Die ältesten Quellen zur Kodifikationsgeschichte des österreichischen ABGB

Christian Neschwara

"... habent sua fata libelli": Nowadays this saying is usually used to state, that a text is only able to impart as much message, as the reader is willing to understand. However, we can make use of this saying in another sense too - for instance just as James Joyce used to say: to give a "book in print a life of its own"; meaning that the fate of a book is above all built on the fact, that it was put into the world. Of course there are papers, which never caught sight of the world, or which later got lost - for example due to a fire-disaster. On the 15th of July 1927, the most important files about the history of the making of Austria's General Civil Code sustained such a fate, due to the fire-disaster in the Viennese Palace of Justice, where these documents have been treasured at the Archive of the Ministry of Justice. This destruction, however, did not lead to the total loss of...