28    

THE WRITINGS ON Lauterpacht’s life had little to say about his university days, what he studied or where he lived, so I decided to explore the city archives of Lviv. Without Polish or Ukrainian language skills, I came to rely on Ihor and Ivan, admirable students at the same law faculty where Lauterpacht had studied a century earlier (Ivan’s Ph.D., on the Soviet naval base at Sebastopol in the Crimea, proved to be timely, coinciding with the renewal of Russia’s territorial forays, this time into the unlawful occupation of the Crimea). Ivan eventually took me on a trail that led to the meandering edifice that was the State Archive of Lviv Oblast.

Muzeina Square, just north of the town hall, was familiar to me, the home to a flea market, an open-air library of postcards, newspapers, and books that offered a full account of the city’s anguished twentieth century. My son bought a Soviet cuckoo clock (blue and red, metal) as I forayed for scraps from the Austro-Hungarian period, Polish postcards, a few Jewish and Yiddish objects. The premium objects—if price was the measure—were from the three years of Nazi control: I spotted the distinctive shape of a dark green Stahlhelm with a swastika on one side and an SS symbol on the other, but the seller shooed me away when I got too close.

Lemberg, 1917. Law faculty on left, second from top; railway station on right, second from top; George Hotel, bottom right.

The State Archive occupied a dilapidated eighteenth-century building abutting a former Dominican monastery, part of the Baroque Church of the Blessed Eucharist. In the Soviet era, the church served as a museum of religion and atheism; now it was a Ukrainian Greek Catholic church. A scarfed babushka guarded the entrance. “Your business?” she shouted. Ivan mouthed the password—“Archiv”—with sufficient authority that we were allowed to enter. The secret was to carry on walking, not to stop.

The reading room was reached through an overgrown rose garden and up a metal staircase over which a rain-sodden carpet had been laid. Ivan and I entered on the first floor, a place with no signs, the corridor unlit, a hallway lined with the detritus of Lembergiana. Documents lined the walls: the final retreat of the Austro-Hungarian army, November 1918; the proclamation of the independent but short-lived West Ukrainian People’s Republic, same date; the German encirclement of Soviet Lviv, June 1941; Governor Hans Frank’s order incorporating Galicia into the territory of his General Government, August 1941; another order, closing all Lemberg’s schools and universities, September 1941.

At the end of the corridor, a neon light flickered above the entrance to the reading room. Here the archivist took our book orders, in the presence of five readers, including one nun and two sleepers. All was quiet until the electricity died, a short, daily occurrence that prompted a gentle commotion, although on one occasion I noticed that the nun managed to sleep through the entire disturbance. Return tomorrow at ten, the archivist instructed, to collect the books. The next day, a pile of volumes awaited, neatly laid out on wooden desks, three towers of dust, leather, and crumbling paper. These were the student records of the law faculty from 1915 to 1919.

We began in the autumn of 1915, working our way through hundreds of forms filled in by hand, the pages arranged alphabetically by the name of each student, identified as a Pole or Mosaic (Jewish), with only a few Ukrainians. It was painstaking work. Names were written out, with lists of the courses taken, class hours, the names of the professors. The back of each form was signed and dated.

Ivan spotted a first Lauterpacht document, based on the work of his friend Ihor, which dated to the autumn of 1915, shortly after the Russians had been removed. We gathered a near-complete set, seven semesters of study from 1915 to 1919, Lauterpacht’s formative years. There was a home address, 6 Rutowskiego Street, now Teatralna Street, just a few doors from my hotel. I’d walked past it, even noticed the fine metal doors with their two large Ls at the center, mounted in circular metal frames. Lauterpacht? Lemberg? Lwów?

I learned that Lauterpacht’s studies began with Roman law and German public law, followed by one course on soul and body, and another on optimism and pessimism. Of the early teachers, only one had a familiar name, Professor Oswald Balzer, teacher of the legal histories of Poland and Austria, distinct subjects. Balzer was a practicing advocate who argued esoteric cases for the governments of Austria and Galicia. The most notable, which I’d come across in my own work on boundary disputes, was a nineteenth-century conflict over the ownership of two lakes in the Tatra Mountains. Balzer was a practical man, an influence on Lauterpacht.

The second year of studies, from September 1916, was dominated by war and the death of the emperor Franz Joseph, after a record-inducing reign over sixty-eight years. Change was in the air as battles continued to rage around the city, yet classes continued. I was struck by the seam of religious themes (Catholic Christian law, then the History and Culture of Israel) and by the daily lecture on pragmatism and instinctivism, the two poles between which Lauterpacht’s intellectual development oscillated like a sharp current of electricity. In April 1917, he passed a state exam in historical and legal science, obtaining the highest mark (“good”).

His third year began in September 1917 as Austria’s hold on the city became more tenuous. Lauterpacht took a first class on criminal law, taught by Professor Dr. Juliusz Makarewicz, a well-known authority on Austrian criminal law. A second followed, with the same teacher, on the science of the prison. A third course, on Austrian adversary proceedings, was taught by Professor Dr. Maurycy Allerhand. I mention these names because they will return.

The fourth and final year of studies opened on the cusp of dramatic changes, for Lemberg, Europe, and the world. In November 1918, as World War I ended—along with the Austro-Hungarian Empire—control of Lemberg changed as each week passed.