1875 - May 29, 1967), a daughter of the late Hechingen banker Julius Weil ( 1844-1882). He had six children with her, five of whom reached adulthood. Initially, he and the family lived in the center ( Kronenstrasse ) for rent . The lawyer's office was then located at Wilhelmstrasse 14. In 1899 the law firm moved to Uhlandstrasse 15, to the rooms that had been used by the Jewish lawyer Ludwig Kiefe, who left for reasons of age. When he was able to afford this, Hayum bought the two-story house in 1905, in which the law firm was located on the first floor, in which he now worked with other lawyers as partners. The family then moved to the second floor. The law firm was soon to become the largest in Tübingen. The Hayum family belonged to the educated and wealthy upper class. Therefore, not only her sons, but also two of the three daughters attended grammar school and not the girls' upper secondary school, which is considered worse . In 1913, Hayum took his nephew Julius Katz (1887–1948), who was also a doctor of law, into the firm as a partner. In 1929 his son Heinz Hayum (1904–1963), also a doctor of law, began to work in the office. Since then, the firm's name tag has read “Lawyers Doktores Hayum I, Katz and Hayum II”. At the First World War Hayum did not take part for reasons of age. However, he supported the state financially: as early as 1914 he signed a war loan.

Simon Hayum considered himself to be a Jew who was assimilated in every respect, so he looked for social contacts with the non-Jewish population of Tübingen and went to regulars and bowling parties. In retrospect, he had to state that he “didn't really come in” and “didn't feel right”, so that he later gave up these attempts. It was because even before 1933 the contacts between Jews and non-Jews were marked by a social dividing line. He was, however, a member of the bar association and since 1925 its cashier. He had been a member of the citizens' association since 1898 and since the turn of the century he and the banker Friedrich Weil were the first Jews to be members of the Museum Society , the educational institution of Tübingen, which only opened up to other members of the Jewish upper class after the First World War. Like other members of the upper class, he regularly took part in fundraising campaigns organized by the local newspaper "Tübinger Chronik".

From 1919 Simon Hayum was chairman of the local branch of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith and from 1920 (until 1935) a member of the State Israelite Assembly of Württemberg and the State Church Assembly. His wife Hermine not only supported the social welfare office financially, but was also socially involved in the Jewish women's association and in social welfare, for example in the early 1930s, in times of high unemployment, she set up a soup kitchen for the needy in her house.

Simon Hayum had left-wing liberal convictions and was accordingly politically active. He had been a member of the Free People's Party since 1893 , which was absorbed into the Progressive People's Party in 1910 and was chairman of the Tübingen branch for several years. In the years 1908-1912 he was chairman (chairman) of the municipal citizens' committee. During the revolution of 1918/19 he was chairman of the Tübingen Citizens' Council, which formed a counterbalance to the workers' and soldiers' councils . With the Progressive People's Party he got into the German Democratic Party in 1918 . As a member of this party he was from 1919 to 1925 Tübingen municipal council, he was the parliamentary group chairman and belonged to the legal and finance committee. Since 1928 he was again a councilor and now also led the six-member DDP parliamentary group in the town hall. As a local councilor, Hayum was a representative of non-party, citizen-oriented policy with a social-liberal emphasis. After the seizure of power by the Nazis, as the atmosphere of the open anti-Semitism grew, he felt threatened in the City Council as a Jew. After the resolution of the “ Enabling Act ” on March 23, 1933, he decided to anticipate his impeachment and on March 31, he submitted a request for release from office. The municipal council was dissolved on the same day anyway.

The anti-Semitic mood in Tübingen was already so widespread in the early 1930s, as in other parts of Germany, that the pupils of the nearby grammar school shouted slogans such as “old Jud guck 'nei” or “Jew verrecke” both after Hayum and his son Heinz could, which had no consequences for them, although Heinz Hayum described the incidents in a letter to the grammar school rectorate and suggested a punishment. The Hayums law firm was boycotted by the SA on April 1, 1933 . The number of clients decreased rapidly as fewer and fewer had the courage to use the firm. Under the pressure of anti-Semitism, Hayum was forced to remove the firm's nameplates from the facade and in the hallway on the night of August 31st to September 1st, 1933. On May 29, 1934, the Hayum family received news from the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior that, as a result of the Reich law on the admission of lawyers, Heinz Hayum would be excluded from the legal profession on September 1. Thanks to the personal advocacy of Landerer, President of the Tübingen Regional Court, it was possible to obtain an exception from the Württemberg Ministry of Justice to maintain Heinz Hayum's license on condition that his father had to give up his license to practice as a lawyer on September 1, 1934. (Under these circumstances, Hayum's daughter Dorothee, who received her doctorate in law in 1934, could no longer get admission.) As a result, he and Julius Katz were able to continue to run the office. Simon Hayum continued to work in the firm and was able to support his clients as long as the attorney did not have to appear in person at the court. The ongoing lack of clients led to the firm's financial ruin in 1935. Simon Hayum also experienced discrimination in everyday life since 1933. He was shunned or isolated by both his clients and the rest of the population. In order to avoid insults, Hayum and his wife avoided going to restaurants, concerts and theater performances, which they used to take for granted. Julius Katz's situation became unbearable and he left the firm on October 1, 1935 and then emigrated to Switzerland. Since Heinz Hayum was supposed to be working in a relative's Berlin bank from January 1936, he managed to obtain permission to represent him in Tübingen. This representation was taken over by Erich Dessauer (1887–1944), who grew up in Uhlandstrasse in Tübingen and practiced in Bad Cannstatt. At that time he was forced to give up his office in Cannstatt. Thanks to Dessauer, the firm existed formally until September 5, 1938, the day on which Heinz Hayum gave up his residence in Tübingen and emigrated to Seattle . On November 10, 1938, the day after the pogrom night , Hayum was visited by the Gestapo , which confiscated the local group files of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith from him.

