Ernst Ludwig Theodor Otto Eger

Otto Eger (19 October 1877 – 11 April 1949) was a German jurist and legal historian. As a professor at the University of Giessen (and undertaking, more briefly, an eight-year professorship at Basel), during the first half of the twentieth century, he was an influential teacher of several generations of legal scholars. He served terms as University Rector at both institutions. A committed nationalist, he backed national socialism which, in his judgement, opened up opportunities for revanchists who still hoped to find ways to undo the destruction of the Bismarckian German state in 1918/1919. More than six decades after his death, Otto Eger remained a controversial figure due to his engagement with the Nazi régime.

Life Provenance and early years Ernst Ludwig Theodor Otto Eger was born at Darmstadt. Gustav Eger (1827–1894), his father, was a professor of linguistics at the (slightly misleadingly named) Technical University of Darmstadt. Gustav Eger died in 1894 making Otto an orphan: his mother had already died two years earlier. Otto Eger's later upbringing was accordingly supervised by a guardian: his father had already taken care to make available the funds needed to complete the boy's education. He then took a post with the Legal Preparation Service . He worked, in parallel, on his doctorate, which was supervised by , and which he received from the University of Giessen in 1899 or 1900. His dissertation concerned representation in property acquisition .

Marriage and family He remained in Giessen, according to his own records employed between 1903 and 1908 by the university as a faculty assistant. In 1905 he married Margarete Zöppritz (1880-1973), daughter of geographer (1838-1885) and, through her mother, a granddaughter of chemist (1812-1890). The marriage would be followed over time by the births of three recorded children.

Habitation, professorships and the war years Under the influence of and of Leist, after 1905 his primary focus switched to some of the legal elements in papyrology. His widely commended work on Egyptian land registration in the Roman period earned him his habilitation (under the supervision of Mitteis) in 1909 and, having been published in book form, remains relevant for researchers more than a century later. In 1929 work started on a new accommodation building in the which was opened to students in 1931, and continues in use complete with a cafeteria: it was later named the Otto Egger Hall of Residence , though more recently, as Otto Eger's political record has been re-evaluated, pressure has grown for a reversal of the naming decision. The government's rapid suppression of the Putsch made this impossible, but it had served to highlight and intensify the political polarisation between traditionalists who saw the new republican government as a foreign imposition, and the large numbers of left wingers from the working and intellectual classes who thought that Germany's best hope now lay with a rerun, on Germany soil, of the still rapidly unfolding October Revolution in the Soviet Union. For many years following the violence of the early 1920s, Otto Eger made himself available as the local contact man for the "persecuted putschists" who had been members of the disbanded (in 1921) Escherich .

During the 1930s Eger also returned to his research work on legal history. but it would be only in 1957 that Giessen recovered its university status, offering again a broad range of academic disciplines. By that time Otto Eger had long since died aged 71, following a long illness, in 1949. His entry in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, also written by Friedrich Weber, and published in 1959, barely mentions the final sixteen years of Eger's life.

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