Ernst Fraenkel

Life Fraenkel was born in a Jewish family in Cologne. He served during the First World War from 1916 to 1918 in the German Army. He wrote his dissertation in law about The void labor contract (Der nichtige Arbeitsvertrag), under Hugo Sinzheimer.

During the Weimar Republic, he worked in labor law with Franz Leopold Neumann, published scientific publications and was engaged in socialist politics. Although the Nazis banned Jewish lawyers from appearing in court after they came to power in 1933, Fraenkel was still allowed to work to a limited extent due to having been a soldier in World War I. He was connected to several resistance groups such as the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (International Socialist Fighting Alliance) . In 1938 he finally left Germany for the United Kingdom, then immigrating in 1939 to the United States, where he became a citizen in August 1944.

Shortly after arriving in New York City, Fraenkel moved to Chicago, where he studied American law at the University of Chicago Law School, graduating in 1941. During this period he revised and completed a manuscript that he had brought with him from Germany. for the future occupation powers to avoid repeating the mistakes made 20 years earlier.

From 1945 on Fraenkel was an adviser to the American government but was soon dissatisfied with its policy of occupation in Korea. For the United Nations he was supposed to be one of the people to prepare free elections in Korea, but the Korean War made the elections impossible and forced Fraenkel to leave the country.

In 1951 Fraenkel returned to Germany. He became a lecturer at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin and later a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he founded the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies. He considered his writings to be normative; his concept of pluralism was meant to criticize the existing political system. Those among his students who were active in the 1968 movement, however, saw his American-influenced theories as defending monopolistic capitalism.

He was a U.S. citizen until 1972. He died in Berlin on March 28, 1975.

Works 1927 – Zur Soziologie der Klassenjustiz (Sociology of Class Justice) 1931–1933 – "Chronik" des republikanischen Richterbundes (Chronicles of the Republikanischer Richterbund) 1941 – The Dual State 1957 – Staat und Politik 1960 – Das amerikanische Regierungssystem (The American System of Government) 1964 – Deutschland und die westlichen Demokratien (Germany and the Western Democracies)