Renate Drucker
[1] Salem was a prestigious establishment, but Drucker herself would frequently express her sadness that, as a girl, she had been unable to follow her brothers in attending the Thomas School in Leipzig, with its rich musical heritage.
In October 1936 she moved on to Leipzig University initially intending to study Jurisprudence which would have enabled her to follow her father and uncle into the legal profession.
[1] As Nazi ideas on race became embedded in daily life, Germans were encouraged to engage in a little basic genealogy and research their four grandparents in order to demonstrate to the authorities that none of these had been Jewish.
The absence of a simple "Aryan certificate" now became a continuing burden for Drucker and her family for the rest of the twelve Nazi years, making it very difficult for her to complete her education.
[2] Progressing all the way to a higher degree at Leipzig was still unthinkable, so she then enrolled at Germany's Strasbourg University "Reichsuniversität Straßburg" where she worked on her doctorate, supported by the historian Hermann Heimpel [de] (1901–1988) and Walter Stach (1890–1955).
Just hours before US and French troops entered the city, on 23 November 1944, she successfully defended her dissertation and thereby justified her doctorate for work on "the Old High German Glosses in the Salic law" ("Die althochdeutschen Glossen in der Lex salica").
Renate Drucker's contribution to the democratic renewal of Germany now included work for the Leipzig Professional Committee of Lawyers and Notaries, engaged in the denazification of the profession.
She volunteered to help with "history studies support" ("historische Hilfswissenschaften") at the University's Historical Institute under Professor Helmut Kretzschmar (1893–1965), and just over a year later was given a job teaching Medieval Latin, at which she excelled.
The appointment, which came after several months of unclarity, temporary arrangements and fevered discussions, was made at the suggestion of a history professor newly returned from several years at the University of Rostock, Heinrich Sproemberg.
It was based more on political than on academic criteria and followed a change of heart by Hans-Georg Gadamer who had previously favoured a renewal of the contract of the existing university archivist, Richard Walter Franke.
Before the outbreak of the war the most valuable items in the archive had been hurriedly placed in the relatively bomb-proof cellar of the adjacent Augusteum building, while other records had been distributed away from the vulnerable city centre.
The archive building itself had survived the heavy bomb attack on Leipzig of 3/4 December 1943, but it was only in 1949 that a start had been made on retrieving and sorting the material from the next door cellar where it had been placed ten years earlier.
[1] Across the universities sector in East Germany she created a "Working Group for the archive departments of academic institutions" ("Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Archivare wissenschaftlicher Einrichtungen"), designed to facilitate the orderly exchange of materials.
[8] The foundation, named after the German rabbi Ephraim Carlebach, is dedicated to researching the many faceted contribution of the Jewish community as an integrated element in the city's history.
