part iii • contemporary legal history • michael stolleis scientist Hans Maier, who worked on the older German state and administrative doctrine, and Manfred Friedrich in Göttingen, whose history of the science of state in Germany was some years in the making, but in the end he did complete it. Wilhelm Bleek, meanwhile, wrote a history of political science in 2001. I say I imagined something analogous to Wieacker, but public law was missing not only the groundwork, but also a construction plan. How to overcome the feared ‘baroque mountain of books’ in the framework of the constitution of the Old Reich? For the late eighteenth century, Johann Stephan Pütter’s Litteratur des teutschen Staatsrechts (1776–1783) gives helpful guidance; for the time until the mid nineteenth century the expert with the firmest grasp on the literature was Robert von Mohl. After that things become more manageable. The First World War, the Weimar Republic, and theNazi era and the Second World War sawplenty of readily accessible literature (its presence in the faculty library in Lund demonstrates just how accessible). When I look back today over the last five decades, a great deal has changed. Studies about Nazism or theDDRcan be published freely without fearing for one’s career. Contemporary legal history has found its place in the curriculum – and a very attractive one at that. Social law was established, in part because of themany anniversaries of the Bismarckian social insurances and social courts, and it began to write its own history, for example in an editorial project at the University of Kassel led by Florian Tennstedt. The intellectual history of public law has carved out a place alongside the traditional constitutional history, recently even in Switzerland (Andreas Kley). Today, we can draw on studies of important professors of state and administrative law (Otto Mayer, Fritz Fleiner, Heinrich Triepel, Hermann Heller, Erich Kaufmann, Carl Schmitt of course, Ernst Forsthoff, and, globally, Hans Kelsen – a critical edition of his complete works is underway in Freiburg and Vienna). The field is far more colourful and more tightly connected. In retrospect, the changes in Munich since 1965 when I arrived there have been incredible. The student movement (1968–1972) did cause havoc, but it also signalled a deep change in German society. Germany has 164
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