TV judge Ruth Herz has died at the age of 79
She was the figurehead of a fictional court show: “The Juvenile Court” ran on RTL from 2001 to 2007. The TV judge Dr. Ruth Herz not only allowed a glimpse behind the scenes, she was also a paradigm for dealing fairly and respectfully with young people. This caused a lot of sympathy in the TV audience. She dealt with young people between the ages of 14 and 21 who were responsible for fights, car theft or purse snatching. Ruth Herz knew from her own experience how difficult paths in life can be. Because her biography was unusual. She had compiled her life experiences in the book “Rechtpersonal”.
Her Jewish parents fled Breslau in 1933 from the Nazis, who had seized power in Germany earlier that year. The father was Rudolf Pick, a lawyer in Düsseldorf, as many of their ancestors valued jurisprudence. “On public holidays, when the family got together for the festive meals, there were no fewer than 17 lawyers at the table,” she writes in her biography. The mother belonged to one of the founding families of the city of Tel Aviv. Just because they were Jews, they had to give up all their jobs and leave the country that they took for granted as their homeland.
Nevertheless, her father returned as part of the British occupation army in 1950. He was responsible for the return of Jewish property and later a lawyer in the Frankfurt trials. Determination was a trait in her family and in Ruth Herz’s. First she trained as an interpreter, then she studied law in Geneva, Munich and Cologne. After completing her doctorate at the University of Cologne in 1974, she was sworn in as a judge.
It was a big day for her. Since her robe was too big for her and reached over her feet, the chairman of the chamber said to her seriously: “You will still have to grow into it.” She did not understand that as if he wanted to encourage her, she writes.
The judiciary in the 1970s was a purely male world. “His statement seemed to me to be more of an expression of his skepticism as to whether a very young woman was worthy of this office.” But that was to change in the next few years.
As a wife and mother of two children, things were not made easy for her. “I didn’t want to stand aside,” she said of her role in the women’s emancipation movement, “which encouraged many women to fight against the superiority of men.” Equality was taken for granted in her family. But not in the professional world. “Being a judge is not always easy for a woman,” says her biography. “As a woman, you are constantly confronted with prejudices. ‘You are a judge? You don’t look like it. I imagined the judges to be very different’.”
Ruth Herz was also successful in the academic field. She was visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. She taught at Princeton University as a Visiting Fellow and as a Research Associate at Oxford University. With her former husband Thomas Herz she had two children, Daniela Herz and the architect of the synagogue in Mainz, Professor Manuel Herz. In 2000 she married the Oxford professor Gabriel Gorodetsky, who edited the “Maiski Diaries” (CH Beck), which deals with a Russian diplomat’s fight against Hitler.
As has now become known, Ruth Herz died last weekend at the age of 79.
