Otto Max Köbner
1869 - 1934

Otto Max Köbner was born in Breslau (Silesia, Prussia) in June 1869, the son of dermatologist Dr. Heinrich Köbner (1838-1904) and Agnes Ephraim (?-1889). His parents were Jewish. His father habilitated in medicine at the University of Breslau in 1869. In 1872 Heinrich Köbner became a professor and four years later was appointed director of the Breslau University Clinic and Polyclinic for Skin Diseases and Syphilis.

In December 1914, Otto Max Köbner married Eva Liebermann, who was born in Berlin in November 1878. She was the daughter of the Jewish textile entrepreneur Georg Liebermann (1844-1926), older brother of the famous Jewish painter Max Liebermann (1847-1935), and Elsbeth Marckwald (1855-1924). The Köbners' marriage was childless. Otto Max Köbner was baptized a Protestant in February 1898, the year in which he became an employee of the Reichsmarineamt in Berlin. In Frankfurt on the Main, the Köbners lived at Zeppelinallee 44 in the Bockenheim district from at least 1928.

After Otto Köbner graduated from the Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin in 1887, he studied law at the universities of Freiburg (im Breisgau), Berlin and Vienna. In 1890, he passed his first state examination in law. In September 1891, he received his doctorate in law from the University of Berlin with a thesis on "Die Maßregel der Einziehung nach dem Reichsstrafgesetzbuche und der Nachdruckgesetzgebung" (The measure of confiscation according to the Reich Criminal Code and the reprint legislation). Almost four years later, he was awarded his doctorate at the University of Berlin with a further thesis on "Die Methode einer wissenschaftlichen Rückfallstatistik als Grundlage einer Reform der Kriminalstatistik" (The method of scientific recidivism statistics as the basis for a reform of criminal statistics).

From 1891 he worked as a trainee lawyer in the German capital, and in 1896 at the Berlin Court of Appeal. The following year he became a court assessor and was also a legal assistant in the Imperial Navy Office. Dr. Otto Köbner gradually rose through the ranks. In 1900 he was first appointed Imperial Councillor of Justice and Assistant Councillor at the Central Administration for the German Protectorate of Kiautschou in China, then Admiralty Councillor and finally, in 1907, Acting Admiralty Councillor and Lecturing Councillor at the Imperial Navy Office (Central Administration for the Protectorate of Kiautschou). In 1913, Köbner was then appointed Privy Admiralty Councillor with the rank of Councillor 2nd Class. From 1915 to the beginning of 1920, he became a consultant in the Reichsamt des Inneren and the Reichsministerium des Inneren (Reich Ministry of the Interior). He undertook numerous trips, including to North America and East Asia.

Parallel to his legal activities, Dr. Otto Köbner worked as an assistant lecturer for consular and colonial law at the Seminar for Oriental Languages at the University of Berlin from 1901 to 1906. He held the title of professor from July 1902. From 1905, he worked first as a private lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of Berlin, then as an associate professor, and from 1917 as a full honorary professor.

On October 1, 1925, he was appointed full professor of foreign studies, foreign policy and colonial affairs in the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Frankfurt on the Main. He was also Director of the newly created Department of Foreign Studies at the University's Institute of Economics. Up to and including the summer semester of 1933, he held lectures and tutorials on these subjects, for example in the winter semester of 1930/31 on "Entwicklungslinien der Weltpolitik" (Lines of development in world politics), "Probleme des britischen Weltreiches" (Problems of the British Empire) and "Seminaristische Uebungen aus dem Gebiet der auswärtigen Politik" (Seminar exercises in the field of foreign policy), and in the summer semester of 1933 on "Auswärtige Politik" (Foreign policy) and "Probleme Ostasiens" (Problems of East Asia).

During the First World War, Prof. Dr. Otto Köbner not only worked at the Reichsamt des Inneren, but also travelled, for example, to the front in Macedonia in the spring of 1918 where he gave lectures to soldiers. In April 1917 he was awarded the Cross of Merit for War Aid and in January 1918 the Iron Cross II class with white ribbon, which was awarded to people who did not fight at the front.

Otto Köbner published numerous works, such as "Einführung in die Kolonialpolitik" (Introduction to colonial policy), published in Jena in 1908, and "Wohlfahrtserwerbslose und Gemeinden" (Welfare unemployed and communities), published in Berlin in 1930. Also in 1930, Wilhelm Arntz published a commemorative publication for Otto Köbner on his 60th birthday entitled "Außenpolitische Studien" (Foreign policy studies). Prof. Dr. Otto Köbner published his views on teaching in Frankfurt on the Main in 1926 in the "Kölner Universitäts-Zeitung" under the title "Die weltpolitische Schulung des Studenten" (The global political education of the student). According to the city edition of the Frankfurter Zeitung on November 11, 1925, he described his work as a "nationale Erziehungsaufgabe" (national educational task) with regard to foreign policy.

