The Successor: The Life, Work and Impact of Ernst Heymann (1870-1946)

From 1937 to 1946, Ernst Heymann led the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign and International Private Law as successor to Ernst Rabel. On the occasion of the Institute’s 100-year anniversary, Heymann’s life, work, and impact is depicted by Reinhard Zimmermann, Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, the entity which emerged from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

The 1937 appointment of Ernst Heymann as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign and International Private Law, which had been housed in the Berlin City Palace, occurred after his predecessor Ernst Rabel was forced to resign from his position on account of his non-Aryan ancestry under the terms of national socialist legislation. It was for the same reason that Heymann had already succeeded Rabel in 1933 as dean of the Law Faculty of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität.

Who was Ernst Heymann? In order to answer this question, Zimmermann draws not only on many historic sources but also on the still extant daily journals of Heymann. He comes to the conclusion that while not a supporter of the national socialist regime, Rabel’s successor was at the same time not one of its opponents. Heymann was socialized in the era of the Wilhelmine Empire and adhered to an authoritarian view of the state. His even character and considerable organizational talent predestined his being selected to take over numerous influential positions within the academic system as constituted in the Empire, the Weimar Republic, and during the Nazi period. Yet he was never able to equal the academic achievement or international acclaim of his predecessor Rabel. 

As Institute director, he performed his work in the institutional context of a Kaiser Wilhelm Society that had been configured under a national socialist hue. From 1940 forward, to secure the Institute’s ongoing existence, he sought to portray its academic research and expert reports as essential for the war effort. In 1946 he died in Tübingen, the city to which the Institute had been evacuated in 1944 in order to avoid the destruction of its library from bombardment. Highly regarded in his time, Heymann is today a mostly forgotten figure.

The publication has also been published online in open access.

Image: © Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law / Bastian Kurzynsky