a summary Our contacts with international scholars were crucial to our success. Special mention must be made of the group working on the Great Council of Mechelen under the guidance of Tom de Smidt (1923–2013), professor of legal history in Leiden. He welcomed us younger German legal historians to the Netherlands with a generosity few could have hoped for at the time, smoothing our way into the international discourse. We remain eternally grateful. In 1973 De Smidt and his Belgian colleague John Gillisen (1912–1988) held an international conference in Brussels and Mechelen to mark the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Grosse Rat von Mecheln (Great Council of Mechelen).Among the international participants was a young Swede from Lund, Kjell Åke Modéer – my teacher Hans Thieme (1906– 2000) had noticed him at the German legal historians’ meeting in Erlangen–Nuremberg because he was studying the Swedish Crown’s jurisdictions on German soil – and we hit it off. Our shared enthusiasm for the topic resulted in the law faculty at Lund inviting me to be the external examiner when he took his PhD in 1975. He was made a professor in 1978, and our collaborations continued at legal history conferences and joint seminars, not only in Frankfurt and Lund but also after German reunification in Greifswald. I was deeply touched to receive an honorary degree from Lund, and although I could not participate in the conference instead I am happy to present this contribution to celebrate our broader scholarly enterprise. If the purpose of working on the Imperial jurisdictions was to enable new perspectives on the old theme in legal history, the relevant research of contemporary legal history first had to be identified. Whether engaged in legal training or legal science, legal scholars had been preoccupied by the twentieth century. Jurists did not hold decisions from this period tobe historical sources; theywerematerial tobe used to solve current legal problems. A very few legal historians, with Bernd Rüthers and Michael Stolleis in the lead, escaped this methodological dead end to interrogate the material as historical sources. The answers they obtained indicated the continuities in the legal system from the German Empire to the Weimar Republic and on to the Nazis. The exact nature of the changes after 61
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=