Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1874–1936), Jurist – Friedensforscher – Künstler

Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, great-great-grandson of the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and grandson of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, was a renowned professor of international and foreign law, a peace researcher and an artist. After he had studied law at the Universities of Leipzig, Heidelberg and Munich, he became a member of the faculty at the University of Leipzig and in 1905 assumed a full professorship at the University of Würzburg in the fields of civil law and civil procedure law (as of 1917, also in the area of international law, especially English law). Mendelssohn Bartholdy was regarded as the most accomplished expert in Anglo-Saxon law within Germany. From 1912 he was a member of a committee for a better understanding between Germany and England, and after World War I he tirelessly sought for a reconciliation of the two nations' peoples.In 1920 he relocated to the University of Hamburg, founded just earlier in 1919. Mendelssohn Bartholdy became professor of foreign law and, in 1923, director of the Institute for Foreign Policy«. This famous »Mendelssohn Institute« was one of the first research institutes for peace studies in the world, the first research institute for political science in Germany and – like its founder – a representative of the democratic Weimar Republic. Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a member of the German peace delegation at Versailles 1919, a member of the Hague court of arbitration for resolving differences of interpretation in the Dawes-Plan and Young-Plan (starting in 1925), and a member of the German delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva (starting in 1931).After his first lecture tour in the United States in 1926 he founded a special library for American law, a society for friends of the United States in Hamburg and the bilingual journal »Hamburg-Amerika-Post« which carried the English subtitle »A messenger of good will between the United States and Germany«. In 1927 he received an honorary LL. D. from Harvard University, and in 1929 one from the University of Chicago as well. After the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933, Mendelssohn Bartholdy lost almost everything within a few months. As a »non-Aryan« and a democrat he was dismissed from the University of Hamburg and was forced to resign from the directorship of his own institute. In 1934 he emigrated to England, where he was elected senior research fellow of Balliol College. He died in Oxford in November 1936 at the age 62.This essay is the first step towards a biography on Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, which will describe the life of an outstanding liberal and attempt to rediscover his impressive academic achievements.