Otto Kahn‐Freund: A Weimar Life

Date01 November 2017
AuthorRuth Dukes
Published date01 November 2017
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12307
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REVIEW ARTICLE
Otto Kahn-Freund: A Weimar Life
Ruth Dukes
H. Ludyga,Otto Kahn-Freund (1900-1979) Ein Arbeitsrechtler in der
Weimarer Zeit, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2016, vi, 120pp, hb £37.99.
The name Otto Kahn-Freund will likely be familiar to readers of this journal,
if not as that of a leading scholar of law during the second half of the twentieth
century, then as that of a regular contributor to the Modern Law Review and,
from 1945, a member of its Editorial Committee.1Although Kahn-Freund
published on a range of subjects, including family law, comparative law and
international private law, it is for his contribution to labour law scholarship that
he is best remembered. Still today it is not unusual for scholarly consideration of
a question arising in that field to begin with a recollection of what Kahn-Freund
thought, or might have thought, the answer to be. Indeed, such is the continued
fascination and engagement with Kahn-Freund’s work that the publication of
this new biography – Otto Kahn-Freund (1900-1979) Ein Arbeitsrechtler in der
Weimarer Zeit – is likely to be met with some interest.2
As the subtitle of the book indicates, its primary focus lies with the fourteen
years of the Weimar Republic, during which Kahn-Freund matured from an
undergraduate student to a judge in the Labour Courts in Berlin and finally to
a refugee from Nazism, struggling together with his wife Elisabeth to build a
new life for themselves in London. Its author, Hannes Ludyga, a Professor of
Private Law at the University of Saarland, explains in the introduction that his
primary motivation in writing the book was to contribute to the as yet relatively
sparse body of research on the mostly Jewish scholars and artists who emigrated
or fled from Germany and Austria in the 1930s; a group which includes, of
course, no lesser figures than Albert Einstein, Otto Klemperer, and Sigmund
Freud (2). It is not intended, Ludyga explains, as a definitive biography of
Kahn-Freund – and, indeed, the treatment of the subject’s life in England after
the end of the Second World War is very br ief, restricted primar ily to a record
of his limited engagement with German politics and scholarship in those later
decades (80-86).
School of Law, University of Glasgow.I am grateful to Mark Freedland and Alan Bogg for comments
on an earlier draft.
1 C. Glasser, ‘Radicals and Refugees: the Foundation of the Modern Law Review and English
Legal Scholarship’ (1987) MLR 688-708.
2 H. Ludyga, Otto Kahn-Freund (1900-1979) Ein Arbeitsrechtler in der Weimarer Zeit (Berlin/Boston:
De Gruyter, 2016).
C2017 The Author. The Modern Law Review C2017 The Modern Law Review Limited. (2017)80(6) MLR 1164–1177
Published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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