Sinn für Institutionen

In a memorial speech for the Heidelberg theologian and Berlin cultural philosopher Ernst Troeltsch, which he gave on 23 March 1923 at the "Democratic Club Berlin", Theodor Heuss attested to his fatherly friend's strong "sense of institutions": "almost a lawyer". This essay is about Troeltsch's reception of jurisprudential literature and his close friendship with the constitutional law teacher Georg Jellinek. In a tense learning pro-cess, the politically committed liberal-religious Protestant became a democrat fighting for the republic out of patriotic sentiment - for which Weimar constitutional law teachers such as Carl Schmitt and Rudolf Smend criticised him.