Biography|Günther Bräunig — The Referendar Years in This Courthouse

The courthouse a Wiesbaden law graduate actually walked into is not the glass Justizzentrum on Mainzer Straße.

It is this brick pile on Gerichtsstraße.

Günther Bräunig, born in the city on 10 October 1955, served as a Referendar at the Landgericht Wiesbaden from 1981 to 1983 while finishing his Mainz doctorate.

The second state exam followed in 1983.

German legal training splits that way: university for the first exam, a court or authority for the Referendariat, then the second exam that licenses the profession.

The building he trained in had opened on 3 April 1897 as a Frührenaissance court house on Albrechtstraße and what is now Gerichtsstraße.

Landgericht and Amtsgericht shared it until late 2009, when both courts moved to Mainzer Straße 124.

The old house still stands at Gerichtsstraße 2.

After a conversion by Kissler Effgen it holds flats, a café, and event rooms under the name Heimathafen.

A visitor can still read the judicial sculpture on the façade.

The training here is what made the later bank jobs possible.

German public banks hire lawyers who have done the Referendariat, not only graduates with a first exam.

From this courtyard he went to Commerzbank's Frankfurt investment-banking desk in 1984, then to Airbus sales finance in Toulouse and Washington from 1986.

KfW hired him in 1989.

The court moved.

The building did not.

If you come for the pin, come for the 1897 house, not the 2009 Justizzentrum.

The new courts are a different address and a different moment.

Photo: Leonhard Lenz, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Secondary: Martin Kraft, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.