Gertrud Schubart-Fikentscher (23 December 1896 - 24 March 1985) became Germany's first female professor of Law in September 1948, and remained the country's only female university law professor - after 1957 an emeritus (retired) law professor - for seventeen years. She taught at the University of Halle. By the time she received and accepted her professorship she was a few months short of her fifty-second birthday, reflecting a somewhat indirect career trajectory, her having grown up in a country where the educational system was not set up to enable women either to study or teach at any university.
Life
Provenance and early years
Gertrud Klara Rosalie Fikentscher was born into a Protestant family in Zwickau, where her father successfully ran a small family business in the manufacturing sector. Between 1903 and 1913 she attended the "Höhere Bürgerschule" girls' school in Zwickau, after which she received further tuition privately for the next few years. Meanwhile war broke out in 1914. In 1916 she left her parents' home and relocated to Berlin where she lived with relatives. She undertook a twelve-month traineeship in child welfare at the "Charlottenburger Seminar des Vereins Jugendhilfe". Over the next few years she worked as a school care-worker and in other child welfare jobs, alternating or combining her work with periods of training. Between 1919 and 1921 she was a student at the Alice Salomon Women's Social Work Academy (subsequently renamed) where in July 1921 she completed the national exams in welfare care, receiving a coveted "very good" commendation in respect of her exam results. Thus qualified, in September 1921 she accepted an appointment as head of the "Youth Court Assistance" ("Jugendgerichtshilfe") for central Berlin. Over the next few years her work gave her valuable hand-on experience of the youth justice system which awoke her interest in the Law more generally. Despite never having been entered for the Abitur (school leaving exams) which, once passed, opened the way for young men of her generation to move on to university-level education, the gender bias in the education system had been softened a little by the slaughter of war, and during the early 1920s Fikentscher was able to attend law lectures at Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University as a "guest attendee" ("Gasthörerin"). She passed the Prussian Culture Ministry "Culture Exam" which provided a belated alternative opening to university admission, and between 1924 and 1928, she studied Jurisprudence in Berlin.
In October 1928 she sat and passed her Part I national law exams ("Staatsexamen") which under some circumstances might have preceded a traineeship with a law firm. It is not clear whether she ever contemplated that step. On 17 December 1928 she married her uncle, the leading scholar and internationally respected papyrologist, Wilhelm Schubart (1873-1960), whose first wife had died the previous April. Gertrud Fikenscher had known her uncle and his wife since moving to Berlin twelve years earlier, and it is likely that it was only on account of Schubart's encouragement that she had pursued her legal studies with such persistence. The newly married couple spent six months between April and November 1929 in Egypt together in connection with Wilhelm Schubart's papyrological researches. It was Wilhelm's sixth visit to Egypt and Gertrud's first (and only) stay in the country. Between 1929 and 1933, while her husband fulfilled his teaching contract at the university, Gertrud Schubart-Fikentscher pursued her own academic path.
Under National Socialism
She received her doctorate from the same university. Her doctoral supervisor was Ernst Heymann (whose entry in the Neue Deutsche Biographie she would subsequently contribute). Her dissertation was based on a study of the Brünner Schöffenbuch from which she had distilled a study of marriage law in the medieval period. She analysed the Roman Law basis for the medieval legal context and drew conclusions on the legal status of women as this had evolved in the empire by and during the medieval period. Had she been pursuing a conventional academic career, her doctorate would have been followed a few years later by her Habilitation (higher academic degree). However, in January 1933 the Hitler government had taken power; they lost no time in transforming the country into a one- party dictatorship. There is no indication that Schubart-Fikentscher had been politically engaged up to this point, but sources nevertheless state that "on account of her political convictions" she was refused the opportunity to progress to a Habilitation degree.