Background

Dr. Spethmann, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

Where were you born and raised?

I was born in the coal district of Germany seventy-six years ago, in 1926, in Essen, the center of the German heavy industrial world.

And looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your character?

They gave me the conditions of my character, and they shaped me through a very liberal education. My father was a man from the academy -- a geographer and geologist. He had done research in the United States in 1929 and 1930, at an important time. He then came back to Germany. Yes, I got a liberal education.

PROFESSOR FELDMAN: He also wrote very important works on the history of the Ruhr. I benefited from them. You might say something about what he wrote about the Ruhr.

He found after World War I that teaching at the university would not make a living for a family of four, so he accepted an invitation by the coal mining industry of Ruhr in 1923. He went there and did research work, and a lot of publications. The first publication was Zwölf Jahre Ruhrbergbau. When he died in '57, he had altogether some 200 publications. I think the most important ones were Das Ruhrgebiet, beginning in the early thirties, and then at the end of his life. My wife and I have the single unpublished copy of Ruhrbergbau und Zweiter Weltkrieg, which is the story of the coal mining industry during the six years of World War II.

That was a very turbulent time in German history, when you were growing up as teenager. What sticks in your mind about that period, and how your parents guided you through it?

It sticks in my mind that my parents and I survived. We lost everything material, but we survived, that is the main recollection that I have. My father lost many of his important files, materials, but he still had the strength to do some important writing after World War II.

What led you into the legal profession, which was where you turned when you went to get your education?

It was a coincidence. I had studied law and economics from November 1945 onward. But when the currency reform came in June 1948, I ran out of money, so I had to look around for the first possible examination, and that was law. So I found myself in law.

German law must have been changing at that time because of the occupation. Was it exciting in that sense?

It was fascinating because we had practically no books on which to rely, so we had to participate in the lectures. I had the advantage of writing shorthand that I had learned as an apprentice during the war. So I took shorthand notes, and I translated them into machine writing, and these copies I exchanged against something to live -- cheese, butter, whatever.

PROFESSOR FELDMAN: How did you make a living, however? It was still a very hard time.

Yes. Well, we had good luck. The three of us survived. My father had a small income from the remnants of the coal industry. I produced some cash flow from what I mentioned and a few other sources. Yes, we survived, we made it.

PROFESSOR FELDMAN: How did you move into industry?

After my law exam in December, 1948, I had to go to court. That was mandatory in those days, for at least two years, in order to qualify for the second examination. But I found that presence in the courtroom irritating, because six, seven, eight judges did their work in one single room under the conditions of postwar years. So they were more interested in practical work, which I offered to do, and less in my physical presence in the courtroom.

So I went next door to United Steel Works, where they had their coal mining headquarters, and I applied for a job there for the afternoons, and I was taken.

PROFESSOR FELDMAN: What did you do?

I helped them out with their legal department, and I tried to learn bookkeeping and taxation. And then after a while, they offered me a firm contract, which I accepted.

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