In the course of preparing for the escape, the Hayums sold the house in Uhlandstrasse to the city on December 30, 1938, well below its value. Hermine Hayum gave away part of the household goods to the domestic workers (including the former). After Mayor Adolf Scheef had warned them of the impending arrest, Hayum and his wife fled via Stuttgart to Zurich on February 1, 1939 , without saying goodbye to their old, bedridden mother Hermines, in order to avoid the pain of separation. All of her children and grandchildren had emigrated to the USA before . The furnishings of the house were then auctioned, after which the SA standard set it up as their seat. The Hayums lived in Zurich for two years until they received the necessary permits to continue their journey and set off for the USA on March 8, 1941 via Geneva and Barcelona and arrived in New York on April 8 . They lived in Queens (New York) until 1947 . Perhaps because of Simon Hayum's deteriorating health, they moved to their daughter Edith, who lived with her husband in Cleveland. Hayum died there of a heart attack at the age of 81 and was buried there. Erich Dessauer, who could not manage to escape, was murdered in Auschwitz .

children

• Luise (April 12, 1898 - April 23, 1899)
• Margarete (* May 1, 1900; † July 1992, ⚭ 1920 Louis Koppel), studied law for three semesters
• Edith (born March 25, 1902; † August 1970, ⚭ Siegfried Koppel), kindergarten teacher
• Heinz (born August 10, 1904; † February 9, 1963, ⚭ Ellen Oppenheimer), lawyer
• Julius (born May 20, 1906; † 2001, ⚭ 1945 Doris Greenberg), bank clerk
• Dorothee (born April 28, 1912; † 1950, ⚭ 1935 Heinz Oppenheim) completed her law degree in 1934 with a doctorate

Fonts

• The arbitration contract , dissertation at the University of Tübingen, Tübingen: printed by W. Armbruster & O. Riecker 1892
• Memories from Exile: Life Path of a Tübingen Citizen , ed. from the Tübingen History Workshop, Tübingen: Kulturamt, 2005, ISBN 3-910090-66-4 (= Kleine Tübinger Schriften, Vol. 29)

Appreciation

• In 2009 the Tübingen municipal council decided to rename part of the Hundskapfklinge street on the Österberg to Simon-Hayum-Straße .
• On December 12, 2011, a memorial plaque of the Tübingen Bar Association was unveiled at Uhlandstrasse 15, honoring all lawyers working there.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Martin Ulmer: Destroyed Democracy… , pp. 32–34.
2. ↑ Destroyed hopes ... , p. 61.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Simon Hayum in the database Jüdische Familien in Süd-West (access only for registered users).
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Office in Uhlandstrasse , "Schwäbisches Tagblatt", December 10, 2011.
5. ↑ Eva Maria Klein; Martin Ulmer: History of a Expulsion , p. 123.
6. ↑ Ann-Katrin Gehrung: Jewish traces in Tübingen ... , p. 3.
7. ↑ Destroyed hopes ... , p. 42.
8. ↑ Destroyed hopes ... , p. 47.
9. ↑ Destroyed hopes ... , p. 50.
10. ↑ Destroyed hopes ... , p. 52.
11. ↑ Destroyed hopes ... , p. 53.
12. ↑ Simon Hayum: Memories from Exile , p. 13.
13. ↑ Simon Hayum: Memories from Exile , p. 235.
14. ↑ Destroyed hopes ... , p. 62 u. 70.
15. ↑ Simon Hayum: Memories from Exile , p. 22.
16. ^ Letter of July 9, 1932 (Tübingen City Archives) - Benigna Schönhagen: Tübingen under the Hakenkreuz , p. 85.
17. ↑ Destroyed hopes ... , p. 63.
18. ↑ Ulrike Baumgärtner: "It was never emigration, always just an escape". The expulsion of the Jews from Tübingen . In: Destroyed Hopes… , p. 276 based on the autobiography of Simon Hayum.
19. ↑ Andrea Bachmann: Simon-Hayum-Strasse

literature

• Ann-Katrin Gehrung: Jewish traces in Tübingen: a city walk , ed. from the history workshop Tübingen , Tübingen 2014
• Martin Ulmer : Destroyed Democracy. Tübingen city councils forcibly resigned in 1933. A documentation , ed. from the Tübingen history workshop, Tübingen: Kulturamt 2013, ISBN 978-3-941818-16-3 (= Kleine Tübinger Schriften, 39)
• Andrea Bachmann: Simon-Hayum-Strasse . In: " Schwäbisches Tagblatt ", September 1, 2011
• Destroyed hopes. Ways of the Tübingen Jews , ed. from the history workshop Tübingen, Tübingen: Kulturamt / Stuttgart: Theiss 1995, ISBN 3-8062-1216-3 (= contributions to the history of Tübingen, 8)
• Benigna Schönhagen ; Wilfried Setzler : Jüdisches Tübingen , Haigerloch: Media and Dialogue 1995, ISBN 3-933231-08-6
• Benigna Schönhagen: Tübingen under the swastika , Tübingen: Kulturamt / Stuttgart: Theiss 1991, ISBN 3-8062-0838-7 (= contributions to the history of Tübingen, 4)
• Eva Maria Klein; Martin Ulmer: History of a Expulsion. The Hayum family . In: Benigna Schönhagen (ed.): National Socialism in Tübingen. Gone and Forgotten , Tübingen 1992, pp. 121–130
• Hayum, Simon . In: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . Munich: Saur, 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 141
• Lilli Zapf : Die Tübinger Juden , Tübingen: Katzmann 1978, 4th edition 2008, ISBN 978-3-7805-0326-8