Erik Wolf

Nationality

Germany

Date of Birth

1902

Date of Death

1977

Political
Preference

Erik Wolf was born in Biebrich, Hessen and studied economics and law at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, then law and history at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, and the University of Heidelberg. Wolf was an outspoken legal professor and active in the ecumenical movement.

He focused on criminal law and legal philosophy, lecturing in Bonn and Kiel, where he met Martin Heidegger and was appointed full professor of criminal law at the University of Rostock in 1928.
In 1930 he became professor at the University of Kiel, but in the same year he was appointed to the Chair for the History of Law and Philosophy of Law at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg. There he was introduced by Gerhart Husserl in the circle around the philosopher Edmund Husserl, where he made an impression. Under the influence of Martin Heidegger, Wolf fell under the spell of Nazi ideology in 1933/1934. In 1933 he welcomed the seizure of power by the National Socialists. In the summer of 1933, Wolf joined the NS Lawyers’ Association. Heidegger, then rector in Freiburg, appointed Wolf as the first dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Science after the takeover. After Heidegger’s resignation as Rector, Wolf resigned from the Dean’s Office in April 1934. He had seen “the legal ideal of the National Socialist state” in the estates state, in his opinion an “eternally essential” “order of God”. From 1936 Wolf became a member of the Confessing Church and joined the NSDAP in 1937. Wolf did not publicly distance himself from National Socialism. In 1939, he attempted to help overcome the methodological dispute in National Socialist law by stating that “the material content of justice in the area of ​​contemporary German law is determined by National Socialism. All individual legal ideals are determined by his idea, including that of criminal law. ” According to Christoph Mährlein, Wolf was able to clearly distinguish itself from the Nazi ideology, but it was not entirely clear whether he was no longer attached to National Socialism.

During the Second World War, Wolf worked on the Nazi project “Warfare in the Humanities”.
Wolf, who made statements in favor of the Nazi regime after 1933, had turned into a decisive opponent of the Nazi system at the end of 1941. He became active in the Freiburger Circle and contributed to Annex 5 of the Freiburg memorial Political Community Order. Wolf also stayed active in the ecumenical movement. After the Second World War, Erik Wolf was Chairman of the Constitutional Committee of the Evangelical Church in Germany from 1946 to 1948 and delegate to the World Church Conference in Amsterdam in 1948.