c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 163 The Nazi labour law’s perversion of the duty of fidelity did not lead to any reorientation whatsoever after the totalitarian regime’s fall in1945.The doctrine about Gemeinschaft remained pre-dominant also during the first decades of the Federal Republic. It was considered as a necessary prerequisite to realise the “social content” of the employment relationship. The doctrine’s foremost representatives were still Hueck and Nikisch, who both decisively had contributed to its emergence in the 1920s and its elaboration in the 1930s and 1940s. Characteristically enough, Hueck in a famous lecture in1946 directly referred to Otto von Gierke’s ideas as he, from the close relations between the parties to the contract of employment, once again derived a “Gemeinschaftsverhältnis”, characterised by mutual fidelity.333 The doctrine about a Gemeinschaftsvertrag as the foundation of the employment relationship was seriously criticised in the 1950s. Still in1955, however, the German Supreme Labour Court could declare that the employment relationship is a community relationship within the law of persons, which not only like the “Dienstvertrag” concerns independent or other relationships of obligations, exclusively separate fixed tasks, but for its scope “embraces the whole of the employee’s person, and thus essentially shapes his life and determines his personality”. It must be noted that the court used the doctrine to defend the employee’s protection of employment.334 From around the middle of the 1960s the Gemeinschaft doctrine gradually disappeared from the German textbooks on labour law and it is today considered to be a thing of the past.The now 333 Hueck 1947, p. 13. 334 Bundesarbeitsgericht (BAG) November 10th 1955: “Denn das Arb.Verh. ist ein personenrechtliches Gemeinschaftsverhältniss, das nicht nur wie beim Dienstvertrag der selbständig oder sonstigen Schuldverhältnisssen lediglich Einzelne bestimmte Leistungen betrifft, sondern für seinen Geltungsbereich die ganze Person des Arbeitsnehmer erfasst, deshalb wesentl. sein Leben gestaltet und seine Persönlichkeit bestimmt”, in Hanau & Adomeit 1978, p. 128. 6. 3. 6 ge rman postwar labour law. back to the bgb - andTreue
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