Ernst Fraenkel - Biography

Ernst Fraenkel (26 December 1898 – 28 March 1975) was a German political scientist. He was one of the founding fathers of German political science after World War II.

During the Weimar Republic Fraenkel was a member of the social democrats and one of the few jurists who held socialist opinions. According to some historians in the 1930s he was designated to be Attorney General of a possible social-democratic German government. In 1939 he immigrated to the United States where he began to develop his respect for the politics of that country, especially its pluralism and its checks and balances.

Life

Fraenkel was born in a Jewish family in Cologne. He served during the First World War from 1914 to 1918 in the German Army. He wrote his dissertation in law about the void labour contract (Der nichtige Arbeitsvertrag) with the help of Hugo Sinzheimer. During the Weimar Republic he worked as a lawyer for labor law with Franz Leopold Neumann, published scientific publications and was engaged in socialist politics. As a soldier in World War One he was still allowed to work to a limited extent even after the Nazis came to power in 1933. He was connected to several resistance groups such as the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (International Socialist Fighting Alliance). In 1938 he finally immigrated to the United Kingdom, in 1939 to the United states.

After studying American law Fraenkel lectured at the New School for Social Research. In 1941 he published The Dual State in which he analysed the political system of the Nazi state. For Fraenkel it was a "normative state" (Normenstaat) which secured the continuation of capitalist society for those Germans not threatened by Nazism coexisted alongside a "prerogative state" (Maßnahmenstaat) that used legal sanctions as well as brutal violence against people considered to be enemies of Nazism and Nazi Germany.

From 1945 on Fraenkel was an adviser to the American government but was soon dissatisfied with their policy of occupation in Korea. For the United Nations he was supposed to be one of the people to prepare free elections in Korea, but the Korean War made the elections impossible and forced Fraenkel to leave the country.

In 1951 Fraenkel returned to Germany. He became a lecturer at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (German University for Politics) in Berlin and later a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he founded the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies. He considered his writings to be normative, his concept of pluralism was meant to criticize the existing political system. Those among his students who were active in the 1968 movement, however, saw his American-influenced theories as defending monopolistic capitalism. He died in Berlin.

Works

• 1927 - Zur Soziologie des Klassenkampfes (Sociology of Class Warfare)
• 1931-1933 - "Chronik" des republikanischen Richterbundes (Chronicles of the Republikanischer Richterbund)
• 1941 - The Dual State
• 1960 - Das amerikanische Regierungssystem (The American System of Government)
• 1964 - Deutschland und die westlichen Demokratien (Germany and the Western Democracies)