part i • supreme courts • bernhard diestelkamp 1933 was set out with help of new interpretations. The research on these themes was prompted by the concerns of students in the 1970s. Thus was the field of contemporary legal history established, and the first chair inWest Germany instituted in Frankfurt. The key concerns were Hitler’s judicial system and its roots in the Empire and the Weimar Republic. I, however,was increasingly interested in the history that informed the law after 1945. Which of the older layers survived to be subsumed into contemporary law, and which elements in the legal system and its culture were instead new? First I approached this by summarizing the contemporary historical literature on the central legal and constitutional problems of the early history of the Federal Republic of Germany. I published this in the leadingGerman journal of legal education, Juristische Schulung, alerting young jurists to the legal aspects of the transition, the implications of Stunde Null (Hour Zero) for German partition, and the reconstruction of the German administrative apparatus after its disintegration in 1945. When Michael Stolleis and I organized a colloquium at the law faculty in Frankfurt on the theme ‘The everyday world of the justice system in the Third Reich’, I used the final lecture to look at its relevance for post-war realities, and in 1986 I returned to the theme to address the question of the judiciary and their past. In 1985 and later at a GermanJapanese colloquium I charted the continuities between nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the legal system of the Federal Republic, as well as the break with this legal order in the German Democratic Republic (DDR). In both the Soviet Occupied Zone and the earlyDDR, traditional private law still pertained. Legal scholars in the DDRset out to adjust the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (Civil Code) to make it socialist, with interesting outcomes that confirmed for the post-war generation what Bernd Rüthers had shown for the Third Reich: how effectively a legal system can be changed just by interpretation. Only later was the newly interpreted existing law replaced by new legislation. My one excursion into the interwar period came with the opportunity to reflect on the Weimar judicial system in an address about the Massacre in Mechterstädt in 1920. The woefully inadequate response by the 62
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