The new co-editor of the Savigny-Zeitschrift and member of the Akademie für Deutsches Recht

1936 - the year of Koschaker’s arrival in Berlin - coincides with another important stage in his academic career, namely his acceptance on the editorial board of the Roman law section (Romanistische Abteilung) of the Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung.

This sequence of events also concerned Koschaker. In March 1934, he had been requested to take the place of his close friend Rabel, who had resigned in January of the same year, but Koschaker refused to do so. Wenger therefore took Rabel's place.^{[255] [256] With Levy and Koschaker as the main editors of the journal, along with Heymann, Stutz and Feine, there seemed to be a safe and cautious enough combination to calm the worries of the publisher Karl Rauch.[257] However, when Koschaker refused to join the editorial board, Levy also decided to stand down (he would have otherwise have remained).}

Finkenauer and Hermann referred to this conduct as the opportunism of a man interested in his career, who did not want to be compromised, and Koschaker’s human weaknesses emerge from these events.^[262]

Similar considerations can also be made with regard to the events surrounding his participation as a member of the Akademie fur Deutsches Recht and the lecture he gave there in December 1937. This academy had been instituted in 1933 by the Nazi regime in order to promote German law (a "deuisches Gemeinrecht”):'^[263]'' its president being Frank, who was Commissioner of the Reich for the Standardisation of Justice (Reichskommissar fur die Gleichschaltung der Justiz) in 1937.^[264] Just one year earlier, Frank had been invited to give a lecture at the Fascist Institute of Culture (Istituto fascista di cultura) in Rome: clearly influenced by the theories on German law elaborated over the decades by scholars like Chamberlain, Leonhard and Wagemann, he explained that one may distinguish between an original "Roman law”, which was still the unalterated law of a "Nordic population”, and a "Roman law” of the later period, developed under the deleterious influence of Oriental laws (and the Jewish influence, in particular).^[265] Moreover, according to the dominant trend of that time among Germanists,^[266] it appeared from Frank’s lecture that the target of regime’s hatred was no longer the so-called "Roman law of the Romans”, but rather the Roman law as studied and developed by the pandectists.^[267] Nonetheless, the hostility of the Nazi regime towards Roman law was unquestionable and Point 19 of the programme of the NSDAP represented an attack on it.^[268]

When Koschaker was invited to talk at the Akademie für Deutsches Recht, he decided nonetheless to deal with Roman law and, in particular, with the crisis it was undergoing in Germany at the time.

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