In Memoriam Boris Meissner

IN MEMORIAM BORIS MEISSNER

Professor Boris Meissner was for many years, until his retirement, the director of the Institut für Ostrecht of the University of Cologne, where he was succeeded by professor Georg Brunner. Now, less than a year after the death of the latter, the fi eld of East European studies has suffered another great loss when professor Meissner passed away on 10 September 2003 in Cologne. Boris Meissner was born on 10 August 1915 in the old Russian city of Pskov, the last Russian principality to submit to the Moscow grand prince (in 1509). Pskov is not far from Estonia and that is where Boris Meissner went to school (in Pernau/Parnu) and to university (in Dorpat/Tartu/Iur’ev). He then continued his studies in law and economics at the universities of Posen (now Poznan’) and Breslau (Wroclaw), until the war broke out. After the war he started working at the university of Hamburg, concentrating on the Soviet Union and combining the disciplines of political science, public international law, and constitutional law. In 1953 he joined the West German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spending some time in Moscow and being closely involved in the rebuilding of German-Soviet rela- tions. In 1959 he accepted the chair of East European Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Kiel, moving to Cologne in 1964. For several decades Meissner was one of the most active and infl uential fi gures in East European studies in Germany. It is not very well known in the English-speaking world that the scholarly output of East European studies in Germany has for many years been larger than that of the rest of the world put together. Meissner’s tireless organizational work certainly deserves great credit for the high level and vast size of the collective achievement of German scholarship. His own academic work was equally impressive; until quite recently he kept up a continuous stream of books and articles of great quality. He will continue to be respected as one of the principal authorities on Soviet public international law and foreign policy and he must be regarded as one of the leading sovietologists of the last decades. He had the satisfaction of seeing his beloved Estonia restored as a sovereign state and he took an active part in the rebuilding of its legal system. He had received high honours from the German government and other governments, but nothing delighted him more than the honorary doctorate bestowed upon him by his old alma mater in Tartu. He will be remembered as an inspiring and impressive teacher by his students and as a kind, generous and courtly gentleman by his colleagues and friends.

Ferdinand Feldbrugge 680 28 Review of Central and East European Law 2002-3 No.3/4