Introduction

Current legal aid in Germany consists of assistance with legal costs in con­nection with a lawsuit and legal advice. An economically disadvantaged citizen finds a private lawyer and they provide legal assistance as part of their occupational practice.

H. Kawamura (*)

Faculty of Law, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail: kawamura@jur.uni-frankfurt.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 117

Switzerland AG 2021

F. Batlan, M. Vasara-Aaltonen (eds.), Histories of Legal Aid, World

Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80271-4_5

legal aid clinics in Germany.^[350] There are public legal advice centres, for example, in Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, and Lubeck, which are operated by municipalities.^[351] In Frankfurt am Main, the Bar Association (Frankfurter Anwaltsverein) operates its legal advice centre for socially and economi­cally disadvantaged people, where lawyers provide legal advice pro bono.^[352] However, these kinds of public offices for legal aid are rather the exception.

From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, the situation was quite different. This was a time when diverse and plural legal aid was realised in Germany, and many entities provided legal advice for economically and socially disadvantaged people. Moreover, most of the legal advisers were lay lawyers. In some large cities, jurists—judges, prac­tising lawyers, and other qualified lawyers—provided legal advice.

The historical experience in Germany suggests some important points about legal aid including professionalisation (lay vs. professional lawyers as providers), the range of clients, the relationship to social policy, as well as legal aid and the development of industrial society. This chapter describes and analyses the development of extrajudicial legal aid^[353] in Germany in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century from these viewpoints. It consists of two parts. In the first part, the background of extrajudicial legal aid as provided by some organisations—the Catholic Church and Free Trade Unions, public legal advice centres of charitable organisations and municipalities, and the Legal Protection Centre for Women—will be described to provide an overview of extrajudicial legal aid in Germany at that time. In the second part, the development of extrajudicial legal aid will be analysed from different perspectives including the effort of Prussia to promote municipal legal advice centres and the quantitative and quali­tative development of extrajudicial legal aid. This chapter continues by examining legal regulations regarding the provision of legal advice, and the relationship between extrajudicial legal aid, practising lawyers, and professionalisation.

Before moving to the main topic, some explanations of the terminology and definitions will be helpful. The phrase “legal aid” is usually used to mean legal assistance for economically disadvantaged people. It can be classified into two categories. The first is assistance with the legal costs in connection with a lawsuit. In Germany, this was called Armenrecht until 1980 and is now stipulated as Prozesskostenhilfe in the Code of Civil Procedure (legal aid in a narrow sense).^[354] The second is the provision of legal advice, which in German is called Beratungshilfe, for which the Beratungshilfegesetz is applied.^[355] For this kind of legal aid, the expression “extrajudicial legal aid” (auβergerichtliche Rechtsberatung) is used in con­trast with legal aid for a lawsuit, and it means helping economically and socially disadvantaged people through legal advice out of court.

In the early twentieth century, the recipients of free legal advice were quite diverse, and the largest group was composed of the working class. However, as a cohort, workers at that time could not be simply classified as “the poor.” Rather, there was significant economic and social variation. Furthermore, the provision of extrajudicial legal aid was not limited to economically disadvantaged people. Some organisations supported certain socially disadvantaged groups, such as women, religious minorities, for­eign workers, and others. To encompass this wide range of clients, in this text, I use the expression “workers and economically and socially disad­vantaged people.”