Abstract
In the run-up to the Re-Unification of the East and West Germany in the 1990's the governments faced a problem, how do we integrate two political systems without causing a collapse of the economy and livelihoods. In order to counter the aforementioned the East-German government initiated the Treuhandanstalt, a piece of legislation that would govern over State Owned Enterprises in order to ready them for either investors to take over or for liquidation. In so doing the similarities between the Anglo-Saxon Trust and the Germanic Treuhand is of extreme interest, namely; in what manner did the German government design the Treuhandanstalt? Was it focussed on the Germanic tradition, of does it draw heavily from the common law trust? This paper focusses on the similarities and differences between the two concepts of ownership.
Highlights
A crisis leads to innovation and creativity in problem solving
With regard to the legal systems that formed the basis of East German jurisdiction before the reunification in 1990, one ought to analyse the Marxian stance towards property in a communist system, as the communist and socialist ideology can be traced back to the thinking of one man, as opposed to the compilation of ideas in the capitalist system
The Treuhand mechanism can be regarded as the ugly duckling of German law: it is rather strange and does not fit within conventional German law
Summary
‘Various authors, (...) especially English and American, are inclined to deny soviet law the originality that it claims, and to classify this law in the family of Romanist laws’.17 This extract – written when the Cold War was in full swing in 1985 – clearly shows the tension between scholars from the political East and West, so it was no wonder that the response of the Soviet legal scholars was that their colleges in the West were undoubtedly mistaken. ‘Various authors, (...) especially English and American, are inclined to deny soviet law the originality that it claims, and to classify this law in the family of Romanist laws’.17 This extract – written when the Cold War was in full swing in 1985 – clearly shows the tension between scholars from the political East and West, so it was no wonder that the response of the Soviet legal scholars was that their colleges in the West were undoubtedly mistaken. With regard to the legal systems that formed the basis of East German jurisdiction before the reunification in 1990, one ought to analyse the Marxian stance towards property in a communist system, as the communist and socialist ideology can be traced back to the thinking of one man, as opposed to the compilation of ideas in the capitalist system. After all ‘the soviet state [had] remained a socialist state, founded on an economical infrastructure that conforms to Marxist doctrine’, as David & Brierley commented on the Soviet laws of Russia.[18]
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