Without Dr Friedrich Karl Fromm, NORDEMANN would probably not exist today. And given the racial laws and practices in Germany after 1933, Friedrich Karl Fromm fought an uphill battle against the odds to make it past 1945.
Friedrich Karl Fromm was born in Germany in 1906. He was one of the few lawyers in Germany to specialise in intellectual property law, particularly copyright law. Under the later German racial laws, he was considered a “Halbjude” (“Half-Jew”). To save his life, he went into hiding in Silesia from 1938 to 1945. He returned to Berlin in 1945 and immediately set up his own law practice.
Friedrich Karl Fromm was not only an excellent lawyer, famous among Berlin judges for his brilliant written pleadings, but also the author of successful novels and plays.
In 1959, Wilhelm Nordemann, the father of Anke Nordemann-Schiffel, Axel Nordemann and Jan Bernd Nordemann, began a post-graduate legal traineeship in the law firm of Friedrich Karl Fromm. Wilhelm Nordemann went on to become a partner in the law firm in 1963 and one of the leading copyright lawyers in Germany.
In 1966, Friedrich and Wilhelm published the first German treatise on copyright law – the Fromm/Nordemann treatise. Friedrich Karl Fromm died in 1969, a few months after the premiere of his last play “Tribüne”.
These days we are publishing the 13th edition of the Fromm/Nordemann.
It is quite common for a former editor of a legal treatise to disappear from the name after two new editions. This did not happen here. By keeping Dr Friedrich Karl Fromm’s name in the Fromm/Nordemann since the1960ies, we want to pay tribute not only to this great personality and his achievements in law and literature, but also to his story. Neither his achievements nor what he had to endure in Germany in the 1930ies and 1940ies shall be forgotten.
