Lawyers

This collection documents the life and work of Eduard Lasker, a German politician and jurist, who was member of the Prussian House of Representatives between 1865 and 1879, and later on member of the German Parliament (1867). He played a decisive role in the process of German Unification (1870), and gained importance as a co-founder and leader of the National Liberal Party and chief opponent to Chancellor Bismarck. The collection includes a great amount of photographs, identity cards, membership cards and business cards, but the core consists of obituaries, transcripts of some of his speeches and essays of other scholars, a draft of a constitution of the North German Federation with marginal comments by Lasker, letters, newspaper clippings, scholarly papers, essays, articles and a review.

The life of Ernst Hamburger was extraordinarily rich and varied; regrettably, his literary estate does not completely document it. In his flight from Nazi Germany, Hamburger had to leave all his papers behind. With a few exceptions, the same was the case in 1940. It appears he made it a practice to periodically weed his papers. At his request, a friend went through his papers after his death and destroyed two cartons full of personal and confidential material. Consequently, the remaining matter is only a fragment of a much larger life’s work.