National Socialists are still very present in German courtrooms. When judges want to look up something, they regularly consult the “Palandt”, the most important commentary on the civil code. This reference work from the CH Beck publishing house, currently in its 80th edition, has been named Otto Palandt since 1938. He was a member of the NSDAP and president of the Reich Judicial Examination Office. Many also use the “Schönfelder”, the collection of laws with the highest circulation, also from CH Beck. It is named after the NSDAP lawyer Heinrich Schönfelder.
Now the traditional Munich publisher has surprisingly announced that it will say goodbye to the old Nazi namesake. On Tuesday the publisher announced: The “Palandt” would be renamed. It was time. In future, the plant will bear the name of Christian Grüneberg. Grüneberg, today a judge at the Federal Court of Justice, is so far only known to a few in the legal world. However, he coordinates the work of the many authors who contribute to the legal commentary. From the next, the 81st edition, which is due to appear in November, his name will be found on practically every judge’s desk.
The publishing house announced that the collection of laws “Schönfelder” is to be renamed. It is to be published in the future by the President of the German Lawyers’ Association Mathias Habersack and will also be named after him. Habersack is professor of civil law and corporate law at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. The previous namesake Schönfelder had already died in 1944. The numbering of the laws still comes from him today. In the collection of laws, the civil code bears the number 20. In the past, places 1 to 19 were still the NSDAP party program and various racial laws.
The publisher is giving in to years of criticism. In 2014, a group of doctoral students from Hamburg began to draw attention to the Nazi history of common legal works. Based on their “Palandt renaming initiative”, politicians from the green state ministers of justice to the SPD federal minister of justice and the Bavarian CSU state minister of justice appealed to Beck-Verlag. The decisive impetus came from the CSU man Georg Eisenreich. In May he commissioned an independent historical study to re-examine the Nazi past of the namesake. At the same time, in a series of personal conversations, he advised the publisher Hans Dieter Beck not to let himself drift too long, but rather to clean the table.
“Maunz / Dürig” and “Blümich” are also given new names
The publisher is now taking the opportunity to rename one of the most important comments on the Basic Law. The standard work “Maunz / Dürig” is called after its founder Theodor Maunz. He was an influential law professor during the Nazi era. After 1945 he was a member of the Constitutional Convention in Herrenchiemsee, then Bavarian Minister of Culture for the CSU. In 1964 he had to resign because of his Nazi past, but then advised the right-wing extremist DVU of the Munich publisher Gerhard Frey and wrote under a pseudonym for his newspaper.
The work is to be called “Dürig / Herzog / Scholz” in future, after its current co-authors: the former President of the Constitutional Court and Federal President Roman Herzog and the former Defense Minister and constitutional lawyer Rupert Scholz. Finally, the publisher announces that it will also rename a commentary on tax law, “Blümich”, which is currently in its 157th edition. Instead of Walter Blümich, who from 1933 onwards promoted tax discrimination against Jews in the Reich Ministry of Finance, the work will in future bear the name of the current editors Peter Brandis and Bernd Heuermann.
There is no doubt that the old namesake has long been just that: namesake. The content of legal works has long been denazified. In the past few years, Beck-Verlag had argued against critics: They wanted to stick to the Nazi-polluted names, not only because they were established as a “brand”, but also to “stumble” readers over the history to let. “The namesake for collections of laws and comments must be personalities of integrity,” said CSU Minister Georg Eisenreich most recently. “No National Socialists.”
In order to “rule out misunderstandings”, the publisher Hans Dieter Beck announced in a press release from the publisher on Tuesday. They want to examine their own publishing program even further for possible problematic titles.