Prof. Dr. Otto Max Köbner became a member of the Frankfurt on the Main section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club in March 1930, according to the Nachrichten-Blatt of the Frankfurt on the Main section. He came from the Berlin section, which he had joined as a student in 1888, at the age of 19.

He was active in the Berlin section in the period before the First World War. For example, he spoke about "Dalmatia and Montenegro" in May 1890 and reported "From Abruzzo" in November 1897. Thanks to submitted tour reports, we know that in the 1890s he climbed, for example, the Hohe Dachstein (2995m), the Suldenspitze (3376m), the Cima di Brenta (3151m), and the Corno Grande of the Gran Sasso d'Italia (2912m). After 1900, he climbed the Titlis (3238m) in 1901 and the Rotwandspitze in the Rosengarten group (2806m) in 1909, as well as the winter ascent of the Rochers-de-Naye (2042m) in 1901 and winter hikes in the Harz mountains (Brocken, 1901/2) and the Riesengebirge (1908/9).

Otto Max Köbner attended a celebration of the Vienna Academic Section in Vienna in January 1889 and co-founded the Berlin Academic Section after his return to the German capital. He was also its first chairman until the fall of 1890 and later a member as "Alter Herr". According to the 1928/29 annual report of the Academic Section Berlin, which also formed the commemorative publication for the 40th anniversary of the Academic Section, he was one of the three honorary members of this section alongside the Jewish architect Fedor Feit and the district court judge Lothar Keyssner. Interestingly, the Academic Section Berlin also voted against the anti-Semitically motivated exclusion of the Donauland Section, which was heavily influenced by Jewish members, in 1924.

At present, we cannot say in what way Prof. Dr. Otto Köbner participated in section life in Frankfurt on the Main. Although he came from a Jewish family, he did not leave the section in 1933. As Prof. Köbner had already been a member of the Alpine Club before 1914, the so-called "Aryan paragraph" newly introduced in Frankfurt did not affect him. Interestingly, he was listed by name in the Frankfurt section's Nachrichten-Blatt of April 1935 among the "treuen und bewährten Mitgliedern" (loyal and proven members) who had been "torn" from the ranks of the section by death the previous year. This proves that the Section had in fact not excluded him until his death in January 1934.

Otto Max Köbner was no longer allowed to teach at the University of Frankfurt on the Main from the winter semester of 1933/34 because of his Jewish parents. According to a letter in the university archives in Frankfurt on the Main, Professor Köbner himself requested his retirement at the beginning of August 1933. This took place at the end of September of the same year. He died in January 1934 and was buried at Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdorf, where the graves of Gustav Langenscheidt, Werner von Siemens, and Heinrich Zille can also be found. Upon being informed of Otto Köbner's death by his widow Eva Köbner, the Rector of the University of Frankfurt on the Main, Ernst Krieck, who had been appointed in April 1933, wrote to her:

"Hochverehrte gnädige Frau! Nehmen Sie bitte das herzliche Beileid unserer Universität und auch das meine entgegen zu dem Heimgange Ihres Herrn Gemahls. An seiner Bahre trauert mit Ihnen unsere Universität und ihr Lehrkörper, die in ihm einen ausgezeichneten Lehrer und einen lieben Kollegen verlieren. Aber nicht nur auf den Kreis der Universität erstreckte sich sein rastloses Wirken; durch seine Vorträge und die von ihm ins Leben gerufenen außerordentlich erfolgreichen Vortragsreihen hat er Klarheit und Wissen über Auslandsfragen in breite Schichten unseres Volkes getragen und in diesem das Bewußtsein seiner Weltgeltung gestärkt. Der Name des Verblichenen wird in unserem Herzen und in der Geschichte unserer Hochschule unvergessen bleiben. Mit dem Ausdruck ausgezeichneter Hochschätzung verbleibe ich Ihr sehr ergebener Krieck" (Dear madam! Please accept our university's and my heartfelt condolences on the passing of your husband. Our university and its teaching staff, who have lost an excellent teacher and a dear colleague in him, mourn with you at his bier. But his tireless work was not limited to the university; through his lectures and the extraordinarily successful lecture series he initiated, he brought clarity and knowledge about foreign issues to broad sections of our people and strengthened their awareness of his international standing. The name of the deceased will remain unforgotten in our hearts and in the history of our university. With the expression of excellent esteem I remain your very devoted Krieck).

For a rector with National Socialist leanings, this honor for a professor who was persecuted as a Jew is unusual. However, it shows the high esteem in which Otto Köbner was held at the university. The Frankfurter Zeitung reported in detail about the late "Geheimrat Köbner" in its city newspaper on January 30, 1934, even mentioning his Jewish father Heinrich Köbner by name.

According to the Memorial Book of the Victims of the Persecution of Jews under National Socialist Tyranny in Germany published by the Federal Archives, Eva Köbner, his wife, took her own life in October 1939. Her brother, the chemist Prof. Dr. Hans Liebermann, had also committed suicide a year earlier, in September 1938, due to Nazi persecution.