law émigré max rheinstein (1899–1977) er’s perspective. From the very first his correspondence in exile had been bilingual. As a comparatist he moved easily across the borders between German and American legal culture. After midnight on 8 May 1945, Hour Zero, all the German law émigrés faced the question of whether to return toGermany.That summer Rheinstein visited Germany for the US Government as a civil law consultant to the legal division of the Office of Military Government, United States Sector. The mission, which was part of the legal denazification process, occupied him until January 1947. Both officially and privately he advocated conciliatory reconstruction, convinced that an overly eager denazification risked turning the Germans against democracy while delaying economic recovery. He tried to combine loyalty to his new homeland with the reconstruction of traditional German ideals of theRechtsstaat. He was very optimistic, and the students he met at a summer school in Marburg inspired him. He wrote to them to say he had rarely had better students, and that ‘Their expressive fluency, their sincerity and their serious looking for a new way had strongly impressed him and his colleagues’.18 He was glad there were young people in Germany who had not been poisoned by Nazism. To his study group he wrote, ‘I have found you open-minded, sincerely eager to learn about Germany’s past and present, about the United States and the other Allied countries, eager to work for a peaceful world and to avoid the errors of the past.’19 He was profoundly sceptical of national differences, adding that ‘Of course we are more captivated by differences and divergences.But in all my contacts with so many different countries, I have always been more deeply impressed by the basic uniformity of human nature. Basically, Germans are not different from Frenchmen, Britons, Italians, Americans, white or black, or from Puerto Ricans. This is 18 UChicago, SCRC, Max Rheinstein Papers, Box 4, Folder 3. 19 Ibid. 261 Hour Zero and beyond
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